How Old Is Too Old for a Nuclear Reactor?

If those plants go offline it would mean the emission of an additional 67.3 million tons of carbon dioxide a year (to replace the lost power with fossil-fuel generation).  That number includes the James A. FitzPatrick nuclear plant, on the shore of Lake Ontario, which its operator Entergy said last week will shut down by early 2017.

Many of these plants, though, will likely keep operating, thanks to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s practice of granting new licenses to plants that have outlived their original operating licenses.  Most of the 100 nuclear plants now generating power in the U.S. were originally licensed for 35 to 40 years of operation; now the NRC is issuing new permits, in 20-year increments, that will allow them to keep running for 60 or even 80 years.  Eighty reactors (many plants comprise more than one reactor) have already had their licenses renewed, and many of the remaining ones are likely to come up for renewal in the next decade.
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While there are significant unknowns around extending the lives of nuclear plants built in the 1970s and 1980s, most people in the industry believe that the reactors can operate safely for 80 years.  And it’s economic issues, not technical ones, that are likely to shutter aging nuclear plants over the next 20 years.  Cheap natural gas and flattening demand for electricity have combined to make older nuclear plants relatively uneconomical.  Although the price of uranium fuel is relatively low, nuclear plants remain costly to run: according to the Institute for Energy Research, the levelized cost of electricity from existing nuclear plants is 50 percent higher, on a per-megawatt-hour basis, than that from combined-cycle natural gas plants.

Entergy, for example, is closing the FitzPatrick plant not because of technical issues but because the plant loses money: an analyst with UBS Securities calculated that the plant will lose about $40 million in 2016.  Entergy has already announced the closing of two other money-losing plants in New England.

The problem with money-driven nuclear shutdowns is that they don’t account for the cost of replacing that power with other forms of generation.  U.S. utilities cannot meet their obligations to lower emissions under the EPA’s Clean Power Plan—to say nothing of whatever agreement emerges from the Paris talks—if they’re forced to replace large amounts of zero-carbon generating capacity from closing nuclear plants.

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