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Monday, August 28th, 2017

Nuclear power plants are ‘bleeding cash’

Author:     JOE ROMM
Source:     Think Progress
Publication Date:     AUG 22, 2017, 4:50 PM
 Link: Nuclear power plants are ‘bleeding cash’
Stephan:   And finally, here is what is happening in the nuclear industry, like coal a dying sector bleeding money. If wellbeing had been a social priority the civilian nuclear industry would never have been created and this story, unlike coal will never be gone. As I have covered in SR, we're going to being dealing with nuclear waste functionally forever. All of this is good news.  I hope I have made it clear with these three reports that for all the kicking and screaming the Carbon Energy Era is coming to an end.    

The V.C. Summeer Nuclear STations in South Carolina.
Credit: AP/Chuck Burton

“It sometimes seems like U.S. and European nuclear companies are in competition to see which can heap greater embarrassment on their industry,” the Financial Times wrote earlier this month.

This appears to be the summer that the final nails are put in the coffin of the much-overhyped U.S. nuclear renaissance — despite President Trump’s comment in June that “we will begin to revive and expand our nuclear energy sector, which I’m so happy about.”

The nuclear industry is so uncompetitive now that over half of all existing U.S. nuclear power plants are “bleeding cash” according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report released earlier this summer. BNEF found that $2.9 billion is lost every year by just 55 percent of all the nuclear plants in the United States.

But, as the chart below shows, even the profitable plants have the narrowest of positive operating margins.

NEGATIVE OPERATING MARGINS ARE NOT […]

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1 Comment

  1. Mark R on Monday, August 28, 2017 at 10:10 pm

    Sadly, this is correct and Stephan is right on target here. We should be decommissioning nuclear reactors in this country..especially the ones which have been granted extensions on their operating license to exceed the designed life cycle. We must deal with nuclear waste using advanced research into how radioactive materials can be safely sequestered on the required timescales, or neutralized completely..something we don’t currently have the technical ability to do. This should be a national as well as global priority because this is everyone’s problem. Governments and corps have kicked the can so far down the road on this one that we can ill afford to wait much longer.