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Page added on March 1, 2014
US Backing First Nuclear Reactors in 30 Years
The U.S. government has announced that it will be offering substantial loan guarantees for two new nuclear reactors, giving a major boost to what would be the first such projects to go forward in the United States in more than three decades.
The move was immediately hailed by the nuclear industry, which has faced mounting concerns in recent years over the economic feasibility of nuclear power in today’s energy landscape. Yet public interest groups and environmentalists offered quick criticism, warning that U.S. regulators have failed to learn lessons from recent nuclear disasters and that the projects are too risky for taxpayer funding.
Ahead of a Thursday trip to the southeastern state of Georgia, where the two plants are to be built, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz noted that the loan guarantees, worth 6.5 billion dollars, are specifically meant to rejuvenate the U.S. nuclear industry.
“The construction of new nuclear power facilities like this one … is not only a major milestone in the [Obama] administration’s commitment to jumpstart the U.S. nuclear power industry,” Moniz told reporters here, “it is also an important part of our all-of-the-above approach to American energy as we move toward a low-carbon energy future.”
The administration provisionally approved the loans four years ago, and these were expected to be finalised in 2012 (a loan for a third project remains under negotiation). Around that time, however, the high-profile and politically contentious failure of a solar energy start-up company, another recipient of federal government backing, failed, causing officials to pull back temporarily.
Private capital, meanwhile, remained largely uninterested in funding the projects, in part due to the ongoing recovery from the 2008 recession and in part due to continued reverberations from the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. Indeed, the Energy Department is now touting a new reactor design to be used for the two projects, which in part is distinguished by having an automatic shutoff system in case of emergency.
Yet green groups say significant safety concerns remain.
“We have particular concerns about this current design – we were part of a challenge to that design after the Fukushima disaster, and the United States hasn’t yet incorporated lessons learned from that experience,” Katherine Fuchs, a nuclear subsidies campaigner at Friends of the Earth US (FOE), an advocacy group here, told IPS.
“Just last week we had an earthquake in Georgia and [nearby] South Carolina, underlining continued risks that we need to make sure are taken into account. It’s significant that these are the first two plants being built in decades – there are lots of good reasons for this, particularly economics and safety concerns.”
Prohibitive expense
Although nuclear energy continues to produce about a fifth of U.S. electricity, the last construction cycle for U.S. nuclear power plants ended abruptly in 1979.
In March of that year, a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania partially melted down, the result of a confluence of poor design, technical malfunction and user error. Although the resulting release of radioactive material was never officially held responsible for any public health problems, the incident led to broad changes in regulation and oversight of nuclear power plants.
While U.S. nuclear plants have come online since then – the most recent was in the mid-1990s, for a project that began during the 1970s – the focus of both federal authorities and the private sector has largely moved on. Particularly in the context of new “fracking” technologies that allow engineers to access previously hard-to-reach natural gas deposits, the heavy capital investment required to build a new nuclear reactor – estimated by some at around nine billion dollars – has increasingly come to be seen as prohibitive.
Over the past year alone, four nuclear power plants have closed down in the United States over financial feasibility concerns, and FOE’s Fuchs points to several plans for new plants that have been shelved. Meanwhile, Wall Street investors have reportedly refused to get involved in the Georgia projects, making the federal government’s backing all the more critical if these proposals were to go forward.
Such a situation leads many critics to suggest that any nuclear project today would be too risky for the use of federal funds.
“The construction of the two new reactors … are 21 months behind schedule and 1.6 billion dollars over budget,” Allison Fisher, outreach director for the energy programme at Public Citizen, a watchdog group here, said Wednesday.
“This not only calls into question the decision to underwrite this risky project with taxpayer dollars, but … this is a technology that continues to be beset with safety issues and produces toxic wastes that we still don’t have a solution for – hardly a technology the government should be promoting and propping up with taxpayer funds.”
Clean and green?
Reaction from the nuclear industry, meanwhile, has underlined the importance of the Energy Department’s backing. On Thursday, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a trade association, dubbed the new agreement “historic”.
“The agreement demonstrates the Obama administration’s recognition of the key role nuclear energy must play in a successful clean energy policy,” Marvin Fertel, the NEI’s president, said in a statement sent to IPS. “The loan guarantee program … will act as a catalyst in hastening the construction of low- and non-emitting sources of electricity, such as nuclear power plants.”
As Fertel notes, the new loan guarantees are coming from a pot of money created by the U.S. Congress in 2005 to support new and “innovative” energy technologies. In announcing the new deal, the Energy Department, too, has been keen to conflate nuclear power and clean energy.
The new reactors “will produce enough clean electricity to power more than 1.5 million homes,” Peter W. Davidson, a senior Energy Department official, wrote in a blog post Thursday. “At the same time, this project will help fight climate change by keeping about 10 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution out of our atmosphere. That’s like taking 2 million cars off the road.”
The debate over nuclear energy’s impact on global warming has heated up somewhat in the environmental community in recent years. Yet for many green groups, such conflation is misleading.
“Nuclear power is not clean energy,” FOE’s Fuchs says. “There is no way to deal with the waste, and we don’t yet have safe designs or adequate regulation. It’s entirely wrong to lump nuclear energy in with green energy, and it’s unbelievable that the administration would tout such a thing.”
17 Comments on "US Backing First Nuclear Reactors in 30 Years"
Steve on Sat, 1st Mar 2014 8:28 pm
Where are we with the thorium solutions? http://www.itheo.org/bill-gates-invests-thorium-capable-reactor-venture
action on Sat, 1st Mar 2014 9:01 pm
Hydrocarbons are still the weak link in our civilization’s chain – the nuke plants will shut jus the same as everything else, and there’ll be a point when they’re too expensive to build and maintain dumb to energy costs, they won’t by us any extra time.
DC on Sat, 1st Mar 2014 9:31 pm
……clean and green….seriously? This is the 21st Century right? IPS knows there nothing remotely ‘green’ about nukes dont they?
If amerika wants to save the pollution equivalent of taking 2 million gas-burning trash cans off the roads, then you know what they should do?
TAKE 2 MILLION FRIGGENS CARS OFF THE ROADS THEN. Left un-mentioned in that little fact-free nugget is that the uS auto-oil complex is constantly pushing to add MORE cars all the time-even in the face of the empires serfs to actually be able to afford them.
Alternately, they could use solar and wind instead, imperfect and transient as those would be-to do the same thing. Of course, were all aware here, that solar panels and wind turbines wont last forever-but nuclear waste, that DOES last forever.
Plantagenet on Sat, 1st Mar 2014 10:38 pm
O promised an all of the above energy strategy. Why are people so surprised when O actually does what he promised to do?
Dave Thompson on Sat, 1st Mar 2014 10:48 pm
A continuation of humanities bend to destroy the biosphere under an illusion of endless industrial, fiat currency,economic growth.
Norm on Sat, 1st Mar 2014 10:59 pm
Steve, you cannot use a thorium fueled reactor in the USA.
The reason is, it is clean-burning and efficient, and be sustainable. So congress will not allow anything that would work. Hence the focus on dirty yucky uranium reactors that use only 2% of the available energy in the rod.
Building lousy reactors on the government dime, it gives the corporate fat cats something to laugh and sneer about… when they are dining on roast duck at the golf course.
J-Gav on Sat, 1st Mar 2014 11:12 pm
A strategic error but whatcha gonna do? It allows them to say “Clean electricity for 1.5 million homes.” Even if it’s a lie, nobody wants the lights to go out so most will go along …
Northwest Resident on Sat, 1st Mar 2014 11:44 pm
I wonder how long the service life of these nuclear reactors will be. Fifty years? Sixty? Maybe one hundred if they really stretch it out with intensive maintenance, spare parts and good luck? Then what?
Davy, Hermann, MO on Sun, 2nd Mar 2014 12:24 am
I want to make a bet with someone here. My bet is this plant will be started but never completed due to a correction/contraction and or collapse in 5 years or so.
Northwest Resident on Sun, 2nd Mar 2014 1:36 am
“… will produce enough clean electricity to power more than 1.5 million homes.”
I personally don’t believe that the purpose of these two reactors in southeastern Georgia are for the purpose of powering 1.5 million homes.
What are the chances that top level planners in the Federal Government including elements of the military, intelligence services and other national security agencies are looking at the facts just like most of us here are, and coming to the conclusion that we are headed for collapse — and they probably know a lot more about the general timeframe of that collapse than us. If they see it coming too, which I am positive they do, then it would make a lot of sense to build a couple of state-of-the-art nuclear reactors.
What are the odds that the real purpose of these two new nuclear reactors are to power the new seat of the federal government, the military, and other vital factories and highly selective needs in the not-too-distant future? When collapse hits, they’re going to need a long-term guaranteed source of electric power, and these two nuclear reactors would do the job.
It doesn’t make sense at this late stage of the oil game to go off and spend so many billions on nuclear power plants just to power 1.5 million homes in Georgia. It does make sense for them to build a couple of nuclear power plants to guarantee their own future survival. At least, that makes sense to me.
Kenz300 on Sun, 2nd Mar 2014 4:16 am
Nuclear energy — too expensive and damaging to the environment.
TEPCO has a 40 year plan to clean up the environmental damage at Fukishima. The technology to do the clean up does not yet exist. This is the most expensive and most environmentally damaging way to produce electricity.
When the cost to decommission old nuclear power plants and store the accumulated nuclear waste FOREVER is added up we will see how foolish this experiment was.
The world has learned nothing from the disasters at Fukishima and Chernobyl……….
Northwest Resident on Sun, 2nd Mar 2014 9:58 am
A little more info:
Both of the nuclear reactors are going to be built close to Augusta, Georgia, most likely on the Savannah river that separates Georgia from South Carolina.
It is interesting to note that these two new reactors are going to be built in an area that is surrounded by a heavy concentration of military bases, some of those bases among the largest and most significant installations in the country. Check them out at the links below.
It looks like a cluster concentration of military bases along with existing and new nuclear power plants. Coincidence?
http://militarybases.com/south-carolina/
http://militarybases.com/georgia/
Northwest Resident on Sun, 2nd Mar 2014 10:02 am
A little more info:
Both of the nuclear reactors are going to be built close to Augusta, Georgia, most likely on the Savannah river that separates Georgia from South Carolina.
It is interesting to note that these two new reactors are going to be built in an area that is surrounded by a heavy concentration of military bases, some of those bases among the largest and most significant installations in the country. Check them out at the links below.
It looks like a cluster concentration of military bases along with existing and new nuclear power plants. Coincidence?
And from now on, construction will proceed right on schedule, the man says. Projected to go into operation in 2017 – 2018.
militarybases dot com/south-carolina
militarybases dot com/georgia
Bard on Sun, 2nd Mar 2014 11:09 am
All nuclear advocates get to sign a contract allowing them non subsided electricity prices from the plants, but if their is a nuclear incident in their country then they are the first responders. Oh and they get to bury the nuclear waste under their gardens. If these conditions were met then I’d agree to let the nutters have nuclear. Any nuclear advocates agree with the above conditions?
ghung on Sun, 2nd Mar 2014 2:22 pm
Not sure why folks are making such a big deal out of a formality. Construction began around two years ago. Georgia Power has spent over $400 million so far and construction is well underway. Early last year:
h ttps://maps.google.com/maps?q=nuclear+plant+vogtle&hl=en&ll=33.14154,-81.770983&spn=0.021057,0.038581&sll=35.170517,-79.860994&sspn=5.261533,9.876709&t=h&hq=nuclear+plant+vogtle&z=15
Makati1 on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 1:12 am
ghung, that means that it will be years before they can open. Let’s hope that something prevents it.
Northwest Resident on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 2:49 am
Makati1 — I read that they are projecting 2017 to go into operation, and they don’t expect any more delays.