Round up on Nuclear vs Coal and the state of the industry
Rod Adams over at Atomic Insightsposted a link to a story from two days ago on CNBC, the US's most popular financial cable network. The article gives a brief, surface-like, and very neutral overview of the state of the industry, focusing on gas, nuclear and coal and their near term to long term development.
I want to examine parts of this article and comment on it:
From the article on CNBC:
For an unregulated energy provider like NRG Energy, federal incentives were a primary driver in plans to move forward with two new nuclear units in Texas, says Crane.
The incentives were also important to UniStar, a joint venture between Baltimore-based Constellation Energy and French electricity group EDF.
This is, of course, something we all know about. The rate of filings with the NRC has increased, and is expected to increase over the next 2 years...beginning in December.
UniStar plans to submit the second half of its application for a new reactor in Maryland by March of 2008. CEO George Vanderheyden says the company is also considering an application for a new reactor in New York.
In all, 21 new reactor license applications for a total of 32 units are expected between now and 2009, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
More than half the proposals are for the southern part of the country. The Tennessee Valley Authority submitted a request in October to build two units in Alabama; Virginia-based Dominion received early site plan approval for a unit northwest of Richmond, Va. and South Carolina Electric and Gas, a unit of SCANA, is expected to submit a request for two units in December.
"Whether we go ahead with one or two units is still up in the air," says spokesman Robert Yanity.
Decisions on the first set of applications are expected by the middle of 2011, according to NRC spokesman Scott Burnell.
The NRC will hold hearings, and generate more paperwork for each plant than there was for the massive Justice Dept. case against AT&T in the 1970s. It will also be during this period that politicians, Democrats and Republicans, will have to state their opinion(s) in order to influence (or hide) from these important, political decisions the NRC will be making.
Construction – which takes three to four years – can begin after that, putting the first new nuclear unit in operation by mid 2014 at the earliest.
There are currently 104 licensed nuclear power reactors, generating 20% of the all US electricity.
Nuclear generating capacity in the US is projected to increase to 112.6 gigawatts in 2030, from 100 gigawatts in 2005, according to the Energy Information Administration’s 2007 annual energy outlook. The increase includes 12.5 gigawatts of newly-built capacity, or roughly 12 units, the EIA said.
This sounds really good, yes? For those of us on the Left who see this as progressive, and only advancement against the forces of fossil hydrocarbon deaths, what possibly is bad about this? Read on...
As the nuclear power industry eyes a new generation of plants, other technologies are hardly standing still. Coal-based generation is projected to dip from today’s 50% to 49% in 2020, but the decline will be short-lived. By 2030, coal is expected to account for 57% of total production in 2030, according to the federal government’s energy outlook, as new technologies, like carbon capture and sequestration are incorporated to prevent carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere.
So here you have it. The EIA sees an increase in deadly coal use by 2030 and an actual decrease in nuclear energy as a percentage of overall electrical energy generation...even if every NPP gets built that is expected to file a COL with the NRC.
This is the result, in no small way, of over regulations and, more importantly, of the anti-nuclear movements intent on delaying the building of NPPs over the last 3 decades. A true movement in favor on atomic power needs to be organized to combat these legions of darkness that is ever pushing us into more coal-generated deaths and ever increasing amounts of carbon emissions.