Planning August/September 2016
Is Nuclear Clean Power?
This carbon-free energy source isn’t without environmental implications.
By Susannah Nesmith
As cities, counties, and states look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint in the face of global warming, the nuclear energy industry has offered up its power plants as one of the solutions — clean, emission-free electricity to keep the lights on as communities work to meet emissions reduction targets and transition away from reliance on fossil fuels.
Opponents of nuclear energy sometimes point to the potential catastrophic consequences of a nuclear meltdown — the future Fukushimas that many say make nuclear simply too dangerous to deal with. There is also the problem of safely storing spent fuel rods, which remain radioactive.
But even some who believe American nuclear plants are sufficiently prepared for a disaster and are safely containing their spent fuel worry that the environmental costs of operating nuclear plants outweigh their benefit as a source of climate-friendly energy.
Nuclear plants supply about 19 percent of the power currently generated in the U.S., and almost two-thirds of the power generated without carbon emissions, according to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration. The White House considers nuclear an important component in its Climate Action Plan. But nuclear plants also interact with their environments in a variety of ways, creating environmental concerns that range from water use and contamination to the disruption of the mating habits of the American crocodile and the weird and little understood swarming behavior of jellyfish. Nuclear power plants kill America's well-savored salmon and beloved sea turtles. They can also threaten drinking water supplies and endanger industries that rely on fresh water.
And they use a lot of water, far more on average than any other type of power generation.
Illustration by Hugo Espinoza; art source: H. Mark Weidman Photography/Alamy.com
Water hog
Many power plants, nuclear and not, withdraw water from lakes, rivers, aquifers, and the ocean. In most thermoelectric plants — including coal-fired, gas, and nuclear — withdrawn water is used to cool the highly processed water needed to drive steam turbines. That processed water is reused once it is cooled. The cooling water is then either pumped back into its source in what's called a once-through process, or it is reused in what's known as a closed cooling system. Forty-five percent of all water withdrawn from aquifers and surface water like lakes, rivers, and the ocean in the U.S. goes to power plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Withdrawals, however, are only one way to measure water usage — and they're not necessarily the best way. Another measure is consumption — the amount of water a plant uses and does not discharge back into its source in a once-through system or recycle back into a closed system. Much of this water is lost to evaporation. And measured by consumption, nuclear is a water hog compared to the power it provides.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that a nuclear plant with a once-through cooling process withdraws between 25,000 and 60,000 gallons of water for each megawatt-hour of electricity it produces. That same plant consumes just 100 to 400 gallons for each megawatt-hour — the rest is flushed back into the body of water it came from. Meanwhile, a nuclear plant that is recirculating its cooling water withdraws far less — between 800 and 2,600 gallons per megawatt-hour — but it consumes far more — between 600 and 800 gallons.
Nuclear plants withdraw nearly eight times the freshwater of natural gas plants per unit of electricity they generate, the Union of Concerned Scientists found. Compared to coal-fired plants, nuclear withdraws 11 percent more. And its consumption is higher, too.
"Nuclear plants consumed three times the amount of freshwater that natural gas plants did, for example, and about four percent more than coal plants, per unit of power produced," the study found.
The nuclear industry does not dispute that the plants use a lot of water.
"Nuclear plants do use water, as do coal plants and some natural gas plants," says Susan Mathiascheck, senior director of environmental policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. "The amount of water a nuclear plant uses is somewhat more than a coal plant if the coal plant is not imposing anything for emissions."
The NEI has a PowerPoint presentation ready for anyone who asks about water. While the industry expresses the numbers differently, the results are very similar. The science is clear — nuclear uses a lot of water compared to natural gas, solar, or wind power, and while the comparison to coal is imperfect, nuclear still uses more than even the cleanest coal.
Species in danger
But the overall consumption of water is not the only concern to environmentalists. In once-through systems a whole lot of aquatic life enters the process as well, and getting sucked into a power plant is not a great thing if you're a salmon swimming up the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest or an endangered sea turtle feeding in a reef in the Atlantic Ocean off of Florida.
Florida Power & Light's St. Lucie plant on Hutchinson Island on Florida's East Coast is a case in point. The plant's off-shore intake pipe brought some 16,000 sea turtles into the plant's property since it began operating in 1976, according to a recent investigation by the Treasure Coast Newspapers.
FPL spokesman Peter Robbins says the company spends more than $400,000 a year on its sea turtle conservation program, which includes special nets inside the plant's canal and the services of a conservation group that monitors those nets and sends divers to grab turtles caught in them.
A more effective way to save turtles would be to put a grate on the intake pipe that FPL says would prevent 23 percent of the turtles from passing through it — and 99 percent of the breeding-age females. It took FP&L nine years to get a permit from U.S. Marine Fisheries to put the grate on the intake pipe. The permit was finally granted this year, a few months after a human diver went through the pipe, the second diver to do that in the plant's history.
Both people survived. But not all the turtles do. FP&L has a special exemption to the Endangered Species Act that allows it to operate in a way that kills the endangered turtles, something it does a few times every year. The plant also rescues hundreds of turtles every year, including some who were injured by their trip through the intake pipe and some who were injured in ways that had nothing to do with the plant but managed to find themselves in the plant's canal. The injured turtles get veterinary treatment and rehabilitation.
FPL hopes to have the screen in place by mid-2018, Robbins said. But environmentalists are not impressed.
"You can't have a good enough screen," says Reed Super, an attorney who specializes in the environmental problems of nuclear plants. "It's a problem everywhere. There's a lot of take, which is the legal term for killing or harassing endangered species. The thing about endangered species is there aren't that many out there. That's the problem. And it's not only the threatened and endangered species. It's also all the others, fish people like to catch and eat, species people don't like to catch and eat but that are a part of the food chain."
St. Lucie has had problems with other species, including swarms of jellyfish that have shut the plant down, and a few years ago led to the deaths of between 50 and 75 goliath grouper. The fish, which weigh an average of 200 pounds, are protected in U.S. waters, meaning they can't be caught on purpose and must be released if they are accidentally caught.
Robbins calls that "a unique event."
Leaks and other water issues
Like about half of U.S. nuclear plants, the St. Lucie plant uses a once-through cooling system, which is cheaper to build and operate and is preferred by the nuclear industry. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency prefers closed cooling systems, ruling in 2001 that they were the "best available technology" for new power plants because they do less harm to the environment.
And what the plants take in is not the only concern. The plants also periodically leak pollutants. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called for the Indian Point nuclear plant, 25 miles from New York City, to be closed. The plant recently reported elevated levels of tritium, a radioactive tracer element, in monitoring wells. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 46 plants have found tritium at levels above the amount allowed in drinking water by the EPA. Almost none of those leaks reached groundwater or rivers or lakes outside of the plant property, according to a December 2015 report.
The most recent tritium leak discovered was also from an FPL plant, the Turkey Point plant, 25 miles south of Miami. The plant sits next to Biscayne National Park and tritium was found at elevated levels in park waters in December and January. The levels were far below EPA limits and even opponents of the plant acknowledged the tritium itself wasn't dangerous at such low levels.
"Tritium is not a major concern," says Rachel Silverstein, executive director of Miami Waterkeeper. "But the tritium is proof that the water from FPL's canals is ending up in the Bay."
FPL was ordered by a federal judge to build the cooling canals in the early 1970s after the EPA sued the company for discharging water that was too hot into Biscayne Bay. Although the canals are considered a closed system, they are not lined and they were designed to "communicate" with the groundwater, Robbins says.
Unfortunately, they've communicated too much, not just with the waters of the bay, but also with the freshwater aquifer that supplies drinking water to South Florida. The canals have caused a plume of salty water in the underground aquifer that has been moving steadily west of the plant. The company has faced protests from environmentalists and legal action from a rock mining company that operates near the plant and from the county and city governments over the canals.
In February, an administrative law judge ruled state environmental regulators had not done enough to force FPL to clean up the canals and stop the spread of the salt plume toward a drinking water well field.
Environmentalists point to the plant's recent uprating — a process in which it increased the energy-generating capacity of the two nuclear reactors at the plant. They say that uprating was problematic. In 2014, after the uprating was completed the year before, FPL was forced to pump freshwater from a state canal into its cooling canals after water temperatures spiked and the plant had to be shut down.
FPL insisted the uprating was not to blame and pointed to the fact that one of the two natural gas-fired units at the facility is offline, so the amount of heated water being produced by the plant was actually lower than it was before the uprating when all four units were using the canals. FPL instead blames a drought that year for the heat in the canals.
"The canals have been there for 40 years and they worked well for 40 years," Robbins says.
The temperatures left the canals saltier than they should have been, and also apparently discouraged American crocodiles from breeding there.
"A significant percentage of the crocodile population is breeding in those canals," says Edan Rotenberg, another attorney who specializes in the environmental costs of nuclear plants and works with attorney Reed Super.
"FPL created these great conditions for an endangered species — they should be given credit for that. But what happens when you change it?" FPL plans to expand the monitoring of crocodiles at the plant and hopes that a plan the company has proposed to reduce the salinity in the canals will get the crocodiles breeding again.
"We do think they're going to respond positively to the better salinity," Robbins says.
The plan that FPL has proposed would withdraw brackish water from an aquifer below South Florida's freshwater aquifer. That water will be pumped into the canals to lower their salinity. FPL also plans to inject hypersaline water into what's called the boulder zone, an area below both the freshwater and brackish aquifers.
The company recently put on hold plans to build two more reactors at the plant, but said that had nothing to do with problems in the canals.
"We're still seeking federal approvals," Robbins says, though the company won't be proceeding with preconstruction of the proposed new reactors.
National picture
FPL has also been watching the progress of new reactor construction projects in Georgia and South Carolina.
"There are 130 amendments to our license application, just from things we learned from those two projects," Robbins says.
The two new reactors at Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle and two others at SCANA's V.C. Summer in South Carolina — the only new nuclear reactors currently in the pipeline — have both faced significant delays and cost overruns.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade group for the industry, predicts more plants will come offline in the next few years than the number of new plants being built.
"Right at the time when we're getting serious about reducing our carbon emissions, we're in danger of losing one of our best tools to fight climate changes," NEI's Susan Mathiascheck says. "Over the next two to three, maybe five years, we're at risk of losing 12 to 15 reactors."
The state of New Jersey and Exelon reached an agreement to close the Oyster Bay nuclear plant by 2019 because of concerns about water pollution. Vermont officials tried to force Entergy's Vermont Yankee to close because of its once-through system but lost a court case to the company in 2012. The next year, the company announced it was mothballing the plant because it no longer made sense economically.
And a lot of Americans think that might be just fine. Fifty-four percent of Americans said they opposed nuclear energy, according to a March poll by Gallup. It was the first time since Gallup began polling on the question of nuclear power in 1994 that a majority opposed it. The polling company concluded that nuclear energy's increasing unpopularity was not due to the Fukushima disaster, since a poll conducted a year after the accident showed 57 percent were still in favor of it.
Silverstein, the activist fighting FPL over pollution at Turkey Point, says she doesn't think the reactors there need to be shut down, just modernized to protect the area's water.
"Using cooling towers is a more modern approach for containing the contamination," she says. But even though FPL's original plan to build two new reactors at the plant included using closedcycle cooling towers for those reactors, she says she also opposed the new reactors on the edge of Biscayne Bay and so close to Everglades National Park.
"It is a historically bad idea to continue to invest in nuclear power at this location," she contends. "This happens to be a terrible place for a nuclear power plant."
Jerold Kayden, the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, says that understanding a community's opposition to a nuclear plant is a key element in the decision of whether it is an appropriate technology for a given place. He recently toured Fukushima.
"I'm personally not deeply nervous about nuclear power plants. Assuming they are a land use that is acceptably safe, doing the metrics, I think people can live near nuclear power plants. To the extent that nuclear doesn't emit greenhouse gases, that's an enormous advantage," he says.
But there's more, he adds: "There's also the psychological factor. As a planner you cannot ignore that. Visit the Fukushima power plant and the region and you understand the horror of a nuclear meltdown. You have this feeling of wanting to get out of there as fast as possible."
Susannah Nesmith is a freelance writer based in Miami.
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Photo courtesy © Pacific Gas & Electric.