Looking at Palisades, Constellation Energy Considers Restart of Three Mile Island.

[NNadir]

With the encouragement of Gretchen Whitmer and President Biden, the shut Palisades Nuclear Plant will be restarted in Michigan.

This has led to consideration of reopening the shut Three Mile Island Reactor, the second reactor, obviously not the one that melted.

Life extensions vital to underpin future expansion: Constellation

Subtitle:

Expanding capacity with uprates and new build at existing nuclear plant sites are part of Constellation Energy's plans to meet growing needs for clean energy in the USA - even a restart of Three Mile Island is not ruled out - but extending the operating lives of existing nuclear plants will be vital, CEO Joe Dominguez has told investors.

Some excerpts:

Constellation lays claim to be the USA's largest producer carbon-free energy, with a fleet of nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar generation facilities that powers more than 16 million homes and businesses and provides 10% of all clean power on the US grid.

The data economy and Constellation's nuclear generating capacity "go together like peanut butter and jelly", Dominguez said in the company's Q1 results call on 9 May. Constellation is having "conversations" with multiple "large, well-known companies" about meeting their future energy needs, although such "large and complicated transactions" will take time to finalise...

... The company intends to do this in three ways: extending the operating lives of its existing sites through licence extensions; increasing output through uprates; and building new capacity. The first of these measures - continuing to run existing plants through licence extensions - "is quite simply the most important thing we can do for America's clean energy future", he said.

The company is already adding megawatts through uprates at current plants, he said, citing already announced plans for uprates at the Byron and Braidwood plants that will add some 160 MWe over the next few years, while it believes that uprate opportunities at other plants "will add up to 1000 megawatts or perhaps more of clean firm power to the grid"...

...Questioned on whether Constellation was considering restarting Three Mile Island unit 1, which was shut down for economic reasons in 2019 after more than 45 years of generation, Dominguez said that "seeing what happened with Palisades" - a shut-down plant in Michigan which Holtec is planning to repower, with federal government support - was "brilliant".

"We're not unaware that that opportunity exists for us … we're doing a good bit of thinking about a number of different opportunities, and that would probably be certainly one of those that we would think about."

I added the bold.

I have several objections to the text, one of which is defining wind and solar, both of which are dependent on access to dangerous fossil fuels, as "clean energy." They are no such thing. However this belief, that solar and wind are "clean and green" is a culturally universal public myth and businesses do not do well confronting broadly held public mythology.

The use of units of power, Megawatts, to describe energy, is also a cultural universal, but it is uninstructive. There is a huge difference between a nuclear Megawatt, since nuclear plants are reliable and operate typically at capacity utilization of better than 90%, and a solar Megawatt, which typically operate with a capacity utilization of less than 30%, often close to 20%, similar to wind. Thus a nuclear "Megawatt" is at least three times more valuable than a solar or wind "Megawatt" and does not depend on access to dangerous fossil fuels.

Enjoy the rest of Sunday.

[hunter]

1. Whatever natural gas we don't burn here in the U.S.A. we can export to Germany.

Thus the world will not be saved.



TMI-1 was expected to run until 2034 but was shut down in 2019 in favor of planet-killing natural gas. Restarting it seems to be a good idea.

Is TMI-2 beyond all repair? I haven't seen the question answered explicitly. If not, it might be a good site for a new nuclear power plant while TMI-1 is operating.

It's clear we should be building new nuclear power plants. The first question we must ask is "where?"

It appears "NIMBY" will be a common answer.

[NNadir]

2. TMI-2 is well beyond repair, although - I have no information - the non-nuclear parts may be intact.

In theory, these could be connected to a new nuclear island, although I don't expect any will to do so. It's probably a very good idea, but one I doubt that would catch on. It is interesting to think they have plenty of valuable used nuclear fuel on site, and, again in theory, these might be reprocessed there to build a series of SMR's that might be added together to drive the turbines from the damaged unit, although it's quite possible they've been cannibalized for parts.

Another option that we should consider would be finishing the construction of Seabrook-2, rather as was done with some of the Brown's Ferry reactors. I've seen the Seabrook reactors, having spent some time in Newburyport nearby, and it does seem that Seabrook-2 might be completed.

I regret to say that when I was a young and stupid antinuke myself, I participated in idiot "activism" in opposition to Seabrook. I helped in this way to kill people and to kill the planet since Unit 2 was not completed, costing lives. It is a matter of some regret.

In my defense, I believed the theoretical bullshit handed out about worst cases, until Chernobyl demonstrated experimentally what the worst case actually was. I was also oblivious to uses of mathematical statistics beyond the narrow quantum applications, and so I was easily sold the bullshit without taking the time to check into things like expectation values, which is now obvious since there is a 100% probability that fossil fueled power plants kill people when they operate normally.