Two very interesting pieces from Bloomberg that deserve to be read in entirety.
Gift links should get you there.
First up, Europe’s renewable transition, unintentionally juiced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is presenting a big challenge for nukes currently in operation, as prices fall to zero and below on sunny, windy days.
Secondly, a US company originally started to build nuclear waste storage casks, is branching out into restarting an older nuke, and planning new Small Modular units of its own design.
The drive to promote renewable energy is turning the screws on Europe’s nuclear industry.
While churning out fossil-free electricity has never been more urgent, surging renewables and a slump in power prices are undermining operations of atomic plants that are still the cornerstone of electricity grids in several parts of the continent.
The signs are that they are facing some tough times ahead. Demand hasn’t recovered fully since the energy crisis and the region’s wind and solar parks are producing more power than ever, which is eating into the share that both nuclear and coal plants send to national grids.
“With current power prices, the traditional baseload plants will struggle, unless we face longer periods with very unfavorable solar and wind conditions, drought or strong heat,” said Sigurd Pedersen Lie, a senior analyst at StormGeo Nena A/S in Oslo.
Longer term, it’s a warning sign that reactors might get increasingly squeezed out, even as countries such as France and the UK plan to spend huge sums on new plants, having identified the technology as a key element in the fight to limit global warming. At the United Nations climate meeting in Dubai late last year, they were joined by more than 20 nations including the US, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Korea in calling for a tripling of global nuclear generation by the middle of the century.
While EDF’s reactors were designed with some degree of flexibility, the company is looking at current developments “with extreme care,” Cederic Lewandowski, the company’s head of nuclear and thermal generation, told a senate hearing on Thursday.
European Union nations added a record amount of wind power capacity last year. The growth of solar capacity exceeded 40% for a third year running, lobby group data showed.
It’s not unusual for nuclear operators to dial down output when demand is low and supplies of solar and wind energy surge, but shutting down units completely is rare because of the time it takes to ramp back up again and the complexities involved.
“What we dread the most is reactor stoppages,” Lewandowski said. “If we were to have more frequent halts tied to renewables, climate change and so forth, we would have to look at that very closely.”
In 2016 the utility company Entergy Corp. announced plans to close one of its nuclear power plants. Palisades, a facility in Michigan that supplied about 6% of the state’s energy, was no longer cost-effective, with natural gas and renewables becoming cheaper. When the plant finally shuttered in May 2022, it looked as if it would be the very last of a series of reactors going dark as America’s grid turned away from fission.
But then the opposite happened. Even before Palisades officially closed, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, had called for the lights to stay on. “I intend to do everything I can to keep this plant open, protect jobs, and expand clean energy production,” she wrote to US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholmin April 2022. Whitmer kept her promise: This year, on March 27, the Department of Energy approved a $1.5 billion loan for Palisades to be restarted. By 2025, if all goes according to plan, the state will once again be running—in part—on the plant’s 800-megawatt reactor, which sits on the shores of Lake Michigan about two hours northeast of Chicago.
More recently, DOE officials have indicated their support to restart other reactors beyond Palisades. To hear it from the growing chorus of nuclear’s cheerleaders, that’s good news not just for the US but also for Earth itself. Some 440 reactors around the world supply about 10% of the planet’s electricity, a share that will have to triple by 2030 to head off the most extreme effects of climate change, according to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental research organization. An increasing number of Americans seem to agree: In 2023, 57% supported the use of more nuclear power in the US, up from 43% in 2020, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center. Fervent anti-nuclear activism and memories of the Three Mile Island accident haven’t gone away, but they seem to be fading.
These shifts are certainly good news for the nuclear industry—and arguably for one company in particular: Holtec International. Privately held since its founding in 1986, Holtec is the top US manufacturer of storage equipment for nuclear waste, primarily casks: gigantic steel and concrete vessels capable of safely stashing the material outdoors. In 2023 casks and related services accounted for more than half of Holtec’s $800 million in sales.
While Holtec had bought Palisades to tear it down, now, with the help of that $1.5 billion loan from the DOE, which was made directly to Holtec, the company is preparing to turn the reactor back on. This is unprecedented: Restarting a cold reactor has never been done before in the US. Once Palisades is back on, Holtec will face a whole new set of challenges, because it has no experience running a nuclear plant.
If the idea of a radioactive waste cask supplier turning first-time plant operator sounds like the start of a Simpsons episode, well, some wariness may be warranted. In its four years of decommissioning plants, Holtec has accrued a number of violations, raising concerns among some industry observers about its approach to safety. Others say a few infractions should be expected, and normal, in such a tightly regulated industry.
But what’s certain is this: As the effects of climate change become more frequent and extreme, nuclear power is increasingly viewed as a key solution to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Not only does Holtec intend to bring Palisades back online, it also plans by the end of the decade to have its own small modular reactors up and running. Also known as SMRs, these are factory-built reactors that can be assembled onsite. That’s yet another undertaking that is highly complex and largely unproven—not only for Holtec, but for the entire industry.
They might want to start pairing multi-day energy storage with their reactors as a buffer for their energy production.
The pressure might start to run the other way, as ‘Use it or lose it’ rears its ugly head, and data centres, with burgeoning 24/7 demand, tie down available ‘clean firm’ capacity with contracts. New Zealand’s normally nearly 90 % renewable (hydro 60%, geothermal 20%, both normally considered ‘clean firm’, and ~8% wind) but our only surviving coal plant operator has just announced that in future, they won’t be providing backup for the other large gentailers – unless they lock in capacity contracts.With most US coal plants facing strong pressure to close, and gas to switch to hydrogen or carbon capture, both problematic, nuclear operators should be in the driving seat.
It;s been decades to see 4th generation Candu reactors developed. By using heavy water they can work at much lower pressures risking only radioactive farts instead of explosions in extreme conditions that they won’t see. The big benefit is using uranium with only 0.7% U-235 which means it could eat mined uranium and chew down on most of the “spent” fuel that’s classified as waste. It also does thorium.