{"id":4087,"date":"2013-06-14T14:02:18","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T18:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=4087"},"modified":"2013-06-14T14:03:51","modified_gmt":"2013-06-14T18:03:51","slug":"tva-bellefonte-nuke-wont-be-built","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/06\/tva-bellefonte-nuke-wont-be-built.html","title":{"rendered":"TVA Bellefonte nuke won’t be built"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nEconomics stopped another reactor, this time in Alabama,\r\nless than a week after \r\nSan Onofre<\/a>.\r\nBut more are still in the works.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nBrian Wingfield wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday,\r\n\r\nTVA Shelves Work at Alabama Nuclear Plant Amid Industry Struggle<\/a>,\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\n“Over the past few months, TVA has been looking across the\r\ncompany, including at our nuclear construction projects, to\r\ndetermine the work that is most important to perform,” Mike\r\nSkaggs, the TVA senior vice president for nuclear construction, said\r\nin the statement. “Hard decisions are necessary.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nThe U.S. nuclear industry is wrestling with competition from a glut\r\nof natural gas, which has lowered its price and made the fuel more\r\nattractive for electric utilities. At the same time, U.S. regulators\r\nare writing safety rules following a triple meltdown at Japan’s\r\nFukushima Dai-Ichi plant in 2011.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nThe fracking backlash<\/a> is building against natural gas.\r\nAnd guess what’s even cheaper?\r\n\r\nSolar power<\/a>.\r\nLooks like Forbes was right to wonderback in January,\r\n\r\nNew Centralized Nuclear Plants: Still an Investment Worth Making?<\/a>\r\nIt’s like\r\n\r\nGM CEO Immelt said a year ago:<\/a>\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\nNuclear power is so expensive compared with other forms of energy\r\nthat it has become “really hard” to justify, according\r\nto the chief executive of General Electric, one of the world’s\r\nlargest suppliers of atomic equipment….\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n“When I talk to the guys who run the oil companies they say\r\nlook, they’re finding more gas all the time. It’s just hard to\r\njustify nuclear, really hard. Gas is so cheap and at some point,\r\nreally, economics rule,” Mr Immelt told the Financial Times in\r\nan interview in London at the weekend. “So I think some\r\ncombination of gas, and either wind or solar … that’s where we see\r\nmost countries around the world going.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nAnd that was before\r\n\r\nEdison Electric Institute warned<\/a> distributed solar energy will disrupt\r\nutilities that don’t change their cozy centry-long big baseload business model, as in:\r\n

\r\n“irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects\u201d\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nEEI gets it that \r\nMoore’s Law for solar is driving prices down and deployments up\r\nlike compound interest<\/a>.\r\nAs a stock trader remarked<\/a>,\r\nsolar power is going to beat every other energy source so fast it will\r\n“make your jaw drop with astonishment.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nNext nuke to stop: Watts Bar 2, as the Bloomberg article notes:\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe TVA will cut spending for Bellefonte to $66 million in the year\r\nending Sept. 30, 2014, from $182 million this year, as it seeks to\r\ncomplete its Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor, about 60 miles (97\r\nkilometers) southwest of Knoxville.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nBut that’s not all.\r\nSee \r\nnext post<\/a>.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]","protected":false},"author":3,"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":[14,6124,104,23,24,36],"tags":[8759,6437,8704,6140,8702,12,562,8737,8713,8714,8789,1399,2192,8716],"class_list":["post-4087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-natural-gas-2","category-nuclear","category-renewable-energy","category-solar","category-wind","tag-alabama","tag-bellefonte","tag-economy","tag-edison-electric-institute","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-renewable-energy","tag-solar","tag-tennessee","tag-tva","tag-watts-bar","tag-wind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-13V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4087","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4087"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4090,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4087\/revisions\/4090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}