With renewable energy sources on the rise, U.S. nuclear power plants are now gradually shutting down, suggesting nuclear energy production is in its twilight.

Entergy Corporation is the latest organization to call it a day. The national fleet plans to switch off the Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant on Lake Ontario close to Syracuse, New York, and the Pilgrim Nuclear Power station close to Boston, Massachusetts, within a decade or less.^[1]

The closure of the power plants serve as a symbol for the challenges facing the nuclear industry, explained Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland.

“They’re both single reactor sites. They’re both very old, which means it takes a fair amount of money to keep them going,“ Makhijani told sources. “The cost of power generally has been going down while the cost of operating these old reactors has been going up, and now those lines have crossed.”^[1]

The price of nuclear energy

It costs more money to keep these single reactors operational with age. As a result, cut backs are made in maintaining these power plants, which raises the risk of potential accidents.

“The boiling water design [at these plants] is similar to the Fukushima plant in Japan and we’re all aware of the vulnerabilities of that design,” Makhijani noted. “They don’t have the kind of robust secondary containment that, say, Three Mile Island had, which is really what saved us from massive releases of radioactivity during that accident in 1979.”^[1]

In 2011, a tsunami laid waste to three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi site off the coast of Japan. It was the worst nuclear disaster to plague the world since the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. Best estimates suggest it will take a minimum of 40 years to decommission the power plant, which consists of shutting the reactor down, removing and storing the nuclear fuel and disassembling the site.

“What happened at Fukushima was a hydrogen explosion that blew apart those buildings,” he explains. “There was also a hydrogen fire and explosion at Three Mile Island, but because it had that extremely robust thick concrete containment building, the fire [stayed] on the inside, the pressure increase was withstood by the containment building and there wasn’t a massive release of radioactivity.”^[1]

One problem with closing these power plants is that the tax income they generate helps fund local communities. Nuclear reactors tend to be located in the countryside nearby towns, where they financially support schools, police forces and fire departments. The situation enables the nuclear industry to feed off subsidies in exchange for staying open.

In response to this crisis, Makhijani recommends a two-part solution: “Rather than keep old, clunky nuclear power plants going, we should have a community and worker protection fund — a small charge on nuclear electricity that can be used to protect workers from unemployment and transition them into new employment,” he said. “We give companies incentives to come, but then they can be a kind of pension fund for communities when they die or leave.”^[1]

Long-term solution provokes short-term problems

Step two involves substituting the plant with renewable energy sources, which can generate jobs and a stream of revenue. Makhijani recognizes this will create some short-term challenges, but believes closing the power plants will be more economically feasible in the long run.

Despite the fact that U.S. power plants are closing throughout the country, the nation’s dependency on nuclear energy isn’t expected to wane any time soon. Although power plants are closing at a faster pace than power plants are opening, the nuclear powerhouses under construction are much larger than their precursors. The U.S. nuclear generating capacity is still expected to increase by 2020.^[2]

Thus, ignore false reports that nuclear energy production is in decline. Although small reactors are shutting down throughout the U.S., they are overshadowed by a mountain of other power plants under construction.

Sources include:

[1] PRI.org

[2] FukushimaWatch.com