I think you are missing the essence of my question, which is "Deduct from what? From revenue to compute taxable income or from U.S. income tax?" I am not intimately familiar with natural resource accounting and taxation, but I believe that if I mine a resource, say coal, and pay a property owner a royalty, that royalty is considered a cost of the coal and is accounted for as any other cost of production. I believe the same accounting is also applied to a severance tax, which is levied in some U.S. states. In contrast, a state income tax is accounted for as a business expense, albeit a period expense rather than part of the cost of the coal.

Foreign income taxes are, I believe, treated differently for purposes of U.S. income tax. There is at least the option of treating them as a credit on an income tax return. I know this is the way the taxes levied on foreign dividends are handled on a personal tax return. Say that a Thai company paid me $1,000 in dividends. I would only get $900, with Thailand withholding $100. I would be expected to report the full $1,000 in income, which if I were in the 25% marginal U.S. tax bracket, would increase my U.S. income tax by $250. I could, however, elect to file a foreign tax credit form (1116, I believe) and claim the $100 as a credit against my U.S. tax. The net result would be that I pay the $250 in tax, with Thailand getting $100 and Uncle Sam getting $150.

Again, I want to emphasize my ignorance of the actual practices, but it is my understanding that the "Royalties that companies pay to foreign governments for the oil they extract" could be properly accounted for as a severance tax. If they are accounted for like a foreign income tax and deducted from the U.S. income tax, then I agree with your implication that that is unfair. If it is treated as a state income tax and deducted as a period expense, than that is also unfair, but it shouldn't amount to much money compared to the theoretically correct accounting, which treats it as a cost of goods sold.

My question is, which method is used?

It is refreshing to see someone actually list the tax breaks and compare them to those given to other industries.

I would, however, appreciate a clarification as I have no time to look it up:

In your last paragraph, you discuss the treatment of royalties paid to foreign governments. The way you expressed it--they are usually not deductible but they usually are--makes no sense. Are you trying to say that they are not deductible from income in computing taxes, but they are allowed as a credit (i.e. a deduction from taxes as opposed to a deduction from taxable income) against U.S. taxes? If that is the case, that does appear to be preferential treatment.

Also, is treating oil company profits as manufacturing profits the same treatment as for other extractive industries, e.g. copper mining?

Actually, I believe that Doosan(sp?) in Korea made the Vogtle reactor vessel.

The Bloomberg article has somewhat confused terminology. The forged item they seem to mean is the reactor PRESSURE vessel, which during operation contains the core surrounded by water at approx. 100atm.
The bottom head belongs to the CONTAINMENT vessel, which in normal operation contains air at near atmospheric pressure, along with the pressure vessel and other components. During an accident, the pressure would rise, but to a much lower pressure than the pressure vessel routinely holds. The idea is that the outside of the containment vessel would be kept cool in the advent of an accident by having water flow by gravity over it from a large tank above it. The cooling would condense enough steam inside the containment vessel to keep pressure within the design limit--seems like around 80psi, but I'm not sure.
The containment vessel is itself surrounded by the shield building, which supports the water tank and allows air to flow over the containment vessel.

One milli-sievert = 100 millirem. Chest X-ray = 10 millirem=.1 milli-sievert.

I don't have a reference on this, and there is so much misinformation running around that I can't be sure of anything, but I have heard that the panels to take the electricity to the equipment were all in the basement of the plant and were flooded. Units 5 and 6 also had panels in their basement, but there was an alternate circuit that allowed the cooling equipment to be energized without going through the basement panels, explaining why they haven't experienced so much trouble.

"Wrong connector" doesn't make sense. It would be easy to wire around an incompatible connector. Wrong voltage or wrong frequency would be more plausible, but I haven't heard that explanation.

I wasn't aware that the Calvert Cliffs plant was ever scheduled to be the first new design plant to be built in the US. At one time that label was applied to the South Texas Project, and I believe that the two new reactors at Vogtle are now in the lead. The Vogtle reactors use the Westinghouse AP1000 design, and the latest revision to that design is nearing presentation to the NRC for certification. (An earlier revision has already been certified.) The Calvert Cliffs reactor was an Areva EPR, which is still a ways from having US approval of its design.

At Vogtle there has already been a lot of dirt moved, and parts of the containment are already being delivered to the site.

That most of the French plants were built by the military in an effort to become a nuclear power is, for the most part wrong. A few of the earlier plants were graphite moderated, gas cooled, which were presumably used for Pu production. There was a push in the bureaucracy for more of these to be built for electricity, put the engineers in the power producing group preferred light water reactors, which are much less useful for Pu production. When there was a push to get off of oil fired electric generation, almost all of the plants were light water. Given the British experience with graphite moderated power plants, the French evidently made the right decision.

Someone could have a field day with this data looking for discrepancies between claimed and actual paternity. A gold-mine for the tech savvy blackmailer.

Exactly.

Besides the fact that people who feel their writing is good are more likely to write, somewhere I have read a research study showing that poor students are likely to overrate their mastery of a subject whereas good students are more likely to underrate their ability.

Actually, Iran probably does need nuclear power. Instead of using oil and gas for electricity generation, it can sell them for hard currency. (I don't know the specifics for Iran, but a lot of middle eastern countries still use oil for power generation, which is very uneconomical. Just because they have lots of oil doesn't mean they should burn it for electricity any more than a bank should burn money for electricity.)

What Iran shouldn't need is enrichment technology which, unlike most modern power reactors, can be used to create weapons grade material.

It's been done several times. There is a study called "ExternE" that does the calculation for several methods of electric generation. Nuclear is low, especially if the calculation assumes centrifuge enrichment, although not as low as hydro. Nuclear opponents sometimes like to quote a study by a guy named Storm van Leeuwen who claims otherwise, but from what I can tell it is flawed.

Actually, if you talk to someone in a community that hosts a nuclear plant, the opinion is usually positive. I recently met a newspaper man from Waynesboro, GA, which has two reactors and two more on the way, and he said the plant was the best thing that had happened to the city.