(Source)
ROB WILE, 27 Aug 13
The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which just two years
ago had its licence renewed, will be decommissioned, plant owner Entergy
announced.
This is the fourth nuclear plant in the U.S. to go down this
year.
In June, California utility Southern California Edison
permanently shuttered the massive San Onofre nuclear plant outside Los Angeles.
A few weeks later, the Obama administration announced it was
seeking to cut off construction funding for a plant near Aiken, S.C. designed
to make fuel out of retired nuclear bombs.
And last month, Duke Energy said it would not go forward
with plans to build a plant in central Florida.
The common thread for each: it has become prohibitively
expensive to operate a nuke plant, especially when the cost of natural gas is
so cheap.
Here’s the key part from Entergy’s statement on Vermont
Yankee:
The decision to
close Vermont Yankee in 2014 was based on a number of financial factors,
including:
– A natural gas
market that has undergone a transformational shift in supply due to the impacts
of shale gas, resulting in sustained low natural gas prices and wholesale
energy prices.
– A high cost
structure for this single unit plant. Since 2002, the company has invested more
than $US400 million in the safe and reliable operation of the facility. In
addition, the financial impact of cumulative regulation is especially
challenging to a small plant in these market conditions.
The company also cited the lack of subsidies going to
nuclear compared with other sources in the area.
Also of note is that regulatory uncertainty in the wake of
Fukushima is now a permanent of Entergy’s material risk statement (“nuclear
plant re licensing, operating and regulatory risks, including any changes
resulting from the nuclear crisis in Japan following its catastrophic
earthquake and tsunami” it says).
The future of nuclear in the U.S. has never looked more
uncertain.
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