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from the just-preparing-for-thorium-and-molten-salt-reactors? dept.
from the economic-realities dept.
Utility Dive reports
Entergy Corp. plans to shutter its 680 MW Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Mass. no later than June 1, 2019, the company said this week.
AP reports that financial factors drove Entergy to make the decision, including tough market conditions, reduced revenues, and increased operational costs. Entergy said it did not anticipate the economics of the plant to change in the near future, either through a rebound in power prices or a different market structure.
The exact timing of the closure will be decided next year, but the company has already informed the ISO New England that it intends to stop participating as a capacity resource.
CounterPunch continues
Entergy is also poised to shut the FitzPatrick reactor in New York. It promises an announcement by the end of this month.
Entergy also owns Indian Point 2 and Indian Point 3 some 40 miles north of Manhattan. Unit 2's operating license has long since lapsed. Unit 3's will expire in December.
[...] Meanwhile, like nearly all old American nukes, both Pilgrim and FitzPatrick are losing tons of money. Entergy admits to loss projections of $40 million/year or more at Pilgrim, with parallel numbers expected at FitzPatrick. The company blames falling gas and oil prices for the shortfalls.
[...] the boom in wind [and] solar, increased efficiency, and other Solartopian advances are at the real core of nuke power's escalating economic melt-down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 19 2015, @01:55PM
The economics of nuclear power can be described as "except for those issues, it looks real good".
Where "those issues" includes radioactive waste disposal, plant decommissioning, and the possibility of core meltdown (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukishima). The industry has no answers for the first two, and only PR ("we've just concluded a top to bottom safety review and have left no stone unturned") for the last. The average nuke plant is not going to be run by top-notch personnel. And we haven't even seen a serious terrorist attack yet.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 19 2015, @07:39PM
FWIW, we've also never seen a serious core meltdown. Decent designs would keep that from ever happening, no matter what, but IFAICT none of the existing plants were built with such a design. (They would make reprocessing spent fuel even more of a pain.)
The main reason I'm anti-nuclear is that I don't trust the groups running them to do a good job. I trust the US Navy more than any other operator of nuclear piles, but their goals aren't primarily safety either. (What happens when that aircraft carrier sinks in a harbor? [As the battleship Arizona did at Pearl Harbor...so it can happen.]) Perhaps the Navy has given consideration to such problems. (They wouldn't admit it, so you can't tell.) I'm rather certain that no commercial plant has adequate emergency provisions for extreme events that will "probably never happen". And, as mentioned about, provisions for decommissioning plants have thus far proven to be lamentably sub-par. The best one I've heard of is the British plant that got filled with cement. (If the plan hasn't already been executed, then I don't trust them to have an adequate one, as I haven't heard of an adequate decommissioning so far.)
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