Public Intelligence

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

This NUREG contains the improved Standard Technical Specifications (STS) for General Electric (GE) BWR/4 plants. Revision 3 incorporates the cumulative changes to Revision 1 and 2, which was published in April 1995 and April 2001, respectively. The changes reflected in Revision 3 resulted from the experience gained from license amendment applications to convert to these improved STS or to adopt partial improvements to existing technical specifications. This publication is the result of extensive public technical meetings and discussions among the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff and various nuclear power plant licensees, Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) Owners Groups, and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI).

The unfolding crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has put a harsh spotlight on General Electric, the giant US conglomerate which built parts of the plant and which had been hoping to benefit from a renaissance in nuclear power that now looks to be on hold. Almost $12bn (£7.4bn) has been wiped from the value of the company since Monday, and a retired nuclear engineer revealed how he and several colleagues resigned from GE in 1975 because of his safety concerns over the design of the Mark 1 containment unit used at the plant. GE beefed up its nuclear business in 2007 by forming a joint venture with Hitachi of Japan that could bid to build new nuclear reactors around the globe. Climate change and energy security concerns are driving a global resurgence in support of nuclear energy, it said at the time.

GE Hitachi BWR Reactor Fuel and ABWR Experience Presentation from September 2008.

A presentation given a little over a week before the 2011 Japanese Earthquake promoting nuclear power plant construction by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy. GE and Hitachi both manufactured reactors which are now currently involved in the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In 2007, the companies’ nuclear divisions merged to form GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy.

Business Roundtable is an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than $5 trillion in annual revenues and nearly 10 million employees. Member companies comprise nearly a third of the total value of the U.S. stock markets and pay nearly half of all corporate income taxes paid to the federal government. Annually, they return $133 billion in dividends to shareholders and the economy.