Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

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Gas Interests Opposing U.S. Nuke Industry’s State-by-State Strategy

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Pro-Nuclear Campaigners

The nuclear industry’s strategy of working in individual U.S. states to obtain support for financially stressed plants has stalled.

Despite successfully implemented efforts in New York and Illinois to provide assistance that is narrowly targeted at a handful of especially vulnerable units, no other state has been able to get a support measure out of the discussion phase.

Ohio and Pennsylvania illustrate the difficult lobbying challenge posed by the state-by-state strategy to save existing reactors.

Both states have a solid nuclear plant fleet that produces a significant portion of their generated electricity. There are several thousand nuclear plant employees in each state and both have shown undisputed public support for nuclear energy for decades.

Neither is famous for restrictive environmental rules and each favors industrial development.

Beneficiaries of Gas Boom

But Ohio and Pennsylvania are enjoying the widely spread economic benefits associated with developing large natural gas resources that had been previously thought to be inaccessible.

Pennsylvania sits on top of some of the sweetest spots of the multi-state Marcellus shale formation and recently passed Louisiana as the state with the second highest production of natural gas.

The eastern part of Ohio is home to the highly productive, but deeply underground, Utica shale formation; it recently passed West Virginia to move into seventh place among natural gas producing states.

Developing those ancient reservoirs has resulted in economic benefits for landowners, often moderately-sized family farms that had been having difficulty remaining as viable entities on agricultural income alone.

Benefits have not stopped there. Natural gas production requires drilling teams, specialized drilling equipment, consumables trucking, processing plants, new pipelines and new compressor stations. The increased economic activity has been a boon to retailers, hospitality suppliers, real estate developers and restaurants.

Protecting Newly Captured Markets

The gas industry is an effective public promoter. It’s invested diligently to make sure that people know that the more obvious burdens of increased industrial activity are mitigated or completely offset by the positive aspects of those developments.

Gas production has increased more rapidly than pipeline takeaway capacity, resulting in local gas prices that are often 50% or more lower than the benchmark prices quoted for Henry Hub.

That provides the opportunity for independent power producers to site their affordable gas turbines in places where fuel costs are below average while selling power at prices driven by the higher cost suppliers.

Before the nuclear industry began approaching state legislators for assistance, coalitions of companies and individuals that were already reaping the benefits of the recently refined techniques for extracting natural gas from Utica and Marcellus formed their own lobbying and pressure groups to defend their interests.

Challenge for Nuclear = Opportunity for Gas

Gas interests recognize that nuclear plant nancial weakness is an opportunity for them to capture addition market share. Every additional 1,000 MWe produced by natural gas represents an additional sale of about 0.18 billion cubic feet of gas every day (Bcf/day).

Leaders of the pro-gas coalition saw what was happening in Illinois and New York and began communicating their position to their elected representatives.

Partially as a result of this preemptive effort, the most frequently used talking points in support of nuclear energy subsidies have been “checked” by similar arguments. Legislators that focus on constituent employment challenges hear that jobs at nuclear plants might come at the expense of jobs in the natural gas industry.

Though nuclear work might have higher hourly wages, natural gas work is reasonably well compensated, carries the opportunity for substantial overtime and often employs politically engaged people that might have been out of work or underpaid before the gas boom arrived.

Most nuclear plant workers have been comfortably and steadily employed for many years and are not well known for their political involvement.

When legislators in Ohio hear First Energy lobbyists seeking assistance because their nuclear plants help meet CO2 reduction targets, they remember the company’s strong resistance any new air pollution rules or restrictions on CO2 from its more numerous coal stations.

Are Nuclear Supporters Fighting Back?

After a delay that lasted at least four months, interests involved with the legislative lobbying fight in Ohio started providing support for a grass-roots effort built on a door-knocking campaign assisted by a recently developed mobile phone application.

The organization leading the grass-roots effort is an exciting startup called Generation Atomic. It’s led by Eric Meyer and Tay Stevenson, a dynamic duo of trained activists who’ve chosen to advocate for nuclear energy as the most important thing they can think of doing.

The initial funding for that effort did not break six figures. It’s small in comparison to the resources invested in blocking new nuclear support programs in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Disclosure: Atomic Insights is a Generation Atomic supporter. I serve as a member of the Board of Directors. End Disclosure.

Generation Atomic is not alone in seeking to help people in Ohio and Pennsylvania understand the importance of existing nuclear plants, but the supportive organizations are currently small and under-resourced compared to the opponents.

The state-by-state campaign to support stressed nuclear plants is also being challenged by established market players who understand that there are no final answers in politics.

According to recent observations, there is a multi-vector advertising campaign being run in New York to overturn the previously awarded zero emission credit program. It’s worth remembering that New York is one of the most influential and expensive media markets in the United States.

Environmental Progress has documented the dark money behind the reappearance of a mole that had been considered whacked already.

Note: A version of the above was first published in the June 23, 2017 edition of Fuel Cycle Week. It is republished here with permission.

Save Diablo Canyon so it can continue to supply massive quantities of clean power

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dcpp_without_textCalifornia has one of the most confusing energy policies in the country. Though it loudly proclaims itself as an environmental leader, with some of the most strict air and water pollution regulations in the world, it has a state law that prevents consideration of new nuclear power plants. It has forced the early closure of 5 completed and operable reactors, replacing their output with additional electricity imports or with local natural gas combustion plants.

It heavily subsidizes or mandates wind and solar energy, giving the impression that it is replacing clean nuclear power with other forms of clean power, but the numbers show that those sources are not providing anything close to the same total amount of electricity as the shuttered nuclear units. They are certainly not providing the other forms of grid stabilization services provided by moderate to large thermal power generation systems like nuclear energy.

My studies into the history of the state’s schizophrenic energy policies has led me to the conclusion that they have been strongly influenced by the fact that California has a long tradition as a natural resource state and as the home of several major oil and gas producers. They have always known that abundant nuclear energy threatens their business model.

Now that Diablo Canyon is the last remaining nuclear power plant operating in California, the organizations, individual citizens and political leaders that have made nuclear energy opposition one of their significant activities have been forced to concentrate their efforts. We’ve covered some of the pressures being applied to force the plant owners to give up and shut the plant down in previous articles.

Fortunately for people who care about rational thinking and clean air, the pressure to protect Diablo Canyon and enable it to continue providing safe, clean, affordable, and reliable power is also growing. Many well-informed, experienced people are realizing that good decision making in a democracy requires their input and actions.

Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP) is an outstanding group that has been working hard to publish op-ed pieces, participate in public meetings, provide docketed comments to policy actions, and speak to community groups all with the goal of helping their fellow Californians understand the importance of nuclear technology. Headquartered on the central coast, they have focused much of their effort on one of their most productive neighbors, Diablo Canyon.

There are other groups that have been focusing their efforts on helping the enormous “tech” industry in Silicon Valley and San Francisco remember that not all technology is based on silicon. They are working to generate excitement about technologies that use thorium, uranium, and plutonium in new and powerful ways to make life better for humanity. At least one of the advanced reactor start-up companies – Oklo – has chosen to locate in Silicon Valley so they they can more easily tap the tech industry’s resources, both human and financial.

Michael Shellenberger, one of the co-founders of the Oakland, California based Breakthrough Institute, has been supportive of efforts to improve public knowledge and acceptance of nuclear energy for several years. He was one of the converted former antinuclear environmentalists who were the main characters in Robert Stone’s Pandora’s Promise. He’s still an environmentalist and an ecomodernist who fully supports what Breakthrough is doing, but at the end of 2015, he decided it was time for a new challenge.

He left the Breakthrough Institute and began raising money for a new venture to build an organization that can focus on clean, reliable, affordable energy. The new group, named Environmental Progress, has chosen to Save Diablo Canyon as one of their first campaigns.

Shellenberger has a strong network. He is a professionally trained and experienced campaign organizer who is passionately committed to making a positive impact. Even though Environmental Progress is so new that I was unable to locate its home page, its effort to SaveDiabloCanyon has already been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle with both a front page article titled Yes nukes! Conservationists rally to save state’s nuclear plant and an op-ed by Shellenberger and Peter Raven titled Diablo Canyon is needed to save the climate, coasts.

The news story that helped attract the attention of the SF Chronicle writer was the publication of an open letter to elected state officials and heads of state agencies with assigned areas of responsibility affecting Diablo Canyon informing them of the importance of the plant and petitioning them to take actions to keep it open.

The letter was initially signed by an “international group of scientists, conservationists, and philanthropists”; the campaign also established a capability to add additional signers who want their voices to be heard.

Steven Weissman — Lecturer at the Goldman School of Public Policy and Director of the American Jobs Project, and a former administrative law judge at the California Public Utility Commission — published a rather piqued reaction to the Chronicle’s decision to cover the open letter with a front page article. Here is a quote from his post on Berkeley Law’s Legal Planet blog titled The Future of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant.

The role that nuclear power could or should play in helping to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions is worthy of serious debate, but the latest nuclear-related front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle is a head-scratcher. Above the fold, the headline reads “Nuclear plant’s surprise backers,” followed by the following subheading: “Environmentalists push for Diablo Canyon to stay open.” The accompanying article reports on a letter sent by a new coalition identifying itself as “Save Diablo Canyon,” calling on regulators to relicense the plant. The stated concern is that a closed nuclear plant would make it harder to meet the state’s greenhouse gas reduction goals. Constructed on a cliff along the central California coast, Diablo is the last remaining commercial reactor in the state and it soon must either receive a new license, or cease operation.

The mystery about the article is that it only mentions three of those who signed the letter, and each of those three has been on the public record for years as favoring nuclear power. So, where is the surprise? Where is the news item?

After challenging the newsworthiness of the letter, Weissman questions the credibility of claims that the people signing the letter because they care about clean air and water are environmentalists. He seems to believe they are simply good at getting attention as people who have donned the easy-to-assume moniker of “environmentalist” and then challenged environmental orthodoxy.

Weissman ends with a litany of reasons that he opposes the plant, including what he considers to be a poor siting choice, mistakes during construction and a series of “reported incidents.” There are several lengthy comments attached to the article, including an exchange between Shellenberger and Weissman that is worth reviewing for civil expression of differences of opinion. Here is the comment that I contributed to the discussion.

February 4, 2016 at 4:49 pm #
Steve:

I’d like to challenge some of the points you asserted and for which you can probably find plenty of supporters. Nuclear energy has been controversial in CA since the early 1960s, when two of California’s largest companies (Chevron and Gulf) recognized that it was going to threaten their dominance of the state’s energy production and take market share. Shell Oil, though headquartered in Europe, also played a role as did several smaller oil companies, notably ARCO.

You assert that a new nuclear plant being built in CA today wouldn’t be located at Diablo Canyon, but you stated that judgement as if it was a known fact with which “everyone” would agree. I can guess the basis for your assertion, but did you know that the Sierra Club specifically worked with PG&E to select the Diablo Canyon site as preferable to several others under consideration? The “cliff” that you mention is a safety feature, it is what puts the plant’s safety related systems, structures and components out of reach of any conceivable tsunami.

Since the site is already the location of nuclear power plants, it is probably the best place in CA to site new ones. There is a supportive local community — outside of the Mother’s for Peace — and there are knowledgable professionals who can train a new generation of plant operators. There are transmission corridors that could be expanded, and readily available cooling water.

There is a good bit of controversy in the scientific community about the overall environmental effect of once through cooling versus other ways to dissipate the heat from a thermal power plant. The volume of ocean that is affected is minute compared to the size of the body of water, so the effect on living creatures is equally minute. Many other nations have made no attempt to regulate the long established practice of once through cooling out of existence.

There has been plenty of ink spilled in opposition to Diablo Canyon and in an effort to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about its performance in an earthquake. I’ve been suspicious of that heavily promoted earthquake risk ever since I learned that the Hosgri fault was discovered and named by two Shell Oil geologists who delayed promoting their findings until after PG&E had already completed much of the facility. That seems to have been calculated to impose huge costs on a competitor but no one seems to have batted an eyelash at the time.

I don’t claim to be a converted former anti-nuclear activist. I’ve been in favor of the technology ever since I was 8 and my dad explained how his company’s new power plants didn’t need smokestacks. I know a bit about transmission lines, unreliable power sources, and power generation and believe that Jacobson’s studies are build on dreams or mirages, not reality. His employer at Stanford is named the Precourt Institute for Energy. It’s named after a generous alumni donor named Jay Precourt, who has given the institute at least $80 million since it was formed in 2006.

No surprise to me, but Jay Precourt earned his BS and MS degrees in Petroleum Engineering and made his fortune in a variety of positions in the oil and gas industry. He probably knows full well that wind and solar projects are really gas projects with nice PR and signage.

I encourage all readers to recognize the importance of full participation in what is going to become a rather loud and contentious discussion about whether or not Diablo Canyon should continue to operate. Like Shellenberger, I believe that this is a great opportunity for people who favor the use of nuclear energy to clearly explain their reasons. Including a bit of passion and honest concerns for current and future generations in that explanation will likely help strengthen the statements.

Atomic Show #241 – Rachel Pritzker, philanthropic problem solver

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Rachel Pritzker is a philanthropist motivated to solve problems, even if they require rethinking long held notions. She is the founder and chairman of the Pritzker Innovation Fund, which she operates along with her brother, Roland. The tagline used by her organization is “Supporting the development and advancement of paradigm-shifting ideas to address the world’s […]