Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant's New Enemy: Global Warming

Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Massachusetts can't take the heat.

But Hurricanes Wouldn't Dare Hit Our Nuclear Plants, Because MURRICA

Japanese nuclear power plants the path of Super Typhoon Neoguri: Two

Nuclear power plants on America's hurricane-vulnerable East and Gulf Coasts: Thirteen

The Cost of Nuclear Power is Killing Nuclear Power

Proponents of nuclear power love to blame the lack of new nuclear power plants on environmentalists. But in reality, many environmentalists have given up their past opposition to nuclear on safety grounds in the face of the need to cut carbon pollution from fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

What's stopping the expansion of nuclear power is its own high cost, as in this example from David Shaffer of the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Xcel originally planned to boost the output of the Prairie Island plant by 164 megawatts with upgrades to the reactor in 2014 and 2015, but the utility shelved those plans last October.

Electricity demand has not been growing as fast as the company earlier estimated, and cheaper natural gas had become more attractive as an alternative power source, the utility told state regulators.

Not only do you have to build the plant (expensive!), you have to have a plan for what to do with the spent fuel (expensive & dangerous!), get a water source to cool the plant (increasingly uncertain - thanks, climate change!) and the big one, you have to insure the plant (incredibly risky & expensive!). At every step of the way, nuclear power relies heavily on taxpayer support, either directly through subsidies & loan guarantees or indirectly through use of public resources & public assumption of risk.

Given all that, why not just build a natural gas plant, or better yet, a wind farm? That's nuclear's real problem.

Nuclear Giant Exelon Back to Bullying Wind Energy

Nuclear power giant Exelon is once again complaining that wind power makes electricity prices too low. On page 21 of Exelon's new report slamming government support for wind energy:

[S]ubsidized wind generation also exacerbates artificially low electric prices, thus imposing economic harm.
on competitive generators that are needed to maintain system reliability.

Aw, poor little Exelon! Considering the company brought in $19 billion in revenue last year while dumping vast amounts of carbon pollution into the air at no charge, I bet that cheap wind power had Exelon executives crying in their Johnnie Walker Blue.

Exelon isn't poor or little - it's a big, powerful bully that has no problem putting its best interests ahead of your family's best interests. Exelon spent $9.2 million on lobbying last year, just one of many electric utilities fighting to protect our dirty, expensive energy status quo. The entire alternative energy industry - from wind to solar to biofuels - spent $28.6 million.

As Michael Hiltzik writes in the Los Angeles Times, for all the nuclear and fossil fuel complaining about wind energy incentives, you don't hear those same industries volunteering to give up their own breaks to level the playing field:

Fossil-fuel producers reap tax accounting breaks such as the depletion allowance, which is worth an estimated $1 billion a year, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a Washington think tank created to advise Congress on energy policy. Tax-expensing options for drillers bring them $1.9 billion a year. Relief on royalty payments due to drillers on government property: $53 billion over the lifetime of the leases. Partially as a result, the U.S. government's take from its oil and gas leases is among the lowest in the world, the Government Accountability Office found in 2007.

Then there's coal, the owners of which get to classify royalty income as capital gains, therefore paying a preferential tax rate. This break was enacted in 1951 as relief from the high taxes levied to pay for the Korean War (paying for wars from tax revenue, not by borrowing, was a quaint practice of that era). Bizarrely, it never went away and today is worth as much as $170 million a year to the coal industry.

Finally, there's nuclear, which over its fledging years received subsidies that dwarf all others, while producing a small fraction of the energy per subsidy dollar of any other fuel source. To this day, according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the nuclear power industry receives subsidies worth as much as 11.4 cents per generated kilowatt, or five times as much as the 2.2-cent wind tax credit. (The figure includes such breaks as the federal cap on the industry's liability for nuclear accidents and the government's shouldering of waste management costs.)

What gives away the game on the real goals of the lobbying against the wind credit is that for all their talk about letting "the market" dictate energy policy, Romney and the Koch types never seriously advocate ending the existing subsidies for oil, gas or nuclear. Those politically connected industries are the antithesis of market operators, and their real goal is to tilt the playing field back toward the past, not the future.

Again: I understand the reasons why the nuclear industry is so terrified of extending wind energy incentives, but they're the exact same reasons average Americans should be asking their members of Congress to extend them.

Nuclear Power Operator Complains Wind Energy is Too Inexpensive

The American Wind Energy Association made a bold move late last week, dropping the electric utility Exelon over its opposition to extending key federal incentives for wind energy. Within The Hill reporter Zack Colman's article is this odd complaint:

[Exelon Senior Vice President David] Brown said the PTC is helping wind cut into its nuclear power business. Though the utility has 900 megawatts of installed wind electricity generation capacity, he said wind is “distorting competitive markets that we operate in" by lowering the wholesale price of electricity.

Wait, what? Wind energy is lowering electricity costs ... and that's a PROBLEM to big electric utilities like Exelon?

Federal incentives for wind energy are a drop in the bucket compared to the billions in long-term taxpayer support on which the nuclear power industry has depended. When President Obama and members of Congress talk about expanding nuclear power, they're really talking about shoveling more tax dollars at nuclear and raising your electricity rates.

I understand the reasons why the nuclear industry is afraid of extending wind energy incentives, but they're the exact same reasons average Americans should be asking their members of Congress to extend them.

Insignificant Nuclear Risk: Terrifying! Guaranteed Widespread Coal Deaths: Yawn.

Even though "multiple monitoring systems across the Commonwealth continue to show no levels of public health concern," the Virginia Department of Health is warning residents to avoid drinking rainwater collected in cisterns.

You have to wonder: If insignificant health risks posed by a distant nuclear disaster are worth a health update, why isn't VDOH giving constant updates on the known devastating effects of coal?

Mercury contamination is so widespread that one out of every six pregnant women have mercury levels in their blood high enough for levels in the fetus to reach or surpass the EPA's safety threshold for mercury.

According to the latest government data, this means that 630,000 children are born each year with a strong chance of developing serious mercury-related health effects.

According to the American Lung Association, 24,000 people a year die prematurely because of pollution from coal-fired power plants. And every year 38,000 heart attacks, 12,000 hospital admissions and an additional 550,000 asthma attacks result from power plant pollution.

Now that's truly terrifying. Dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people may be killed in rare nuclear disasters (to say nothing of the risks posed by uranium mining). But coal kills tens of thousands of people every year by design.

Unfortunately, the risks we've known & lived with for years aren't nearly as good at scaring up ratings as the new & unknown ones. Isn't that right, Nancy Grace?

Japan's Nuclear Crisis Reveals Difference in Communication Styles

Shortly after the earthquake & tsunami in Japan, statements by Japanese nuclear officials prompted both TPM's Josh Marshall and Matt Yglesias to express hope that the plants in question were out of danger. But if you go back and read the statements, Japanese officials weren't saying there would never be any danger; they were specifically saying "no release of radiation had been detected" so far.

I wonder if there's a cultural difference there - while we're used to hearing nightmarish warnings from U.S. officials, Japanese officials have simply related the current facts without inference, speculation or prediction.

Why the difference? Some U.S. officials say nothing short of the worst-case scenario will get Americans to heed any threat. And even then, they may ignore emergency instructions - among the Galveston, TX residents who heard the dire warning they faced "certain death" if they didn't evacuate ahead of Hurricane Ike, 50% stayed put anyway.

So when Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary says "there is no immediate danger" after this morning's blast at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, who can be sure what to expect next?



Text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami throughout the Pacific.

The Big Lie About Nuclear Power

Just finished my appearance on CleanSkiesTV. (Looking at the screen cap, I'm reminded that my head looks like an orange on a toothpick.) It's funny how their website goes to such great lengths to emphasize their objectivity, then you get on and they're like, "Renewables are teh suck! Long live natural gas!"

I kid. Actually, I thought their reporting on natural gas this morning was pretty objective. It was their coverage of nuclear power that was hard to swallow. According to one reporter, the biggest obstacles to nuclear power are "government bureaucracy and how to deal with the nuclear waste."

Really? I thought the biggest obstacle to building new nuclear power plants was that it's wicked expensive.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) this week proposed instructing utilities to build 100 brand-new nuclear power plants. As Grist reports:

A study released last month [PDF] by economist Mark Cooper, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, found that building and operating 100 new nuclear reactors would cost $1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion more over the life of the reactors than would generating the same electricity from renewables and energy efficiency. And taxpayers would have to foot the bill for loan guarantees for the nuclear industry, as the private sector has been unwilling to make big investments in the sector.

Sen. Alexander's nuclear unfunded mandate would force utilities across the country to jack up rates to pay for those plants. As much as Republicans cry socialism at the tiniest increase in tax rates, they seem to have absolutely no problem with skyrocketing electricity rates.

And from a political point of view, why not? People tend to blame high electricity rates on their utilities. But they blame high taxes on politicians. And having to take a leadership role to explain why something unpopular is needed is what spineless elected officials fear most.

So having to explain to voters that while a bill like the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act might cause their rates to go up a bit but their bills to go down thanks to massive efficiency gains ... well, that's a bit much to ask of Sen. Alexander.

Photo courtesy Public Citizen