I have discussed many issues that might lead to closing a nuclear power plant. There can be concerns about earthquakes, flood, tornados, hurricanes, explosions, leaks and many other problems. One thing that has nothing at all to do with reactor design, the weather but does have to do with the location is the demand for electrical energy. The United States is working to upgrade our power grid to be able to distribute power better across the country so that we can location wind farms and solar farms where is convenient and get the power to where it is needed but we don’t have that grid yet. Since up to one third of electrical energy can be lost during transmission, we still try to site the power plant as close to where the energy will be used as possible.
The Kewaunee Power Station, a nuclear power plant in Wisconsin is owned by Dominion Resources, Inc. They bought the plant in 2005 from two utilities which now buy power from Dominion. The plant generates about one half of a gigawatt of power which is enough to power about one hundred forty thousand homes.
Recently, Dominion announced that it was going to close the Kewaunee Power Station in 2013 because it could not find a buyer for the plant. Dominion said that the low price of natural gas which sets the price of electricity on the wholesale power market was a big factor in the decision. Dominion had had contracts to sell two nuclear power plants to utilities in Wisconsin but the contracts expire next year. Late last year, Alliant Energy Corporation in Madison, Wisconsin ended negotiations with Dominion over the purchase of a plant.
Dominion’s CEO said that it was a difficult decision because the plant is running smoothly and the employees are dedicated. The plant had just been granted another license which would have extended the life of the plant to 2033. They had intended to expand their Midwestern fleet of nuclear power plants but were unable to. They will have to write down a two hundred eighty million dollar expense connected to the shut down and decommissioning of the Kewaunee Power Station.
Politics reared its ugly head as Governor Scott Walker blamed the inability of Dominion to find a buyer for the Kewaunee Power Station and to expand the number of reactors that it owns on burdensome EPA regulations that were discouraging the “job creators”. While there are some EPA regulations that might affect the future operation of the plant, Dominion VP of Operations said that the new EPA regulations were not the main reason that they decided to shut down the plant. He said that it was the recent boom in fracking and the abundance of cheap natural gas that was the main problem. Many utilities are switching to natural gas and coal because it is cheap than nuclear for electrical power generation.
This will be the first US nuclear power plant shut down since two plants were shut down in the late 1990. Out of all the problems that can accompany the use of nuclear power to generate electricity, the reason that this plant is being shut down is purely economical.
Kewaunee Power Station from Reznick111:
