Economics stopped another reactor, this time in Alabama,
less than a week after
San Onofre.
But more are still in the works.

Brian Wingfield wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday,

TVA Shelves Work at Alabama Nuclear Plant Amid Industry Struggle,

“Over the past few months, TVA has been looking across the
company, including at our nuclear construction projects, to
determine the work that is most important to perform,” Mike
Skaggs, the TVA senior vice president for nuclear construction, said
in the statement. “Hard decisions are necessary.”

The U.S. nuclear industry is wrestling with competition from a glut
of natural gas, which has lowered its price and made the fuel more
attractive for electric utilities. At the same time, U.S. regulators
are writing safety rules following a triple meltdown at Japan’s
Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in 2011.

The fracking backlash is building against natural gas.
And guess what’s even cheaper?

Solar power.
Looks like Forbes was right to wonderback in January,

New Centralized Nuclear Plants: Still an Investment Worth Making?
It’s like

GM CEO Immelt said a year ago:

Nuclear power is so expensive compared with other forms of energy
that it has become “really hard” to justify, according
to the chief executive of General Electric, one of the world’s
largest suppliers of atomic equipment….

“When I talk to the guys who run the oil companies they say
look, they’re finding more gas all the time. It’s just hard to
justify nuclear, really hard. Gas is so cheap and at some point,
really, economics rule,” Mr Immelt told the Financial Times in
an interview in London at the weekend. “So I think some
combination of gas, and either wind or solar … that’s where we see
most countries around the world going.”

And that was before

Edison Electric Institute warned distributed solar energy will disrupt
utilities that don’t change their cozy centry-long big baseload business model, as in:

“irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects”

EEI gets it that
Moore’s Law for solar is driving prices down and deployments up
like compound interest.
As a stock trader remarked,
solar power is going to beat every other energy source so fast it will
“make your jaw drop with astonishment.”

Next nuke to stop: Watts Bar 2, as the Bloomberg article notes:

The TVA will cut spending for Bellefonte to $66 million in the year
ending Sept. 30, 2014, from $182 million this year, as it seeks to
complete its Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor, about 60 miles (97
kilometers) southwest of Knoxville.

But that’s not all.
See
next post.

-jsq