Plausibility: 1970s/1980s Electricity Industry Bailout

Delta Force

Banned
The electricity industry in the United States (and likely many other countries) had a very rough time in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1973 Energy Crisis caused coal and petroleum prices to spike while forcing them to expend funds converting petroleum fired generation to coal and natural gas, and many units intended for additional generation were canceled.

At the same time the nuclear power industry was facing a host of new and constantly changing regulations. Combined with the inflation at the time, it was quite common for reactors ordered in the 1970s to suffer 500% to 1000% cost escalation. Eventually many utilities were unable to secure enough bonds to complete nuclear reactors they were building. Reactors were canceled, and while some were mothballed for potential later completion (the TVA and WPPSS ones being most prominent), many became the nuclear equivalent of parts cars, and quite a few were simply abandoned.

The cancellation of projects and power demand lower than forecast led to additional problems, because the bonds that are used to finance utility capacity expansion depend on the utility selling electricity (that's how the utility makes revenues). Thus, when projects were canceled it became difficult, if not impossible, for many utilities to make their bond payments. In some cases public utility commissions allowed the bond payments to continue by charging ratepayers for the units anyways, despite the fact that they never actually generated any power. In quite a few cases utilities simply failed. The most prominent case was the Washington Public Power Supply System, which defaulted on $7.25 billion in nuclear reactor construction bonds in 1983, which was the largest public bond default in history until Detroit.

Only a few years later the government bailed out the banks during the Savings and Loans Crisis, and it seems that an electricity bailout would have been even more popular for helping out just about every sector of the economy (investors, banks, industry, labor, consumers). Since rising energy prices were a major concern in the 1970s and early 1980s, and there were tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars at risk in various bonds (as well as a particularly exposed nuclear power industry), how plausible would a bailout have been?
 
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