2013 has so far been a very bad year for the nuclear power
industry, culminating last month with the permanent closure of the San Onofre
reactors in southern California. The
aging national nuclear fleet is now down to 100 plants, with the recent closure
of Crystal River and Kewaunee. None of
these reactors have run through their 40-year license because major repairs and
upgrades have been technologically unfeasible and/or economically unaffordable. This opens a whole new set of questions and
concerns regarding RELICENSING, which was deemed to be a given just a few years
ago.
Construction costs for a large number of nuclear plants
built 30-40 years ago were generally under $1 billion each, and they were
issued a 40-year operating license by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In most industrial environments, mechanical
components have a 30-year life, after which repairs and replacement of
components becomes almost mandatory. In
a lot of cases, a new state of the art facility is built. Being that reactors have to be shut down for
months at a time for refueling and other maintenance, this 40-year regulatory
statute was well founded. Several years
ago, the industry, realizing that new construction was astronomically
unfeasible, the concept of extending the operating license by 20 years was
justified by plans to just repair, replace, and retrofit the existing
plants. The utilities would save
spending money and continue to profit from the “cheap” old reactors. Sort of like repairing that “83 Buick with
280,000 miles, and wanting to take it on a cross-country trip and back. The problem is a nuclear power plant is very
complex and radioactive, which makes any kind of maintenance difficult.
Crystal River in Florida shut down for refueling and repairs
in 2009. Its normal license would
expire in 2016, but with relicensing, Florida Power was optimistic that it
could run the plant until 2036. Just
this year, the plant was permanently closed due to an estimated repair price
tag of $3.5 billion. The Kewaunee reactor
in Wisconsin was shuttered in early May after it was deemed uneconomical to try
and run the plant until 2033. The big
blow came later last month, when Southern Cal Edison retired the two San Onofre
reactors. The difference here was that
they had already spent close to $800 million replacing steam turbines that
proved to be defective, and fixing that problem would lead to billions more.
Lots of money wasted.
This all raises several major issues…what will happen to
relicensing? Will Prairie Island (proposing
to spend $280m), Monticello ($600m), Vermont Yankee, Oyster Creek and the long
list of other plants be willing to gamble that they can technologically and
economically keep plants running beyond their legal time frame, when experience
shows that the majority of retired reactors have failed to even run to their
40-year expiration. One must remember
that this is not really their money, but that of the ratepayers who
automatically get stuck with the bill.
A second major concern deals with the construction of new
nuclear plants. The dream of a nuclear
“renaissance” has faded with only five reactors currently under
construction…two in Georgia, two in South Carolina, and a fifth being the
completion of Watts Bar in Tennessee, where construction began in 1973 and was
stopped in 1988 because of cost issues.
Just this year, two proposed plants in Texas and two in North Carolina
were cancelled. The fate of those under
construction is certainly up in the air, since they could not be built without
huge subsidies from the Federal Government, and are already way behind
schedule, and way over budget. Some
economic analysts propose that it would be cheaper to ratepayers (and tax
payers) if construction was abandoned and the costs written off…similar to what
the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS…oops) did back in the early
‘80s when they abandoned two partially built reactors and defaulted on $2.25
billion in bonds. Other analysts claim that if completed, the electricity
produced would be so expensive that nobody would buy it without additional
government subsidy. The outrageous cost
of all this is starting to come to light, and has even caught the eye of the
Tea Party in South Carolina who is suing the utility for not considering
cheaper renewable alternatives.
The third major issue concerns the future of the current
nuclear industry. While it is obvious
that we will not be constructing new reactors to replace ones being retired,
the industry will not just disappear.
We are beginning to comprehend the huge decommissioning costs facing us
over the next 60-100 years. Kewaunee
says it will take 60 years to decommission; San Onofre claims it will cost them
$2.8 billion, a price tag that is way under-estimated. When the tiny Humboldt Bay reactor was shut
down in 1976, the decommissioning cost was estimated at $95 million. Today, with full decommissioning about half
complete, the estimated cost is $1.082 billion! We, and our children and grand-children, will cough up hundreds
of billions of dollars bill to dismantle and deal with these radioactive
facilities. We will not benefit from
these expenditures, since the electricity (cheap electricity) would have been
long gone through our electric wires.
In addition, we will continue to pay to safeguard the tens of thousands
of tons of high-level spent fuel, for which we have no feasible storage plan or
cost estimate.
The nuclear power generating industry is once again
teetering on its unsustainable fulcrum.
It is not safety issues, or weapons proliferation issues, or moral
issues, but pure economics that will finally tilt it towards oblivion. New modular reactors or new technologies
will not save this dinosaur. It cannot/will not compete with the decreasing
true costs and other advantages of renewables and, for now, natural gas.
Let the sun shine and the wind blow! It’s free!
My next blog will examine the current economics of solar, and how this
resource will displace/is displacing the incredibly true high cost of nuclear
electricity.
Some good references for follow up reading:
1. A nice overview by Terry Tamminen, ex-Secretary of
Resources for State of California
2. A piece by Mark
Cooper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
3. San Onofre
4. Matthew Wald on
the aging of the nuclear fleet
5.
A peek at the complex economics
6.
New construction problems
7.
End of the renaissance
