Previously posted:
Message 25721992
U.S. Chooses Four Utilities To Revive NUCLEAR Industry
By Rebecca Smith
17 June, 2009
The Wall Street Journal
[ I will amend my previous characterization of the OBAMA administration as anti-NUCLEAR. But why only four companies and why weren't Entergy and Exelon included? Didn't they make enough contributions to the right folks? ]
Four power companies are expected to split $18.5 billion in federal financing to build the next generation of NUCLEAR reactors -- the biggest step in three decades to revive the U.S. NUCLEAR industry and one that could vault the utilities ahead of some of the sector's strongest players.
UniStar NUCLEAR Energy, NRG Energy Inc., Scana Corp and Southern Co. are expected to share a set of loan guarantees to be awarded by the Energy Department.
.....
And
Message 26251984
....In the U.S., we are into the second decade of the 21st century, waiting for the NUCLEAR renaissance, after the market collapsed in the 1970s. Waiting and waiting.
NUCLEAR power plants won’t pick up U.S. generating market share in 2010, by all accounts. That’s despite prior federal government policy aimed at jump-starting new NUCLEAR generation, including allegedly streamlined federal regulations and a longed-for candy jar of additional subsidies, such as major loan guarantees, pledged in the Republicans’ Energy Policy Act of 2005. Those have yet to materialize.
Some in the OBAMA administration and Congress are contemplating additional loan guarantees and other NUCLEAR subsidies, to be included in pending climate change legislation. Arguing for $50 billion in additional federal loan guarantees, Exelon CEO John Rowe told a Senate committee in late October, “Deployment of new NUCLEAR plants simply will not happen, given the large up-front capital costs, without a much more robust federal loan guarantee program than currently exists.” There doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm on either side of the partisan aisle for committing that kind of money to NUCLEAR power.
The 2005 congressional vision (perhaps a hallucination) was of a modest new fleet of nukes—a dozen or so—that would come into the U.S. market and revitalize the stagnant industry. New reactor designs from U.S., Japanese, and French companies; interest from multiple utilities; applications for more than 30 units under the streamlined approach of the NUCLEAR Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) licensing reforms of the 1990s; and the Energy Policy Act of 2005 all led to irrational exuberance among NUCLEAR power developers. The 2005 loan guarantees would jump-start the market, the legislation assumed and the industry agreed.
More than four years later, the presumably vibrant market for new nukes in the U.S. is becalmed at best. That’s a factor of the worldwide economic collapse of 2007–2009, combined with U.S. regulatory and technical difficulties afflicting the new, putatively safer and more efficient NUCLEAR reactors, plus the industry’s inability to deliver on promises of new reactor designs that will be easier, quicker, and cheaper to build. Then there is the unwillingness of anyone with real money to finance new plants.
The NRC has been unable to certify the latest new reactor designs under its “combined operating license” reform, for reasons indicting both the industry and the regulators. The French AREVA evolutionary design is facing its first round of NRC scrutiny while experiencing major cost overruns and schedule delays in construction of a new unit in Finland. U.S. regulators at the end of the year rejected a modified advanced reactor design from Westinghouse for the AP1000 that they had earlier approved. Westinghouse made changes in the shield building to protect the reactor from airline strikes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The NRC said those changes raised new licensing issues. General Electric, according to the NRC, never provided design details for its advanced boiling water reactor sufficient to judge the safety of the machine (Figure 6).
Figure 6. New NUCLEAR queue grows. The location of planned new NUCLEAR plants in the U.S. Source: U.S. NUCLEAR Regulatory Commission
Given regulatory uncertainty and the conditions of current capital markets, no rational investor is likely to commit major private-sector resources to building new NUCLEAR plants, according to several investment bankers who talked to POWER on background. If new nukes are to be built, they argued, the effort will require large commitments of federal dollars, probably in the form of loan guarantees vastly exceeding those in the 2005 act. That’s an unlikely prospect. Even with much larger federal loan guarantees, it isn’t clear that Wall Street will commit the capital necessary to build units at $8 billion to $10 billion a pop, the latest estimates.
In Congress, feckless Republicans are calling for a fleet of 100 new nukes within 20 years, at a $700 billion price tag. That’s pure politics, or else they are smoking some powerfully atomic wacky-weed that induces weird policy visions. There is no U.S. capacity to license or build that many plants. Maybe the system could support three, or six, new nukes, but that’s a guess. A hundred? Fugetaboutit.
Waste Storage Discussions: A Waste of Time. Another blow to the prospects for U.S. nukes was the White House decision last year—no surprise—to euthanize the Yucca Mountain, Nev., project for permanent underground storage of spent NUCLEAR fuel and other high-level NUCLEAR wastes. The OBAMA administration, fulfilling a deal with Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, zeroed out Yucca in its budget submission early in 2009. The funding decision will stick. Sic transit gloria Yucca.
The U.S. finds itself in the embarrassing position, not for the first time, of having no practical idea about NUCLEAR waste storage. Spent fuel rods will remain at reactor sites for the unforeseeable future, probably past the lifetime of anyone reading this article. In the wake of the administration’s decision, the NRC last September began a rulemaking that would give regulators the authority to approve at-reactor waste storage for 40 years, up from the current limit of 20 years.
The administration says it will appoint a “blue-ribbon” commission to study options for NUCLEAR waste disposal. That’s classic D.C. talk for, “We are clueless.”
......
[ Re. Obama's uping loan guarantees to $54B from the announcement last summer ... about what would h/b expected. That will amount to maybe 5 additional nuke plants over time.
This is probably the influence of Chu, who is the most moderate and reasonable of Obama's energy people. Everyone else there is pretty radical. You get very mixed messages from the Obama administration - anti-nuke actions and statements from some folks and more pragmatic actions and statements from some others. Its like the left hand doesn't know what the further left hand is doing. For example, the FERC head has said we need NO NEW COAL OR NUKE plants in the US: ]
...
No new NUCLEAR or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said today.
.....
NUCLEAR and coal plants are too expensive, he added.
"I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism," he said.
......
Wellinghoff's statement – if it reflects OBAMA administration policy – would be a huge blow to the U.S. NUCLEAR power industry, which has been hoping for a NUCLEAR "renaissance" based on the capacity of NUCLEAR reactors to generate power without greenhouse gas emissions.
Congress created significant financial incentives to encourage the construction of perhaps a half-dozen NUCLEAR plants with innovative designs, and Energy Secretary Steven CHU has promised Congress to accelerate awards of federal loan guarantees for some of these proposals.
..... |
