NEI Nuclear Notes

Nuclear plants occupy an unusual spot in the towns where they operate: integral but so much in the background that they may seem almost invisible. But when they close, it can be like the earth shifting underfoot. Lohud.com, the Gannett newspaper that covers the Lower Hudson Valley in New York, took a look around at the experience of towns where reactors have closed , because the Indian Point reactors in Buchanan are scheduled to be shut down under an agreement with Gov. Mario Cuomo. Patty O’Donnell, chairwoman of the Vernon, Vermont, select board, had to drastically cut the town’s budget in the wake of the closure of Vermont Yankee. Photo courtesy of LoHud.com. From sea to shining sea, it was dismal. It wasn’t just the plant employees who were hurt. The losses of hundreds of jobs, tens of millions of dollars in payrolls and millions in property taxes depressed whole towns and surrounding areas. For example: Vernon, Vermont, home to Vermont Yankee for more than 40 years, had...

Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a public meeting to consider the latest development in what has become a growing trend in the nuclear power industry – accelerating decommissioning by transferring licenses to third parties after a plant shuts down. The topic of today’s NRC meeting was to provide an overview of Entergy’s plan to sell and transfer the NRC licenses for the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station – which permanently ceased operations at the end of 2014 – to NorthStar Group Services, Inc. , a company that specializes in nuclear decommissioning and environmental remediation. This meeting began the process by which the companies seek NRC approval of the transaction. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station Why would anyone want to buy a nuclear plant? Because they can decommission it faster, with more certainty in schedule and costs,that’s why. In the nuclear decommissioning business, time is literally money. NRC regulations allow up to 60 years for compl...

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald . Last month Bill McKibben wrote in The New Yorker magazine about a family in Vermont that had insulated its house, replaced its oil burner with electric heat pumps, added solar panels to the roof and, presumably, cut its carbon footprint. It’s a noble concept but I’m not sure it’s working. Bill and I go back a long way. We took a trip together in September, 1984, to Hydro-Quebec's James Bay plant, then nearing completion, and he wrote about it in March, 1986, in an article in The New Yorker about the various sources of energy for his apartment in New York . I believe it was one of Bill's first assignments for The New Yorker . I was then a reporter at The New York Times and wrote about the project immediately . Both of us have closely followed the evolution of energy and climate science ever since, but our pa...

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. The Energy Department has posted the first installment of its Quadrennial Energy Review . Quite sensibly, the department cast a critical eye on the sorry state of energy infrastructure: overstressed gas lines that leak, sometimes catastrophically, and can’t meet the demand during cold spells; bottlenecks in the rail and canal systems that move coal and oil; and electric generating stations that starve for fuel when the coal pile freezes. But the sections of the plan that have been published so far do not give any credit to generation technologies that do not add strain to the fuel shipment infrastructure. To the department’s credit, officials there say that they are working to “unbundle” the attributes of various electricity generation systems, and to assign appropriate values to each attribute, including transportation requirements. Nuclear power plants,...

Years end, as everything finds an ending. Vermont Yankee is ending its 42-year run. Nuclear energy, which generated 70 percent of Vermont’s electricity, is ending in the Green Mountain state – as the year ends – as everything finds an ending. But you don’t need to see the old feller of 2014 shuffling off as the 2015 babe supplants him to know that endings portend beginnings. Vermont Yankee is closing because it is not making enough money, not because it has ceased to be an effective supplier of clean energy. Under the proposed EPA rules regulating  carbon dioxide  from electricity generators, Vermont is the only state that did not have to reduce emissions at all – in large part due to Vermont Yankee (hydro supplies most of the remaining 30 percent, so Vermont had a particularly good emissions profile). So now Vermont will turn to its neighbors New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Quebec to fill the gaps in its energy portfolio – some of that may be nuclear, but a lot of it l...

Meredith Angwin We continue our focus on the closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant with a guest post by Vermont resident Meredith Angwin. A nuclear industry veteran, Angwin is now project director of the Energy Education Project at the Ethan Allen Institute . Vermont Yankee will close at the end of the year. I have blogged at Yes Vermont Yankee for five years. It’s hard to even know how to begin a description of the effects of closing Vermont Yankee. The pain starts with the people who work at the plant. Hundreds of Goodbyes Jan. 30, 2014, was the day that the “lists were up” at the plant. The plant will cease operations by the end of December 2014, and fuel should be unloaded to the fuel pool by the end of January 2015. In August, 2013, Entergy announced that the plant would close and not be refueled. "This was an agonizing decision and an extremely tough call for us," said Leo Denault, Entergy's chairman and chief executive officer, when the com...

What becomes a nuclear facility most? These days, it may be its emission-free quality – its production of nothing, in other words, at least in terms of the greenhouse gases that have concerned policymakers and the public in recent years. In NEI’s third article on the closing of Vermont Yankee, we look at the implications of closing not only the source of 72.3 percent of Vermont’s electricity, but the implications of losing all that nothing – those gases that it doesn’t produce . The loss of 604 megawatts of carbon-free generation will hinder efforts to reduce emissions in the region. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s draft plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants includes an initial estimate of how much each state will need to reduce emissions by 2030.  The proposed reduction targets show the difference that energy mix makes from state to state. And not only does it impact the region’s proposed EPA target, but it could make a mess of a more local conc...

Is New England facing an energy crisis? Today, in the second of three parts about closing Vermont Yankee , NEI looks at the looming energy shortages in the far Northeast. Along with Vermont Yankee, nearly 1,400 megawatts of baseload electric generating capacity will retire in New England this year, including a 750-megawatt coal- and petroleum-fired power plant in Massachusetts. But New England is using a lot of natural gas these days, right? New England has significantly increased its reliance on natural gas for electricity in the past few years. The increase has contributed to pipeline transportation congestion in the region’s natural gas market, particularly in the winter when it competes for heating homes and businesses. Which can lead to, indeed, did lead to: These supply constraints contributed to extreme spikes in spot natural gas and electricity prices in New England during the winters of 2012-2013 and 2013-2014. During the severe cold snap of January 2014’s polar vort...

Vermont Yankee is a relatively small nuclear facility in a relatively small state. Its closure later this year will cause Vermont to import more electricity, but what happens in Vermont does not impact Vermont alone. That’s important and this week, NEI will put up a set of Web pages that zero in on the implications of shuttering a nuclear reactor. The articles are grouped under the title “ Closing Vermont Yankee ” and covers the electricity markets, the possibility of an energy crisis in New England and the efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the region and country. And Vermont Yankee has an important role in all three topics. The first article, available today , focuses on the electricity marketplace. The polar vortex showed the importance of nuclear plants to provide reliable energy (notably in New England) and the coming EPA carbon dioxide emissions rule makes manifest the value of clean nuclear facilities. In the article, industry executives warn that more nuclear pl...

Up in Vermont, a good deal of its electricity was generated by Vermont Yankee, a nuclear facility state legislators worked like demons to close. They basically lost that fight, but Entergy will close it early anyway. Fine – so it goes – and Vermont got what it wanted. [N]ew Englanders, more than the residents of many areas of the country, are reluctant to give ground on quality-of-life issues in order to site new facilities or means of transmission. That means we say no to wind farms on the ocean or atop the mountains, for fear of affecting our views. We say no to pipelines and fossil-fuel-based plants for fear of air, water or ground pollution through emissions or spills. We say close nuclear plants for fear of catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation pollution. This editorial, from the Keene (Vt.) Sentinel, is more about the spikes in energy prices that occurred during the polar vortex. We’ve made a lot of hay over the vortex, because nuclear energy proved so reli...

In the news : Voters in the Vermont town of Vernon have once again approved getting rid of the local police force. Why? Budget cuts have been in the works since the August announcement that Entergy would shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant by the end of this year. Yankee accounts for about half of the town's municipal tax base. Now, we should note that Vernon has about 2200 people in it, so turning police services over to the county will not cause pandemonium and murder sprees. It’s not Gotham City. Still, when we say that nuclear energy facilities have an economic impact on their communities, we’re not fooling. Closing Vermont Yankee is what the state wanted – is the state going to step up and replace the lost revenue? All eyes on Montpelier.

From Japan : A candidate backed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won Sunday's election for governor of Tokyo, frustrating a rival's efforts to make the vote a referendum on the Japan ese leader's pro-nuclear energy policy nearly three years after the Fukushima disaster The widely-expected victory by former health minister Yoichi Masuzoe comes as a relief for Abe, who had suffered a rare setback in another local election last month. So Abe lost one and won one – which proves only that Japanese voters are tough to move on a single issue – and that nuclear energy is not a potent enough issue, if it ever was, to sway elections. --- A striking example of how a nuclear energy facility can benefit neighboring communities: The University of Sharjah has announced that three nuclear energy laboratories worth Dh7 million will be set up in the university, with the aim of preparing highly qualified human cadres specialized in nuclear power. The first ever inte...

This week's announcement that Vermont Yankee would be shut down in 2014 was sad news to bear for our industry. Here at NEI, we covered the negative impact on the local economy that this closing will have, and our CEO Marv Fertel's comments  expressed how disappointing it is when a well-run and highly productive nuclear plant gets shuttered because of skewed markets . Caroline Cochran  It was easy to feel discouraged by this, especially knowing all of the hard work put forth by the talented employees and tireless supporters of Vermont Yankee. That's why it was both inspiring and uplifting to read the following message to industry communicators from Caroline Cochran , a nuclear engineer, blogger and advocate. I wish we were fighting a battle of facts, but clearly that's not what this is. This is a battle of hearts and guts and cool and public opinion. That’s why what you all are doing is so important. Organizations like PopAtomic Studios and The Breakthrough ...

Entergy's Vermont Yankee Here at NEI, we're used to producing economic benefits reports to quantify exactly what sort of impact the operation of a nuclear plant has on a local economy. But from time to time, it's important to hear from the folks who live closest to the plants to really understand how important they can be. Here's an excerpt from a story that ran earlier this week on VT Digger  that reinforces the point: “Rep. Mike Hebert, R-Vernon, said the closing will have an irreparable impact on local towns. ‘It’s going to be devastating to our communities because of the volunteers,’ he said. ‘Our local rescue is predominantly Yankee employees, the volunteer fire department is predominantly Yankee employees, just about every charitable organization in the county has received something from Yankee. … It will be a brain drain,’ he added. ‘It’s not just the economic impact.’ The economic impact will be significant. Since 2007, the Windham Regional Commission...

Nuclear Notes friend Meredith Angwin kindly pointed us to a pdf of Robert Alvarez’s written testimony to the Vermont Senate committee considering a bill to tax the used nuclear fuel being held at Vermont Yankee. The fuller post about the Vermont hearing and who Robert Alvarez is is two below this one. I figured Alvarez was simply reinforcing what the committee wanted to do, and with no other witnesses, no opposition to his statements. Little did I know. The written testimony is just – awful – almost willfully useless as a fact set. Because, in this instance, facts don’t matter. The document is on Ms. Angwin’s site, so by all means, send some clicks her way . It’s the bottom link. Thanks to her for this. It’s an important “o” to put an umlaut over – it exposes the hearing as little more than a show trial for Vermont Yankee. If the state wants to tax used fuel, then pass a tax bill including it – that’s its right. But trying to fix a bogus motivation to the effort is very discourag...

There’s been a little swath of stories lately about a hearing in Vermont about the used fuel held at the Vermont Yankee facility. Here’s a sample from one of them: The testimony of Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, comes as some lawmakers are urging that Vermont consider a new tax on the highly radioactive nuclear waste being stored at the Vermont Yankee plant in Vernon. Alvarez said Minnesota levies such a tax.   Minnesota does indeed do this and commits the funds to renewable energy projects. You can read the details of this program here . If a consolidated storage site opens in 2021, as has been bruited, and Xcel moves its used fuel there, the state will have to find another way to, um, let’s say gather funds for this effort. Granted, that’s a lot of ifs, and I guess they would all go for Vermont as well. But what about Robert Alvarez? Here’s more of him at the hearing. The pool “contains about nine...

Some folks in Vermont shared the following about a radio debate on the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant that will take place on Tuesday morning. WHEN: Tuesday, April 24, 8-10 AM WHAT: Vermont Yankee Power Struggle: Radio Panel, Northhampton, MA WHERE: WHMP Radio with frequencies at AM1400/1240/1600 and FM96.9, broadcasting from Sylvester's Restaurant in Northhampton, MA. WHO: The Energy Education Project is sending Meredith Angwin (Yes Vermont Yankee) and Richard Schmidt to defend nuclear energy and provide factual information about Vermont Yankee. Two people will speak in opposition to Vermont Yankee and nuclear power: long-time activist Michael Daley and Jeff Napolitano, an anti-nuclear civil disobedience trainer with the American Friends Service Committee WHAT YOU CAN DO:Listen, call in, attend in person! It will not stream on the web but will be podcast later. Call-in number is 413-586-7140. Questions can also be posted in advance on the station's Facebook pag...

Welcome to the 99th Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers, a get together that we at NEI Nuclear Notes have been honored to host from time to time since its inception. This week, we've got selections from seven of the best blogs the online nuclear energy community has to offer. If you would like to host a future edition of the carnival, please contact Brian Wang of Next Big Future to get on the rotation. And please, don't ask to host the 100th edition of the carnival, as that honor has already been parceled out to a well-deserving blogger. Nuclear Power Talk: What's Good for the Goose . Gail Marcus takes a hard look at Mark Cooper's claims about the economics of nuclear energy. The Nuclear Green Revolution: The Clinch River Reactor Failure, Lessons Unlearned . Did AEC make a mistake by pursuing the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor over other designs? Read and find out. Yes, Vermont Yankee: Green Jobs and Taxes . In this guest post, Guy Page of the Vermont Energy ...

Last week was another busy week in social media. Today we’re hosting the 94th carnival and highlighting 21 posts from 14 blogs. To start, Gail Marcus at Nuke Power Talk discusses her concerns about the zeroing of funds for nuclear engineering education programs in the 2013 budget request. It’s been an annual battle to maintain the nuclear education programs at the NRC and DOE and this year was no different. From Gail: It seems to me that in general, it is penny-wise and pound-foolish for a nation to skimp on education. I know the budget is tight and I know there are many other important programs, but we really can't stop looking ahead. The case for nuclear engineering education is particularly important. The current workforce of nuclear engineers is rapidly retiring. … One hopes that some of the supporters of nuclear energy on the Hill will notice this cut and restore the funding. I would encourage those who share my concern to contact your members of Congress and ask f...