Antinuclear

Industry spokesmen such as Nuclear Energy Institute president Marv Fertel are stressing the good news, leaving the gnashing of teeth over the absence of nuclear-specific favoritism to fellow travelers at places like the Breakthrough Institute and Third Way. This split response stems from the inconvenient truth that made the good and the bad news in the Clean Power Plan identical. Getting a just result is not enough for the US nuclear industry to compete, let alone to grow.

Priced out of the market. Economic analysis shows that the cost of new reactors is far above that of other low-carbon alternatives. The most recent of many proofs is Dominion Resources’ midsummer acknowledgement that the cost estimate for its proposed North Anna 3 unit in Virginia now exceeds $19 billion, or about 19 cents per kilowatt-hour—at least three times current US power market prices, which would make the project even more expensive than Britain’s proposed Hinkley Point reactor, whose costliness has resulted in calls for its cancellation from three of the environmentalists whose decisions to support nuclear have been so highly publicized in recent years. Concluding “Yes, we are still pro-nuclear. But not at any price,” the trio have not grasped that, for now, one is either pro-nuclear at any price or one is not pro-nuclear at all.

The four reactors being built in Georgia and South Carolina were supposed to demonstrate that new construction techniques and a new licensing process had finally brought nuclear plant cost overruns and construction delays under control, but they have shown the reverse. Construction of the fifth new US reactor, Watts Bar Unit 2 in Tennessee, began in 1973. Its design would not be licensed today. It is far behind its schedule even of four years ago and far over its budget. Industry efforts to tout its 2016 opening as proof of a reactor construction rebirth signify desperation, not accomplishment.

Only buckets of money from taxpayers and customers can lead to new reactor construction. The Clean Power Plan contains no such buckets.

Furthermore, even the cost of operating today’s reactors has risen above power market prices in the substantial parts of the United States that rely on wholesale power competition. EPA’s draft rule had given limited special status to existing nuclear plants, a poorly constructed effort to avoid the closing of the 6 percent of operating reactors that EPA calculated were in some danger because they could no longer operate profitably. Industry comments, in keeping with the overall quest for special protections, were to the effect that the 6 percent solution was far too little. These comments contended that extending the lives of all operating reactors was a costly activity that should be counted as new carbon reduction between now and EPA’s 2030 target date, even though almost all of those reactors either are already licensed to operate past 2030 or soon will be.

The EPA’s refusal to assign nuclear power a privileged place in its climate change arsenal comes as a damaging rebuff to the multifaceted industry effort to convince policy makers and the public that carbon-reduction goals can only be attained if almost all operating reactors are preserved. How much might this preservation cost? How many other low-carbon alternatives must be kept from competing for this market? No one ever says. In the last two years, the industry and its front group Nuclear Matters have sought billions in support for existing reactors from state governments without ever saying how much money would be enough. Nuclear power plant owners Exelon, First Energy, and Entergy have also demanded guaranteed above-market pricing from regulators in several states, while importuning grid operators and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to revise marketing rules in ways that would increase nuclear plant revenues by yet more billions.

The same companies have lobbied against subsidies for renewable energy and energy efficiency in Congress and in state capitals, blaming these subsidies—rather than the much more substantial operating cost increases of their aging reactors—for their economic problems…..http://thebulletin.org/what-epa%E2%80%99s-clean-power-plan-means-nuclear-energy8763