GO NUCLEAR

IT’S THE CLEANEST, LOWEST COST & MOST RELIABLE ENERGY SOURCE …

For six decades, nuclear energy has provided carbon-free, economical and reliable power to millions of Americans.

Nuclear accounts for roughly one fifth or 20% of the total 4,177,810 thousand megawatt hours of electrical power generated annually by all energy sources in the U.S.

Natural gas (35%) has overtaken coal (27%) as the number one energy source in the U.S.

Overall, the rising usage of natural gas has significantly reduced carbon emissions. When burned, natural gas releases up to 50% less CO2 than coal and 20-30% less than oil; when used in power generation, natural gas emits as much as 50% less CO2 than coal, and results in negligible emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), mercury (Hg), and particulates compared with other fuels.

While utilizing more natural gas and less coal in electrical power generation is better for the environment, carbon-free energy sources like nuclear, wind and solar are the cleanest.

Currently, U.S. nuclear power plants provide 60 percent of carbon-free electricity. The U.S. gets twice as much carbon-free power from nuclear as it does from renewables. 

But the U.S. power grid faces the potential loss of more than 228,000 gigawatt hours of carbon-free nuclear generation because of nuclear plant closures.

According to the EIA:

Electricity generation from U.S. nuclear power plants totaled 807.1 million megawatthours (MWh) in 2018, slightly more than the previous peak of 807.0 million MWh in 2010, even though several nuclear power plants had closed since 2010. A combination of added capacity through uprates and shorter refueling and maintenance cycles allowed the remaining nuclear power plants to produce more electricity.

Between 2010 and 2018, only one new nuclear power plant came online in the United States. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor came online in the fall of 2016, providing 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of additional power.

Seven plants with a combined capacity of 5.3 GW have retired since 2013.

As of the beginning of 2019, the United States had 98 nuclear power reactors at 60 plants, but two plants—Pilgrim, Massachusetts’s only nuclear plant, and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania—are expected to retire later this year.

Currently, 30 of 50 states produce nuclear energy in the following proportions.

The 2018 peak level of U.S. nuclear generation is not likely to be surpassed in the coming decades. Only two new nuclear reactors are scheduled to come online in the near future. Georgia’s Vogtle Units 3 and 4, which are planning to come online in 2021 and 2022, respectively, would provide 2.2 GW of additional power. However, this new capacity will not offset the capacity that is expected to retire in the next seven years — two plants will retire later this year, three more in 2020, and four more in 2021. By 2025, U.S. nuclear capacity will fall by 10.5 GW from the closings of twelve reactors.

As more nuclear plants close, EIA projects that net electricity generation from U.S. nuclear power reactors will fall by 17% by 2025 in the Annual Energy Outlook 2019 reference case.

According to the World Nuclear Association, nuclear plant closures have been brought on by a combination of factors including cheap natural gas, market liberalization, over-subsidy of renewable sources, and political campaigning.  

The loss of electricity production from nuclear power is expected to be largely offset by output from new natural gas, wind, and solar power plants.

However, as mentioned earlier, natural gas emits carbon through fossil steam, whereas nuclear energy is carbon-free and costs less to produce. The cost of producing other carbon-free renewables, like solar and wind (gas turbine and small scale), have come down substantially in the past ten years, but they are still more expensive than nuclear. Hydro-electric is the cheapest, but it has significant location limitations.

According to Energy.gov, nuclear power is also the most reliable, as measured by ‘capacity factor.’ The graph below shows that U.S. nuclear power in 2018 was at its highest capacity factor on record, at 92.6%. This means nuclear power plants are producing maximum power more than 92% of the time during the year. That’s 1.5 to 2 times more reliable than natural gas and coal, and 2.5 to 3.5 times more reliable than wind and solar.

Jameson McBride, an energy and climate analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a liberal think tank that promotes technological innovation to combat climate change, told the Washington Examiner that: “There is no doubt losing nuclear plants is a tragedy for clean energy. If we start closing these nuclear plants en masse, we’ll go backward on carbon reduction efforts. Switching from coal to natural gas has been good for reducing emissions, but switching from nuclear to gas would be very bad.”

The U.S. operates 22% of the world’s 450 commercial nuclear reactors. At the start of 2019, the U.S. has two of the 57 reactors under construction globally; 13 are being constructed in China.

Based on the environmental, economic and reliability advantages of nuclear power over coal, natural gas, solar and wind energy sources, we strongly encourage Energy Secretary Rick Perry to do everything he can to keep existing nuclear plants open and consider expanding our nation’s nuclear power capacity beyond current plans.

If you believe in reducing man-made emissions that harm our climate and environment, then GO NUCLEAR!