“Vermonters sent a message to President Obama and the nuclear industry today,” said Greenpeace’s Nuclear Policy Analyst Jim Riccio. “The nuclear renaissance is dead on arrival. We can retire old, decrepit and leaking reactors like Vermont Yankee and help usher in the energy revolution that America needs.”
“When American’s have the choice about the kind of energy they want in their communities, they don’t want nuclear. Vermont has shut down the myth of the so-called nuclear renaissance. Greenpeace is calling on Vermonter legislators to vote against relicensing in the house as well so that the message to America registers loud and clear.”
This decision is an interesting one. Like Sacramento many years before it, Vermont decided to proactively shut down their Nuclear plant. In this case, Vermont was choosing this pathway even though the variable costs of the plant were less than $0.03/kWh.
For new Nuclear we have a slightly different case. The recently $8.3B in loan guarantees for Southern Company’s nuclear plant is on a total bill of $14.4B for just 2,200MW of nuclear. At the same time, McKinsey claims that over over 85% of the 17 gigatons of carbon reduction we need globally by 2020 could be achieved by efficiency alone. Further, that for $14.4B, Southern company could perform such deep energy efficiency retrofits that they would create 10 times the number of construction jobs than the Nuclear plant.
I am not anti-nuclear, but some of these large Nuclear plants plans need to rethought towards more manageable strategies. Companies like Hyperion are creating small reactors that can be sited and financed more easily than the large Nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power holds the promise to be a big player in our effort to decarbonize the electricity grid, but their lack of common sense around how to handle public relations seems to be their Achilles heel.
Jigar Shah
CEO, Carbon War Room
Founder, SunEdison
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