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Amidst utter chaos in the atomic reactor industry, Team Obama is poised to vastly expand a bitterly contested loan guarantee program that may cost far more than expected, both financially and politically.
The long-stalled, much-hyped "Renaissance" in atomic power has failed to find private financing. New construction projects are opposed for financial reasons by fiscal conservatives such as the Heritage Foundation and National Taxpayers Union, and by a national grassroots safe energy campaign that has already beaten such loan guarantees three times.
New reactor designs are being challenged by regulators in both the US and Europe. Key projects, new and old, are engulfed in political/financial uproars in Florida, Texas, Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey and elsewhere.
And 53 years after the opening of the first commercial reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu is now convening a "Blue Ribbon" commission on managing radioactive waste, for which the industry still has no solution. Though stacked with reactor advocates, the commission may certify the death certificate for Nevada’s failed Yucca Mountain dump.
In 2005 George W. Bush’s Energy Bill embraced appropriations for an $18.5 billion loan guarantee program, which the Obama administration now may want to triple. But the DOE has been unable to minister to a chaotic industry in no shape to proceed with new reactor construction. As many as five government agencies are negotiating over interest rates, accountability, capital sourcing, scoring, potential default and accident liability, design flaws and other fiscal, procedural and regulatory issues, any or all of which could wind up in the courts.
In 2007 a national grassroots uprising helped kill a proposed addition of $50 billion in guarantees, then beat them twice again.
When Obama endorsed "safe, clean nuclear power plants" and "clean coal" in this year’s State of the Union, more than 10,000 MoveOn.org members slammed that as the worst moment of the speech.
The first designated recipient of the residual Bush guarantees may be at the Vogtle site in Waynesboro, Georgia, where two reactors now operate. Georgia regulators have ruled that consumers must pay for two proposed new reactors even as they are being built.
But initial estimates of $2-3 billion per unit have soared to $8 billion and more, even long before construction begins. Standardized designs have not been certified. On-going technical challenges remind potential investors that the first generation of reactors cost an average of more than double their original estimates.
The Westinghouse AP-1000 model, currently slated for Vogtle—and for another site in South Carolina—has become an unwanted front runner.
Owned by Japan’s Toshiba, Westinghouse has been warned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of serious design problems relating to hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.
The issues are not abstract. Florida’s Turkey Point plant took a direct hit from Hurricane Andrew in 1991, sustaining more than $100 million in damage while dangerously losing off-site communication and power, desperately relying on what Mary Olson of NIRS terms "shaky back-up power." Ohio’s Perry reactor was damaged by a 1986 earthquake that knocked out surrounding roads and bridges. A state commission later warned that evacuation under such conditions could be impossible.
Long considered a loyal industry lap-dog, the NRC’s willingness to send Westinghouse back to the drawing board indicates the AP-1000′s problems are serious. That they could be expensive and time-consuming to correct means the Vogtle project may prove a losing choice for the first loan guarantees.
South Texas is also high among candidates for loan money. But San Antonio, a primary partner in a two-reactor project there, has been rocked by political fallout from soaring cost estimates. As the San Antonio city council recently prepared to approve financing, it learned the price had jumped by $4 billion, to a staggering $17-18 billion. Angry debate over who-knew-what-when has led to the possibility that the city could pull out altogether.
In Florida, four reactors have been put on hold by a plummeting economy and the shifting political aims of Governor Charlie Crist. Crist originally supported two reactors proposed by Florida Power & Light to be built at Turkey Point, south of Miami, and two more proposed near Tampa by Progress Energy. State regulators voted to allow the utilities to charge ratepayers before construction began, or even a license was approved.
But Crist is now running for US Senate, and has distanced himself from the increasingly unpopular utilities. With votes from two new appointees, the Public Service Commission has nixed more than $1 billion in rate hikes. The utilities have in turn suspended preliminary reactor construction (though they say they will continue to pursue licenses).
At Calvert Cliffs, Maryland, the financially tortured Constellation Energy has committed to the French AREVA’s European Power Reactor, now under serious challenge by regulators in France, Finland and Great Britain. An EPR under construction in Finland is now at least three years behind schedule, and more than $3 billion over budget.
Meanwhile, at Entergy’s 30-year-old Yankee reactor In Vermont, a series of radiation and information leaks have severely damaged prospects for re-licensing. The decision will soon be made by a deeply divided state legislature. "It would be better for the industry to let Vermont Yankee die a quiet death in the Green Mountain state," says Deb Katz of the grassroots Citizens Awareness Network. "With radioactive leaks, lies and systemic mismanagement, Entergy is no poster child for a new generation of nukes."
Meanwhile, New Jersey may require operators of the aging Oyster Creek reactor to install sizable towers to protect what’s left of the severely damaged Barnegat Bay, which the plant uses for cooling. Though the requirement may not be enforced for as much as seven years, the towers’ high cost could prompt a shut-down of the relatively small plant.
This unending stream of technical, financial and political downfalls could doom the "reactor renaissance" to history’s radioactive dump heap. "President Obama needs to remember what Candidate Obama promised: no more taxpayer subsidies for nuclear power," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "Renewables and energy efficiency provide both greater carbon emissions reductions and more jobs per dollar spent than nuclear. Unlike nuclear power, they are relatively quick to install, and are actually safe and clean."
Indeed, despite Congressional and White House support for these latest proposed loan guarantees, the grassroots fight over both old and new nukes grows fiercer by the day.
In the long run, this alleged "nuclear renaissance" could prove to be little more than a rhetorical relapse.
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Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with his HISTORY OF THE US. He is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and Senior Editor of www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.
Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org.
6 Comments
Wind and solar are not base load power. Increasing our efficient use of energy is great but there are very real limits to the gain from this.
So what are you going to use for base load energy generation?
The choices are nuclear, coal and natural gas. I’d argue that coal is the dirtiest and least safe of the 3.
We currently generate about 20% of our energy via extremly old nuclear plants. Old construction, old designs, old technology.
Is it feasible to close these nuclear power plants and replace them via energy conservation, solar and wind? Can we really get 20% out of that?
Because if not then we should at least be retiring our old nuclear plants and replacing them with modern designs.
Why is it that, as in so many other areas, countries such as France and Sweden have accomplished what our politicians try to make impossible? Nuclear power has an enviable safety record, except for two instances of outright malfeasance bordering on sabotage. (TMI & Chernobyl.)
Nuclear power requires a mere fraction of the mining needed for coal, and produces no greenhouse gases. The “waste” problem could be addressed by reprocessing.
I would point out that the environmental movement was galvanized in 1962 by opposition to the Storm King Mountain pumped storage program. They ran a successful campaign against what today would be considered the epitome of “green.” The plant would use excess capacity at night to pump water from the Hudson into a reservoir, and use the hydro power during peak times. Because of Storm King’s history with the Hudson River School, the project was killed. The environmentalists’ solution to this problem – The Indian Point Nuclear Plant!
Now, several environmental groups have come around to seeing the advantages of nuclear power. Unfortunately, the thirty years we have lost will be paid for by energy shortages and high prices for the next generation.
Nuclear power has proved it’s worth but the inviornmentalists and fear mongers have set our Country back trillion sof dollars and many years.
The celebration of the defeat of Yucca mountain only shows the ignorance of the people.
The french reprocess their fuel, and their is no reason we couldn’t do that also.
Nuclear waste is just not concentrated and powerfull enough to boil water, but it’s not dead, and can be reconcentrated and used again.
Private power companies always want to build nuclear power plants close to population areas, saying that’s where the power is needed. Yet that same power is transported often thousands of miles from those power plants. The fear would be far less if the plants were further from population centers. The indusrtry has created many of it’s own problems, by being run by companies whose only interests are profit, and where people are aware that companies like that often fail to take proper safety measures.
Wow. Where to begin?
With nuclear power, we are talking about waste matter that is toxic for longer than humans have been recording history.
Yucca Mountain is on a fault line; just what we need for nuclear waste storage of a material that will be toxic for longer than our current recorded history.
The Fast Breeder reactors create waste that is exponentially more toxic. Think the difference between the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki versus the hydrogen bombs that came later. And you want that out and about for terrorists to get their hands on it?
Your final paragraph in and of itself refutes your entire premise of the safety of nuclear power.
Do the math. At estimated costs of 6 to 10 billion dollars each, 54 billion will cover the cost of 6 to 9 nuclear plants. 100 plants provide 20% of our electricity, so 6 to 9 plants will provide 1.2% to 1.8% of what we need.
Vermont Yankee is planning to raise the price of electricity it sells from 4.1 cents/kWh to 6.1+ cents/kWh when it is relicenced. Meantime, one of the smaller Vermont utilities built a generating station that uses methane from a landfill for fuel, and it sells power at 4 cents/kWh. That little plant needed no loan guarantees, and has no possibility of nuclear pollution.
Solar power can be stored in water and stone, and is more than 50% efficient when it is. Wind power can be stored kinetically (refer to the Northfield Mountain plant). Electric power from whatever source can be stored chemically (imagine a car battery). Biomass can be produce at 100 tonnes per hectare.
Pro-nuclear listings read like they are produced by people who benefit from nuclear power. Here, in Vermont, the nuclear industry busses in employees to meetings so they can talk. Even with such interested parties talking at public forums, they are very much outnumbered. And for good reason.
The waste from nuclear plants is toxic for far longer than their half-lives. Much of it will be deadly for hundreds ouf thousands of years. The record of safety for the nuclear industry is over a period of 54 years. The much touted safety record of the nuclear industry in the USA is statistically insignificant. The world-wide safety record is terrible. Belarus is still putting 20% of its GNP into cleanup, and the total cost of Chernobyl has been estimated at roughly 400% of the value of the industry’s annual worldwide production.
Nuclear power is too expensive. Nuclear power is too dangerous. Anyone who supports it is either to ignorant or too well payed by the industry.
The real limits are on the usefulness of nuclear power. Expense is beyond the private sector’s willingness to risk. (btw voglte’s renaissance is already being financed on the backs of current rate payers). Also the problems of waste disposal, heat pollution and T3 pollution only escalate, not to mention the planet is are running out of uranium.