Professor: Don’t turn off nuke plants

University research and U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, R-Rogers, advise against a retreat from nuclear energy.

Opposition or fear of nuclear energy began to wane in the past 10 years. New technologies and renewed efforts by governments to seek non-carbon forms of electric generation were credited for what was sometimes referred to as a nuclear renaissance.

And then the March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami created a nuclear nightmare at the country’s Fukushima nuclear power plant.

“Not surprisingly, public support for the increased use of nuclear power has declined amid the ongoing nuclear emergency in Japan. Currently, 39% say they favor promoting the increased use of nuclear power while 52% are opposed. Last October, 47% favored promoting the increased use of nuclear power and the same percentage (47%) was opposed,” according to a March 21 report from the Pew Research Center.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced May 30 that Germany would close all the country’s nuclear power plants between 2015 and 2022. The announcement raised questions about how the world’s fourth-largest economy would power itself considering that about 28% of Germany’s electricity comes from its 17 nuke plants.

Switzerland officials are considering a plan that would close the country’s five nuclear plants by 2034.

But Paul Fischbeck, a professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, warned in a June 17 statement that shifting from nuclear to other types of energy production could increase electricity costs and push power production to plants with higher carbon emissions.

"Turning off a single large nuclear power plant could require dozens of coal and gas-fired plants to ramp up production to make up the difference," Fischbeck said in the statement. “These plants use fossil fuels, cost more to operate, and emit pollution that can lead to acid rain and ozone, and CO2, a greenhouse gas."

Womack, who represents a Congressional District that includes significant natural gas interests, a nuclear plant in Russellville and future production by Mitsubishi of wind-turbine components at Chaffee Crossing, was appointed in early March to the House Energy Action Team (HEAT).

New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. provides much of the electricity used in Arkansas, and operates two reactors in Russellville — where Womack was raised — that employ about 960.

Womack says nuclear energy must be part of an “all of the above” approach to gaining energy independence.

“Nuclear energy is clean energy, costs less, and is responsible for approximately thirty-percent of Arkansas’s total energy consumption. The disaster in Japan was tragic, but shutting down the nation’s nuclear power plants is far from the right answer,” Womack said.

Fischbeck and his research team studied various scenarios in which some of the 104 reactors at 65 nuclear power plants in the U.S. would close. The team measured economic and environmental impacts of switching the nuclear plants off and moving production to the more than 15,000 non-nuclear power plants in the U.S.

Fischbeck and his research team made the following claims:
• Replacing the Brown’s Ferry plant in Alabama with a mix of coal and gas power plants would cause CO2 emissions to increase by approximately 24 million tons each year. That’s the same as the annual emissions of over 4 million cars.

• If plants that are in “tornado alley” were shutdown, national coal consumption for power generation would go up over 160 million tons or 16%, electricity costs for consumers would rise by $9 billion a year.

• To replace the nuclear plants located in counties with populations greater than 500,000 with wind power would require the construction of 25,000 large wind turbines on land greater than one and half times the size of Rhode Island.