Over the next nine years, six nuclear power plants are expected to close unless economic interventions are put into place to keep at least one of them operating, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Tuesday.
Four of the six plants set to close down – Palisades, Pilgrim, Oyster Creek and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania – have plans to shut down more than a decade prior to their operating licenses expiring, the EIA noted.
Four new U.S. plants are expected to come on line within the next nine years, two at the Plant Vogtle expansion project in Georgia and two at the V.C. Summer expansion project in South Carolina – contingent, in the wake of Westinghouse Electric Company's bankruptcy filing, on long-term funding coming through for both projects.
New York and Illinois have adjusted policies to help keep the carbon-emissions free nuclear power plants open in the face of economic headwinds. In recent years, falling natural gas prices and the political popularity of renewable power sources has chipped away at nuclear industry profits.
Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania is one plant in which the owner – Exelon – has said that the plant could remain open if an economic policy was put in place to make the plant profitable again.
The trend of plant closures or announced closure schedules prior to the end of a plant's operating license is new, the EIA noted. “Prior to the retirement of Crystal River, Kewaunee and San Onofre nuclear power plants in 2013, no nuclear reactor had been retired since 1998,” the EIA said.
“Since 2013, two more plants – Vermont Yankee in 2014 and Fort Calhoun in Nebraska in 2016 – have retired. In total, the five nuclear plants that retired in the past four years had a combined capacity of nearly 5,000 megawatts (MW).”
Strikingly in the era in which climate change has emerged as the No. 1 environmental threat the planet faces, the EIA noted that the close to 5,000 MW loss has been made up for primarily by increases in electricity generation from natural gas and coal – both sources of dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.
The EIA noted that there were currently 99 commercial reactors operating at 60 power plants, but retirements are not new. Since 1957, when the first commercial nuclear power plant came on line, about 30 reactors — some of them experimental or research-oriented — have been retired.