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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."
Am I alone in wondering why the cost to the consumer remains the same?
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?
My reaction was, really? I haven't seen my electric bill go down by half...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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
Who's it going to be this time?
Gas. You're already subsidizing gas in that the government is providing a free license to trash the place with fracking and will eventually (i.e. you eventually) have to pay for the cleanup. They get to keep the profit.
The invisible hand: grabbing you by the balls since 1764.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Letting a short-term downturn in natural gas prices ruin other established energy producers just strikes me as unwise. Reliable energy infrastructure, like nuclear power, takes decades to build up. Natural gas prices are volatile. It may be cheap now, and may easily double or quadruple again in the near future for unforeseen reasons. Nuclear power is not volatile like this.