The impending closures of four nuclear power plants across the country could “give away years of progress” in decarbonizing the U.S. energy sector, the head of the industry’s biggest trade group said Tuesday.
“Our climate plans can’t work if we go backwards by shuttering our nuclear plants, but that’s exactly the possibility we face,” said Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) president Maria Korsnick at the trade group’s “State of the Nuclear Energy Industry” webinar.
The Byron and Dresden plants in Illinois, Palisades in Michigan, and Indian Point in New York are all slated to go offline in the next two years. Korsnick expressed concern that after these plants close, carbon-based generating sources will “likely fill the gap.” Sure enough, the Energy Information Administration reported last week that while nuclear energy outperformed coal in 2020, they’ll likely trade places over the next couple of years as nuclear capacity declines.
Nuclear plants elsewhere in the country are struggling to keep the lights on. Ohio’s Davis-Besse and Perry stations got a controversial state bailout in 2019 after FirstEnergy subsidiary Energy Harbor said the plants would go out of business without subsidies.
As for spent fuel management, Korsnick said that NEI welcomes federal progress in finding a solution for the over 80,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel currently stranded on site at power plants. Spent fuel is “safely stored where it is today,” she said, but the trade group supports more efficient solutions like consolidated interim storage.
Korsnick said during the webinar that the Biden administration’s climate agenda would be under threat without nuclear energy. “Either we’re serious about building a better energy future, or we’re not,” she said.
