Blake Farmer reports that the largest public utility in the U.S. is quietly scaling back expansion plans for nuclear power. Just eight years ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority was leading a nuclear renaissance, with plans to restart work on a handful of mothballed reactors. But splitting atoms to make electricity has become less attractive in the last few years.
The energy sector appetite for nuclear power has always ebbed and flowed. The plants are attractive because they create so much power in one place, but they are also highly regulated by the federal government.
Currently, there is less demand for power. At least in the cases that we looked at, the need for a large base-load plant really does not currently exist, TVA vice president Joe Hoagland says of the utility new Integrated Resource Plan.
The new power predictions mean TVA will only finish Watts Bar Unit II, slated for completion later this year, after delays that span decades and cost overruns in the billions of dollars. Hoagland says demand just has not picked up since the recession, and not just because big industrial customers went out of business, although they did. Consumers are more energy conscious, he says. The most obvious example of that would be the shift from incandescent lights to compact fluorescents, Hoagland says.
Compounding the economic shift is the abundance of natural gas. Richard Myers of the Nuclear Energy Institute, says that utilities like TVA have been adding natural gas power plants, which are cheaper and more flexible than nuclear. But Myers figures that the time for nuclear will still arrive as electricity demand increases and as gas prices rise. He thinks the new plants are going to get built when they are needed, where they are needed, noting that one in five U.S. households is powered by nuclear reactors (20%).
Even environmentalists (aka Adversaries) who want to curtail the use of nuclear power in the U.S. agree with the assessment that the energy form will live on.
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