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US Approves Billions in Aid To Restart Michigan Nuclear Plant (nytimes.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
The Energy Department said on Monday that it had finalized a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to help a company restart a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan -- the latest sign of rising government support for nuclear power. From a report: Two rural electricity providers that planned to buy power from the reactor would also receive $1.3 billion in federal grants [Editor's note: the link is likely paywalled; alternative source] under a program approved by Congress to help rural communities tackle climate change. The moves will help Holtec International reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in Covert Township, Mich., which ceased operating in 2022. The company plans to inspect and refurbish the plant's reactor and seek regulatory approval to restart the plant by October 2025.

After years of stagnation, America's nuclear industry is seeing a resurgence of interest. Both Congress and the Biden administration have offered billions of dollars in subsidies to prevent older nuclear plants from closing and to build new reactors. Despite concerns about high costs and hazardous waste, nuclear plants can generate electricity at all hours without emitting the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet. David Turk, the deputy secretary of energy, said he expected U.S. electricity demand would grow by 15 percent over the next few years, driven by an increase in electric vehicles, a boom in battery and solar factories as well as a surge of new data centers for artificial intelligence. That meant the nation needs new low-carbon sources of power that could run 24/7 and complement wind and solar plants.
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US Approves Billions in Aid To Restart Michigan Nuclear Plant More

US Approves Billions in Aid To Restart Michigan Nuclear Plant

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  • Great news for us locals (Score:4, Funny)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @12:28PM (#64828757) Homepage Journal

    We can go back to swim at the beach in Van Buren State Parks well into October once the nuclear plant is releasing warm water into the lake.

     

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

      The German government forces old nukes to shutdown.

      The American government pays old nukes to reopen.

      Certainly very different policies.

      • LNG from mother russia cant make its way to Germany anymore. Germany now paying a pretty premium to ship US LNG over production over the atlantic to power BMW & VW car plants. Germany will more than likely look into re-activating their old nuclear reactors soon.

        • You can not reactivate a dismantled nuclear reactor.
          Facepalm

          • So they even dumber than originally thought

            • If you like to live close to a 70 year old reactor, on a seismic fault line, at a river that gets flooded every spring, in a Tornado zone: up to you.
              Most Germans do not like to live that way, so they voted a government into power, that abolished nukes.

              Democracy as it should be, or not?

        • >> Germany will more than likely look into re-activating their old nuclear reactors soon.
          B.S.
          Germany looked at it, and it makes absolutely no economic sense whatsoever.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by vyvepe ( 809573 )
            That must be why Germany is at the top as for as household electricity prices goes in Europe: https://qery.no/consumer-energ... [qery.no]

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by stooo ( 2202012 )

              you're confusing price and costs.
              Only 42% of the household price of electricity is the real cost of electricity. The rest is taxes, transport, and similar stuff.
              Also, it is Putin that doubled electricity cost in Germany, the stopping of nuclear plants reduced costs.
              https://www.bdew.de/service/da... [www.bdew.de]

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by vyvepe ( 809573 )

                Taxes are pointed out in the article. They are not that much higher in Germany than elsewhere (e.g. even when taxes are excluded the price in Germany is higher than in France).

                Transport is a legitimate cost of electricity. If your energy generation is badly distributed compared to the consumption centers then it should be included in the cost (e.g. a wind friendly north with and solar friendly south and weak/expensive interconnects). Germany may have build other sources of energy which may be better colloc

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It won't be restarted. This is 53 year old reactor. The amount of money needed to bring this up again is several times what is mentioned here: components will have to be fabricated from scratch and the whole thing will need to be recertificated by the NRC. The design documents are all owned by some Canadian private equity outfit now, via the carcass of Westinghouse via Combustion Engineering.

      This is Whitmer and the (D)s in the MI legislature pulling an election year campaign stunt. It will die on the

      • It won't be restarted. This is 53 year old reactor. The amount of money needed to bring this up again is several times what is mentioned here: components will have to be fabricated from scratch and the whole thing will need to be recertificated by the NRC. The design documents are all owned by some Canadian private equity outfit now, via the carcass of Westinghouse via Combustion Engineering.

        This is Whitmer and the (D)s in the MI legislature pulling an election year campaign stunt. It will die on the vine next year.

        In other words: 'Pork' ??

        • sounds like it to me, they will spend that $1.3 billion going over the plant with a fine-tooth comb and write a report saying it can't be restarted without an extra $XXX billion dollar influx from somewhere. and the people that do that will be paid and such... and congressweasels will thus garner more votes.

      • Re:Great news for us locals (Score:4, Informative)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @02:22PM (#64829047)

        components will have to be fabricated from scratch and the whole thing will need to be recertificated by the NRC.

        It's licensed to operate until 2031. It's been idle for two years, so some work will need to be done to restart it, but not nearly what you imply.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dhobbit ( 152517 )

        Maybe it will never start. But some amount of that money will flow to business that will at the very least start training people to restart reactors. That's kinda the thing with investments they don't all return but end up laying the groundwork for future investments. Stunt or not, a government investment will hopefully raise peoples interest in nuclear power.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          Why is that a good thing though? Sure, nuclear engineering is neat and, if there are no reactors, operating them will become a lost skill, but why do we need them? The only useful applications I can think of are all niche applications like really remote locations, deep space, that kind of thing. Here, on Earth, nuclear has pretty much been proven to be a more costly way of producing power than renewables. So what's the point? I suppose if you want to be ready for every possible situation then it's nice to h

      • it's not about the reactor.
        it's about distributing juicy subventions to private companies.

    • any 3 eye fish?

    • Are you sure it is 'the nuclear plant' and not the workers who are warming the water (in a more biological way) for you to swim in?
  • We need 100's of billion allocated for new nuclear energy. The single largest expense of a nuclear power plant is interest on loans. Almost 2/3 of the cost is interest. That's why the delays of Vogtle 3 and 4 massively increased its cost. So direct payments, massive subsides, or 1% loans would significantly drop the price.

    • Re:Good but not enough (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @01:47PM (#64828965)

      There were interest rates near zero for much of the teens and that didn't help Vogtle. Nuclear was way too expensive then and it is now as well.

      • Yeah but Vogtle didn't get those interest rates.

        • That sounds like their problem, not the taxpayer.

          • Climate change is the taxpayers problem. DF

            • A few massively expensive nuke plants built 15+ years from now sure won't help much. 100's of $billions allocated to solar, wind, and batteries to be built over the next 5 years would though.

              • Only building solar, wind, and batteries guarantees fossil fuels will remains on the grid.

                • Some will remain in the near term I agree, but what we need at present is speed of displacement of fossil. That would be solar, wind, and batteries.

                  • Well if you care about speed then you shouldn't have blocked nuclear energy development for 40 years. Building only solar, wind, and batteries will fail to deep decarbonize the grid. Logically we should also build new nuclear.

                    • >> you shouldn't have blocked nuclear energy development for 40 years

                      Except there's no evidence for that. I think this has been explained to you several times here.

                      "Most reactors began construction by 1974; following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and changing economics, many planned projects were canceled. More than 100 orders for nuclear power reactors, many already under construction, were canceled in the 1970s and 1980s, bankrupting some companies."
                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

                    • LOL. What passed Congress in 1974 and opened in 1975 due to coal industry lobbying? The NRC of course. The first thing they did was implement artificial delays of 40 months for all new nuclear projects. That above all else resulted in those cancellations. In the 50 year history of the NRC only 2 reactors went through their regulatory gauntlet-Vogtle 3 and 4. Every other reactor was grandfathered in from the Atomic Energy Commission. Let's also not forget the decades of fear mongering that took place

                    • Significant regulation of nuke plants is well warranted. And so many legitimate safety violations have been identified, right?

                    • Nuclear plants were always regulated. See the AEC. The purpose of the NRC wasn't to regulate nuclear power, but to kill all new nuclear power plants. And it worked.

                    • >> to kill all new nuclear power plant

                      Sounds like an unfounded personal opinion.

                      "since the 1980s the NRC has generally favored the interests of nuclear industry, and been unduly responsive to industry concerns, while failing to pursue tough regulation"
                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

                    • The evidence is on my side of the argument. 50 years, 2 plants. The ten years before that - almost 100 plants. Also all of the claims that the NRC has been regulatory captured were projection since it was captured--by the coal industry. And the opinion of two antinuclear zealots on wikipedia is meaningless.

                    • >> The evidence is on my side of the argument

                      As I already showed; "More than 100 orders for nuclear power reactors, many already under construction, were canceled in the 1970s and 1980s, bankrupting some companies." They weren't economical to build and operate then, and they still aren't.

                      Meanwhile, I'll take a well-referenced Wikipedia article about the NRC over your personal opinion.

                    • More than 100 plants were canceled after the NRC was created. Before that Nuclear was growing exponentially.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      The interest is high because nuclear plants cost a huge amount of money, but take a long time before they start to generate anything. You can't build them progressively like solar and wind. With solar and wind plants, you build them array by array and tower by tower. As soon as a single array or tower is built, it can be producing power in rough proportion to the money you have spent. With nuclear, you have to basically spend all the money you will spend building it before you can generate any power at all

      • Direct payments, massive subsidies and 1% loans don't actually make it any cheaper. They just shift the financial burden elsewhere. We've had this argument before, but you don't seem to understand the simple economic concept of opportunity cost.

        They eliminate the high interest rates. They have all been proven to work. China is guaranteeing a 1% interest rate on all new nuclear power plants. You just don't like nuclear and anything that will significantly reduce the costs is wrong in your mind.

        And your opportunity cost is a bs argument when solar, wind and storage will not deep decarbonize the grid. Germany spent 700 billion euros on renewables and failed. Their grid produces electricity dirtier than Texas. If they spent half of that they wou

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          They eliminate the high interest rates. They have all been proven to work. China is guaranteeing a 1% interest rate on all new nuclear power plants. You just don't like nuclear and anything that will significantly reduce the costs is wrong in your mind.

          No. I just have a basic grasp of economics and understand that if you set interest rates on loans lower than the rate of inflation, then you're basically paying for someone to take your money. Setting very low interest rates or using direct payments or subsidies does not actually make nuclear power cheaper. It just means that someone else is paying for it. That's not changing the true cost, that's just hiding it. In reality, the cost of the thing plus all the extra interest while you're waiting for it to tu

          • Setting very low interest rates or using direct payments or subsidies does not actually make nuclear power cheaper.

            Sure it does. See China who set a 1% interest rates. See UAE who paid S. Korea using direct payments.

            It just means that someone else is paying for it.

            It also means you are preventing bankers from leeching 10's of billions per project. How do you not understand that DF?

            By the way what's wrong with the taxpayer paying it? I pay taxes, therefore I'm a taxpayer. Taxpayer subsidies are okay for solar and storage, but wrong for nuclear? Hypocrite much?

            What is "deep decarbonize" the grid?

            I have seen it defined 2 ways, but they are almost equivalent. 90% of the electrical grid being from

    • >> We need 100's of billion allocated for new nuclear energy.
      Yeah nope. It makes no economic sense whatsoever.
      It's an economically obsolete money grab.

      • We burned 8 trillion during Covid. How is spending a fraction of that to solve climate change economic suicide? Especially since grids with nuclear energy on them tend to have lower electricity costs.

  • Why restart old technology? (Score:4, Funny)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @02:29PM (#64829075)

    Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the money building the latest nuclear reactor designs? Or is the glacial pace of government approval the real problem?

    • that's what bothers me, I mean, I have read so many articles about newer tech for nuclear reactors and yet.... I do not read about people actually building them for commercial use.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      This is just a small tide-over while renewables come up to full speed. Same story for many other temporary reprieves after loss of Russian gas supply.

      Fission has long been a dead end. Future long term nuclear investments, if any, will be into fusion. Fusion has no operational safety concerns, nor radioactive waste concerns, nor supply limits, nor supply safety concerns. And no security concerns either. So therefore won't have the same running costs, nor decommissioning costs.

    • >> Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the money building the latest nuclear reactor designs?
      Nope. Each kWh is 4-10x more expensive than any alternative.
      Nuclear electricity is obsolete due to costs.
      The only reason some countries build new nuclear reactors is to get Plutonium to build bombs. Look at China growing their bomb arsenal with the help of the Western Nuke Industry....
      Electricity is just an expensive byproduct of Plutonium.

  • Let's hope it goes better in Michigan than it did in Ohio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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