{"id":116,"date":"2013-02-13T11:11:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T16:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/02\/it-has-to-close-because-of-the-pocketbook-kyle-jones-on-maine-yankee-nuclear-power-plant.html"},"modified":"2013-02-13T11:11:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-13T16:11:00","slug":"it-has-to-close-because-of-the-pocketbook-kyle-jones-on-maine-yankee-nuclear-power-plant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/02\/it-has-to-close-because-of-the-pocketbook-kyle-jones-on-maine-yankee-nuclear-power-plant.html","title":{"rendered":"“It has to close because of the pocketbook.” —Kyle Jones on Maine Yankee nuclear power plant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nInstead of demonstrating to influence legislators, sometimes it's better\nto get elected and legislate: that's what Kyle Jones did in Maine,\nand he closed the Maine Yankee nuke,\nde-monopolized the state's electrical utilities,\nand instituted a 30% renewable energy goal.\nAll this was helped by the nuclear industry's own incompetence.\n<\/p>\n

\nBangor Daily News, Page A2, 28 May 1997,\n\nMaine Yankee plant may be closed down: Owners weigh repair costs, deregulation<\/a>,\n

\n

\n\n\"Page<\/a>\nCracking in the plant's steam generator tubes, which carry the superheated,\nradioactive water, was first discovered in 1990.\nIn 1994, Main Yankee officials predicted that the plant's problems\nwere over after they plugged more than 300 of the cracked tubes.\nHowever, testing of the tubes during a shutdown for refueling in 1995\nrevealed as many as 10,000 additional cracked tubes.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nSounds a lot like\n\nSan Onofre.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nAt the time, it was estimated that permanently shutting down\nthe plant would cost at least $316 million while,\nafter 23 years of operation, Maine Yankee had collected only\n$100 million to pay for its decommissioning. The most recent\nestimate for decommissioning is $369 million, of which\nonly $169 million has been raised as of this month.\n<\/p>\n

\nFacing the accumulation of these engineering and operational difficulties,\nthe owners of the plant signaled a departure from business-as-usual\nand, earlier this year, brought in the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp.\nto provide management services at Maine Yankee.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nOh, my!\nThe same Entergy that's now\n\nlikely to close Vermont Yankee.<\/a>\nAnd Vermont Yankee wasn’t the first to follow this financial path to closure:\n<\/p>\n\n\n

\n

\nMain Public Advocate Steve Ward said it is too soon to tell whether\nconsumers will benefit or suffer from plans to shut down the plant,\nbut he said it is a "good thing for the renewable energy industry"\nof the state.\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cMy view is that they are following the same path as Connecticut\nYankee and Yankee Rowe [in Massachusetts] that became too costly for\nthe owners to operate,\u201d said Ward, who represents Maine consumers\nin utility regulatory matters. Both of the other Yankee plants were\nshut down before their designed life span.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nAdd\n\nDominion's Kewaunee<\/a>\nand\n\nDuke's Crystal River<\/a>\nand the list\nof nuclear plants shut down for economic reasons is pretty long,\neven before\n\nVermont Yankee (probably)<\/a>\nand\n\nSan Onofre 3 (already)<\/a>\nand\n\nSan Onofre 2 (looks more likely all the time)<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nThe move comes as a sweeping electrical deregularion bill awaits\nKing's signature. The bill requires Maine's three investor-owned\nutilities to sell their power plants by March 1, 2000, with some\nexceptions.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nWhy stop at just fiddling with\n\nGeorgia's 1973 Territorial Electric Service Act<\/a>\nas\n\nSB 51 will do?<\/a>\nWhy not go farther?\nIf tiny little Maine can do it, mighty Georgia can.\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nState Rep. Kyle Jones, House chairman of the Utilities\nand Energy Committee that sent the bill to the Legislature,\nsaid he finds it ironic that a decade after critics\nurged the plant's closing for public safety reasons,\n\u201cit has to close because of the pocketbook.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cEconomically it was not favorable for them at the moment\nto keep pumping money into a plant that may have a life of a day\nto a decade or more,\u201d said Jones, D-Bar Harbor.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nAnd the only reason those new nukes Southern Company (SO) is building\nare not a\n\nbet-the-farm risk<\/a> for SO is because of that\n\nthree-legged nuclear regulatory-capture stool<\/a>\nof subsidies that shift the risk onto Georgia Power customers and\ntaxpayers.\n\n<\/a>\nThe Georgia legislature or GA PSC or U.S. Congress could kick any leg\nout from under that stool and never-powered\n\nVogtle 3 and 4<\/a> would fall flat on\ntheir\n\nmis-poured concrete<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n

\nPS: Lots of detail in\n\nFinal Report of the\nJOINT SELECT COMMITTEE\nTO OVERSEE\nMAINE YANKEE ATOMIC POWER COMPANY\nJanuary 1998<\/a>.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Instead of demonstrating to influence legislators, sometimes it's better to get elected and legislate: that's what Kyle Jones did in Maine, and he closed the Maine Yankee nuke, de-monopolized the state's electrical utilities, and instituted a 30% renewable energy goal. All this was helped by the nuclear industry's own incompetence. Bangor Daily News, Page A2, […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,14,49,16,17,18,2,19,20,104,21,22,23],"tags":[8736,8704,8721,648,8706,8707,8701,8708,8699,8709,645,8702,8710,12,7,649,646,647,8737,8711,107,8712,8713,108,6],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-economy","category-elections","category-environment","category-ga-psc","category-georgia-power","category-government","category-history","category-law","category-nuclear","category-planning","category-politics","category-renewable-energy","tag-activism","tag-economy","tag-elections","tag-electric-utility","tag-environment","tag-ga-psc","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-power","tag-government","tag-history","tag-kyle-jones","tag-lake","tag-law","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-maine","tag-maine-yankee","tag-monopoly","tag-nuclear","tag-planning","tag-plant-vogtle","tag-politics","tag-renewable-energy","tag-southern-company","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-1S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}