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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!
Am I alone in wondering why the cost to the consumer remains the same?
You mean lead boots?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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?
Isn't that what the Free Markets are about? The most economically efficient survive and the least economically efficient do not?
Slap quite clean but unpopular energy with MASSIVE regulations, force them to clean up every single bit of pollution, etc. On the other hand, let the dirty variant pollute all they want, literally dumping everything into the air. Because, you see, campaign donations are not bribes but wisely taking part in the political process, right?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Umm, this article is about 'gas' as in 'natural gas', not as in 'gasoline'.
And, as it happens, one of the things that utilities like about combined cycle gas turbine units is that (by power plant standards) you can knock 'em together extremely quickly and cheaply, and once constructed, you can ramp them up and down very quickly indeed.
It's kind of nuts that natural gas is cheap enough that these things would be competing with base-load units; but natural gas plants have been the peaking-load choice for years.
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
quite clean(*)
* Clean in terms of other emissions/waste, but not so clean when it comes to the waste it actually produces.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Clean is washing powder, not nuclear. That stupid propaganda has failed and nuclear would probably have a better reputation if it had never been tried since the person on the street is very much aware that nuclear has cleanup costs too.
The US nuclear industry committed suicide anyway by lobbying against development of smaller reactors and thorium. At this point nobody is going to put up the capital for the huge 1970s dinosaurs that are their preferred option.
It's someone who disagrees with the parent poster, and therefore needs to be called names.
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.
The energy markets not a mean type of market; there are huge and wildly varying external costs associated with them. Which means either heavy regulations (which characterize the nuke industry), subsidized costs, and/or those burdening the populous/environment directly. It's the name of the game. And big blunders hurt us all in the long run. There's a lot, a lot, a fuggion lot of sunk costs in nuclear plants. And if those costs don't pay themselves back, future financial backers will be more hesitant to lend at similar or lower interest rates. Which means higher energy prices for future plants.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
What, exactly, is a nuke fanboi?
Oppenheimer
Not at all. Of course you can produce energy cheaper by burning fossil fuels than with nuclear, because fossil fuel plants are allowed to externalize most of the costs of energy production, such as pollution. Once these externalities - such as turning every coastal city into a New Orleans - is taken into account, nuclear power is cheapest and safest.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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...
Until, of course, you have a situation like Fukushima.
Decentralized renewables are cheapest and safest, when all risks and external costs are factored in.
New designs come from improvements on old designs and from the experiences of the engineers and workers who work on them. If the reactors are shut down and the best of the workers find gainful employment in another industry, we will not have a good starting point for the improvement process. There will be a few old coots who hung around and a bunch of new kids with book smarts and no practical experience.
Hardly a recipe for success.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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.
Until, of course, you have a situation like Fukushima.
Decentralized renewables are cheapest and safest, when all risks and external costs are factored in.
You are entitled to your opinions but not your own facts. Do you know how I know you're making up facts completely? Because the fact you've made up is not true.
It's very easy to check: google "deaths per kWh".
Nuclear comes up as the safest even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even safer than decentralized renewables.
The thing with decentralised renewables is that they require construction on a vast scale because renewables are quite diffuse. Construction is inherently dangerous and that leads to more deaths.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...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.
Yup. I live in upstate New York.
I'd rather have a nuke plant a mile away than gas drilling operations commencing anywhere upstream on the Susquehanna, even if I pay more, because with gas I know I'll be paying longterm for the contamination. Nuclear's track record per unit of energy produced is stellar compared to the track record of constant failure and environmental contamination the gas drillers have established so far.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
You misspelled "Teller".
force them to clean up every single bit of pollution, etc
To this date, the nuclear industry have not actually "cleaned up" a single gram of any of the spent nuclear fuel ever produced.
They've just neatly stacked it, waiting for someone else to deal with it.
Gas companies can still raise prices as high as they want.
No they can't. Free markets make it impossible for companies to just adjust prices at a whim. As long as you preserve the free market and healthy competition you will generally keep prices as low as possible because no one entity has the final say about what price will be charged.
Now if you are claiming that the government will somehow step in and raise prices... That's possible... But that's not the fault of the evil rich gas production companies..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"Yep. Thorium LFTR is the nuclear reactor of the future. Small, affordable, and by design will never have a runaway meltdown."
Reminder: Thorium reactors cannot be built for at least another 40 years at the most optimistic. (India's about halfway there since starting work in the 1950's.)
"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected “3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time”.[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050.[67]"
Link.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
What exactly do you suggest they do?
Stop billing themselves as "clean" until they figure out what to do with their hoarded mess.
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.
Considering we don't yet know all the costs of clean up and impact for Chernobyl OR Fukushima, I'm not sure how you can state that nuclear is the cheapest.
Like how long until Japan can fish in the seas to the east of them?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I'm not sure how you can state that nuclear is the cheapest.
I stated it was the safest. My reply didn't include anything about cleanest. That is far more hard to determine.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So eating irradiated seafood, for possibly decades, is counted in that 'safest' statistic?
If you actually looked at the deaths per kWh figures you would see that they include deaths due to externalities like pollution from the various power sources if applicable.
The thing is nuclear is exceptioinally safe. Nuclear provides 12% of the entire electricity needs of the earth and there have been a handful of incidents. Of those a particularly notabli incident is Three Mile Island which despite being a severe accident resulting in a meltdown released almost nothing into the environment.
So yes when you take into account all the externalities including direct deaths, construction and pollution, nuclear is still the safest in terms of number of deaths per unit of energy generated.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And again, you miss the point that that has been calculated for already. The field you're studiously ignoring is called Statistical Analysis. The only part that is difficult to calculate is how much the cleanup will ultimately cost. The deaths from radiation (whether from exposure in the greater environment or directly at the accident site), the projected damage to the local environment, etc., can all be determined with degrees of accuracy similar to those in the renewable energy field. People have spent a lot of time over the last 100 years looking at these things, and have a pretty good idea of what will happen to a pound of a particular cesium isotope over the next few hundred years.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?