LOUISVILLE, KY— In a five-year span, prospects for the U.S. commercial nuclear power sector have gone from gloomy to upbeat, an executive with the industry group, Nuclear Energy Institute, said here last week.
As recently as 2019, up to 20 U.S. reactors, or more than one-fifth of the fleet, were expected to shut down under economic pressure, Bruce Montgomery, director of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) Decommissioning & Used Fuel office, told the Radwaste Summit on June 4.
At the time, it was believed decommissioning of nuclear plants would become a $20-billion-to-$30-billion business in the United States, Montgomery said. That did not happen thanks in part to rising electricity demand, worries over climate change and energy security worries highlighted by the war in Ukraine, he said.
Not only have decommissionings been called off, but the state of Michigan is on board with a plan to revive the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. A similar plan is being discussed for Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
It now appears nearly all operating reactors in the United States will seek license extensions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allowing the units to run until they are 80-years-old, Montgomery said. The idea of letting some reactors stay in service for a total of 100 years is also being discussed, he added. Meanwhile, there continues to be something of a boom in interest in advanced new reactors and small modular reactors for electric power and other uses, Montgomery said.
The value of old nuclear and even old coal plant sites is becoming recognized, Montgomery said. TerraPower, a company with Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates as an investor, is pursuing a new advanced reactor near an old coal plant site in Wyoming.
Decommissioning completed at 13 reactors, with licenses terminated and sites released to owners for reuse, Montgomery said. The three most recent completions were at the Humboldt Bay plant in California, the Lacrosse plant in Wisconsin and the Zion plant in Illinois. Several other retired units are in the decommissioning process, he said.
Montgomery has more than 40 years of experience in the commercial nuclear industry, working with companies such as Bechtel, Constellation Energy and Exelon before joining NEI.
