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New Jersey Spotlight reports
Three Mile Island may be the next nuclear power plant to be shuttered by its owner unless it gets financial help to keep the facility afloat.
Exelon Corp., the owner of the Pennsylvania generating station, announced yesterday it will retire the plant by or about September 30, 2019 absent any change in that state's policies dealing with nuclear power.
The announcement is the latest by an owner of a nuclear plant to threaten or close its facility unless given financial assistance to make the facility profitable, a drama that could play out soon in New Jersey with its three nuclear units operated by the Public Service Enterprise Group in South Jersey.
If Exelon follows through on its threat, it would mean the Oyster Creek plant in Lacey Township, also owned by the Chicago energy giant, could outlast TMI, the site of the nation's biggest nuclear accident when it had a partial meltdown in 1979.
Oyster Creek, the country's oldest commercial nuclear plant, agreed to shut down at the end of 2019 under a settlement worked out with the Christie administration in 2010.
[...] Environmentalists oppose extending the incentives renewable sources obtain to nuclear, because unlike solar, wind, and water, the former is not sustainable. “It’s not renewable; you have to keep buying the fuel,’’ said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.
(Score: 2) by mth on Sunday June 04 2017, @01:25PM (2 children)
As far as I know natural gas is not very expensive at the moment. Its price is connected to the oil price and that's at a relatively low level.
Also, if a nuclear plant needs financial support to stay open, then nuclear isn't one of the cheaper power generation options.
I do think though that as long as there are still coal plants running, we shouldn't be closing nuclear plants, unless they're at an age where safety becomes a concern.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2017, @04:06PM
The issue is that if it's not nuclear and it's not coal or gas, then what do we use for base power generation? Of the three, nuclear emits by far the least amount of pollutants during the process.
Hydro and geothermal are great if you're in an area that has them, but they both have their own consequences. Wind, solar and tidal are great, but they aren't consistent enough throughout the day and year for base power generation. Probably they will be in the future, but the storage technology isn't yet there to do it.
(Score: 1) by Elledan on Monday June 05 2017, @10:58AM
Natural gas is currently very inexpensive, yes. That wasn't the case before, however. It's very likely that prices will skyrocket again once the fracking bubble pops. It doesn't make sense to bet the farm on NG staying cheap for the next 40-50 years.
The reasons why nuclear power is 'expensive' is very much due to the political climate. In countries like South-Korea, China and India where they aren't focusing on one-off designs for practically every location, but instead coming up with a standard design that they can mass-produce it's really quite cheap to build the plant itself. Fuel costs can be ignored. Running a nuclear plant is very cheap, unless the political climate makes that it isn't.
Part of the problem is that nuclear plants are burdened with countless additional costs, lots of frivolous lawsuits and more which for example a coal plant never has to bother with. There have been countless instances where a fly ash pool's containment broke and toxic sludge contaminated the nearby river. The operators of the plant then receive a slap on the wrist for such a 'bad thing' and live continues as before, despite heavy metals and worse affecting wildlife and communities all the way down the river. And that in addition to the 'normal' pollution from these coal plants.
In short, in countries like the US, the system is stacked against nuclear power. In countries with a less hostile attitude towards nuclear power (like Canada, with Ontario being 100% hydro/nuclear-powered), this is far less of an issue, and it shows.