Three Mile Island nuclear shutdown is a big setback in climate change fight
Smart environmentalists are up in arms over the imminent closure of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, where a partial meltdown in 1979 squelched an industry.
Exelon Generation, the owner of the last operational reactor at the Pennsylvania facility, says it will not order new uranium fuel for the plant before a June 1 deadline.
Anti-nuclear activists are rejoicing; they’ve been trying to shutter the plant for 45 years. Jane Fonda’s movie “The China Syndrome” had terrified America in 1979 with fears of a meltdown when twelve days later a faulty valve caused an accident and a small release of radioactive gas.
Unlike the movie, there was no irreparable damage. No one was killed and the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests the release had negligible health effects. Nevertheless, Three Mile Island became shorthand for nuclear disaster and remained so even after far worse accidents at Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan.
Opposition to nuclear power became a tenet of environmental activism. But in the face of climate change, nuclear power is looking pretty good.
Nuclear generation releases no greenhouse gases, making it an excellent source of clean energy. The 98 operating reactors in the U.S. generate 20 percent of the country’s electricity, according to the World Nuclear Association.
More importantly, nuclear plants generate 60 percent of the clean energy produced in the U.S. Unfortunately, nuclear is expensive, which is why plant owners are threatening to shut down half of the country’s nuclear power capacity.
Current power plants, including the only new plant under construction in Georgia, cannot compete with cheap electricity from natural gas. Traditional nuclear plants generate enormous construction, security and clean-up costs, even though the fuel is relatively inexpensive.
High costs are not a big deal in places like Georgia, where utilities force customers to pay whatever price is necessary to recoup them. But most of the country is moving to competitive pricing, like Texas, where generators compete to provide the cheapest possible electron.
Half of the nation’s nuclear power capacity is losing money and could shut down, according to a financial analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. But replacing that power with wind and solar energy would take 11 years, according to a new study from Third Way, a center-left think tank.
Losing that much nuclear generation would incentivize coal and natural gas power plants and drive up greenhouse gas emissions.
New York and Illinois have both passed laws to reward nuclear plants for generating emission-free electricity, keeping six reactors online. But the threat of losing other reactors is making smart environmentalists rethink their opposition to nuclear power.
“Ideally, we’d want nuclear reactors to generate zero-carbon power throughout a 60-year life
span, or even longer if they’re able to continue operating safely,” Third Way researchers concluded.
The only way the U.S. and other wealthy countries can cut greenhouse gases and meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement is to keep every nuclear plant online and even build new ones. The challenge is building safer nuclear plants that cost less to build and decommission.
Oregon-based NuScale is developing small, modular reactors that are built in a factory and delivered to a power plant site. The company created a joint venture this month with Virginia-based Enfission, which is developing a new nuclear fuel technology to improve the economics and safety of existing and new reactors.
The world is also making progress on fusion reactors, which recreate the sun’s process of creating energy while producing no dangerous waste.
Chinese researchers have set a record by maintaining the conditions for a fusion reaction in their Tokamak reactor for 100 seconds. Late last year they achieved a record temperature of 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.
The Chinese research feeds into the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, the world’s largest fusion reactor under construction in France. The ITER reached a significant milestone this month when U.S.-based General Atomics completed the first stage of fabrication on the central solenoid, the heart of the project.
While encouraging, small nuclear reactors are a decade away from generating commercial electricity, and fusion reactors will not start working before 2050. We need existing reactors in the meantime to keep powering our homes and businesses.
President Donald Trump and Congress could make every nuclear power plant in the country profitable tomorrow if they passed a tax on carbon emissions. The tax would also incentivize more rsearch into new clean energy technologies and discourage coal.
While wrong to oppose all nuclear power, environmentalists were right about one drawback of old-school plants. Though Three Mile Island will shut down in September, Exelon estimates the site will not be cool enough to disassemble until 2074.