Pilgrim Nuclear Generating Station (via WBUR)
While I fully support permanently shutting down rickety old Pilgrim nuclear this week, I’m agnostic on nuclear power in general. Sixty years into the nuclear era, it remains disaster-prone and we have no answers (never mind good ones) when it comes to storing the waste. The cost of building new plants is so absurdly high it’s unclear if the United States will ever build another one – South Carolina recently spent a mind-boggling $9 billion before abandoning an attempt to build a nuclear plant. Massive investment in wind (onshore and offshore) and solar is a much better bet.
Nuclear power advocates are an odd bunch. They totally ignore safety concerns, always have some magic new technology that will somehow solve cost concerns, and insist environmentalists are the biggest obstacles to nuclear. Because progressives totally control everything on Beacon Hill and in Washington, right y’all?
Here is the 2nd sentence of today’s Boston Globe op-ed by a nuclear advocate:
Pilgrim supplied more carbon-free electricity every year than all Massachusetts solar, wind, and hydro combined, and supplied it 24/7, year-round, in any weather.
Now, reading that sentence, you would think Pilgrim operated all day, every day, all year, in any weather! Well hold onto your Dunks my friends because that’s an it-was-all-Buckner’s-fault-sized lie:
- To find Pilgrim’s most recent unexpected shutdown, you have to go all the way back to (checks notes) last week when one of its water pumps failed.
- Pilgrim is often forced to shut down by weather when we need the power most. It was knocked offline for weeks in 2018 by two snowstorms, first in January, then again in March. Pilgrim is also forced to slow down during extreme summer heat when Cape Cod Bay water gets too warm.
- Over the course of 2018, Pilgrim was at “zero” power for two full months because of unplanned shutdowns related to equipment problems.
- In 2015, Pilgrim was rated one of the worst-performing nuclear plants in the country & one step from mandatory shutdown by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
- Pilgrim was under a federally ordered shutdown from 1986 to 1989 for equipment and management failures.
Why would the Globe allow such an obvious, easily-fact-checked lie on its op-ed page?
It’s telling that nuclear advocates have shifted their criticism of solar and wind from “they don’t run full power all the time!” to “they don’t run full power all the time and battery storage cannot store our entire state’s energy usage for days at a time!” Why would we want or need that?
When it comes to Pilgrim, the simple fact is we don’t need giant, centralized power plants like we used to. As Vox’s David Roberts has detailed, electric grid operators have gotten extremely good at managing lots of different energy sources from lots of different places. We need lots of renewable energy in lots of different places, battery storage, more investment in energy efficiency and much stricter building standards.
There are some places that have existing nuclear plants in good condition that should keep them running until more renewables are online, but that’s largely a statement about how pathetically slow our legislators have been to incentivize sufficient renewable energy. Pilgrim is not one of those plants and Massachusetts is definitely one of those places where renewable energy – specifically offshore wind – has been sitting on the sidelines ready to go, waiting for our political coaches to plug them into the game.
Finally, a huge thank you to Christine Legere of the Cape Cod Times who has done unbelievably good work in the last few years documenting Pilgrim’s shoddy safety record and frequent failures. I don’t think folks outside the region understand the constant low-level stress that it puts on local residents to have having an aging nuclear plant nearby, and just through being a watchdog for Pilgrim, Legere has done a great public service. Follow her on Twitter!
So your post amounts to, “How dare the Globe print an opinion piece that I disagree with”?
I understand that this is a really difficult concept to comprehend, so let me word it as clearly as possible:
Lying is different from disagreeing.
This is yet another Boston Globe piece that is an outright flagrant LIE. It doesn’t matter whether we agree or disagree — it is a LIE.
In case the thread-starter isn’t clear enough, here is the LIE (from the published piece):
That’s just a lie. Pilgrim did NOT supply power 24/7. It did NOT supply it year-round. It did NOT supply it in any weather. There are three separate claims in that phrase. Each is specifically targeted at competing alternative energy sources, and each is an outright LIE.
This piece is chock full of outright lies. How about this whopper (emphasis mine):
Notice the absence of “safe” in the above. Nuclear power is NOT reliable. Ask the government of Japan whether nuclear power is “affordable”.
Here’s a related whopper from the same piece (emphasis mine):
These lies need to be unpacked one at a time. Each is a serious whopper.
1. “statistically [nuclear power] has been far safer than methane or other fossil fuels”
The Concorde was, statistically speaking, the safest aircraft in the world — until one crashed. It then immediately became the most dangerous. This piece utterly ignores the Fukushima disaster. That disaster shut down ALL of Japan’s nuclear production. The costs of that shutdown have been staggering. In particular, it forced Japan to rely on OIL for power generation for at least a decade.
Japan’s decision to rely on nuclear power was an economic and environmental disaster.
2. “[Some spent nuclear fuel is] no worse than other forever-toxic industrial wastes”
Total hogwash. What other “forever-toxic industrial wastes” emit radiation — radiation that fundamentally changes the material of its container — for tens of thousands of years? We DON’T KNOW what happens to concrete after thousands of years of radiation exposure — we’ve only known about radiation for about a century.
3. “the quantities are very small … about ten “dry casks” (18-foot-tall cylinders) per year”
This is a sheer and flagrant LIE. Sources like this come closer to the truth about nuclear waste (emphasis mine):
The nuclear waste stored at Fukushima was a major contributor to that disaster. Nuclear waste stored in the “wet pool” must be constantly cooled in order to prevent thermal runaway and subsequent explosions and uncontrolled and catastrophic release of radioactive material. The cooling requires constant power — hard enough when the plant is itself mostly operational (diesel generators and other backups are still required) and VERY expensive after the plant has been shut down.
Does anybody seriously believe that Entergy (or anybody else) is going to keep cooling and backup systems properly operating a decade after the plant has been closed?
Ten dry casks PER YEAR simply is NOT a “small” quantity. The amount of nuclear waste already on-site at Pilgrim is not a “small amount”. These are HUGE amounts of highly-toxic radioactive material. We don’t know how long a “dry-cask” will keep it safe.
There IS NO long term plan for disposing of nuclear waste. For decades, the government talked about Yucca Mountain. That plan never materialized, for very good reasons. The military disposal site at Hanford Washington was an ecological disaster. A report summarizes the scope:
4. “[These casks] have never had a serious problem and are certified for many decades.”
We are talking about material that is highly radioactive for tens of thousands of years. “Many decades” is less than a year. In 1943, the containers used at Hanford “never had a serious problem”. They also were good for “many decades”. That entire site is now a major environmental disaster.
This is yet another lie. Aluminum house wiring works fine the first few days after it’s installed. Experience has shown that it’s a major fire hazard once its surface begins to oxidize. Old BX cable (insulated conductors encased in a metal sheath) works fine — until the insulation on the conductors dries out and becomes brittle (after several decades). Once that happens, then ANY movement of the BX cable (such as by changing a workbox connected to it) causes the cable to flex. When the cable flexes, the brittle insulation breaks off of the wires. The wires begin to contact the shield (and each other), and a fire begins — in the wall, hidden from sight, whether or not a switch is turned on.
The lie here is the assertion that these casks do their intended task — keep radioactive material enclosed until it is no longer hazardous.
Would the Globe publish an editorial by a big tobacco lobbyist claiming that cigarettes are safe? This piece is in the same category.
Why pit the renewables against each other? I hate seeing that in the Globe and from right wing pro-nuclear voices which scoff at reliable and cheaper wind and solar, but I also am fairly sick of the anti-nuclear and anti-dam crowd on the left. We need an all of the above approach to get off of carbon. Climate change is a greater risk than a nuclear catastrophe. Climate change is killing off far more species than dams.
France and Germany are decades ahead of us in reducing emissions and getting off of coal (Germany closed its last plant this year) because they were early adopters of nuclear energy. They did not face the cost issues or storage issues we have here in the states due to stronger federal management over nuclear energy, nor did they have the safety issues that plagued the former Soviet Union or Japan. Hydroelectric is a valid option, I am alright with disrupting some salmon if it means closing coal fields for good. These are the tradeoffs we may need to make in the interim.
Harry Reid is gone so we should reopen Yucca mountain. Kennedy and Kerry are out of office so we should restart Cape Wind. There are research reactors that can be powered by nuclear waste or demilitarized plutonium. There are tidal powered reactors in Canada that would work in ME and the Nantucket Sound. We need to invest in an all of the above approach to carbon free energy. The emergency is too real to wring our hands over how we get there.
Germany began shutting down its nuclear plants in response to Fukushima with a target date of 2022 for completion. France is similarly winding down its use of nuclear energy. France and Germany made HUGE investments in renewables. Germany was a world leader in solar energy technology until being largely displaced by China.
Nuclear waste is as hazardous in Europe as it is here. Various published reports show that EU nations are no further along in handling nuclear waste than America. Yucca mountain is a bad idea because of the science and engineering, not because of Harry Reid. The enormous quantities of nuclear waste already distributed across America is a prescription for environmental disaster — we should not create more.
Our own stomv offers what I think is the best measure of how to set our priorities. He long ago argued here that we should be looking at the net carbon footprint reduction bought with each dollar invested. By that metric, simple energy conservation is near or at the top of the list. New nuclear generating capacity is near the bottom. Our resources are already limited — throwing money everywhere strikes me as primarily a way of squandering money.
It is precisely because the emergency is real and immediate that we must prioritize our investments, using some metric such as that proposed by stomv.
Nuclear energy is a technology whose time has long gone.
Thank you! I only had from When I Woke Up until When The Kids Woke Up to write this & I appreciate you diving into the many other problems with the op-ed.
Three Mile Island Unit 2 clean up took nearly 12 years and cost approximately $973 million.
Chernobyl cleanup is estimated at $50 – $433 billion
“Economic damage of the Chernobyl accident is estimated at $235 billion for 30 years on after the explosion, making up 32 national budgets as of 1985. Chernobyl disaster vastly damaged the agricultural sector of the Belarusian economy, which is worth over $700 million annually.”
“Japan’s economy, trade, and industry ministry recently (as of 2016) estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion), almost twice the previous estimate of ¥11 trillion (US$96 billion).” I’ve read in the last week or so that the estimates have increased significantly.
Last I looked, US Energy Information Agency estimated new nuclear at over 9¢/kwh (without subsidies) using 2014 figures. And those figures will probably rise, given the history of nuclear construction.
New wind and solar are being contracted by utilities now in some places in the USA at around 2¢/kwh. And those figures will probably fall, given the history of renewables construction.
Hey, ever hear the story of Nukie the seal which used to play in the outflow waters from Pilgrim Station? Or how about the time(s) low level nuclear waste was delivered from Pilgrim Station to local dumps which were not authorized to accept it?
Personally, I support research and development in all forms of energy but believe that nuclear has priced itself out of the market and, as presently constituted, is not a viable way forward.
Appreciate the reality based corrections to my assumptions. That’s BMG at its best.
I still say we should invest in research for safer and cheaper nuclear energy-but obviously renewables give us more bang for the buck to fight climate change in the near term. On that I stand corrected.
It’s nice when we don’t have to make cost or environmental trade offs to do the right thing. It’s really just the intransigence of the fossil fuel industry that has to be defeated.
I’ll add the wind farm in my wife’s hometown in the Philippines has brought nothing but power and prosperity to the region and her entire family. In just five years between visits they now have a realiable energy source without brownouts and more money coming into the household as people get jobs at the farm or the small businesses created by the farm. The governments repaved the roads and there is a huge tourist industry of eager Manilians willing to make the 12 hour trek to see the largest wind farm in their country and all of Asia. They are really quite beautiful too and make no noises.
What we think of as the “third world” is rapidly advancing past the US on climate mitigation technology. Our loss.