In Florida, botched multi-billion-dollar repairs to the Crystal River reactor near Tampa have forced a brutal grassroots battle over soaring electric rates which must be approved by increasingly beleaguered state regulators. It is highly likely that reactor will never operate again.
At Pilgrim, Massachusetts is strongly intervening against a license extension. Both remaining reactors are currently shut at California's San Onofre (Unit One there also went down long ago), where grassroots activists---including local surfers---are in pitched battle against re-opening. Ohio's Davis-Besse is having its containment dome sliced for the fourth time. Two reactors in Nebraska are still recovering from major flooding.
All across the country, dozens of rust-bucket nukes stagger on their last legs even as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hands them extended licenses in the face of escalating state and local opposition. Once the firewall against recourse from the states is breached, a flood of shutdowns could well follow.
In Japan, utilities must have permits from a host prefecture to re-open after refueling or repairs. Of 54 licensed reactors nationwide, only two now operate. Both could be shut soon, rendering Japan nuke-free for the first time in four decades .
Germany has shut 8 reactors and will take down 11 more by 2012. Except for Great Britain and a number of eastern holdouts, the "nuclear renaissance" has been all but abandoned in Europe, with an escalating cascade of elderly nukes going cold and proposed new projects being abandoned.
The accelerating revolution in renewables has allowed solar, wind and other green sources to outstrip atomic reactors in cost, time to build, ecological impact and safety. As billions pour into Solartopian sources, private investment in atomic energy has all but disappeared---except where there are massive taxpayer subsidies.
Even that's not enough. In 2011, President Obama handed $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees to the builders of two reactors at Georgia's Vogtle. But Peach State ratepayers are already being soaked for billions more in pre-payments, and the cost of the project is soaring. A parallel financial disaster looms at the Robinson site in neighboring South Carolina. Though the industry assumes these four reactors will eventually be finished, economic realities may say otherwise .
Cost estimates for new nukes have been soaring even before construction begins. Even with federal money, the builders still demand that state ratepayers foot the bill as the process proceeds, meaning consumers are on the hook for multiple billions even if the reactors never open. Pitched battles over this Construction Work in Progress scam have already been won by consumers in Missouri and are being fought in Iowa and elsewhere. As the years of building drag on, costs will escalate while renewables continue to become cheaper. Sooner or later, construction is likely to stop, as it did at numerous projects in the 1970s and 1980s which were never finished.
photo by rob kall
Today the Department of Energy still sits on some $10 billion in available guarantees without a recipient ready to build a new nuke. For the first time since early in the George W. Bush years, there has been no executive request for additional reactor construction loan guarantees.
In Finland and Flamanville, France, new reactor projects are years behind schedule and billions over budget.
With new construction virtually abandoned, and the continued operation of old reactors under intense attack in Japan, Europe and the US, only China and India remain as likely sites for large numbers of new nukes. Russia is doing its best to peddle them throughout the Third World. South Korea wants to sell reactors to the United Arab Emirates.
But grassroots resistance in India has been fierce. China is still mulling a post-Fukushima decision on whether to proceed with reactors already under construction. Signs of a popular uprising against rampant pollution---including nuclear reactors---indicate growing public opposition.
But here in the US, we are at the fall-off-the-cliff moment for atomic energy, new and old.
Entergy, says Deb Katz of the Citizens Awareness Network, has been "blinded by its arrogance and contempt for the state of Vermont." The company, she says, "is attempting to establish that corporations are more powerful than the states they operate in."
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