Pennsylvania decides whether to subsidize nuclear energy as “clean” | Hacker News Reader

Pennsylvania decides whether to subsidize nuclear energy as “clean”

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17 pointspseudolus4 comments

This debate is happening in a lot of jurisdictions. Here in Ontario we're refurbishing our older reactors, at a massive expense, in order to get off of coal, and reduce dependance on gas.

It's resulted in very high energy costs (especially compared to our hydro-power rich neighbour, Quebec), drove the provincial government out of office, and is one of the things driving energy-intensive industry out of the province.

Let's look at the bigger picture.

Ontario is one of only a few regions in the world that decarbonized their electricity generation. All of these regions did this with a combination of nuclear and hydro (and a small contribution of other renewables). Unfortunately you can't build hydro everywhere and you have to take into account that it's not environmentally neutral too.

On the other hand, Germany closed some of their nuclear power plants and invested billions in renewables, which resulted in very high energy prices too, but they are nowhere near meeting their emissions reduction targets, and are facing billion-euro fines for missing their targets. They are increasing their dependence on gas (this is inevitable because intermittent renewables like wind and solar require a power source that can be fired on demand, or a very expensive storage). Germany committed to end their reliance on coal by 2038, but they are still building coal power plants.

Another example is California. Just like Germany and Ontario, they had a fleet of nuclear reactors and planned to build more. But they decided to close about half of their nuclear power plants and invest in renewables instead. What happened is very high energy prices and emissions even a little higher than in Germany.

Should Pennsylvania subsidize nuclear energy as clean? Yes, because it's the only big source of clean energy in Pennsylvania. Renewables won't be able to fill the gap if nuclear gets closed. And we should be replacing fossil fuels, not one clean source with another. Nuclear is the biggest clean energy source in United States. It's bigger than all renewables put together, but it gets the least amount of subsidies and tax cuts. Even less than fossil fuels.

The biggest problem regarding electricity costs in Germany is the fact it has too many underutilized power plants. 28GW of mostly unused gas plants that could have reduced CO2 emissions years ago. Meanwhile coal workers have to be protected just like in the US and therefore 46GW of coal capacity gets used instead to make sure coal towns don't disappear.

When you look at this turning off 10GW of nuclear starts to make sense, it's expensive, there are no suitable storage sites in Germany, people don't like it and finally: Germany doesn't need it because it has too much anyway. The dark side is that coal gets to live another day because nobody wants to be personally responsible for the loss of thousands of jobs.

It makes sense here in the states if the reactors don’t need refurbishment and can keep operating with a license extension. If anything other than usual O&M expenses are required, the economics of the policy fail (as you mention).

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