The Los Angeles Times reports on the end of a thirty-year moratorium on building new nuclear power reactors.
A consortium of utilities in the South won government approval Thursday to construct two new atomic energy reactors at an estimated cost of $14 billion, the strongest signal yet that the three-decade hiatus of nuclear plant construction is finally ending.
Several new projects will test whether new technology and streamlined government licensing can help the industry avoid the economic and safety disasters that have tainted its past, nuclear experts say, though critics condemned the action by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The commission’s 4-1 approval of the construction and operating license to expand the capacity of a Georgia nuclear power plant came 11 months after the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi facility left a wide swath of radioactive contamination.
How do you feel about this? It’s been 34 years since the NRC issued a new nuclear construction license. Despite the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the moratorium wasn’t an accident. It came about as the result of community organizing by a dedicated group of people, including Al Giordano. He reflected back on those times recently:
The 1979 Wall Street occupation – it only lasted for two days! – is historic not because of the occupation itself, but, rather, because it inspired a change in the movement’s direction and language, bringing it more coherently in line with everyday people’s daily life concerns and worries, which are not about the environment or the morality of what we do as a society to future generations, but about next month’s bills and making ends meet. This helped shift public opinion more solidly against nuclear power, and many opportunistic state Attorneys General began filing lawsuits against utility rate increases. That nearly bankrupted some public utilities. The great economic “ratings” houses began to tick down their grades on the nuclear industry’s health as an investment. And dozens of nukes that had been proposed were cancelled.
And I would like to be able to say that this is a fairy tale where everyone “lived happily ever after.” But movements, even those that win, like life, are not like that. The truth is that the Wall Street occupation in 1979 was also the regional anti-nuclear movement’s last gasp.
Yes, it destroyed the nuclear industry in the United States. But, like a mother who dies in childbirth, it gave its own life to do so.
Al’s article is about the shortcomings of the modern #Occupy Movement, but it has a lot of personal history on the effort to “destroy the nuclear industry.”
If it was destroyed, though, it appears that the nuclear industry was arisen again, like Lazarus. It has new champions, like Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE). Yet, what has really changed? As the Los Angeles Times says, “The heyday of nuclear plant construction almost bankrupted the electric utility industry and saddled ratepayers with high bills for decades.”
Former NRC member Peter Bradford, now a law professor in Vermont, said Thursday’s approval did not change the poor economics of nuclear power. What makes a difference in Georgia is that the state has ruled that customers are going to have to pay, he said.
If it isn’t profitable unless the consumer gets soaked, is there any reason that we would choose the shadow of the second worst nuclear accident in history to end our moratorium?
You know, people care more about their bills than about a possible meltdown, but:
Commission Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko, who cast the lone vote against approval, said in an interview that he was not satisfied that the license would compel Southern Co. to adopt safety improvements that result from the ongoing review of the Fukushima accident. Jaczko said it would be “very difficult” to get Southern’s compliance after the license was issued.
I mean, seriously. I understand the attractiveness of nuclear energy. I understand the downsides of coal and gas and oil. But the case has not been made that nuclear power can be safe, profitable, and good for the consumer.
What do you think?
link
I’m neither pro nor anti nuclear, but I’m more on the anti side because of the complexity of the plants.
Still, people need to have a realistic understanding of how complex the energy picture is and how bad our options are: physics professor Tom Murphy has been digging through the excruciating details of every option and put together this nice summary of every alternative energy option. It’s the sort of thing everyone needs to understand.
Still the thing that I don’t get is why the focus on nuclear (or even wind for that matter) when electricity production isn’t our problem: oil is the limited resource, and we’re at peak oil now.
During the next presidential term oil production will start declining globally and the industrial world will face massive economic impacts (some of which we’ve seen hints of already, like in 2008). The person in office will get the blame. Might as well start talking about it now.
Take some very deep breaths and prepare for the cost overruns.
Obama’s only doing this because he’s a sandal-wearing hippie who hates the domestic energy industry. Same with fracking — he expressed his support for natural gas exploration in the State of the Union address because he’s actually against it. He supports nukes and fracking because he wants us to go all-solar.
Do I have the right-wing logic more or less accurate?
$13 Billion seems an extraordinary amount of money, and that is before any cost over-runs. What happens if electricity from other sources is cheaper? Do the owners have a guarantee that utilities (and therefore consumers) must buy from them no matter the cost?
The only thing that will stop the nuclear industry is not another melt-down, but a nuclear plant operator losing its investors shed loads of money because it can’t compete with wind, solar and other allegedly expensive sources.
But then no doubt the lobbyists will get a law passed mandating utilities to buy from the plant and passing the higher cost onto the consumer…
In the original nuke plant construction boom the realpolitik motivation was that we needed to be as good as possible at doing stuff with fissile material in order to have the most terrifying nuclear arsenal we could. That rationale is gone. Today the realpolitik motivation is that we need to give more money to the a$$holes who run energy policy and generation in this country.
Barf.
Nuclear is 1) carbon-free 2) self-generating and perpetuating if breeders are used 3) increasingly safe.
Fukashima means nothing in Iowa, most of Georgia, and 99% of the US. We are not proximal to a fault line. While some plants are close to fault lines, new plants need not be.
I’m for this.
by idiots, while Fukushima continues its meltdown. Unbelievable, really. Couldn’t they at least go with thorium and cold shut down? I just don’t understand people.
Well, they say it has something called passive shutdown, but don’t spell out what that means, exactly — but it supposedly doesn’t need the power on to shut down. I agree though that it’s disappointing that after all these decades, all we’ve got is a gussied up version of the same ol’ pressurized water reactor of 40 years ago, and made by the same good folks that brought us Fukushima Daiichi. I they’re going to go with new designs, why not consider alternatives like thorium or heavy water? Never mind.
Anyone who doesn’t support nuclear power simply IS NOT taking the threat of climate change seriously. End of story.
Same with natural gas, frankly. However, I’ll only support that once it’s regulated. Right now it’s a free-for-all kinda thing with local governments and people signing away their land with no cost analysis with consequences.
And I love solar and wind. Maybe nuclear won’t be needed by the time I retire — sure hope not. But right now it’s really our only chance. I’ve worked with solar panels, I’ve done a lot of analysis with wind power. We simply cannot replace our power with these alternatives right now, or even in the near future. Maybe in a few decades. Anyone saying otherwise has an agenda :
That doesn’t mean I support coal/oil’s talking points. Hell, if anything, I want the EPA to bring down the hammer faster.
Unfortunately that’s not correct.
I’ve done extensive calculations (see here for a short summary) and nuclear is actually one of the alternative energy sources we’d have the hardest time scaling up. It’s not an easy technology to scale up, the industry is old and near retirement, and the scale of the challenge is massive.
And new natural gas production is largely fracking, and there’s a fair bit of evidence that the full life-cycle emissions of fracked gas can be as bad as coal for the climate. (The jury is still out as scientists continue to study it.)
Combine that with peak oil and the economic contraction we’ll face as a result, and we’re in for some major changes.
The investments that will give us the most bang for the buck are public transit and electric rail related. And in terms of overall policy there are a number of things we can do, from implementing a clean energy dividend, to lowering the speed limit on highways, to eliminating subsidies that help agribusiness and meat producers.
A few decades is how long it will take to get any significant number of nukes running, so how is nuclear better in that regard than solar,conservation, etc.? Seems to me nuclear is just a band-aid that lets politicians shove the pain of ditching fossil down the road for the next guy to face.
Countries like Germany and Japan are far more sophisticated on energy issues than the US, yet have turned their backs on nuclear. How would you explain that if nukes are “our only chance”?
But the case has not been made that nuclear power can be safe, profitable, and good for the consumer.
Really? I study this issue in my work as a physicist. The case for nuclear power is , to me at least, pretty obvious.
The real obstacle to nuke power expansion has been financial, not regulatory. Nukes are simply not economically viable without massive government subsidies. The interesting part will come when the financing is attempted, to say nothing about getting the thing insured without huge giveaways from taspayers and ratepayers. The NRC decision only approves the reactor design, but does nothing to remove the rest of the formidable obstacles. We’ll see.
Personally I can’t get too excited about a few more nukes for now. The danger is that we’ll forget (with the help of massive propaganda campaigns) that this technology is, in the medium turn, just a dead end. And of course there’s the potential for them to drain resources from realizing actually useful long-term energy solutions.
The financial cost of nuclear power, or any mode of industrial power generation, depends on many externalities that vary from country to country. We subsidize coal, oil and gas power generation in many ways as well, so its actually rather difficult to determine the “true” financial cost of any mode of power generation. However, according to publicly -available documentation (eg. http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCostOfNuclearPower) , nuclear power is, broadly speaking, financially competitive in several European countries with varying regulatory structures, and in the US, the operating cost per kilowatt hour of many nuclear plants is definitely competitive with that from fossil fuel plants. Of course, that cost has all the various subsidies factored in so its hard to unravel the “true” (financial) cost.
I think the main competitive obstacle is not financial, it’s political. The perception of danger among the general public, and how this perception waxes and wanes over time, is, in my opinion, a principle governing factor in the growth of the US nuclear industry. After 3 mile island the us nuclear industry went into hibernation not because financial costs suddenly sky-rocketed, but because of an increased perception of danger that turned the public against building any new plants.
You may be interested in this book on different modes of industrial power generation, which breaks down the costs and benefits:
http://www.withouthotair.com/
I am resolutely opposed to nuclear power.
Why?
Because in this country corruption is rampant. It’s not to the point of everyday people bribing, but it’s still quite bad. That means thanks to regulatory capture and greed, corners will be cut and safety will be compromised for no other reason than that companies are greedy and can by political cover for their mistakes.