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Without Subsidies, Three Mile Island Could Go Dark, Operator Asserts

posted by martyb on Sunday June 04 2017, @10:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the needs-more-wealthfar dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday June 04 2017, @06:56PM (3 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Sunday June 04 2017, @06:56PM (#520317) Homepage

    And that maintenance and replacement is done from... non-renewable materials. Plastics, rare metals, etc.

    What's the difference between that and using the THOUSANDS OF YEARS WORTH of uranium that's left?

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  • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday June 04 2017, @07:39PM

    by Whoever (4524) on Sunday June 04 2017, @07:39PM (#520332) Journal

    You mean materials that can be recycled?

  • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday June 04 2017, @07:41PM

    by Whoever (4524) on Sunday June 04 2017, @07:41PM (#520335) Journal

    Oh, and, nuclear power generators are built entirely out of Uranium, are they?

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday June 05 2017, @01:49AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Monday June 05 2017, @01:49AM (#520502) Journal

    > What's the difference between that and using the THOUSANDS OF YEARS WORTH of uranium that's left?

    You seem to be disputing the characterisation of nuclear energy as "not sustainable." I assume you know that the fission process transmutes actinides such as uranium into other elements in a way that's not readily reversed. Apart from that, your comment appears to assume the use of breeder reactors and reprocessing, or perhaps you're unaware that nuclear fuel must be removed from a reactor before the actinides are fully consumed. This article is about a site in the United States. Reprocessing is not done in the United States, for civilian reactors. Furthermore, the United States has no place to store its high-level wastes from civilian reactors. The way civilian nuclear power is currently practiced there is that fuel is fabricated, used, stored in pools, then stored in casks at the site where it was used.

    According to the Congressional Research Service (using NEI data), there were 62,683 metric tons of commercial spent fuel accumulated in the United States as of the end of 2009.

            Of that total, 48,818 metric tons – or about 78 percent – were in pools.
            13,856 metric tons – or about 22 percent – were stored in dry casks.
            The total increases by 2,000 to 2,400 tons annually.

    -- https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/faqs.html [nrc.gov]

    The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind. Yucca Mountain was expected to open in 2017. However, on March 5, 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu reiterated in a Senate hearing that the Yucca Mountain site was no longer considered an option for storing reactor waste.

    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage [wikipedia.org]

    Calling that "not sustainable" is an understatement.