In 2007, when Gov. Jim Doyle asked a group to form a Task Force on Global Warming, their task was to come back to him with recommendations on how Wisconsin could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The result of their work is now in front of the state legislature in the form of the Clean Energy Jobs Act. Among other things, this piece of legislation proposes altering Wisconsin’s current moratorium on the building of new nuclear power plants.
Currently, Wisconsin law has two requirements that must be met before a new nuclear power plant can be built: there must be a facility available to permanently store the spent nuclear fuel from the reactors, and the Public Service Commission (PSC) must find that the proposed plant is economically advantageous to ratepayers.
Under the Clean Energy Jobs Act, the requirements for a new nuclear power plant would remain essentially the same. One change would allow the PSC to take into account the economic savings by building a new nuclear power plant. The spent fuel storage requirement would also be changed from requiring the federal government to open a national spent fuel repository to only requiring that the plan for spent fuel management be economic, reasonable, stringent and in the public interest. The changes would also add the additional restriction of requiring all of the electricity generated by the plant be needed and used by the state of Wisconsin.
While the anti-nuclear forces are up in arms over the relaxing of the fuel storage restrictions, their opposition seems rather unwarranted. Either way, no one is going to be building a nuclear power plant in Wisconsin anytime soon.
What the proposed changes would essentially do is take a spent fuel storage requirement that currrently makes it impossible to build a reactor, replace it with one that would potentially allow for a reactor to be built and add an additional restriction. This additional restriction would, of course, be the requirement that all of the electricity generated by the plant be needed and used by Wisconsin.
The problem for someone looking to build a new reactor in Wisconsin is that we don’t currently need the additional 1,000 MW that would be provided by a new reactor. According to the latest available numbers from the Energy Information Administration, Wisconsin’s net electricity imports in 2007 were negligible. Considering that our current three reactors supply about one-fifth of Wisconsin’s electricity, and that a new reactor would likely supply about twice as much electricity as each of the current three, this new condition isn’t going to be met anytime soon.
Whether the new electricity demand and use restriction is more or less restrictive than the current wording of the waste storage restriction is rather irrelevant. The probability of either one being met in the near future is very small.
In addition, the recession has tanked electricity demand all over the country, resulting in the delay or cancellation of a host of new power projects. Not to mention the fact that construction has just finished on the massive Oak Creek coal power plant. The PSC has estimated that as a result of the project, Wisconsin will be a net electricity exporter until at least 2018.
Given the massive investment required in a nuclear power plant, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of billions of dollars, the proposed changes in restrictions just aren’t going to be enough to entice anyone to look into building a nuclear power plant in Wisconsin. While many of the regulatory problems that led to the Shoreham nuclear power plant to be built in New York and not generate any electricity have been corrected, the nightmare of spending billions on a plant only to have it never operate due to regulatory politics still haunts the dreams of potential nuclear investors.
The proposed changes to Wisconsin’s regulations of new nuclear reactors are certainly a step in the right direction, and against nuclear waste fear-mongering, just don’t expect them to lead to a new reactor anytime soon.
Patrick McEwen ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in nuclear engineering.