How retiring nuclear power plants may undercut U.S. climate goals
During the last decade, a glut of cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing has driven hundreds of dirtier coal plants in the United States out of business, a big reason carbon dioxide emissions fell 14 percent from 2005 to 2016.
But more recently, that same gas boom has started pushing many of America’s nuclear reactors into early retirement — a trend with adverse consequences for climate change.
The United States’ fleet of 99 nuclear reactors still supplies one-fifth of the country’s electricity without generating any planet warming greenhouse gases. When those reactors retire, wind and solar usually cannot expand fast enough to replace the lost power. Instead, coal and natural gas fill the void, causing emissions to rise.
Some environmental groups that have long been hostile to nuclear power are now having second thoughts. “We don’t support unlimited subsidies to keep these nuclear plants open,” said John Finnigan, lead counsel with the Environmental Defense Fund. “But we are concerned that if you close these plants today, they’d be replaced by natural gas and emissions would go up.”
Faced with looming nuclear plant shutdowns, several states are considering a difficult and sometimes unpopular option: subsidizing their existing nuclear reactors to keep them running for years to come.
In Pennsylvania, for instance, Exelon recently announced it would close the last remaining reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant by 2019 unless policymakers stepped in to support it. Cheap natural gas had cut regional electricity prices in half, pushing Pennsylvania’s nine reactors, which produce one-third of the state’s power, toward unprofitability.
State legislators have formed a “nuclear caucus” to explore policies to keep the plants open, studying recent moves by New York and Illinois to compensate nuclear operators for the carbon-free power they produce. Those in favor are motivated partly by climate concerns.
“If Three Mile Island closes, we’d lose more zero-carbon power than all of the state’s renewable resources put together,” said John Raymond Hanger, a former Pennsylvania environmental secretary.
Yet such policies still face staunch opposition from gas producers and even other environmentalists reluctant to subsidize a multibillion-dollar industry — making this one of the more contentious climate debates around.
A study by Geoffrey Haratyk of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that if all of the United States’ at-risk reactors shut down and were replaced by modern gas plants, domestic carbon dioxide emissions in the power industry would increase 4.9 percent — erasing a large portion of the recent climate gains from the decline of coal.
“For a long time, we could have our cake and eat it, too, with cheap natural gas — it was driving down power prices and also lowering emissions,” said John Parsons, executive director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But now that low gas prices are endangering nuclear plants, we’re facing a real trade-off between the economic benefits of cheap gas and hurting the planet.”
And even if states eventually added enough renewable energy to offset lost nuclear, Parsons said, they would basically just be “running to stay in place,” rather than lowering emissions.
Few companies are contemplating new nuclear plants to replace those lost, deterred by high costs and challenges in construction. And once an existing nuclear reactor is retired, it cannot be reopened later, as workers immediately begin removing fuel and decommissioning the plant.
“If we close, we’re closed for good,” said Joseph Dominguez, an executive vice president at Exelon.
Lawmakers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut are now mulling fresh policies to keep their endangered reactors operating. While some legislators are focused on air pollution concerns, others point to the jobs lost if those plants vanished. Still others worry about becoming overly dependent on a single fuel, natural gas, with a history of price volatility.
Proponents of those subsidies argue that energy markets do not properly value the low-carbon benefits nuclear reactors provide — in contrast to wind and solar, which have been shielded from low electricity prices by state renewable mandates and federal tax credits.
But opposition abounds. In Ohio, the American Petroleum Institute is waging a fierce campaign against a bill to subsidize the state’s two nuclear reactors. In Pennsylvania, a coalition of natural gas producers and manufacturers has railed against state subsidies.
“Competitive markets are working well on behalf of consumers,” said Steve Kratz, a spokesman for Citizens Against Nuclear Bailouts. “Any effort to favor one industry over another would just cause electricity prices to increase and hurt everyone from ratepayers to large-scale manufacturers.”