Santee Cooper announces plans to build a new nuclear plant

Here is yet another planned reactor in the US to go with the 2 planned by NuStart, the 2 planned by Constellation, the 2 planed by Duke and the two planned by Progress Energy. (Note that it was reported in this week's Wall Street Journal that Constellation will be purchased by Florida Power and Light, a company with considerable nuclear assets.

http://www.energyonline.com/news/articles/Articlefor121605.asp

But most of these aren't supposed to come online until 2015 to 2017. How many of the older current reactors do you think are going to get decommissioned in that time frame?

of the United States assuming it remains around 100 exajoules (total including thermal losses), and the reactors run, as is typical of modern reactors, at 90% capacity loading.

It is not clear how many reactors will be decommissioned in that period. Many reactors have had license extensions. Here in New Jersey, the Oyster Creek reactor's license expires in 2009. However most people, including our newly elected Governor, John Corzine, would like to keep the reactor operating through a license extension. The extension process, however, is not completed.

Some reactors will undoubtedly be decommissioned. How many, I don't know. Most reactors that have been decommissioned thus far have been small, ten of them are less than 1000 MWth. In the United States since the dawn of the nuclear era, 19 reactors have been built, operated and are being decommissioned. Four reactors have more or less completed this process and a 5th, Yankee Rowe, is 80% dismantled. (The decommissioning of Yankee Rowe was the subject of a Scientific American article some time ago that I thought was quite good.)

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/decommissioning.html

There has been some talk - I don't know how serious it is, not very serious I think - of upgrading the steam generators at Zion 1 and 2 in Chicago and reopening those reactors. The reactors were shut in 1998 because a $450 million upgrade to the steam generators was required. It was not believed at the time - when natural gas was less than 1/3 of its present cost - that the upgrade would be economic. The plant's licenses ran only to 2013. (The reactor also had poor operational performance - everyone in Chicago will die. These reactors are trotted out by the usual anti-environmental anti-nuclear crowd as evidence that the nuclear industry is failing and is going to whither away.)

The precedent for reopening formerly closed reactors is being set by Brown's Ferry-1, which is currently being rebuilt since closing in 1985. This reactor was the site of the most serious nuclear accident before Three Mile Island, at the dawn of the nuclear age, in 1975. There was a fire in a non-nuclear portion of the reactor started by a candle, of all things.