Here is Why the U.S. Nuclear Industry is in Jeopardy ... and Needs Help from Governments, State and Federal to Stabilize the Market

Uranium (Nuclear Minerals) / Nuclear Power - Economics, Design, & Industry

Date posted: 02/27/17

Matt Smith blogs that after years of bad news, 2016 looked like it might have been a turnaround for the U.S. nuclear power industry. The year saw the opening of Tennessee Watts Bar Unit 2, the first new nuclear reactor to go online in 20 years. State governments in New York and Illinois stepped in keep five struggling plants running in those states. But 2017 started off with the announcement that the two-reactor Indian Point plant outside New York City would be shutting down by 2021. And work on the only reactors now under construction has been clouded by multi-billion-dollar losses by the Japanese industrial conglomerate Toshiba, whose subsidiary Westinghouse is building four reactors in Georgia and South Carolina. The 99 reactors still operating provide about 20% of U.S. electric power. But while environmentalists have fought the industry for decades, its biggest opponent has turned out to be natural gas, far cheaper than nuclear, while producing half the planet, warming carbon emissions of coal when burned. And in regions like the Midwest and Northeast, where electricity is sold on deregulated markets, nuclear plants are facing financial problems. The result has been what Edward Kee, CEO of the Nuclear Economics Consulting Group, calls a market failure, one that may require government intervention to fix. Do we want nuclear in this country or not? Kee said. If we do, we need to fix that problem. We either need to have some additional compensation for these other attributes like zero emissions, or have government ownership or something like that. We can not expect the market to deliver nuclear power that ends up losing money. State governments have stepped in to keep the lights on at three plants in upstate New York and two in Illinois by offering subsidies for producing electricity without carbon emissions. Both programs were sold as part of efforts to address climate change and boost renewable sources like wind and solar power, to a lesser extent. Read on.