Focused Effort to Increase Cost of Nuclear Energy From Oyster Creek
Yesterday, the New Jersey senate held hearings lasting more than three hours on proposed legislation that would force Oyster Creek, the oldest currently operating nuclear power plant in the United States, to install cooling towers. The plant currently operates with the required steam condenser cooling water being drawn from a local surface water supply and then returned to that water supply somewhat warmer than it was before. There are limits assigned to the amount of temperature rise allowed and to the maximum discharge temperature.
No water is lost in the process other than the slight increase in water that evaporates due to the elevated temperatures, but the process operates at a temperature that is well below the boiling point and there is no purposeful evaporation in a once through cooling system. In my technical opinion, that is a less environmentally damaging way to provide cooling to a Rankine Cycle heat engine (aka steam plant) than using the most common form of cooling towers, which are known as evaporative cooling towers. With once through cooling, the plant operator does not add any chemicals to the cooling water stream, and for a variety of reasons has great incentives to strain the water through well designed screen systems to keep creatures and plant matter from entering the plant condensers.
In contrast, evaporative cooling towers are purposefully designed to take advantage of the latent heat of vaporization to increase the cooling efficiency, so they cause about 5% of the water used in cooling to be lost in the vapor that you see pouring out of the cooling towers. That makeup water has to come from somewhere; in most cases that I know of, it is fresh water that is drawn from local aquifers in competition with other fresh water uses. That vapor can also be a local problem – it is fresh water, to be sure, but it can result in a higher than normal incidence of fog creation. Most automobile drivers do not particularly enjoy driving in restricted visibility, so if the plant is near a major highway, it can be an irritant. In addition, it makes economic sense to add some chemicals to the cooling system to inhibit algae growth and corrosion. Some of these chemicals get released to the environment through a process called windage where some water droplets – with their dissolved chemicals – get blown out of the towers. That is not a big issue, but it is something of concern for local bodies of water or for people who farm or live close to the towers.
Finally – cooling towers are butt ugly monstrosities and are iconic symbols of nuclear power plants that bring to mind the mushroom cloud shape of an atomic explosion.
The ONLY reason to require a nuclear power plant that is using cooling from a local body of water that has a sufficient natural flow to overcome the quantity of heat that is added by the cooling process – something that is subject to a relatively simple computation – is to add cost and reduce the competitive position of the plant. If you hear about an organized effort to force the use of a cooling tower – unless the plant is located on a limited body of water – you can be reasonably assured that the group working the issue is composed of people who do not like nuclear energy, people who build cooling towers, and people who sell competitive sources of power.
Here is some food for thought from an Associated Press article published a few hours ago about the New Jersey controversy over Oyster Creek:
Environmental (I disagree with this designation) groups want to see cooling towers built, saying they would reduce the need for cooling water from the bay and prevent destruction of marine life. The towers would cut the impact from returning heated water to the bay by about three-fourths, according to environmental group estimates.
The bay generates an estimated $3 to $4 billion in fishing and recreational tourism per year.
Oyster Creek is the country’s oldest operating nuclear power plant. The Lacey Township facility was granted a new 20-year operating license by federal regulators this year.
Let me parse that for you. The plant in question is the country’s oldest operating nuclear power plant; it began operating in 1969! It has been discharging its warm water into Oyster Creek – which is just a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean – for 40 years. I want to share a few satellite photos of the area with you borrowed from Google Maps. Please help me identify the environmental damage that this 40 year old plant must have caused – other than helping to attract local development that appears to have led to some impressive prosperity.
The photos are a virtual flight along the creek to the opening to the Barnegat Bay, which has direct contact with the Atlantic Ocean and regularly exchanges water with that rather impressively large heat sink. As you can see from the photos, the area is not exactly pristine, but it sure seems like the local residents enjoy their water access and have not rejected the water quality or environmental conditions that have developed as Oyster Creek has continued to operate and provide reliable, emission free power at a very competitive cost for the past 40 years.
It’s also necessary to consider the effects of the salinity of the steam from cooling towers, and I hope that all relevant technical matters are taken into account and an optimal course of action is adopted. In my not-at-all-humble opinion, however, Exelon should have no problem with adding a cooling tower, because it’s already playing with the house’s money.
Exelon (as parent of Amergen) paid $10 million for the plant, far and away the lowest price ever for any reactor sale in the U.S.–essentially chump change. I’ll grant that it was something of a gamble, because at the time of the sale (2000) there were only nine years left on the license, license renewal was still fairly new, and the days of early reactor closures ( 1996-1998 ) were recent enough that any small reactor looked iffy. Before the sale, however, GPU had managed to get Oyster Creek’s capacity up into the 80’s, so a decent operational regime was already in place. Even without renewal, $10 million for nine years of good output was a fine investment. With another 20 years now available, the expense of a cooling tower seems like something Exelon could shoulder if it had to. (Again, this is if what we’re mainly discussing is cost; I don’t know the deregulation status of New Jersey, but in Illinois Exelon has gamed the system so that the company auctions nuclear power to itself, and the savings of lower-cost generation never get to the customers. If this is also possible in New Jersey, customers may or may not feel the effects of cooling tower expense.)
Also, when considering the effects of the next 20 years of operation (in an era in which 90 percent capacity is expected, rationally or otherwise), the effects of the previous 40 years on the surrounding area may not be a completely dependable guide. For about half that time, Oyster Creek was frankly a pretty bad performer (with a capacity factor of about 50 percent over its first 20 years), so there wasn’t the same extent of thermal outflow as there would be now.
Sorry to go on for so long. I’m just trying to contribute to the discussion.
–E. Michael Blake
The senate should compare how many people will die if they do not build these proposed towers with how many will die when the fog created by these towers causes accidents on the NJTP just one mile east of the reactor (even less from where they could build the towers. Are they prepared to accept the inevitable deaths caused by these cooling towers? As I recall there was a multicar pileup on an interstate in Texas (Houston or Dallas area) about ten years ago, which was caused by the fog generated by industrial coolers or cooling towers.
I don’t know what caused this, but in the place where my comment somehow included a sunglassed smiley-face, there should be a numeral 8.
Some discussion-board software automatically convert character sequences that look like they are intended to be smilies into images. E.g.
[Colon Close-paren]: 🙂
[Colon Open-paren]: 🙁
[Eight Close-paren]: 8)
[Semicolon Close-paren]: 😉
The satellite photos show a nice residential area. I’m sure there are many residents who are unhappy about the idea of a new landmark like this spoiling the neighborhood and possibly lowering their property values.
What’s the problem here? Concerns about the side effects of heat dissipation. The concern isn’t imminent – it’s been going on for 40 years, and perhaps a win-win solution for both sides can be found. What can the solution be? Find another way to dissipate the heat – but one that is:
1. less costly for the plant to do than building eyesore cooling towers
and
2. stops or lessens the use of the river water.
There are solutions other than massive natural draft cooling towers, if the concerns are as Michael says.
In the case of Beznau, Switzerland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant, the plant was used as the key component of a regional district heating network which has prevented the release of perhaps millions of tons of carbon annually. It brings in a small profit to the plant owner, and it allows the plant to rely less on the river for cooling.
Now that plant is in a pretty dense area of Switzerland, just as Oyster Creek is in a pretty dense area of New Jersey. I don’t see any reason why a district heating project like was done in Switzerland couldn’t be done in New Jersey. It would require a cooperative effort between both the utility and the environmentalists, though, perhaps a bit less confrontational, where both sides could “win”, instead of one side winning and the other side losing.
Carbon emissions could be reduced, cooling water used would be reduced, the public would receive low cost carbon free central heating (and with absorption chillers, low cost cooling as well), and the plant might make some money back on the capital outlay as well as demonstrate an innovative way to use waste heat to improve the lives of everyone while lessening the almost zero impact of the plant on the immediate natural environment.
katana0182 – What a great idea! I am truly lucky to have you as a regular reader.
I am almost embarrassed to admit that I had not – in this case – put two and two together to remind people that “heat” is not a waste product unless it is discharged somewhere that it is not needed. In other places, people pay for heat by the BTU.
There might, however, be a bit of a challenge in using district heat as the off take because the residents do not always need heat on the coast of New Jersey. Fortunately, there are systems that use waste heat to produce air conditioning, fresh water, or other useful products.
It has been 25 years since I worked at Oyster Creek and I may be mistaken, but I am 95% sure that the plant is NOT on a river. It is near a river, BUT, uses ocean water to cool the plant. Water flows through the manmade canal, to the pumphouse, where a dam prevents water flow past this point. The used water is then dumped on the other side of the dam. Many other plants of this vintage used this (Kewanee and Waterford I think and am not sure at all.) But look around with Google Maps and you will see several that pump water from the lake/ocean and back. Some use a canal, some tunnels (Nine Mile Point – for certain, as I walked in it out under the lake), and some just a pier/embankment, like Waterford, clearly seen on Google Maps.
SOoo, what is the problem with Oyster Creek?