This is a column about how Constellation Energy Group and Electricite de France are going to scrap the $4.5 billion deal that has filled headlines, politics and regulators' files for eight months.
My apologies for not writing it sooner - like the day they announced it. We should know by now that, any time Constellation contemplates matrimony, the courtship is probably doomed to political resistance and heartache.
Shame about that third nuclear reactor the companies were going to build at Calvert Cliffs on the Chesapeake. An electricity-starved Maryland could have used the juice.
A dead deal also means the fabulous paycheck of Constellation boss Mayo A. Shattuck III will escape molestation. Gov. Martin O'Malley was demanding a Shattuck haircut as part of the ransom for approving the deal.
Maybe that's Constellation's main motivation for exiting. But it's not the only one.
I could be wrong. No announcements have been made. To hear Constellation tell it, it's committed to gaining the Public Service Commission's approval and finishing the transaction this year.
But the line of previous deals involving Constellation and subsidiary Baltimore Gas and Electric looks like cattle skulls on the Santa Fe Trail in July. There are reasons to believe this one will meet the same end.
Constellation doesn't need the EDF project as badly as it once did. A few months ago the promise of the French billions and a short-term French bailout were the only things between Constellation and bankruptcy.
The company had borrowed too much and bet too big and nearly came to grief in last fall's financial crash.
First it found a savior in Warren E. Buffett's Mid-American Energy, which agreed to buy it for a bargain price. Then it spurned Buffett and turned to the French, who agreed to inject $4.5 billion in return for half-ownership in Constellation's nuclear-energy business.
But meanwhile Constellation has been replenishing its coffers and cutting its debt. It sold off some businesses. It cut the dividend paid to shareholders. It unwound risky bets on commodities. It laid off employees.
Now, in the opinion of some smart Wall Street cookies, the company is ready to go off the Gallic oxygen if it must.
"We do not believe that Constellation needs the deal to survive," Macquarie Research's Angie Storozynski wrote clients a couple weeks ago. Fitch Ratings came up with the same conclusion.
