How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing

[kristopher]

How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing
Peter A. Bradford Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2013 69: 12
DOI: 10.1177/0096340213477996
http://bos.sagepub.com/content/69/2/12

Abstract
The United States is on course to all but exit the commercial nuclear power industry even if the country awakens to the dangers of climate change and adopts measures to favor low-carbon energy sources. Nuclear power had been in economic decline for more than three decades when the Bush administration launched a program that aimed to spark a nuclear power renaissance through subsidies and a reformed reactor licensing process. But Wall Street was already leery of the historically high costs of nuclear power. An abundance of natural gas, lower energy demand induced by the 2008 recession, increased energy-efficiency measures, nuclear's rising cost estimates, and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station further diminished prospects for private investment in new US nuclear plants. Without additional and significant governmental preferences for new nuclear construction, market forces will all but phase out the US nuclear fleet by midcentury.

[FBaggins]

1. Same thing for renewables.

If government doesn't give industry a reason to move away from coal and gas... they aren't going to do it. With gas prices this low, simple economics will kill both nuclear and renewables.

So government must give both a reason. That could be a carbon tax... or a price gurantee... etc. But "do nothing" will kill them.

At least, that is, until future gas prices look like they'll be much higher.

[kristopher]

2. No, it isn't. Not at all.

I know it's breaking your heart, but try to stay linked to what's going on.

What seems much clearer now is that if the US government (and the states) do nothing to give additional strong preferences to new nuclear construction, the United States will more or less phase out its nuclear fleet on a schedule only a decade or two longer than would the government policy that caused such controversy when rolled out in Japan last September. Put another way, while the US Energy Department deplores the official nuclear phase-outs adopted by Germany and (sort of) by Japan, it is presiding over policies that will - if left to run their course - produce a remarkably similar result.

What a curious paradox. Every decade couples bullish US governmental forecasts of the nuclear construction surge to come with stentorian rebuke of the skeptics. Then every decade brings disappointing results that neither inform nor discourage the next generation of bullish forecasts. The Nixon administration's 1973 forecast of 1,000 reactors by the year 2000 was the champion, but only by degree. Even today, small modular reactors are foreseen reversing the recent downward coast, never mind that they are unlicensed and economically unproven.

Meanwhile, other energy sources - efficiency, renewables, natural gas - follow the opposite trajectory, with each decade's results exceeding the forecasts with which it began. pg. 18

Bradford lays out the history of nuclear with a great deal of clarity. It really isn't complicated after all, a simple recitation of grand promises and repeated failures.