New York Governor Andrew Cuomo must have been very happy last week when he announced that the two nuclear reactors at Indian Point Energy Center in Westchester County would be closing in 2020 and 2021. After all, for fifteen years Cuomo has been doing everything he possibly could to close the plants down.
For New York, however, closing Indian Point is a triple idiocy, worthy of another Dumb And Dumber sequel: First, the cost of electricity will go up for New Yorkers as cheap, safe, already-built nuclear is replaced by new generators whose capital costs have yet to be paid off.
Second, about 25% of New York’s non-fossil electricity goes down the tubes. As a result, total CO2 emissions from New York’s power sector will increase by about 30% from today’s levels.
And finally, as nuclear is replaced by natural gas, radioactive emissions will increase too, by about fifty percent.
What??
24% of New York’s non-fossil generation to close. A bad decision.
But before we get to that computation, let’s just put one more myth to rest. Claims that Indian Point will be replaced by renewable energy is false. First, anti-nuclear activists always say that, and they’re always wrong. Vermont Yankee was replaced by natural gas, in spite of promises to the contrary, and San Onofre was replaced by mostly gas too. Indeed, the only reason nuclear plants across the country are in financial straits right now is that fracked natural gas is cheap right now. But by the time Indian Point actually shuts down, for all we know fracked gas might be expensive again. Basing long-term energy decisions on current volatile fuel prices is incredibly short-sighted.
Second, two of Cuomo’s top aides were recently indicted for taking bribes to grease the skids for Indian Point’s closure. Wanna guess who was handing out the bribe money? You got it, it was a natural gas company. That just happens to have a natural gas power plant project already in the works in New York. It’s gas to the front of the line, and everybody in Albany already knows that.
Finally, even if New York goes full speed ahead on renewables (and I certainly hope they do), replacing zero-carbon nuclear with zero carbon renewable doesn’t reduce carbon emissions one bit. The only way to reduce carbon emissions is to use renewables to replace fossil, and not replace nuclear. We’ve seen that very clearly in Germany, where since 2009 renewables are way up, nuclear is way down, fossil generation is flat, and carbon emissions are flat. Germany has spent billions on RE, and has absolutely zero climate progress to show for it. Because they’ve identified the wrong target. Nuclear is a good guy in the climate fight. Fossil fuels are the bad guys.
Like everything else, natural gas is radioactive
We live in a radioactive world: every rock, every tree, every drop of water, every bite of food contains radioactivity in small amounts. Natural gas is pumped out of the ground, and it consists mostly of methane, with some ethane and a bunch of other stuff in small amounts. One of those other things is radon, which is formed by the decay of uranium and thorium in rocks. And radon is radioactive.
Most of the fracked gas in the Eastern US comes from a few large shale formations in the Appalachian region: the Marcellus shale, Burkett shale, and Utica shale formations. The state of Pennsylvania, where fracking is big, has studied the radioactivity of natural gas and found that it varies considerably from well to well; but by the time it’s all mixed together in the pipeline system and gets to a powerplant, the results come out between 33.7 (at Fayette) and 35.7 (at Berks) picoCuries per liter. We will use the lower of those two numbers. And because radon is an inert gas, all the radon that goes into the power plant will come out of the smokestack completely unchanged.
Natural gas has an energy content of .0373 GJ per cubic meter. One TeraWatt-hour is a trillion Watt-hours, or 3.6 quadrillion Joules. Expressed as pure heat, then, to get that much energy from natural gas would take 3.6 million GigaJoules (GJ). But of course natural gas powerplants aren’t 100% efficient in converting heat to electricity; a good combined cycle natural gas plant is about 50% efficient, which means the gas plant will use 7.2 million GJ of heat to make 1 TeraWatt-hour of electricity; and that in turn will take 7.2 million / .0373 = 193 million cubic meters of gas. Each cubic meter is 1000 liters, and each liter emits 33.7 picoCuries of radiation from radon, so the gas plant will emit 6.51 trillion picoCuries, which is the same as 6.51 Curies, for every TeraWatt of electricity generated.
Indian Point generates 16.3 TWh per year, so replacing that with combined cycle natural gas generation will result in emissions of 106 Curies per year from the radon in natural gas. And of course, that’s all completely unregulated emission; it falls under the exception for NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) and thus gets a pass from the NRC.
Indian Point, by contrast, is heavily regulated and closely monitored, and every radioactive emission, no matter how tiny, is detected and logged. Those reports are publicly available online, and they tell us that between 2005 and 2015 (excluding 2011, where NRC’s link is broken), the average annual radioactive emissions from Indian Point were 69 Curies, varying between a low of 34 Curies (in 2009) to a high of 241 (in 2006). Moreover, 37% of those emissions were in the form of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen which is so benign that it has never been observed to cause cancer, not even when fed to lab mice in absurdly high quantities.
So on a per-Watt-hour basis, combined cycle natural gas can be expected to emit 50% more radiation than the average at Indian Point.
What does it all mean?
I’m certainly not here to tell you that the radon from natural gas plants is dangerous; it’s not. In fact, a large epidemiological study recently showed that in low doses radon has a small but significant protective effect against lung cancer. But I am here to tell you that the radiation from Indian Point isn’t dangerous either. It’s just way too low to be a concern to anyone, and way too low for radiophobic politicians (who should know better) to call Indian Point “dangerous” or even worse “a ticking time bomb.” Andrew Cuomo has spread both of those falsehoods.
What is dangerous is climate change. And closing Indian Point makes dealing with that critical issue just that much harder. The IPCC tells us that during its entire lifecycle, median nuclear emissions of carbon dioxide are 12 gCO2e/kWh, while they are 40 times higher for natural gas, a whopping 490 gCO2e/kWh.
On this point, Cuomo is stubbornly behind the curve and behind the times. We can only hope that he gets a clue and joins the many other former anti-nukes who have seen the light in the fight against climate change, like Stewart Brand, Mark Lynas, George Monbiot, and most recently John Kerry.