Add another casualty to the growing list of U.S. nuclear power plants closing prematurely. Florida-based NextEra Energy announced last week that it will shut the 601-MW Duane Arnold plant in Iowa in late 2020, some five years before its expected shutdown. NextEra said that “Alliant Energy has agreed to make a $110 million buyout payment to NextEra Energy Resources in September 2020 to cover the cost to shorten the term” of the power purchase agreement with the plant.
NextEra said killing the power contract, which is above market rates, will save Alliant customers “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Under the deal, Wisconsin-based Alliant and its Iowa subsidiary Interstate Power and Light will pay NextEra to get out from under the power contract. NextEra, a major wind developer, will provide Alliant with wind-based power to partially replace the lost nuclear capacity.
Duane Arnold, located near Cedar Rapids, is another of the 1970s-generation of U.S. nuclear plants that are facing unsustainable economic headwinds. The single-unit GE boiling water reactor, with a primitive Mark 1 containment, began construction in 1970 and went into service in 1975. Alliant’s predecessor built the plant and NextEra bought it in 2006.
In addition to NextEra, one of the nation’s largest nuclear operators as well as a renewable energy giant, the plant is 20% owned by Central Iowa Power Cooperative and 10% by Corn Belt Power Cooperative.
POWER magazine commented that the plant has “faced similar financial struggles as other relatively small single-unit nuclear plants across the country. A string of single-unit facilities have closed, or announced closure, since May 2013, when the Kewaunee plant in Wisconsin was the first to be shuttered. Vermont Yankee, Fort Calhoun, Pilgrim, Palisades, and Oyster Creek are others on the list.”
The prospects for nuclear power in the U.S. are dim, despite the carbon-free nature of their operation. A recent report from the consulting firm Rhodium Group said that, absent a way to put a significant value on carbon dioxide emissions, a major portion of the U.S. nuclear generating fleet will close in the years ahead. New nuclear construction, outside of the Southern Co.’s two-unit Vogtle plant in Georgia, supported by $8 billion in federal loans, is not in the cards.
While economics is driving the U.S. nuclear decline, politics also plays a role. In Arizona, a ballot measure, funded by liberal hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer, aims to increase the state’s use of renewable energy to 50% by 2030. That threatens the massive, three-unit Palo Verde nuclear station. High Country News commented, “Palo Verde’s fate has been caught in the crossfire of a battle between state utilities and environmentalists.”
The Steyer-backed “Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona” political action group garnered more than twice the signatures needed to get their renewables provision onto the state’s November ballot. It would enshrine the 50% by 2030 goal in the state’s constitution.
The state’s largest investor-owned utility, Arizona Public Service, has filed suit challenging the ballot initiative, charging that many of the signatures on the petition are fraudulent. APS owns 29.1% of the three-unit, Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactor station, followed by the Salt River Project (17.5%), El Paso Electric (15.8%), Southern California Edison (15.8%), PNM Resources (10.2%), Southern California Public Power Authority (5.9%), and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (5.7%). At 3.3 GW of generating capacity, Palo Verde is the largest power station in the U.S. Construction began in 1976 and the units entered commercial operation in 1986 and 1988.
According to High Country News, which covers the Western U.S., an “identical Styer-backed measure” is on the ballot in Nevada, but that state has no nuclear plants in jeopardy if the measure passes. California already has a 50% by 2030 policy, and the state has closed or will be closing all the nuclear units in the state.
California has also adopted a policy that eschews coal-fired power, whether produced in the state or imported from outside the state’s borders.
–Kennedy Maize