Despite its history, Three Mile Island may be missed. Cosh,
To people involved in the production, transmission and selling of electric power, the map of North America does not consist of provinces or states. It’s made up of ISOS and RTOS — regulated grid operators who keep the lights on in their various fiefs, some of which are enormous. There is no such thing as California on this map: only CAISO. Ontario is not Ontario: it’s IESO. The largest of these realms, as big as a France- and- a- half, is the majestic PJM Interconnection. The letters stand for the mere political entities Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, but PJM covers parts of 13 states and D.C.
You can go look up what types of generation sources PJM is using over the most recent hour ( just as you probably can with your own grid operator). You are likely to find that this hunk of the United States is getting a quarter or a third of its power from nuclear energy. The part of the load carried by nuclear plants holds steady ( in absolute terms) round the clock, because that’s the nature of nukes; you can’t turn them on and off like a switch, but they’re totally weather-resistant and not subject to exterior interruptions. They’re used, where they exist, as the bedrock of the electricity supply.
As I type, nukes are contributing 33 per cent of PJM’S electrical load; flexible natural gas is providing 39 per cent, and ugly, murderous coal 23 per cent. Hydroelectricity is all but absent; the remaining five per cent of power mostly comes from wind, solar and other trendy, plucky renewables.
I did say “where they exist” about nuclear plants, and this brings us to the actual news in this column: the surviving power unit at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa., was shut down for good on Sept. 20 after 45 years of service to customers through the PJM grid. When Three Mile Island is mentioned we remember the industrial accident that destroyed Unit 2, causing a partial meltdown of its radioactive core, in 1979. The TMI accident led to a release of radiation that had no human health effects anyone can discern, despite close followup of the people who lived nearest the reactor.
Those people are more upset about Friday’s permanent closure of Unit 1 than you might imagine if you got 10 years’ worth of jokes out of Three Mile Island before Chernobyl took centre stage. Exelon Corp.’s workforce at TMI will be in “decommissioning” mode for a while, and there will be a skeleton crew of employees in Londonderry Township for decades. But the community’s tax base and public services are unavoidably ... well, to say “melting down” would be in dubious taste.
The U. S. has not had any new nuke plants go critical since TMI Unit 2 went kaflooey. Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, they are increasingly being talked about as part of a solution to the climate crisis. I didn’t want to write “alleged climate crisis” there, but talk is about all that is happening. The closure of an established, functioning nuclear plant suggests that the U. S. is going backwards on climate policy.
The proximate cause of Unit 1’s demise was capitalism. If you can find Pennsylvania on a map you probably know it’s the land of natural- gas fracking par excellence. PJM, having abundant gas resources for power generation, simply wouldn’t pay the price per kilowatt-hour that Exelon needed to keep Unit 1 fuelled and staffed. Exelon complains that wind and solar receive a premium in the market for being zero-carbon that wasn’t offered to TMI.
Accounting for the costs of nuclear plants is slippery business, and, anyway, PJM could do more to get the nicer renewables into the mix; economically PJM is mostly an exchange, and it answers to its states and the federal regulator FERC in this regard. The scary part is that we currently have several Democratic presidential candidates calling for total, categorical nationwide bans on hydraulic fracturing in gas wells, a technology which has been inarguably responsible for large declines in U. S. carbon emissions as coal is displaced by methane in power generation. ( Gas also matches especially well with wind and solar.) Sen. Elizabeth Warren boasted that she would “ban fracking — everywhere” on her first day in office.
The reaction of the business and energy news outlets has been, by and large, to thank heaven such a stupid idea is probably impossible. ( Ban fracking everywhere? Including Alberta?) But gas futures in the U. S. should tick upward as soon as Sen. Warren — or Sen. Bernie Sanders, or Sen. Kamala Harris — show signs of winning the 2020 presidential election. The trade press of the power biz is full of happy talk about natural gas being half obsolete as a “bridge” to a zero- carbon world. New methods of mass (and household- level) electricity storage are plunging in price and would allow industrial economies to depend much more on wind and solar.
This would be a glorious step toward truly free- per- marginalwatt power. But in PJM- land they are still burning huge amounts of coal. How ready to explode the natural gas bridge can they be in places that haven’t gotten halfway across? Will Pennsylvania one day be regretting the irreversible abandonment of old Three Mile Island?
THE PROXIMATE CAUSE OF UNIT 1’S DEMISE WAS CAPITALISM.