The revealing item in the chart above is the amount of government subsidy for nuclear power. It is just the fact that it is so large that makes it attractive to those building and operating such facilities.

The name of the game these days is not capitalism, it's extracting money from the government to favor selected endeavors. So corn and beef get subsidized while fruits and vegetables don't. One has the potential for large-scale production and the other doesn't.

Major industrial firms are not interested in specialty markets, the fight for government largess isn't worth the effort. This is one of the problems with wind, no single installation is worth enough to have any major economic impact.

This is just another instance of the winner-take-all economic system that we see all around us.

I commented yesterday on Jerome's dKos blog that in the battle between Exxon and Venezuela, Exxon was the bigger economic power by a factor of two. We aren't talking about East Timor, we are talking about a fairly large country being outgunned by a private firm. There are no effective international controls over the global monopolization taking place. When China has to ally with Alcoa to fight a consolidation in the mining industry you know that the balance of power has shifted too far to the "private" sector.

Since there are no meaningful attempts to limit monopoly power I don't see the situation getting better in the near future.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape