Go Nukes
Our capacity to generate electricity and to transmit it to where it is needed most will be exhausted within a few years without new power plants and significant upgrades to the vast interconnections of power lines known collectively as “the grid”. Blackouts like the one in 2003 could become more frequent, more long-lasting, and more expensive to individuals and businesses.
Peter Huber and Mark Mills, among others, have shown convincingly that improvements to material well-being are inextricably linked to greater use of electricity. Furthermore, the proportion of our total energy consumption that is electricity has increased steadily and will continue to do so in the Internet Age (those PCs, data warehouses, and servers need a lot of juice).
Not only do powerful, well-established trends show that we will need both more electricity and more reliable delivery of it, but a substantially upgraded electric system may also offer us our best hope of weaning ourselves from petroleum-based transportation fuels like gasoline. The earliest examples of a new automotive world are already running on our highways.
On the whole, our system of investor-owned utilities, government-sponsored entities, and transmission wires have provided the US economy with continuously improved output and service for the last century.
So why should we be concerned about looming blackouts now?
Because we have underinvested in generating capacity and the transmission grid for about three decades. Political obstacles and disincentives have been the primary reasons.
For example, of the 104 nuclear power plants in operation in the US today, all began the arduous process of planning, permitting, construction, and final approval before 1979.
Even without an explicit, official prohibition of nuclear power plant construction since 1979, utilities and other investors could see that a vast array of federal, state, and local bureaucrats, judges, and “public interest” lawyers had the ability to block construction, impose long delays on construction and even prevent operation once constructed---as was the case with the Shoreham reactor that eventually bankrupted the Long Island Lighting Company.
Additionally, the US suspended recycling of spent fuel rods during the mid-1970s and has never resumed the practice even though recycling facilities in France, the UK, Russia, and Japan are all successful in radically reducing the amount (by volume and weight) and radioactivity (in terms of years remaining) of the nuclear waste produced through power generating operations.
Even without an antagonistic government and legal system, construction and operation of nuclear power plants are inherently more complicated than for other types of electric power generation. The “up-front” nature of the investment and relatively small subsequent operating costs meant that investors in nuclear power plants were that much more vulnerable to the depredations of opportunistic politicians.
We still managed to put off the day of reckoning through resourceful “up-rating” of nuclear power plants (i.e. operating them longer than originally envisioned) and by building lots of natural gas burning combined-cycle turbines which were relatively quick to construct and benefited from low natural gas prices during the 1990s. We are approaching the physical limits of existing nuclear power generating capacity though, and the dramatic increase in natural gas fired generation since the early 1990s led to much higher gas prices and to significant imports of liquefied natural gas for the first time in our history.
We have almost eliminated petroleum-based fuels (< 3%) as a source of electric generation since 1973. Ninety-five percent of US power generation is fueled by just four sources and these will remain the important sources for a long time to come:
- Coal (50%)
- Nuclear (20%)
- Natural Gas (18%)
- Hydro (7%)
“Alternative” power sources like wind and solar excite the chattering classes but will never be more than ancillary sources of electricity. It is also a virtual certainty that no new hydroelectric dams will be constructed in the US.
To some extent, expanded and more reliable transmission capacity (more and “smarter” wires) can substitute for generating capacity. Because demand for electricity is different across the country, the ability to wheel electricity from one region to another economizes on generating capacity. Some parts of the Midwest and Southeast do still have unused coal and gas-fired generating capacity.
A grid controlled by state-of-the-art silicon switches is certainly desirable but even an advanced grid cannot substitute indefinitely for new generating capacity.
That leaves new coal and nuclear plants as our primary hopes for sustaining our standard of living. Unfortunately, coal fired plants emit significant amounts of CO2 (at 2.5 times that of gas-fired turbines for each kilo-watt/hour generated) and the Obama administration and most Democratic Congressional leaders are determined to curtail US emissions of CO2 on the grounds that it leads to global warming.
As nuclear power plants emit no CO2 (or pollutants into the atmosphere) they are the power generating source of choice for a growing number of the environmentally minded.
Indeed, thirty years after the Three Mile Island accident, nuclear power is almost fashionable again. Newspapers and magazines have referred to a “nuclear renaissance.” Even some well-left-of-center, environmental movement luminaries have become nuclear power advocates such as Stewart Brand, founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, James Lovelock, of Gaia hypothesis fame, and Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. The Manhattan Institute’s Max Schulz makes the point that some important liberal Democrats have also revised their previously hostile stances towards nuclear energy.
Private capital seems interested in finding nuclear power opportunities as well. MidAmerican Energy, the utility arm of multi-billionaire (and Democrat-friendly) Warren Buffett has announced its support of nuclear power generally and its willingness to invest in new nuclear power plant construction in particular.
In 2007, NRG Energy filed the first full Nuclear Regulatory Commission application for new nuclear power plants since Three Mile Island. NRG hopes for federal approval for its two proposed units in south Texas in 2010 and to have one unit operational in 2014 and the second in 2015.
The US Nuclear Renaissance may be short-lived
Such developments are encouraging but hardly an occasion to break out the champagne.
The fact that the time from statement of intent to when NRG’s new plants actually generate power is seven to nine years is painfully significant. In fact, the seven to nine year horizon represents the lower bound on the planning, permitting, and construction phase of nuclear power plants.
Resistance to the NRG plans are relatively low because it is a “brown-field” project (there are already two nuclear power plants at the south Texas site with long-distance transmission infrastructure already in place) and because popular attitudes to power plants in Texas are less unfriendly than elsewhereÑsuch as in New York or CaliforniaÑtwo places that are at especially high risk of blackouts and major economic disruption.
And after all, these would only be two plants and many specialists believe we need at least thirty more in the US to satisfy demand over the next fifteen years.
Major Democratic politicians in New York State have not only opposed new nuclear power plant construction but actually also want to shut down the two Indian Point nuclear reactors ---the most important power plants serving the New York metropolitan area. The supporters of this inane idea a year ago included then-Governor Eliot Spitzer, and Democratic congressmen John Hall and Nita Lowey.
In his cautiously optimistic piece noted earlier, Max Schulz also notes this about Indian Point:
Closing Indian Point would remove 2,000 megawatts at a time when the operator of the state's electricity grid says more power is needed in the next few years just to keep the lights on. Renewables are unlikely to pick up the slack. Indian Point's reactors generate more than five times as much electricity as all 390 of New York's windmills can on their best day.
That several successful politicians in one of our largest states can still advance such lunatic proposals tells us that we still have a very long way to go.
What Needs to be Done?
GOP candidates and issues activists now have an opportunity to establish themselves in the public mind as the party of environmentally friendly, safe, affordable, and reliable electricity. The political battle must be fought in state capitols as well as in Washington, DC and in legislatures as much as in executive branches.
Part of the good news is that building new nuclear power plants and upgrading the grid will not require handouts. Private capital stands ready to make the necessary investments.
What changes would lead to a real Nuclear Renaissance?
- The regulatory approval process at the federal and state levels for new nuclear power plants needs to be made significantly faster.
- State utility regulators need to assure utilities that investments they make in the transmission capacity and switching controls on power flows will be added to regulated “rate-bases” of those utilities even if out-of-state consumers will also benefit from those grid investments.
- Open the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada as soon as possible. This would significantly reduce the risk that spent fuel rods would have to be stored on the sites of nuclear power plants around the country indefinitely.
- The federal government needs to recognize that methods of recycling spent fuel rods have advanced significantly and that these latest methods should be approved officially.
Without these changes, we can look forward to black-outs, brown-outs, and serious interruption of commercial and industrial enterprises.
If that comes to pass, it won’t be fun but let’s be sure that we will have been on the right side of this issue when public opinion begins to shiftÑand shift quickly.