Even before spin-off stock of Babcock & Wilcox starts trading on the New Stock Exchange under its new ticker symbol, BWC,  the company is showing signs of what’s ahead with its recently announced alliance with Bechtel for small modular nuclear power plants,  (SMR=small modular reactor).

Babcock & Wilcox has been successfully putting nuclear reactors in demanding situations for years.  Their small modular reactors have kept the nuclear submarine and surface ships of the US Navy going  efficiently, safely, and largely unnoticed for decades.  Linking up with Bechtel to take this experience and skill out of the warships and out into the world certainly seems like a good idea on the surface of it.

For more details from someone who focuses on nuclear power generation issues, you might find this linked blog post on the Babcock & Wilcox/Bechtel Power venture.

As far as stock spin-off investing goes, we can only hope that most people don’t even know who Babcock & Wilcox are and what they do and only relate Bechtel to involvement in Boston’s “Big Dig”.  If that’s the case, with any luck they will bail out of BWC early, giving us a chance to get in at a good price.

We need every kilowatt we can scrape up in the future and when it comes to nuclear power generation, these two know what they are doing.

Tags: Babcock & Wilcox, Bechtel Power, nuclear power, spin-off stock, stock spin-off

Entergy’s (ETR) spin-off of nuclear power plants looks to be dead in the water according to a recent article from Reuters after the New York Public Services Commission rejected their most recent plan.

No one knows what the ETR board will decide to do next of course, but at some point managers as well as investors need to say . . . “Next!”  .  .  . and move on.

Stock spin-offs can make grand theater as this attempt illustrates, but entertainment should be,  at best,  a very very minor reason that you put attention on any stock or group of stocks.

An obvious part of trading discipline is keeping your attention focussed on what you are doing, but deciding when it is time to direct your attention elsewhere and doing that quickly and completely is just as important . . . and much harder for most people to master.

Tags: Entergy, ETR, focus, New York Public Service Commission, nuclear power, stock spin-off

Entergy, ETR, has been trying to complete a stock spinoff to separate its nuclear power plants for some time.   This may be a terrific deal for Entergy and maybe even a good one for the owners of the new entity to be called Enexus, but states in which those power plants are situated apparently aren’t so sure.

Rightly or wrongly, citizens seem to be saying that they “smell a rat”.  Perhaps they figure that when it’s time to shut down and clean up these plants Entergy wants to be sure that their deep corporate pockets are not available to the states in question if the Enexus doesn’t have enough money to do the job.  And if that happens, guess who will foot the bills.

In a recent Vermont Senate vote reported in the Rutland Herald, the relicensing of the Vermont Yankee plant in 2012 was blocked.

Which leads to a question that comes up every now and then.  Do you invest in a company because it is watching out for its own interests very well if you would feel that their actions were irresponsible if you lived next door to their operations?  I’ve never completely figured that one out for myself,  but I do try to remember that my purpose in investing is to make money.

Tags: Enexus, Entergy, ETR, nuclear power, Vermont Yankee

The Entergy Stock Spin-off of its nuclear power plants has been in the hands of the regulators for some time.  Apparently, Entergy is thinking that if they can’t get their nuclear business separated by spinning it off, then maybe they can do the reverse.  And why not?  If the point of a stock spin-off is to end up with more focused, effective entities that each will do better on its own, what does it really matter which part is the parent?

Recently the  Wall Street Journal wrote . . . “Entergy Chairman and Chief Executive J. Wayne Leonard with saying that  the company could spin off its utility businesses into a stand-alone company to accomplish the same goal of separating its regulated utility businesses concentrated in the Southeast from its nuclear plants that sell power at market prices.”    The article is worth reading if you are following Entergy’s efforts from another point of view.

The question for us may end up being ‘which one is the parent?’  We, of course, want the one whose stock price is going to go up the most, the fastest whatever it ends up being called.  I guess that’s the one whose real value has been bound up the most in the present organization.  Is it the utility that is stuck with the nuclear power plants or the nuclear power plants that are stuck with being part of a utility whose main focus is in another part of the country?

We can just keep watching it unfold.  There seems to be plenty of time for that.

Tags: Entergy, ETR, nuclear power, stock spin-off