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Central New York Nuclear Plants Struggle To Avoid Financial Meltdown
mdsolar writes "As recently as four years ago, nuclear power companies were planning to spend billions of dollars to build a new reactor in Oswego County, alongside three existing nuclear plants. Then the bottom fell out. Natural gas-burning power plants that benefit from a glut of cheap gas produced by hydrofracking cut wholesale electricity prices in half. Now the outlook for nuclear power plants is so bleak that Wall Street analysts say one or more Upstate nuclear plants could go out of business if conditions don't change. Two Upstate nukes in particular — the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Oswego County and the R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant in nearby Wayne County — are high on the watch list of plants that industry experts say are at risk of closing for economic reasons."
I see 'Wall Street analysts' and 'meltdown' in the same sentence. I should probably just bend over and subsidize somebody, to get it over with, right?
Who's it going to be this time?
cheap gas produced by hydrofracking cut wholesale electricity prices in half
If this trend holds up, soon we'll have energy too cheap to meter!
is the minds of the Slashdot nuke fanbois blowing a gasket.
Isn't that what the Free Markets are about? The most economically efficient survive and the least economically efficient do not?
And when the gas boom ends - end it will end eventually - then possibly energy prices will be high enough that not only will nuclear become feasible again, but the modern and much safer reactors can be built.
or gets more expensive?
This move is stupid and shortsighted. Power plants are a 100+ year undertaking...yet they look at profit margins on a matter of months.
Here's a fact no one acknowledges in the energy debate: GAS COMPANIES CAN RAISE PRICES AS MUCH AS THEY WANT
There's no rule saying gas can't be $6.00/gal or more....IF THEY WANT IT THAT MUCH
Obama has nothing to do with gas prices...it is entirely in the hands of the corporations. When we lower their taxes, the prices & profits both go up. Its a swindle pure and simple.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Am I alone in wondering why the cost to the consumer remains the same?
Next up: "Rather Mundane Story Attempts to Get Attention via Sensational Headline"
So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty? You cut your reactor monitoring staff? Drop to the cheap disaster management plan? Postpone the upgrade of the creaky boilers?
It worked so well last time we did, didn't it?
I work in Sector 7G! I'll never get paid better anywhere else!
A fanboi for nukes.
Get a coffee: your brain isn't awake yet.
No.
Corporations are pictures of inefficiency. Ask any employee of one.
You see financial success and assume (for no reason) that that success must be due to a superior product or value.
In America, gaming the system and cheating is now considered S.O.P. for a business....that's **NOT** 'just the free market working'....it's immoral and criminal and we let them get away with it b/c of people like you who look only at the superficial appearance and just assume from there.
Stop labeling all financial gain as 'just the free market' and start looking at what is really happening.
The 'free market' is a concept independent of any ONE economic theory...it's a fundamental aspect of human behavior in **all contexts**...even in Soviet Russia they had a booming black market.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Two worlds collide :
In order to plan an energy strategy, you need to look 20-30 years ahead.
In order to avoid financial meltdown, you need to make Wall Street happy before next quarter.
Gas companies can still raise prices as high as they want.
Plus, you presented no evidence for your 'quick changeover' claim...for all we know it could be the exact opposite...and there's no logical reason to assume switiching from gas to nuclear would be 'easy' like you describe.
You're finding linguistic faults in my argument b/c that's all you have.....GAS COMPANIES RAISE PRICES AT WILL....nothing you can say is a valid counterpoint to this...
We basically are giving these Gas companies a government subsidy.
Thank you Dave Raggett
If you're concern is global warming and carbon dioxide emissions then the glut of cheap gas due to fracking is actually the more expensive choice in the long run.
The long run problem here is that natural gas prices are highly volatile. Prices are super cheap right now because of a big increase in supply while demand doesn't change much and storage costs are big. Prices may stay low for a few years, but nobody knows what will happen later. If we ramp up electricity production through natural gas though, that will increase demand driving up prices again. When natural gas prices go back up, that could be rough on consumers.
Here's a graph highlighting gas prices over the past 40 years.
"Natural gas-burning power plants that benefit from a glut of cheap gas produced by hydrofracking cut wholesale electricity prices in half." ... while retail electricity rates continued to rise...
Viewed superficially, you might appear to have made a contribution to the discussion.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I would thank you to never use the terms "nuclear plants" and "meltdown" in the same sentence unless you're talking about a LITERAL MELTDOWN.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
nuclear and other power plants should not be allowed construction without adequate consideration of cleanup cost. as it stands, superfund is a joke considering an insolvent or nonexistant subsidiary deprecated after the working lifespan of a reactor just lets the government foot the cleanup bill under the guise that its insolvent or nonexistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund
in TFA the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant is arguably at the end of its useable lifespan (30-40 years.) Coincidentally so is the Ginna plant. for those keeping track of the joke that is Nuclear Regulation in america, both have been given a 30 year extension despite having gone from megawatt to gigawatt in their installed versus actual capacity. the reactor cleanup cost would likely go to Entergy...who would either declare bankruptcy or drag the government and mohawk energy (a prior owner) into court over potentially responsible party definition as that would determine who has to clean things up. if Mohawk were to declare themselves insolvent, or the PRP could not be identified in court, the entire site would become an orphan share. that means no one has to clean it up but the taxpayer out of the congressional general fund. its lemon socialism.
Entergy likely understands the cost to litigate its way out of a superfund cleanup is way cheaper than actually cleaning a nuclear site and once its absolved of cleanup, it can focus on investing in the gas fracturing movement, which is likely vastly more lucrative than maintaining 40 year old nuclear sites.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty?
It gets decommissioned. Still expensive but less expensive than operating at a significant loss over time. Nuke plants aren't like gas or coal plants where they can be mothballed and then restarted later easily. (I'm sure it's technically possible but apparently very problematic)
...that all the "clean, safe, and cheap" promises were just so much bullshit? And that the hustle still continues now that it's time to pay for cleaning up the mess they made? I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
So where is all the gas coming from?
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Am I alone in wondering why the cost to the consumer remains the same?
Power utilities are regulated and the prices they charge to consumers are typically regulated as well. Since in most areas they are a monopoly you should expect them to charge the highest amount permitted by the local regulating body and not a penny less. Not like you can go anywhere else. Where I live I have precisely one option for electricity and one option for natural gas. The power company knows this and behaves accordingly. Even in areas where there is more than one option they basically are an oligopoly which isn't much different from a pricing standpoint. They all know there is little incentive to compete.
If every nuclear story needs 'meltdown' in the title, I propose every natural gas story gets 'explode'. This will help remind us of the thousands of people blown up in oil and gas accidents.
Natural gas, the explosive financial opportunity.
I think that this could be good for energy industry because it could open the door to other means for producing energy. Nuclear reactor operators have opposed technologies that improve our energy grid because of the costs associated with running nuclear reactors. But they may have lost the battle anyways.
I think our energy policy that demands big massive producers are they only source of energy is wrong. And its strategically dangerous as well.
For the record, I'm not opposed to nuclear energy. I just don't believe an energy policy solely relying on big business is in the consumers nor countries best interest.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
When someone comes to me with free pollution free energy with zero transition costs and it can be online in about a week the Greens will moan it's still a terrible idea, somehow.
Since France has extensive network of nuke plants - does anyone know what'f the cost of the electricity in France?
You are incorrect. Amory Lovins has done the detailed analysis on this. Large scale renewables with extensive transmission is the absolute cheapest possible system. He prefers more local generation for (esthetic) efficiency and robustness in the face of certain natural disasters and enemy attacks. But, moneywise, big renewbles are the cheapest generating system. http://www.rmi.org/reinventingfire
Why didn't the consumers see any of this? My rates keep going up, up, up....
It is kilowatts times hours, not divided by hours. Converting euros to dollars gives $0.1646/kwh which is higher than in New York based on your figures. Don't think you've got the whole picture though.
Mothballing a nuclear plant shouldn't be an issue at all, many plants have stayed offline for a year or more due to regulatory problems, if they can be kept offline for one year I can't see why they can't be kept offline for 5
There are a lot of costs with keeping them offline. Personnel, servicing, inspections, security, and lots of other high fixed costs that don't go away just because the plant is not producing electricity. For a relatively short time it might make sense to bear these costs but for periods of more than 1-2 years the economics start to look really bad. Nuke plants have huge operating expenses and they generate not a dime of profit unless they are producing electricity. Would you shut down your business for 5 years while still paying a lot of money in the uncertain hope that it might be profitable someday?
Virtually every nuke plant is unique and there is a LOT of institutional knowledge that goes into operating each one. Shut down for several years and a lot of those people are going to move on to other things. Do you really want to keep paying staff for 5 years for them to do essentially nothing even if they are willing? Hard to justify doing that to company shareholders.
Why not urge your representatives to pass legislation to require Indian Point to close before any others?
Hopefully at most they are talking about scaling back or mothballing, not completely shutting down plants. This glut of natural gas can't last long (a decade or so at most). If they can't bring these plants back online after that happens energy prices will skyrocket, which sadly is probably what some people hope for.
What is really needed is to have NEW reactors available to replace the old ones. To replace nuclear power with Nat. Gas or wind/solar is a horrible mistake. By putting in place a number of small reactors (300 MW size) that were built in factories and shipped to on-site, this can lower the price of nuke energy. But, what is also needed are reactors that can burn up the on-site stored 'waste'. It is long past time for CONgress to quit playing their fucking games and focus on solving problems: illegals, and energy are but 2 big ones.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
See subject-line: From CNY area too (Syracuse) here - nice to see some folks that are from the same area using this site too (both yourself & the other respondent to your post, SJHillman)!
* :)
* I've also never heard or seen problems with "9 mile" etc. so I am with you on what you stated - heck, my "senior skip day" in 1983-1984 in highschool, I watered ski'd into the beach our class had it at, on the same lake as the "nuke plant", right into the party... was hilarious, & fun! Iirc, it was at "sandy creek" (or some name like that, been too long).
APK
P.S.=> Piece of trivia I uncovered the other day that *might* interest you both: General Keith Alexander of the NSA is also (Syracuse area, Onondaga Hill).. "will wonders NEVER cease"! apk
Compared to the nuclear weapons industry, regulations are quite light. For example, there are large quantities of missing fuel and spent fuel that would never be tolerated under Nunn-Lugar.
Seems like the USA needs to introduce a carbon tax or similar whereby companies need to pay some number of $ per ton of carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide) that gets spewed up into the atmosphere.
That'll soon change the equations and attractiveness of these "cheap" gas plants.
But for that to happen, American politics would need to not be corrupt. So this will never happen.
Check the book out from the library if you can't afford it. It is better than just babbling when someone has already done the work. You should remember that wind power is the reason one of the other nukes closed. So, it is not just natural gas that is cheaper than nuclear power.
Strangely, you can get real Coke made with sugar from Mexico. There are lots of places in the world to do nuclear experiments, China, India, Iran.... When they get it figured out, we can buy it from them. For now, it does not seem to be economical here.
you definitely just proved my point for me!
to continue your analogy, in dairy/oil world: cows cost $10Million dollars, the same entity owns the cows, farmland, milking plant, cheese factory, milk bottling factory, & owns the stores that sell it
there is no 'competition' in that environment or in the oil industry...it's a very well understood concept...OLIGOPOLY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly
so that's your reward for proving me right: i teach you about oligopolies ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
Nuclear plants only have to bide their time. Sooner or later their electricity will be needed to run the desalinization plants needed to provide fresh water for those whose wells are polluted by the stupid fracking chemicals!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!