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Dominion Announces Plans To Close Kewaunee Nuclear Power Station In 2013
An anonymous reader writes "Due to low electricity prices in the Midwest, and an inability to find a buyer for the power station, Dominion will be shutting down and decomissioning Kewaunee Nuclear Power Station. One of two operating nuclear power stations in Wisconsin, Kewaunee's license from the NRC was not due to expire until the end of 2033."
... the times of low electricity prices will then be over soon.
Now comes the fun part, explaining to the tax payers and anyone else involved, why it stops producing electricity today, but they still pay for the cleanup and stoarage of the radiated materials for the next hundred or so years. Was that cost factored in to all the 'cheap energy prices' the electricity was sold for?
I mean, why would the Dominion need nuclear power plants in the first place? Are they out of dilithium?
And even if they did need nuclear power plants, why would they be in the Alpha Quadrant?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Thorium has some advantages but it's not really a new idea and particularly full of roses. Why do we need to switch to it? Not really a magic bullet. Just gradually move to better nuclear plants as time rolls on, whether Uranium or Thorium or Hydrogen-Fusion or what-have-you. Do the same with every power plant of every kind that we keep using. Phase out fossil fuels where we can.
I don't want to sound like a dick, but the bit about penning traps and black holes are so sci-fi that it makes you sound like you're choosing Thorium because it sounds cool and sci-fi-ish.
One power plant in one place is economically unviable, therefore nuclear power is a bad idea always everywhere and there has never been opposition that could be described as irrational.
Also, restaurants won't ever take off because I know this one restaurant halfway across the country that closed down because ingredients cost too much and nobody would eat there if they used cheaper ingredients.
This whole thing seems like a non-story to me. "EXTRA! EXTRA! Random business venture you probably never heard of before this news article folds after almost 40 years!"
Nuclear is just too freaking expensive to operate with any semblance of reasonable safety.
Nuclear has to pay to clean up the mess. Whereas a coal plant can dump megatonnes of CO2 and sulphur into the air and just collect the money from selling power, leaving the rest of us to pay the cost for the next centuries.
Windmills in space sound like a great idea! Satellites would look so much prettier with big turbines on them instead of all those blue panels.
Do we go back and ask for more from the company running this?
So it would seem, according to the Unites States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, although the point is a moot one in light of the fact this particular fund appears to be sufficiently funded.
Although there are many factors that affect reactor decommissioning costs, generally they range from $300 million to $400 million. Approximately 70 percent of licensees are authorized to accumulate decommissioning funds over the operating life of their plants. These owners – generally traditional, rate-regulated electric utilities or indirectly regulated generation companies – are not required today to have all of the funds needed for decommissioning. The remaining licensees must provide financial assurance through other methods such as prepaid decommissioning funds and/or a surety method or guarantee. The staff performs an independent analysis of each of these reports to determine whether licensees are providing reasonable “decommissioning funding assurance” for radiological decommissioning of the reactor at the permanent termination of operation.
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
Exactly! If we can have solar sails, there's no reason we can't have solar windmills.
in the USA real consumer prices for electricity have fallen slightly over the same period!
So much for "this is a world problem" that the governments kept telling us
ITYF thanks to your idiotic chancellor that german power companies are starting to build coal fired replacements for those shut down nuclear plants. So much for germany being green eh?
Renewables you say? Would those be the windfarms in the north which are 600km from where most of the energy is needed in the south? And given that the wind doesn't always blow - what other renewables did you have in mind? Solar? Yeah , right, in northern europe... suuure. Hydro? Nope, not enough locations. Tidal/wave? Same problem as wind with power transmission. So what is this great hope you germans have for renewables?
Yes, but only if we all get superpowers as a result.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
The problem with the fashionably renewables is continuity of supply. Both wind and solar are intermittent. It was reported that one day a third of German's electricity was provided by wind, and four days later none was. Either you get used to having power only when the wind blows, or you need to have effectively 100% capacity in non-intermittent supplies.
Hydroelectric is an excellent renewable, but most of the sites near users have been exploited. Some of the solar variants with heat storage may work, particularly near the equator. But wind and photovoltaic solar are too erratic to be a major part of out power generation.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
They're both similar.
Both nuclear and coal are obligated to clean up their own site upon retirement. In the case of nuclear, there are typically trust funds established. In the case of coal, differing states have differing requirements, but site remediation is typically part of the requirements.
Now, for off-site pollution, neither coal nor nuclear are responsible for their own mess. Coal plants emit SO2, NOx, CO2, Hg, PM2.5, PM10, and other effluents and pollutants, and once it's out of the smoke stack, it's somebody else's problem. Nuclear plants typically emit very little more than water, but when they do, the US Government is on the hook, not the owner of the plant. It turns out that the United States Government is the sole insurer for catastrophic nuclear accidents in the United States. Yip, that would be the 300 million of "us", not the owner of the plant. It's not a coincidence that nuclear plants in the US are often (always?) LLC corporations, so that the parent company (in this case, Dominion) can walk away from a financial disaster even more easily.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
How was the plant paid for? I know that in my area that the power companies have managed to get the regulation authorities to increase the price of electricity long before the plant is ever built, letting the customers pay for the construction. And without giving the customers stock in the company, even though they are effectively forced to become investors. And this is done with the claims that the electricity is needed and it will keep rates low.
Now they want to shut down the plant? Because building it did help keep rates low? If it was financed completely with private money then they might just get away with that. But if it was financed with rate payer money. then there ought to be a hell of a lawsuit over this move that will drive down supply and drive up rates.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
How is 30GW of solar in Germany not a major amount of generation?
Also, the world still seems to consume the brunt of the electricity during the daytime hours, because we're mostly awake when it's light.
Because the maximum peak is in the early evening, after dark in winter. When solar power production is zero. Even on a cloudy day, a lot of that 30GW is not available. Are you happy to be able to work only on sunny days? Of course we use little energy after midnight. But we use a lot before, and we will need power stations to provide that on windless evenings,
My house uses partial electric heating, which I want in winter, when solar power is at its lowest.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
In September 2010, the German government announced a new aggressive energy policy with the following targets:
Increasing the relative share of renewable energy in gross energy consumption to 18% by 2020, 30% by 2030 and 60% by 2050
Increasing the relative share of renewable energy in gross electrical consumption to 35% by 2020 and 80% by 2050
Increasing the national energy efficiency by cutting electrical consumption 50% below 2008 levels by 2050
The NY Times reports that the Kewaunee Power Station will close early next year because the owner is unable to find a buyer and the plant is no longer economically viable driven by slack demand for energy and the low price of natural gas. âoeThis was an extremely difficult decision, especially in light of how well the station is running and the dedication of the employees,â says Dominion CEO Thomas F. Farrell II. âoeThis decision was based purely on economics.â When Dominion bought the plant from local owners in 2005, it signed contracts to sell them the electricity, a common practice, but as those contracts expire, the plant faces selling electricity at the lower rates that now dominate the energy market. Other companies have also reported falling revenues, although they may not be on the verge of closing reactors because they are in regions where the market price of electricity is higher. The closing, which did not catch many in the industry by surprise, highlights the struggle of the U.S. "nuclear renaissance." A decade ago, the nuclear industry talked about a nuclear renaissance due to rising fossil fuel prices and concerns about meeting greenhouse gas emissions, but the nuclear revival did not occur in the United States as the cost of fossil fuels like natural gas fell and the federal government has been slow to put a price on carbon. "A number of nuclear units won't run their 60-year licensed lives if current gas price forecasts prove accurate," says Peter Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The determining factor is likely to come at the point at which they need to decide on a major capital investment."
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Are you another of those "radioactive carbon" freaks or you just don't know what coal is made of? If it's the latter, consider that the impurities are effectively sand at up to around 10% thus it's 1/10 as radioactive as sand.
If you really want to cure yourself of this annoying little urban myth invented by PR folks you can try the exercise of looking up how radioactive the most radioactive coal found on earth is and then calculate how many hundreds of thousands of tons of coal you would need to get the famous "banana dose" of radiation.
Coal kills people, lots of people (close to 100 per week globally from mining accidents alone), but it does it in real ways having nothing to do with radiation. This radioactive coal thing is a PR myth produced in the 1970s in an attempt to belittle nuclear waste and allow corners to be cut in storage without upsetting the US voting public. It didn't work but we're left with the myth.
My point was not that nuclear was paying for all its clean up. But it does pay a lot up front, as opposed to coal which has gotten away with not paying anything. Which makes coal much more attractive economically for the operators, if not society as a whole.
Meanwhile the Bruce nuclear plant near Tiverton, Ontario will soon have an eighth operating reactor unit, and a total operating capacity of 6,300 megawatts and will be North America's largest nuclear plant.
Radiation from coal is not that the carbon itself is radioactive, it's that there are amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium in the actual material being burned. That material is released from the coal it is embedded in by the coal being burned as fly ash. The production of ash does in fact release some of the same elements and compounds that you might associate with a nuclear plant, but in somewhat greater quantities.
You are correct, however, in stating that it is a background threat, but so is a nuclear plant running in normal operation. So, the usual point about coal releasing more radioactivity on a daily basis than nuclear plants is 100% true, it's just also true that neither one of them is much of a threat.
From http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste&page=2:
"So why does coal waste appear so radioactive? It's a matter of comparison: The chances of experiencing adverse health effects from radiation are slim for both nuclear and coal-fired power plants—they're just somewhat higher for the coal ones. "You're talking about one chance in a billion for nuclear power plants," Christensen says. "And it's one in 10 million to one in a hundred million for coal plants."
Since there is a scare factor involved in nuclear plants, I don't think it is unfair to point out that coal plants, which are one option for base power generation that includes nuclear, also release the exact same material, in relatively larger quantities, and it is not considered as much of a threat. That means that the other pollutants of coal should not be overlooked in a comparison with nuclear, because the "scary" pollutant is released by both. In that comparison, coal should rightly scare more people, but it doesn't. This illustrates a bit of the irrationality of opposing nuclear plants while coal plants, which are worse on a daily basis, tend to get a pass.
Of course, if a nuclear plant goes Chernobyl, then all bets are off. Even then, an event of that size is a serious problem for the regional area, and events like that are extremely uncommon and due to older technologies and poor handing. Even factoring in the worst nuclear events, the average threat to humans worldwide is not much more than the background.