AMERICA LOSES LOVE OF NUCLEAR POWER AS MUCH OF WORLD REALISES ITS VALUE
▶ Industry competes with lower prices of natural gas for electricity, writes David Millward
Three Mile Island, best known for the biggest nuclear accident in US history, is months away from shutting down, with almost 700 people losing their jobs.
Only two of the nuclear plant’s cooling towers are operating. The other two were closed after a partial reactor meltdown in 1979.
The decision by owner Exelon to decommission the plant is a sign of the broader crisis in the US nuclear power industry, which still provides 20 per cent of the country’s electricity.
While other regions, notably Mena, are embracing a nuclear future, the technology is past its sell-by date in the US.
Apicorp Energy Research says the Mena region is set to add 15.8 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2030, which it calls a “quantum leap”.
The UAE’s Barakah nuclear plant, scheduled to go online by 2020, will account for a third of that increase with four reactors of 1,400 megawatt capacity each.
But in the US, six nuclear plants have shut down permanently since 2013 and 11 will disappear by 2025. The number of working reactors has dropped from a peak of 112 in 1990 to 98 in August this year, the US Energy Information Administration says.
“Nuclear power in the US has definitely been squeezed, primarily because of the decline in natural gas prices caused by the fracking boom,” said Steve Clemmer, a director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Existing plants have become a challenge economically and new ones are expensive to build. There are only two reactors under construction.”
With electricity prices declining, about a third of nuclear power plants in the US are no longer economically viable. States including New York, Illinois and New Jersey are offering subsidies to keep their power plants open.
The states say the move is environmentally driven, with nuclear power a low-carbon energy that is less likely to contribute to climate change and helps to meet emission reduction targets. The nuclear sector contributes more than 50 per cent of low-carbon electricity in the US.
Some argue that nuclear power could help the US to meet climate change targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement, which was signed by Barack Obama and renounced by Donald Trump.
A paper published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
calls nuclear power the “vanishing low-carbon wedge”.
The paper, written by researchers at Harvard, the University of California San Diego and Carnegie Mellon, paints a grim picture of the industry’s future.
“There is no reason to believe that any utility in the US will build a new large reactor in the foreseeable future,” it said.
The US has a choice of getting out of nuclear completely or pressing ahead with a new generation of smaller, more cost-efficient reactors – which the researchers believed was unlikely because of the costs.
“We appear to be set to lose one of the most promising candidates for providing a wedge of reliable, low-carbon energy over the next few decades and perhaps even the rest of the century,” the report said.
The US nuclear woes are symptoms of a wider problem, said Miriam Tuerk, chief executive of Clear Blue Technologies International in Toronto, which specialises in wireless solar power providing electricity to consumers.
“The decline of the nuclear generation industry in the US is highlighting the wider problem of ageing infrastructure,” Ms Tuerk said. “Plants can cost from $2 billion (Dh7.34bn) to $9bn to build and construction time can be 10 years.
“For every 40 cents you spend on generating the power, you spend 60 cents getting the electricity from the power station to the customer’s home or business. In the power industry, we still have monopolies and this is creating demand for alternative solutions.”
Mr Trump has tried to intervene, telling his energy secretary Rick Perry to take steps to keep loss-making nuclear power stations running. He says that keeping them open is essential for national security.
But his argument is disputed by many experts who say the US power system has enough energy reserves without the reactors.
The natural gas industry and free-market conservatives oppose any government intervention in energy.
John Quelch, dean of the Miami Business School, said the US had fallen behind commercial rivals in nuclear power. “Environmental objections have precluded the permitting of new nuclear plants,” Mr Quelch said.
“Innovation lags when you don’t have opportunity to bring your ideas to commercial reality. If you need a nuclear power station today, you’d buy it from China, France, Korea or Russia.”