After the Nuclear Beatdown: What Electric Generation Options Remain?

Germany’s announcement that it was shutting down its 17 nuclear plants by 2022 wasn’t a complete surprise. Under pressure from environmentalists and in light of Japan’s continuing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Germany’s government is committing to exit from all nuclear power (at least on Germany’s turf) by 2022. Germany is not alone in having nuclear jitters.

The European Commission and the European Nuclear Safety Regulators' Group (ENSREG) called for stress tests of all 143 nuclear plants in the EU. These began on June 1, 2011. Switzerland isn’t waiting for test results. The Swiss have already decided to freeze plans to build three new nuclear power plants and to decommission the country’s five operating plants.

In the U.S. the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found design flaws in the new generation of reactors that was expected to usher in a revival of the nation’s nuclear industry. (see NYTimes article) The new reactor are designed to shut down safely, without power, during an emergency. “Passively cooled” reactors wouldn’t have had the Fukushima problems of core overheating. Too bad the first ones out of the bag didn’t pass muster.

Both the Southern Company and South Carolina Electric and Gas had begun construction for plants using the Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. Further progress, including licensing, will be indefinitely delayed. The flaws will be fixed but it’s another poke in the eye for nuclear power.

The last decade has seen the U.S. nuclear power industry slowly get back on its feet after 30 years of lying nearly comatose. Now it’s back down on the mat. And you can expect it to be dazed, if not unconscious, for at least a few years.

So, without nuclear, what’s left? Certainly coal will be our most used fuel whether an environmentally sensitive public likes it or not. The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently projected that coal would still be providing about half of U.S. electrical energy needs in 2035. (see SEP article)

Then there’s natural gas – right now we have about 2,000 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves and the bubble will get bigger as we continue to find new sources and develop better ways to extract gas from shale. To add to the glut, federal land leasing laws require drilling companies to continue drilling and producing or lose their land leases.

All this cheap gas will eventually result in plenty of fuel-switching from coal to gas. No wonder General Electric sees a profitable opportunity in developing new gas electric generation technologies.
(see Business Week article)

Of course, there’s also the global warming incentive for using natural gas since it releases about half as much carbon per kilowatt-hour of electric generation compared to coal.

When it comes to renewable energy sources, it looks like solar outshines wind for the foreseeable future. Large, remote wind farms need expensive high voltage transmission lines to bring the power into population centers. The challenge is staggering, even for Germany, the country that knows how when it comes to renewables. For example, about $80 billion is needed to build 2,400 miles of transmission lines to bring power from the windy northern coast to population centers in southern Germany.

In contrast, the cost of solar, particularly thin-film distributed solar, keeps dropping and is expected by to fall to 15 cents per kilowatt-hour in a few years. (see Bloomberg article)That would make it almost competitive with fossil fuel generation, particularly for distributed, customer owned generation. On the other hand, no one really knows how solar will sort itself out after government subsidies and rebates go away.

My prediction? We’ll see nuclear power rise again in the U.S. but it will take at least a decade. Coal will remain our mainstay, although natural gas will increasingly become a greater percentage of fuel for electric generation. Solar will dominate the renewable distributed generation sector. Large scale remote wind facilities, such as in west Texas, California and possibly off the Atlantic shore may have near term usefulness but will eventually become tourism curiosities to our grandchildren.
 

About the Author

Editor:

Paul Mauldin

Paul earned his B.S. and an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of California-Berkeley and is a registered professional engineer. He has worked in the energy industry for more than 25 years, developing and implementing advanced energy technologies. As research director for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. he pioneered methodologies used in the design, maintenance and control of energy delivery systems. As a consultant he has provided guidance to utilities and the vendor community, nationally and internationally.