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America's Nuclear Power Plants Are Money Pits

We all need to adjust our expectations for the carbon-free underachiever.
The closing San Onofre nuclear power plant, via Flickr

Just like a pet alligator that’s grown too big to flush, America’s maturing nuclear power plants are a lot more work and danger than we thought, according to Mark Cooper's piece in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Cooper says if we had known this from the beginning, we probably shouldn’t have bothered to build the damn things in the first place.

The senior research fellow for economic analysis at the Center for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, Cooper wrote that one-sixth of nuclear reactors that have been active in the United States have been retired early. The plants were built in the 1970s with the promise of providing steady, inexpensive power with minimal up-keep, a notion that Cooper says, has been exposed "as a myth."

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Cooper points to plant closings in California and Florida as representatives of a pattern. Utility companies are ill-equipped both in knowledge and funding to deal with the problems that emerge from an aging power plant.

In Florida, Process Energy’s attempt to replace steam generators at the Crystal River nuclear facility resulted in a cracked concrete containment wall. In Southern California, radioactive steam revealed that the new tubes in the San Onofre nuclear plant were wearing down much faster that expected. In both locations, the cost of the problems overran everyone’s expectations and lead to the plant's closure.

Cooper says that utility companies looking to untested solutions to big problems just lead to plants becoming money pits that ultimately have to be closed. That's when another round of fighting begins. “Affixing cost responsibility for broken reactors has become a contentious undertaking, creating arguments over whether ratepayers or shareholders should shoulder repair bills,” Cooper says, not to mention the cost of a new power plant, which in Florida has been estimated at $1.2 billion.

Crystal River, also doomed, via Wikipedia

“Late-life troubles in the life cycle of complex nuclear technologies have implications for decisions relating to new nuclear construction,” writes Cooper. “Current analysis of new nuclear reactor construction proposals tends to assume a long plant life—often up to 60 years,” but it took longer to America’s nuclear power fleet up and running than was estimated, and one-sixth were retired before their first 40-year license ran out.

Still, nuclear power is a carbon-free energy source, which seems to promise cheap, clean power, always just on the other side of a handful problems. It’s already providing about 25 percent of America’s power, and most projections for America’s energy future have it as a part of a repertoire of power sources alongside renewable energy.

Rather than been falsely optimistic about a plant’s potential and ease of repair or pessimistic enough to close a plant at first sign of trouble and just go with coal, Cooper is calling for utility companies to assess costs more thoroughly. “Late life repair-or-retire decisions need to be subjected to full scrutiny…with all options for supplying power considered and realistic assumptions about plant life included.”

Our nuclear power plants aren't all Three Mile Islands and Springfield Nuclears. Running the plants at lower, realistic loads may prolong their lives, but America's shabby record for nuclear power plants needs to be factored in when a community is considering what to build to keep their lights on.

As inevitably as that baby gator outgrowing a 10-gallon aquarium, your power plant is going to grow old, and—if the past is any indication—sooner than you think. Before you flush anything, according to Mark Cooper, you gotta think.