Drought Could Force Nuke-Plant Shutdowns:

Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn’t result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region’s utilities could be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.

Already, there has been one brief, drought-related shutdown, at a reactor in Alabama over the summer.

“Water is the nuclear industry’s Achilles’ heel,” said Jim Warren, executive director of N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, an environmental group critical of nuclear power. “You need a lot of water to operate nuclear plants.” He added: “This is becoming a crisis.”

An Associated Press analysis of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors found that 24 are in areas experiencing the most severe levels of drought. All but two are built on the shores of lakes and rivers and rely on submerged intake pipes to draw billions of gallons of water for use in cooling and condensing steam after it has turned the plants’ turbines.

Because of the yearlong dry spell gripping the region, the water levels on those lakes and rivers are getting close to the minimums set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Over the next several months, the water could drop below the intake pipes altogether. Or the shallow water could become too hot under the sun to use as coolant.

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An estimated 3 million customers of the four commercial utilities with reactors in the drought zone get their power from nuclear energy. Also, the quasi-governmental Tennessee Valley Authority, which sells electricity to 8.7 million people in seven states through a network of distributors, generates 30 percent of its power at nuclear plants.

While rain and some snow fell recently, water levels across the region are still well below normal. Most of the severely affected area would need more than a foot of rain in the next three months — an unusually large amount — to ease the drought and relieve pressure on the nuclear plants. And the long-term forecast calls for more dry weather.

At Progress Energy Inc., which operates four reactors in the drought zone, officials warned in November that the drought could force it to shut down its Harris reactor near Raleigh, according to documents obtained by the AP. The water in Harris Lake stands at 218.5 feet — just 3 1/2 feet above the limit set in the plant’s license.

Lake Norman near Charlotte is down to 93.7 feet — less than a foot above the minimum set in the license for Duke Energy Corp.’s McGuire nuclear plant. The lake was at 98.2 feet just a year ago.

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“Currently, nuclear power costs between $5 to $7 to produce a megawatt hour,” said Daniele Seitz, an energy analyst with New York-based Dahlman Rose & Co. “It would cost 10 times that amount that if you had to buy replacement power — especially during the summer.”

At a nuclear plant, water is also used to cool the reactor core and to create the steam that drives the electricity-generating turbines. But those are comparatively small amounts of water, circulating in what are known as closed systems — that is, the water is constantly reused. Water for those two purposes is not threatened by the drought.

Instead, the drought could choke off the billions of gallons of water that pass through the region’s reactors every day to cool used steam. Water sucked from lakes and rivers passes through pipes, which act as a condenser, turning the steam back into water. The outside water never comes into direct contact with the steam or any nuclear material.

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Nuclear plants are subject to restrictions on the temperature of the discharged coolant, because hot water can kill fish or plants or otherwise disrupt the environment. Those restrictions, coupled with the drought, led to the one-day shutdown Aug. 16 of a TVA reactor at Browns Ferry in Alabama.

The water was low on the Tennessee River and had become warmer than usual under the hot sun. By the time it had been pumped through the Browns Ferry plant, it had become hotter still — too hot to release back into the river, according to the TVA. So the utility shut down a reactor.

It really is this simple: The climate changes triggered by global warming amount to a massive rewriting of the rules that governed how society does everything, and in particular will have profound effects on our production and consumption of energy.

The energy impacts will take three forms:

• Reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. As global warming has an ever larger impact on human beings, we’ll be forced to take increasingly drastic steps to reduce GHG emissions, which are largely CO2 from burning fossil fuels. This will change transportation, electricity generation, and on-site/stationary fuel consumption.
• Reductions in the geographical locations where nuclear power plants and other thermoelectric generation are viable, due to drought conditions, as mentioned in the above article. The US has a fresh water draw of about 14 billion gallons every day for thermoelectric generation, almost exactly the same as agricultural use. (The two uses combine for about 80% of US fresh water draw.) And in many places that water simply isn’t available in the quantities and temperatures required.
• Increases in the demand for electricity for space cooling and transportation. Warmer weather = higher demand for air conditioning. To some extent this can be offset by better building design and more efficient air conditioning hardware, but those changes take a long time to come into play across an economy; if you thought the rolling stock of vehicles turns over slowly, think about buildings, even with refurbishing and retrofits factored in. And as for transportation, the shift to plug-ins will be so painless and quick that it will startle everyone who isn’t paying attention or who underestimates the willingness of consumers to do one simple thing–plug in a car at night–to save 70 to 80% on their per-mile fuel cost (for the battery-only part of their driving).

The electricity generating part of this mess is especially vexing, and I’m not sure how we get out of it, short of building dozens of thin film solar PV plants (with government loans, if needed) and flooding the market with dirt cheap solar panels, plus building wind, wave, and tidal plants at rates vastly higher than anything we’ve seen to date. It’s almost enough to make one, oh, I don’t know, write a book about it.