78-13-B4

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Utilities

Transcript Among the arts or professions, actors--down through the years-- have lived with a false image that they are somehow lacking in what might be called normal attributes. Plumbers have put up with the stock jokes that they always forget their tools and the customer has to pay by the hour while they make the round trip to pick up the missing items. In the industrial world, utility companies rank high on thee villain list. Always the myth prevails that they produce a necessary item in a monopolistic manner, cheaply and easily and extract a horrendous profit from the helpless customer. I'll leave defense of actors and plumbers till another time and plead the case of the utilities today. How many of us have stopped to think that in this long era of inflation electricity is one of the only major commodities that has gone down in price? Now before you scream and say lo ok at my last month's bill, hear me out. We actually pay less per kilowatt hour of electricity than we did 20, 30 or 50 years ago. Our bills are up because we use electricity for many more things. When I was a boy we cooked with a wood burning stove and kept warm with a coal furnace. There was no air conditioning, we had an ice box, not a refrigerator, and electricity was used only for lighting. Now we shave, brush our teeth, watch TV, have all manner of electrical tools--we even carve the Christmas turkey with an electric carving knife. If it still costs as much per kilowatt hour we couldn't afford the electrical gadgets that today we can't seem to live without. And we aren't being ripped off by the producers of that electricity. Just let me read you some figures from the report to the stockholders of the Middle South Utilities, Inc. Last year the company reported total operating revenues of $1,251,600,000. That was a 25.7 percent increase over the previous year. More than a billion-and-a-quarter dollars sounds like a good business and a 25 percent is something to cheer about. The report, however, also shows operating costs of more than a billion dollars, leaving a net profit slightly over $100 million which figures out to $1.72 a share for the stockholders--six cents less per share than they received the year before. Nevertheless, it is a normal, respectable return. It is hardly a windfall or, as some demagogues love to declare, "an obscene profit". Fuel to generate the electricity cost more than twice as much as the total profit, which makes another part of the report very interesting. The stockpile of uranium which opponents of nuclear energy say is a great threat to life on earth would be the fuel used to generate electricity once we finished developing the breeding reactor. The current administration in Washington, as you know, does not want to continue its development. But that present stockpile lies there for the taking. No one would have to find it, or go into a m1ne to dig it out; it would meet our energy needs literally for centuries. It represents a fuel value of between $10 and $20 trillion. I respect the right of the opponents of nuclear power to dissent, but with that right goes a responsibility to know what they are talking about. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 78-13-B4 Production Date 09/19/1978 Book/Page RPtV-360 Audio Youtube? No
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