America's Nuclear Reactors Can't Survive Without Government Handouts (fivethirtyeight.com)

Slashdot reader Socguy shares an article from FiveThirtyEight: There are 99 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the United States today. Collectively, they're responsible for producing about 20% of the electricity we use each year. But those reactors are, to put it delicately, of a certain age. The average age of a nuclear power plant in this country is 38 years old (compared with 24 years old for a natural gas power plant). Some are shutting down. New ones aren't being built. And the ones still operational can't compete with other sources of power on price... without some type of public assistance, the nuclear industry is likely headed toward oblivion....

[I]t's the cost of upkeep that's prohibitive. Things do fall apart -- especially things exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Maintenance and repair, upgrades and rejuvenation all take a lot of capital investment. And right now, that means spending lots of money on power plants that aren't especially profitable... Combine age and economic misfortune, and you get shuttered power plants. Twelve nuclear reactors have closed in the past 22 years. Another dozen have formally announced plans to close by 2025.
A professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University points out that nuclear power is America's single largest source of carbon emissions-free electricity -- though since 1996, only one new plant has opened in America, and at least 10 other new reactor projects have been canceled in the past decade.

The article also describes two more Illinois reactors that avoided closure only after the state legislature offered new subsidies. "But as long as natural gas is cheap, the industry can't do without the handouts."

Comments

I don't have much of a problem with this

[rsilvergun]

though I'd rather they were just gov't operated instead of letting a private citizen skim 10-20% off the top. Anyway, if we're gonna run nuke plants I want them run without a profit motive. Otherwise there's too much incentive to cut corners on safety. And if we're gonna have the gov't run every aspect to prevent that from happen then what's the bloody point of letting private companies run them? If we want to hand out free money we can do that with food stamps and then at least poor people are fed.

Re:I don't have much of a problem with this

[swillden]

In other words nuclear power is brittle and the very high safety standards needed to keep it safe can massively increase costs.

Except it's really not clear that the insanely high safety standards are actually required. The regulations have created an industry that is orders of magnitude safer than any other large scale power generation industry. That indicates significant over-engineering. And given that regulatory-based engineering is never efficient in the sense of minimizing cost for a given level of effectiveness, looking only at the safety record almost certainly underestimates the excess.

The fact that Congress has to approve any design changes is mind-boggling. In any reasonably-regulated industry, Congress creates an agency and directs it to do the job of rulemaking and enforcement, then lets it do its job. There is absolutely no reason for Congress to get involved beyond that... it's not like the politicians can evaluate the design changes in any meaningful way. The only reason for that requirement is to place arbitrary bureaucratic and political obstacles in the way of construction.

Fallout is also not very attractive.

[emil]

Fukushima has shown us that a loss of power for 36 hours at any of these facilities will cause them to boil off all their coolant, melt their containment vessels, and poison the surrounding environment for thousands of years. This includes both the reactor vessels and the waste/spent fuel rods in the local storage ponds.

The exact same GE model that failed in Fukushima runs 30 miles upstream from me on the Mississippi. Should it lose power as Fukushima did, the Mississippi river will be lost to our country. This reactor was scheduled for closure and was saved by my state legislature, and it should not be running.