This commentary is by John Greenberg, a resident of Marlboro.
Comparing energy activists to Cortez’s conquest of Mexico, Tom Evslin provides a totally counterfactual description of how New England’s energy is evolving: “If you shut down the nukes and stop drilling, renewables and drastic conservation will immediately happen.”
First, operating New England nukes were shut down by their owners, no one else. Why? Simply because they were unable to compete in the marketplace with cheap natural gas.
In Vermont Yankee’s case, Entergy vastly overestimated where market prices were headed and consequently failed to negotiate a contract with Vermont utilities whose estimates were far closer to the mark. This meant that Vermont Yankee power was forced to compete directly with other market sources, resulting in revenues below operating costs. We know this because they said so.
While the state of Vermont did indeed try to shut the plant down through legislative action, its attempts to do so were rejected by the courts. Safety had literally nothing to do with it: The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission had given Vermont Yankee a license to continue operations and, for better or worse, it is the sole arbiter of nuclear safety in the U.S. (Evslin’s comments about nuclear safety deserve yet another grain, or pound, of salt, but that’s for another commentary.)
What happened here has been repeated at aging nukes all around the U.S. Plants that have managed to continue to operate have done so due to the injection of billions of dollars of overt subsidies by governments: state and federal, ironically overruling the market’s pricing mechanisms. (Ironic, because these subsidies are often the product of self-defined believers in free markets).
No one I know — and I’ve followed energy issues closely for decades — believed that shutting down the plants would automatically mean that “renewables and drastic conservation will immediately happen.” Many of us did (and do) believe that, with wiser state and federal energy policies, these can provide cheaper, safer, more sustainable energy, but no one thinks they are any kind of automatic consequence of closing old nukes.
Second, continuing to run old nuclear plants is both expensive and risky. In Vermont Yankee’s case, for example, well over a hundred million dollars of repairs would have been required, adding to the already too-high cost of running the plant, making it still less competitive than it already was.
France, the poster child for nuclear development and dependence, is learning that’s just the beginning. “Sixteen out France’s 56 nuclear reactors are currently offline due to corrosion and maintenance issues, sending its normal power output levels plummeting in recent months. Prior to these problems, France’s nuclear fleet generated 70 percent of the country’s electricity. … EDF (owned by the French state) is 43 billion euros in debt, it faces a 100 billion euro bill for mandatory safety upgrades, and a significant number of its reactors continue to be offline due to aging corrosion problems. It also faces a huge decommissioning and waste management bill that is uncosted….” And that fails to mention the fact that global heating has made cooling some nukes impossible, again forcing shutdowns during periods of high demand.
By contrast, since Evslin mentions Germany, today’s Guardian notes: “Through a mixture of state planning and individual parsimony, Germany has weaned itself off Russian energy, an extraordinary achievement for a country that was dependent on Russia for 55% of its gas.” German industry has reduced gas consumption by about 25% since the year’s start, while production has only fallen by 1.4%. Germany has deferred shutting down the last of its nukes for a few months, but clearly does NOT see their continued operation as part of its long-term energy future.
Finally, conservation and efficiency efforts (nowhere near drastic enough) have, in fact, impacted electricity prices by keeping demand far lower than economic growth would have otherwise required, and renewables are being built in the U.S. and around the world at breakneck speed. In 2021, renewables outpaced nuclear and fell just shy of coal as a source of U.S. electricity.
While natural gas is “filling in” for a brief time, nukes and coal are both continuing to lose market share in U.S. electricity generation. Before long, natural gas will meet the same fate, because it’s now more expensive than renewables and its price is far less stable.
Oversimplifying complex issues may make a nice tale, but it bears no resemblance to an accurate analysis of where we find ourselves.
