Did you read the article? It's entirely dedicated to explaining how they reluctantly arrived at this conclusion.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a2540/42...
This sort of application is where one of the smallest Small Modular Reactor designs would theoretically be great, but nobody is offering a commercial SMR yet. All SMR designs are still in the R&D phase. The smallest commercially available power reactor designs start at hundreds of megawatts, which is far larger than the 17 MW the campus needed.
They both sound simple on paper but in reality they'd probably cost more than the natural gas pipeline Fairbanks wishes it had.
When public institutions engage in infrastructure projects they need to do a massive amount of work to ensure their ass is completely and totally covered from every angle. Trying to do something off the beaten path, like go nuclear, is a recipe for lengthy court battles and cost overruns. Blazing that trail is best left to the wealthy universities. Modern micro scale nuclear reactors and power stations built out of surplus hardware would be cool but there's a massive cost disadvantage for the first mover.
Total enrollment is 10k students. We’re firing up a replacement coal plant, which is not paying for its CO2, mercury, and uranium emission externalities, for 10k students.
Something to ponder, though: how much CO2 would be emitted if you shut down the university, and had to build the infrastructure to house and educate those 10k students elsewhere? Building a campus of that size would likely cost >$1 billion and would itself involve lots of emissions from concrete and power generation. And even once constructed, base power generation would still likely use fossil fuels. Natural gas is a far sight better than coal, but it still emits CO2 when burned.
My gut, given these considerations, is that it's much more environmentally friendly to use existing infrastructure and replace this coal-fueled plant with a more efficient coal-fueled plant, which is exactly what the university is doing.
Weird example, I would expect more compassion from most people for that scenario. Criticizing coal plants is common but criticizing people for living on Hawaii seems.. unusual.
I meant somewhere like the Marshall Islands, where there’s nothing.
Anyway, criticism for living somewhere like the Marshall Islands, while perhaps rationally warranted, is very rare to actually see compared to criticism for coal plants. So this is still a bizarre example.
Edit: I take no issue with the people of Hawaii, and that was not the example I intended.
10,000 people is a non-trivial number. Constructing a new 10,000-student-sized university somewhere is also going to need some surrounding infrastructure to support it, which Fairbanks already has, and which (presumably) the new place doesn't have.
If you want to just ship them somewhere else, I doubt that there are openings for 10,000 students in all the universities in the western half of the US.
And if you want to just have those 10,000 students not get an education in preference to building a power plant, feel free to get lost.
At no point did I say these students shouldn’t receive an education. I’m arguing about the wasteful use of resources to be educated in a specific (edit: clean, renewable) energy resource poor location.
We did examine both the operating and fuel costs of a gas option. It costs less to build a gas plant; however, gas is a more expensive fuel than coal. All our models are just that -- models -- because there is currently not a reliable source of gas. Using today's prices, our fuel costs with the new boiler would be about $5.3 million each year. Fuel costs at current gas prices would be about $20 million a year. Until a low-cost, reliable supply of gas becomes a reality in Fairbanks, a gas option is not viable.