Nuclear plants in the US keep closing

http://www.vox.com/2014/5/2/5671394/nuclear-power-retirements-climate-change

by jseliger • 12 years ago

38 49 12 years ago

vox.com

toomuchtodo3• 12 years ago

Possible solutions:

* Increased incentives for solar (which serves as a consistent energy source during daylight hours)

* Guaranteed rates for base load nuclear generation

* A carbon tax on fossil fuel generation, used to subsidize nuclear

Across the US, we already pay for reserve capacity, known as "peaker plants". They are paid simply to sit idle all year for those few days when we reach maximum system demand. It would be similar to paying low/zero-carbon base load plants (nuclear) to produce flat out, acknowledging their fixed costs.

I cringe at the thought of a substantial number of natural gas turbine plants being built, and the price of natural gas skyrocketing.

InclinedPlane3• 12 years ago

Building more solar/wind power means building more gas turbines, because that's the only way to ensure you can meet demand from a solar plant when it's dark out or a wind plant when it's not windy.

If we want more nuclear capacity we need to be serious about it. I think LFTR probably deserves a few billions in research, if it pans out it could make nuclear competitive on price and reduce a whole crap-ton of issues normally associated with nuclear.

MaysonL• 12 years ago

Although increased forecasting accuracy for renewables will lessen the need for standby. See "Better Weather Analysis Could Lead to Cheaper Renewables" http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518051/better-weather-a...

logfromblammo• 12 years ago

I always thought that it would be a better alternative to peak-demand power plants to have a variable-demand industry connected to the base-load power plant.

Rather than firing up the peak-demand plants when load rises, just keep the plant humming along at the same rate and throttle back the cement producer, or biomass gasifier, or fertilizer plant, or aluminum smelter, or paper mill, or desalinator, until the grid load comes back down. Any industry that can singlehandedly soak up all the excess power on additional production would do.

GregBuchholz• 12 years ago

Yes, we'd just need some kind of signal that was proportional to demand. If the demand was high, the signal would also be high, so that consumers would know it was time to cut back on consumption. And likewise, for producers, a high signal would indicate that it was time to bring on extra capacity. Of course, we'd want the signal to be something meaningful that people wouldn't ignore. It would be best if the whole signaling infrastructure was decentralized, so that producers and consumers could act according to their own needs without coordinating through a central authority. It seems like there may be a startup opportunity in there somewhere.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

They already do that. There just isn't any industry that can singlehandedly soak up all the excess power (subject to constraints of proximity to power plants, distance from cities, etc). There's a chance electric cars will change this.

jseliger• 12 years ago

Increased incentives for solar (which serves as a consistent energy source during daylight hours)

Solar, though, is not a panacea, for a variety of reasons: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/243plj/the_koch_at... or http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/jcap-... or http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2014/04/24/sol...

protomyth2• 12 years ago

If you spend a huge amount of time and money demonizing something along with making films about it in disasters and protesting every time an electric company wants to build one, then you get aging plants without replacements. Damn shame that was one of the things that could really help us now.

At this point, it will probably be natural gas then what comes next. We have plenty of resources in the US to bridge to the next power source.

guscost• 12 years ago

Maybe not a horrible situation, but completely unnecessary. It's another part of our present culture which will seem narrow-minded and primitive in retrospect.

zurn2• 12 years ago

staving off catastrophic climate change is the issue, more natural gas doesn't help.

tvladeck2• 12 years ago

natural gas as a replacement for coal-fired power does help, though. it helps a lot.

deeviant• 12 years ago

No big loss. Energy storage is going to hit the scene big time in a very near timeframe, and the "but baseload!" arguments for nuclear are going to hold much less weight.

tvladeck2• 12 years ago

No idea why this is downvoted. This is very true. Batteries are coming down the learning curve very quickly. Distributed storage and high-resolution demand response are very real possibilities. Especially if electric cars come online quickly. And this would eliminate a lot of the intermittency issues.

angersock3• 12 years ago

Well, another awesome legacy of the Baby Boomers and Gen-X. Thanks for all the scaremongering, folks--I'm sure my kids will appreciate your principles when we have to ration their electricity.

protomyth2• 12 years ago

Us Gen-Xers were a little young given the hysteria was all about the 70's. We were the "remember all that free love and stuff? yeah, not for you" generation.

angersock3• 12 years ago

Fair enough--then again, there are a lot of folks in my demographic that aren't helping matters either.

aaronem• 12 years ago

What a constructive and helpful addition to the debate.

angersock3• 12 years ago

It hasn't really been a debate for over three decades--otherwise, rationality (and nuclear power or complete decomissioning) would've prevailed a long time ago.

dang• 12 years ago

This comment is an off-topic tangent into pre-fab indignation and thus has a low signal/noise ratio.

It doesn't take many comments like this to ruin a thread for substantive discussion. The desired conditions are, unfortunately, fragile.

All: please don't post comments like this to HN.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

The power plants that are closing would not be allowed to be built now. New plants are safer, and some designs appear to be inherently safe from meltdown.

Vermont Yankee leaks. Seabrook might be at risk from earthquake. It's time for new and safer nuke plants.

chc4• 12 years ago

If we were talking about replacing old nuclear plants, that would be a different conversation. That isn't what's happening. We're largely transitioning from our aging nuclear infrastructure to our older and even less safe methods of power generation.

neotoy• 12 years ago

This is good news. Solar will fill the gap.

chc4• 12 years ago

Is there any reason to find this claim more credible than "The Flying Spaghetti Monster will provide all the energy we need"? People have been saying that solar is about to take off for about three decades now. They were wrong at every step of the way. Maybe you're right, but the odds are not in your favor. At this point, I'll believe it when I see it.

Until then, nuclear power is actually proven to work and to do so more safely than any comparably effective fuel source, so it's unfortunate to see people saying we should abandon it in favor of a technology that has a demonstrated track record of not being good enough, and thus will just lead us to rely more on fossil fuels.

Hypx• 12 years ago

Solar power has been growing at an exponential rate for the last several years. The interesting thing about exponential growth is that it isn't actually all that fast in its first stages, and easy to dismiss as meaningless. Once adoption really gets going, solar will become very large very fast.

whythehellnot3• 12 years ago

We won't get non-trivial energy coverage by photovoltaic panels until they're unfortunately as cost effective as coal/oil. Which is predicted that it won't be until 2030. Most likely the coal industry will exploit their power to hold back said competition with as long as possible. So it could even take to 2050 before coal use will even start to dwindle.

Literally the only technology worth our time right now is advanced nuclear fission. Occasionally hydroelectric when they're in the appropriate location.

I wish people would realise that solar will only be amazingly useful when we build dyson spheres. But we need Fusion AND Fission to get there.

chris_va• 12 years ago

Technically, nuclear is safer than solar.

But who needs logic.

chc4• 12 years ago

In what way is this true?

afterburner• 12 years ago

Everyone likes to talk about scare-mongers when something like this pops up, which is disappointing and condescending. I oppose nuclear power plans on the basis of their incredible cost, always more than any budget or contingency plan can account for. It's a waste of money that can be put to better use in the renewables field.

chc4• 12 years ago

Which renewables have proven themselves to be remotely as efficient, practical and cost-effective as nuclear plants? I'm not aware of any unless you live around relatively special geography (e.g. there are places where hydro, geothermal or even wind power are strong contenders, but it doesn't seem like it can be generalized).

sadris• 12 years ago

Nuclear has the lowest cost per kWh of any option on the market given their lifespans.

castis• 12 years ago

do you have sources for your opposition?

massysett• 12 years ago

Don't know why you're getting downvotes...nuclear's share has shrunk not due to scare-mongers but due to nuclear's poor cost profile.

rglovejoy• 12 years ago

The scare-mongering is the very reason nuclear is so expensive.

InclinedPlane3• 12 years ago

That's largely a consequence of design, there are other designs which are much cheaper to operate.

djern• 12 years ago

An article sponsored by GE that discusses how great nuclear power is? How surprising.

Yes Nuclear power doesn't emit greenhouse gasses, but to say it's clean isn't true either. Nuclear waste is particularly nasty, and the politics behind dumping it are concerning.

yulaow• 12 years ago

I know that you were downvoted for the first sentence, but the second is a serious problem and this is why in my country, with a referendum, we legislated against the use of any form of production of energy through nuclear fission.

Maybe it does not seem a problem UNTIL you found that some nuclear waste (and with some I mean A LOT) have been buried illegally and without controls not too far from your house [true story -> http://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-waste...]

bsder• 12 years ago

The problem with fossil fuels vs. nuclear is that everybody thinks of fossil fuels as SAFE. They are not.

"Nuclear waste is bad--but I'm okay with you guys destroying the Gulf of Mexico."

Dumping every ounce of nuclear waste we have at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico would cause less damage than Deepwater Horizon did.

And that's before you start talking about things like coal dust that actually adds MORE radioactivity to the environment than nuclear waste.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

Interestingly there is a small and lucrative market that specializes in "closing" and "decommission" of nuclear power plants.

Just like it takes decades to build and start operating them. It takes very very long to close and decommission them.

I knew someone who was in that business, very nice niche market!

spenrose• 12 years ago

On a mostly-renewables grid: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/the-grid-of-2030-all-...

The culture of budgeting new nuclear plants: http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2013/11/21/why-officia...

Nuclear is tied to water in problematic ways: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/the-energy-futurist/the-ener...

callmeed• 12 years ago

I live 10 miles from the last operating one in California (Diablo Canyon, just south of San Luis Obispo, run by PG&E). I have several friends and parents of friends who work there. It's the #5 employer in our county behind only the county itself, prisons, and the university.

One friend said he expects it to be shut down (or at least announced) by 2020.

Maybe this is an uninformed opinion but it will be a bummer if they do. That's a lot of lost jobs for our area (1,700). I've lived here most of my life and no one hear feels unsafe (despite being near fault lines). They spend so much money on this thing, seems crazy to shut it down. (I heard they spent $70M on their SAP installation).

Nuclear plants in the US keep closing

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