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kristopher

(29,798 posts)
Sat Apr 13, 2013, 04:19 PM Apr 2013

Nuclear Retirement Anxiety

Another case of corporate welfare in the making. If these plants shut down because they are no longer profitable (which is becoming a distinct possibility), the money forecast isn't going to be there for decommissioning costs.

Nuclear Retirement Anxiety
As nuclear power plants age, concerns grow over financing, complexity, and safety of decommissioning



By Jeff Johnson


Over the past few months, nuclear power plants have hit a rough spot.

The owners of the Kewaunee Power Station in Wisconsin and Florida’s Crystal River 3 Nuclear Plant announced they were prematurely shutting the plants down, pointing to economic problems driven by growing maintenance costs and competition with cheap natural-gas-fueled power plants. The announcement marked the first nuclear plant shutdowns in 15 years, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

More retirements are likely. Kewaunee is 39 years old; Crystal River is 36. The designed age for nuclear reactors in the U.S. is 40 years. The average age of the 104 working plants is 32 years, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a part of the Department of Energy. With age is sure to come more maintenance, more outages, and greater safety concerns for communities living near the plants. Other operators are likely to take the path chosen by Kewaunee and Crystal River and begin the lengthy, complex, and expensive process of shutting down, cleaning up, and decommissioning.

Those that keep going will struggle with the difficulty of keeping an aging facility operating. For example, in California, two huge reactor units at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station have been idled since January 2012 because of premature wear and leakage of steam generator tubes that had just been replaced at a cost of $670 million. The units supply 2,200 MW or around 20% of the power for the surrounding Southern California area. According to recent NRC statements, it is unclear when the commission will allow the two to start up again. These two reactors join a third out-of-use California reactor at San Onofre. This one was shuttered in 1992 and is being decommissioned.

<snip>

GAO investigated 12 reactors’ trust funds, comparing company-prepared site-specific decommissioning cost estimates to NRC’s formula. For nine reactors, NRC’s formula resulted in funds below the companies’ estimates. In one case, a company believed it needed $836 million, which was $362 million more than NRC’s formula figure. GAO also noted NRC’s funding formula was more than 30 years old....


http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i13/Nuclear-Retirement-Anxiety.html
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kristopher

(29,798 posts)
1. See also: NRG Doubles Down on Distributed Generation
Sat Apr 13, 2013, 09:48 PM
Apr 2013

In reference to the way changing market conditions look set to strand large scale generating assets decades before their owners (and regulators) originally planned. You can see the shortfall that is threatened as the decommissioning funds of the nuclear plants are intended to mature on a schedule coinciding with the plants scheduled life.

From NRG Doubles Down on Distributed Generation

Enter the Utility Death Spiral
To be clear, NRG has flourished under David Crane’s leadership, its stock price nearly doubling in the past year alone. So why would Crane rock the boat, as he just has? The plan that Crane has put forward seemingly contradicts NRG’s current formula for success, and it threatens to alienate others in the industry, to boot. This is a serious challenge to the status quo.

One theory would be that Crane sees the writing on the wall: distributed renewables are forcing centralized fossil-fueled generation to go the way of the dinosaur, opening the door for customers to manage and meet their electricity needs with increased independence. Granted, at today’s pace it’s going to be a while before the electricity industry is no longer dependent on coal and nuclear, but Crane seems to be positioning NRG to get in front of the curve by establishing itself as the go-to provider of islandable micropower. Sun Tzu said: “though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been associated with long delays.” Crane would seem to have taken this to heart.

Should the electric utility industry be worried? At a time when utilities’ business customer satisfaction is already falling, the answer is an unequivocal ‘Yes.’ If NRG steps in and takes people off the grid, there are suddenly fewer customers remaining to pay for the infrastructure needed to make the system work (the same infrastructure that’s needed to bring renewables like Wyoming’s wind power to major load centers across the country). As a result, a utility would have to distribute these fixed costs over fewer customers, raising prices for individual customers and driving even more people to think about switching over to NRG and other options that may emerge. This phenomenon results in a positive feedback loop termed “the utility death spiral.” Investor-owned utilities are taking notice, as this death spiral could result in a cycle that continues shifting customers away from the utility until there’s nobody left.

NRG’s plan hinges on a belief that if a utility can’t prove that it offers more value to its customers, those customers will leave—kicking off the aforementioned death spiral. It’s for this reason that Crane believes that utilities think “distributed solar is a mortal threat to their business.” But does this have to be the case?

...


http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2013_04_11_NRG_Doubles_Down_on_Distributed_Generation



madokie

(51,076 posts)
2. We the people picked up the cost of building the nuclear power plants to begin with
Sun Apr 14, 2013, 07:35 AM
Apr 2013

through subsidies and tax breaks and we'll be who picks up the tab for getting rid of them.
Oklahoma is 4th in wind generation and we've been paying a premium for years to have our power come from wind. That alone gives me the right to bitch about this. We stopped a nuclear power plant, (Blackfox,) from being built near here back then and we're helping to get the wind industry off the ground then and keeping it going now.

I can't post this link enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Fox_Nuclear_Power_Plant

madokie

(51,076 posts)
4. Yes, acquainted but never got to know her on a personal basis
Sun Apr 14, 2013, 02:33 PM
Apr 2013

I did do a considerable amount of dozer work for her husband during this time frame and got to know him pretty good. He was a civil engineer and did all the survey work on the three interconnected ponds we built for him so he would have water for the berry farm he had planned.

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