Smoking gun: LNG ship builders and their financial backers stoke nuclear fears
It’s been a while since my last ‘smoking gun’ report so it might be worth a brief reminder of what that categorization means. For Atomic Insights, the tag ‘smoking gun’…
American Municipal Power-Ohio, a nonprofit wholesale power
supplier and services provider, is planning to build American Municipal Power Generating Station (AMPGS), a 1000 MWe coal fired power plant in Meigs County, Ohio. The organization’s members are interested in building a plant that gives them more control over the cost of the electricity that they provide to their members. AMP-Ohio currently buys much of the power that it sells on the wholesale open market. For the past several years, that has been an expensive source of power that has experienced wide fluctuations depending on world energy markets, weather, and seasonal variations in consumption from major customers.
The list of generation assets owned by AMP-Ohio is pretty limited and consists of a 1950s vintage 213 MWe coal fired steam plant, a couple of diesel and gas turbine projects, a small hydro plant, and 75 distributed generators with a total capacity of 330 MWe. I would bet that most of those burn either diesel fuel or natural gas. With current gas prices, the fuel cost for gas fired generation is approaching 8 cents per kilowatt-hour. With diesel, it is closer to 18-20 cents just for the fuel.
The new coal project requires each of the member distribution utilities – there are apparently 124 different cities, towns and villages located mainly in Ohio, but also in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Michigan – to make a decision by March 1 about whether or not they want to participate. If they agree to participate, they will invest in the plant and agree to purchase power from the plant for the next 50 years.
If you live in one of the towns, cities or villages, you might want to take quick action if you have an opinion about the plant’s value or hazards over the next 50 years.
According to a Houston Chronicle article titled Ohio Coal-Fired Plant Planned there are plenty of people who are opposed to the plant and want the company to consider conservation and alternatives, notably including nuclear power. The article also mentions that Ohio’s governor is working on a new energy plan that sees a large role for emission free generation like nuclear power.
In another example of the fact that increases in the estimates of eventual plant costs are not limited to nuclear power, here is what the article said about the cost trend for this new coal plant, which is apparently using well established pulverized coal technology with a few sophisticated improvements.
Construction of the plant, to be built in Letart Falls, about 38 miles south of Athens along the Ohio River, originally was projected to cost $1.3 billion. However, increases in construction costs and other factors have ballooned the price to an estimated $2.9 billion, with warnings from AMP-Ohio that cost could go still higher.
One of the sophisticated features of the new plant, is an ammonia based scrubber system that yields a by-product that is expected to have use as a fertilizer instead of the gypsum product that comes out of most scrubber systems. According to the company literature, the system may even offer the potential for CO2 separation – that application of the technology is due to enter into a test phase this year.
This scrubber system will allow the plant to burn a coal blend that includes high sulfur, Ohio sourced coal. Since the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1990, that coal has been underutilized as many customers opted to use low sulfur coal rather than install scrubber systems in order to meet the emission requirements. (See, for example The Effects of Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990)
I put this project into the “almost smoking gun” category because of the direct competition aspect – AMP-Ohio needs baseload capacity in order to provide more predictable pricing for electricity, a vital commodity important to the economic vitality of its member cities, towns and villages. Despite all suggestions to the contrary, the only real choices are coal, natural gas and nuclear power. If nuclear is chosen, a fifty year long future demand for about 5 million tons of coal per year disappears. At a long term average price of $40 per ton (ignoring the effects of inflation and the time value of money), that would mean an economic shift of $10 BILLION from coal sales to the nuclear power industry.
Of course, one of the sales points for the coal project is its impact on jobs and economic development. Here is a quote from the press release in 2005 that announced the project
The approximately $1.2 billion project will bring 600-800 construction jobs to the region and once completed will employ approximately 150 people to operate the facility. It is projected that the American Municipal Power Generating Station will bring more than $20 million into the area economy annually. AMP-Ohio anticipates the facility being on-line by 2012.
Darn, that gets my competitive juices flowing – modern nuclear plants can beat those employment and economic development numbers hands down!
Rod Adams is Managing Partner of Nucleation Capital, a venture fund that invests in advanced nuclear, which provides affordable access to this clean energy sector to pronuclear and impact investors. Rod, a former submarine Engineer Officer and founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., which was one of the earliest advanced nuclear ventures, is an atomic energy expert with small nuclear plant operating and design experience. He has engaged in technical, strategic, political, historic and financial analysis of the nuclear industry, its technology, regulation, and policies for several decades through Atomic Insights, both as its primary blogger and as host of The Atomic Show Podcast. Please click here to subscribe to the Atomic Show RSS feed. To join Rod's pronuclear network and receive his occasional newsletter, click here.
It’s been quite a while since my last smoking gun post on Atomic Insights. It may be time to revive the series to remind nuclear energy advocates to follow the money and know their opponents. In the battle for hearts, minds and market share it is always useful to know why vocal opposition exists, but…
I have some very engaged readers. Some of you even follow up if you send something interesting and I do not get around to sharing it with all of you. Daniel sent me a scan of an advertisement that appeared in the Courier-Mail out of Queensland, Australia in November 2007. it is a very straightforward…
Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute, a self proclaimed libertarian think tank, recently visited Fox Business to explain his opposition to nuclear energy. The episode was on the Stossel Show and is called Nuclear Power: Republican Junk Economics?. If you listen really closely, you will hear him using…
Eric Berger, writing for the Houston Chronicle, published an article on Friday titled Nuclear power’s core of support gains strength. He provided some opposing view commentary from Peter Hartley, a man he describes as “an energy expert at Rice University”. Here are some of the quotes from the article: “I just don’t think there will…
Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has taken the time to produce a detailed and well-referenced rebuttal to my post titled Jerry Taylor, a Fellow at the Cato Institute, founded by a Koch, Focuses Libertarian Rhetoric Against Nuclear But Ignores Natural Gas Subsidies. Here is the comment that I posted in response:…
Dieter Helm’s The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong–and How to Fix It has the potential to be an influential energy policy book, not just for the UK but for the rest of Europe and the United States. Helm has been making the rounds to promote the book and recently gave a concise…