Llewellyn King, reporter for oilprice.com, laments that this will be an unhappy year for Vernon, a small town in the state of Vermont. It is losing its economic mainstay. The owner of its proud, midsized nuclear plant, which has sustained the community for 42 years, Entergy, is closing the plant. Next year the only people working at the plant will be those shuttering it, taking out its fuel, securing it and beginning the process of turning it into a kind of tomb, a burial place for the hopes of a small town.
What may be a tragedy for Vernon may also be a harbinger of a larger, multi-layered tragedy for the United States. Nuclear - Big Green - is one of the most potent tools we have in our battle to clean the air and arrest or ameliorate climate change over time. Nuclear power plants produce huge quantities of absolutely carbon-free electricity.
But many nuclear plants are in danger of being closed (prematurely). Next year, for the first time in decades, there will be fewer than 100 making electricity. The principal culprits- age of the facility and cheap natural gas.
Nuclear, in some ways, is no longer the lowest-cost producer. Electricity was deregulated in much of the country in the 1990s, and today electricity is sold at the lowest cost, unless it is designated as renewable - effectively wind and solar, whose use is often mandated by a renewable portfolio standard, which varies from state to state. Nuclear falls into the crevasse, which bedevils so much planning in markets, that favors the short term over the long term.
Nuclear power plants today operate with extraordinary efficiency, day in day out for decades, for 60 or more years with license extensions and with outages only for refueling. They were built for a market where long-lived, fixed-cost supplies were rolled in with those of variable cost. Social utility was a factor. .
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Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-