nuclear-news

Financial meltdown facing Central New York nuclear plants

Central New York nuclear plants struggle to avoid financial meltdown Syracuse.com, By Tim Knauss | tknauss@syracuse.com    September 29, 2013 SCRIBA, N.Y. – As recently as four years ago, nuclear power companies were planning to spend billions of dollars to build a new reactor in Oswego County, alongside three existing nuclear plants.

Then the bottom fell out. Natural gas-burning power plants that benefit from a glut of cheap gas produced by hydrofracking cut wholesale electricity prices in half.

Now the outlook for nuclear power plants is so bleak that Wall Street analysts say one or more Upstate nuclear plants could go out of business if conditions don’t change.

Two Upstate nukes in particular – the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Oswego County and the R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant in nearby Wayne County – are high on the watch list of plants that industry experts say are at risk of closing for economic reasons……Nuclear critics and industry supporters finally agree on something: Nuclear power, the bedrock of Oswego County’s economy and the biggest source of electricity in Central New York, faces a financial crisis…….

“We should expect more early (plant) retirements,” nuclear critic Mark Cooper, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, wrote in a July report. “Rising costs of an aging fleet and the availability of lower cost alternatives are likely to persist over the next couple of decades.”

Across the country, four nukes have shut down this year — the first plant retirements in 15 years — and a fifth announced it will close next year……

The fragile finances of nuclear power have provided new ammunition to anti-nuclear groups. In March, prior to the announcement of Vermont Yankee’s shutdown, a coalition of four groups petitioned the NRC to suspend Entergy’s license to operate FitzPatrick and Vermont Yankee arguing that the plants produce insufficient revenue to maintain and operate the reactors safely. Entergy has not yet responded to the petition…….http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/09/oswego_county_nuclear_plants_struggle_to_avoid_financial_meltdown.html

September 30, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA