Scana Corp. announced on Monday it will stop construction on a nuclear-power plant in South Carolina—one of two in development in the US. Project costs ballooned in recent years, and the decision should eventually save electricity customers $7 billion.
But the stoppage and others like it may cost everyone more in the long run. The move has implications that last hundreds of years—the residence time of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere—as electricity generated from fossil fuels begin to replace aging or expensive nuclear reactors.
Nuclear power has long provoked ardent policy fights, historically centered on the perceived safety or danger of splitting atoms to keep consumers’ refrigerators running. Since America’s most famous close-call—the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island—debates have only grown in complexity.
Today, it’s not local or environmental opposition but economics that’s crippling industry growth and undercutting the fiscal viability of existing plants.
At the same time, the Spanish government says it’s closing the country’s oldest nuclear-power station because of lack of support among political parties and companies involved to keep it open.
Energy Minister Alvaro Nadal said on Tuesday the license for the Santa Maria de Garona plant in northern Spain would not be renewed as there was too much uncertainty surrounding the plant’s viability.
Production at the 46-year-old Garona was halted in 2012 when its operator, Nuclenor, objected to a new tax. Its board recently failed to reach agreement on keeping the plant open.
Environmentalists have long claimed that the plant is outdated, although Spain’s Nuclear Security Council this year said it could continue operating.
Spain has seven other nuclear reactors that produce some 20 percent of the country’s electricity.
A natural gas installation coming online in 2022 might cost $14 a megawatt-hour (MWh) in apples-to-apples capital costs, according to the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) 2017 Annual Energy Outlook.
Nuclear plants would need more than $70 per MWh. (The latest EIA outlook doesn’t project coal costs because under Obama-era regulations, none were expected to be built.) Low natural-gas prices are undercutting even the relatively cheap costs of operating many online US nuclear plants, making some of them too expensive to run.
Among those existing reactors, the Three Mile Island is the latest victim of the US shale gas boom, and to some extent, reduced demand and increased renewables. It is now expected to close in 2019. Four states that have shuttered nuclear facilities in recent years have turned to gas and coal to make up the difference.
More gas and coal, of course, means more emitted CO2. And that’s exactly what scientists say, we need to reduce in order to slow climate change, or, at the very least, avoid global environmental catastrophe.
But renewable energies, like solar and wind, aren’t enough to replace fossil fuels, at least not yet. This is where nuclear comes in. It may be very difficult to meet international carbon-cutting goals without widespread addition of nuclear plants.
The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project is an international research effort into how leading polluters’ may need to transform their energy systems to cut carbon below levels identified as safe by scientists.
The US analysis, which was conducted by the consultancy Energy and Environmental Economics Inc. and two national laboratories, found that electricity demand might double by 2050—while the amount of CO2 emitted per dollar of GDP would need to fall to between 3 percent and 10 percent of current levels.
The report lays out three main scenarios that would achieve such dramatic reductions: A renewables scenario which calls for about 30 times 2015 capacity; the coal scenario would require roughly doubling current coal-generated power (provided it has carbon-capture and storage technology that doesn’t exist); and the “high-nuclear” scenario.
This third option calls for a quadrupling of 2015 US nuclear-power production. And with Scana nixing 2.2 gigawatts of construction, Three Mile Island’s announced closure, and the generally weak state of the industry, the US is not showing much capacity to even hold the line.
“Without an aggressive build-out of nuclear power, climate goals are still attainable, but at much greater expense,” according to Jeffrey Sachs, the economist and director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, who coleads the Deep Decarbonization effort.
“The rest of the options are still feasible, but less attractive,” he said. “We’d make a big mistake if we decide right now we don’t need it.”
Asked how to overcome the unfavorable economics that killed the South Carolina project and is shuttering active plants, Sachs suggested a rethinking of the entire nuclear research, development, and deployment pipeline. Newer technologies—some being pursued in other countries—may dramatically reduce costs, if they prove safe.
A magic wand solving the cost problems would still leave the problem of waste, and give policy-makers a choice between nuclear waste—deadly but concentrated poison that lasts thousands of years—and fossil-fuel waste—invisible, diffuse carbon pollution that in sufficient amounts will transform the Earth for thousands of years.
Some climate skeptics may cite this as a Hobson’s choice, but experts warn that it’s not that simple, especially when considering the economic component.
While nuclear waste is nasty stuff, so are the conventional pollutants of fossil-fuel burning. The Brattle Group has previously found that, “Nuclear power avoids air emissions of over 1 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 650,000 tons of nitrogen oxides each year, as well as significant particulate emissions.”
Restricting these toxins saves America more than $9 billion a year. Brattle Group provides consulting services and expert testimony in economics, finance and regulation to corporations, law firms and public agencies.
Emissions cuts made today are worth more than the same cuts made down the road, authors of a Brattle Group report wrote last December.
“Since CO2 emissions persist for many years in the atmosphere,” they said, “near-term emission reductions are more helpful for climate protection than later ones.”
Bloomberg News and AP
Image credits: AP/I. Lopez