Less to Wind Energy Milestone Than Meets the Eye

Early this morning, the American Wind Energy Association pushed out some data that caught our eye:

Electricity generated by the doubling of the U.S.’s crop of giant wind turbines in the past four years now equals the output of 11 nuclear power plants, according to the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group representing manufacturers and developers.

After a big build up since 2008, the U.S.’s total wind output currently totals 50,000 megawatts, or 50 gigawatts.

It looks like AWEA has the calculations correct. Fifty gigawatts (GW) of wind at a 30% capacity factor generates about 131,400,000 megawatt-hours of electricity in a year. This is roughly equivalent to the annual generation from 11 new nuclear reactors with an average capacity of 1,400 MW, each operating at a 90% capacity factor. It’s also equivalent to the annual generation of nearly 17 nuclear reactors with an average capacity of 1,000 MW, each at a 90% capacity factor.

This is a great milestone for the wind industry, however, they need to increase their capacity by roughly another 250 GW to equal the annual generation of the U.S. nuclear fleet. For those who haven’t seen our infographic, the amount of land needed by wind to produce the same amount of electricity as nuclear in a year is equal to an area the size of West Virginia.

It’s also worth noting that the quality of power from 50 GW of wind is much different than the quality of power from 11 nuclear reactors. Wind is intermittent, only available in certain locations, requires significant amounts of transmission, and produces the least amount of electricity in a year during the summer and winter months because the heat and cold stifle wind flow.

Nuclear is just the opposite. It produces continuous power 24/7, can be located anywhere, helps maintain grid stability, and produces the most amount of electricity in a year during the summer and winter months (pdf). ‘Nuff said.

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Nuclear Emergency Planning Pays Off Big in Iowa

What becomes nuclear energy most? Many things, but surely, most of all, It has to be safety. The accident in Japan might have made this seem a folly – at first – but polls, and early ones, showed that people in the U.S. understand that the accident there was extraordinary and not reflective of the safety of U.S. plants.

That doesn’t mean that the Fukushima accident did not lead to a drive to improve safety, especially in the area of natural disasters such as the mammoth earthquake and flooding (the United States is not prone to tsunami per se) that overtook Fukushima. But there are other issues, too, including evacuation and access to resources to mitigate harm.

A lot of lessons are emerging from Japan and the industry and Nuclear Regulatory Commission take them very seriously.

So – then – how effective are efforts to protect against events that haven’t happened?

Let’s consider the experience of Cedar Rapids, which is about 50 miles from the Duane Arnold facility. No, there was no accident at Duane Arnold, but there was plenty of preparation for an accident.

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Here’s what happened:

In May and early June 2008, tornadoes and floods struck Iowa. The largest single tornado in the state in a 30-year period, an EF-54, struck the town of Parkersburg, Iowa, 85 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids on May 25 and caused millions of dollars in damage, eight deaths, and the mobilization of significant state and local emergency response resources.

Believe it or not, it gets worse and threatens the kind of double disaster that flattened the northeast section of Japan:

The water levels in the Cedar and nearby Iowa Rivers and their tributaries had risen throughout the spring as the agricultural land that covers 74% of the state, still saturated from the heavy winter snow melt and without crop cover, together with an extensive network of subsurface clay drainage tile systems, contributed extensive runoff into the rivers.

This is all from a report called Disaster Resilience recently published by the National Academy of Sciences, which explains the precision of the details. We’ll talk about resilience and what the report means by it a little later.

The narrative goes on to say that the Cedar River did not produce a “100-year flood,” as feared, but a “500-year” flood, much worse – that is, a flood that could be expected to happen only every 500 years. The Cedar River crested at over 31 feet.

What Cedar Rapids needed was an effective risk mitigation strategy, most particularly the risk to people needed to be minimized. Happily, the city already had such a plan; beyond that, essential personnel had drilled on the plan many times.

The city and county have a risk mitigation strategy in place for the nuclear power facility: the city’s emergency planners, hospital personnel, and citizens drill four times a year along established evacuation routes. These drills, including the relocation of essential medical facilities and personnel proved essential during the response to the flooding of the Cedar River into the city in the second week of June 2008.

And the result?

According to the health personnel and emergency responders with whom the committee spoke in their visit to Cedar Rapids, the preparation and planning involved in preparing for that single, human-induced hazard played a large role in the fact that no lives were lost to a different hazard that evolved into a disaster during the flooding in 2008.

I think the reference to a nuclear accident as a “human-induced hazard” means that people erected the plant not that employees there would cause an accident and, by contrast, the flood was a natural disaster.

So, in this instance, an emergency plan intended to keep people well away from radiation kept them equally well away from water run wild – and, let’s repeat from the NAS report, “no lives were lost.” (It is fair to add that, industrial accidents aside, no one died at Fukushima Daiichi, either. But it’s also not fair to minimize the impact of what happened there, so let’s keep the point parenthetical.)

Now, the NAS report is largely about natural disasters and the subject of the report is resilience in the face of them. The report defines resilience thusly:

Resilience: The ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events

Which sounds very much like what the nuclear energy industry is doing.

In the report’s terms, the benefits of preparing for “adverse events” is not only good for mitigating harm to life and property, it even makes sense economically.

For example, the Multi-Hazard Mitigation Council (2005)
found that for every dollar spent on pre-event mitigation related to earthquakes, wind, and flooding, about $4 were saved in post-event damages. Furthermore, the planning and preparation for one type of disaster (such as the nuclear accident planning experience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa), can reap benefits for other types of disasters or unexpected adverse events.

If it seems tacky to bring up money, consider it instead as a finite resource. Draining those resources in the face of one disaster will lead to a lack of resources for the next disaster. And we seem to face more natural disasters in recent years, not fewer.

In fact, the report is really dour about the nation’s preparedness for natural disasters.

An alternative to the resilience vision is the current path of the nation—the status quo in which innovations are not made to increase the nation’s resilience to hazards and disasters. Unless this current path in the nation’s approach towards hazards and disasters is changed, data suggest that the cost of disasters will continue to rise both in absolute dollar amounts and in the losses to the social, cultural, and environmental systems that are part of each community.

It seems to me very striking that a nuclear accident mitigation plan proved so effective in preventing loss of life and limb in a natural disaster. (And it happened in 2008, three years before the accident in Japan.)

The cost of preparing that plan and of working out the kinks in it through drills – to the nuclear industry and to federal, state and local government agencies – paid off is a big way – and in exactly the way it should have, albeit not in response to a nuclear accident – and to the universal benefit of the people of Cedar Rapids.

The NAS report is long enough that I could have missed it, but it  seems that the nuclear energy industry points some useful directions for natural disaster planning that could be more widely adopted – even if it was created to mitigate the effects of a “man-made hazard.”

So - what becomes nuclear energy most? Safety – and the experience of Cedar Rapids.

Cedar Rapids, dangerous swimming hole.

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A Nuclear-Powered Space Rover Lands on Mars, Brings New Hope for Space Exploration

“If anybody has been harboring doubts about the status of U.S. leadership in space, well, there’s a one-ton, automobile-size piece of American ingenuity, and it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now.”

This statement came from John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor, this morning following the landing of a 2,000-pound nuclear-powered space rover, Curiosity, on the surface of Mars. This marks the first time that NASA has ever safely landed a human-made object of this size and weight on the surface of Mars, a notable feat in American engineering.

Early reports from The New York Times describes the rover’s landing on the Red Planet like a scene in a movie script:

As the drama of the landing unfolded, each step proceeded without flaw. The capsule entered the atmosphere at the appointed time, with thrusters guiding it toward the crater. The parachute deployed. Then the rover and rocket stage dropped away from the parachute and began a powered descent toward the surface, and the sky crane maneuver worked as designed. 

“Touchdown confirmed,” Allen Chen, an engineer in the control room, said at 1:32 a.m. Eastern time, followed by cheers, hugs and high-fives. 

Two minutes later, the first image popped onto video screens — a grainy, 64-pixel-by-64-pixel black-and-white image that showed one of the rover’s wheels and the Martian horizon. A few minutes later, a clearer version appeared, and then came another image from the other side of the rover.

This pivotal moment in space exploration is even more exciting because of the far-reaching implications Curiosity’s mission has for the nuclear energy field. The space rover is fully outfitted with an advanced nuclear power system called the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or MMRTG (for those who like acronyms), to power its large frame over the two-year mission.

Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory, explains that Curiosity needed a good, strong, reliable source of power to keep it going over its two-year mission. Other Mars Exploration Rovers—Spirit and Opportunity—have used solar panels for a source of power, but the engineers have found that they did not have enough power at times to complete their objectives because of dust settling on the panels or during the short days of winter. With Curiosity measuring two times bigger, five times heavier, and holding 15 times the weight in scientific equipment than the former space rovers, Vasavada said that the space rover needed a power generator that would be guaranteed to charge its battery year-round in all types of harsh conditions, which is why the laboratory turned to nuclear energy.

Curiosity’s generator serves a dual purpose: it provides electrical power and heat to the rover. The generator has a capacity of 110 watts of electrical power, which is used to continuously charge the rover’s battery and keep the rover moving and operating its technical devices. The heat that is created can then be pumped off using pipes, but maintain the warmth on the inside of the rover, including the scientific instruments.

Vasavada explains the reasons for selecting the nuclear-powered generator and how it works in the following video:


For a more technical explanation on how the generator works, see this description by Canadian Energy Issues:

Curiosity’s electronics are powered by what’s called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). An RTG is a device that uses the heat from disintegrating radioisotopes to generate an electric current. In Curiosity’s case the radioisotope is plutonium-238, a strong alpha emitter with a half-life of around 88 years. A disintegrating Pu-238 atom ejects an alpha particle from its nucleus with an energy of 5.5 million electron volts. The ensuing collision between that ultra-high-energy particle and the first material it encounters generates a lot of heat.  

All missions to Mars and beyond are powered with Pu-238. By the time you get out to Mars, solar energy is too weak to generate meaningful amounts of electricity.

Over the course of its mission, Curiosity will be searching for indications that Mars was once habitable, such as examining rocks and other organic matter and sending images and samples back to Earth. The Washington Post says this is the first time NASA has embarked on a mission to Mars since the Viking missions in the 1970s. Since then, scientists have discovered that the planet was once wetter and warmer, which signals improved possibilities for life on the planet.

Photos from Curiosity’s first day on Mars are available on NASA’s website. You can also follow the space rover’s mission on Twitter: @MarsCuriosity and on Facebook: NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover.

Have thoughts to share about Curiosity? Join the conversation about the space rover on NEI’s Facebook page.

For more information on nuclear energy’s applications in outer space, see NEI’s website.
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Photo captions: Image #1: One of the first test images from NASA’s space rover Curiosity upon landing on Mars to signal that everything was operational (credits: NASA TV, via The New York Times).

Image #2: Engineers work on a replica of NASA’s space rover Curiosity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (credits: Damian Dovarganes, Associated Press, via The Los Angeles Times).

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Australia Unto UAE

Just for fun, let’s combine a couple of topics into something miasmic – who knows, maybe even phantasmagoric. Lately, we’ve noted that despite some expectation in the press that nuclear energy would go gently into that long night, it seems be staying out in the daylight. Even countries that have notably downbeat on ever implement nuclear energy have shown at least shivers of interest.

Thus, this editorial in the Canberra Times:

The United Arab Emirates is not a country that springs to mind as one in need of nuclear power. The small federation on the Arabian peninsula has oil reserves ranked as the world's sixth largest, and could conceivably use this resource to generate cheap and plentiful power for decades.

The news hook here is that UAE has pacted with Australia for some of its plentiful uranium to run its reactors, but I found the Canberra Times’ bluntness, which can sound a little rude to American ears, to be refreshing:

Although the UAE's foreign minister stressed that it was not a commercial export agreement, anti-nuclear campaigners in Australia criticized the development, saying that not only was it out of step with energy developments elsewhere in the world, but that it risked adding to the region's volatility.

Such anti-nuclear sentiment is routine in the environment movement, though seldom accurate or rationally based.

The editorial takes a swing at the German decision to close plants, saying that “it is by no means clear that this is practicable or advisable.”

Can’t say there’s anything to disagree with here, but it does beg the question, what then about Australia, mate?

It makes good sense for the UAE to go nuclear: doing so allows it to save its non-renewable oil for export rather than using it to generate electricity, and significant new economic development opportunities will be created in the process. Would that Australia was similarly pragmatic about its own long-term energy strategies.

Not to tell an Australian his or her business, but just wait. It only seems a matter of time.

PS: The headline is great: Dismiss Nuclear Energy at Peril – although, to be honest, the editorial doesn’t match its headline that well.

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And it we’re going to tweak Australia with the UAE even if inadvertently, it only seems proper to see how the UAE is doing with its nuclear facility.

The United Arab Emirates geared up Wednesday to begin construction of its first nuclear energy plant after the oil-rich country's nuclear regulator gave its blessing for work to begin.

The green light by the UAE's Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation will make the seven-state federation the first country in more than two and a half decades to begin building its first nuclear power plant.

This happened last month. The home page for the UAE regulator, acronym FANR, is English friendly and worth a visit. Maybe the good English language has to do with the way UAE builds website and perhaps something more to do with FANR’s director, General William Travers, who hails from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Just as a reminder, most of UAE’s seven emirates are very lightly populated (Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah have about 80 percent of the population) and the country in total has about 8.2 million people. That’s almost double its population five years ago, largely due to foreign workers – only about 30 percent of the current population is native Emirati.

The nuclear facility will take some advantage of the fact that most of UAE’s land could be considered remote.

The license covers the construction of the first two reactors of a plant slated for a remote coastal site near the border with Saudi Arabia.

So we know that UAE will be getting uranium from Australia. What about the reactors?

ENEC in late 2009 awarded the $20 billion contract to build the power plant to a consortium led by Korea Electric Power Corp. The Korean company beat out more seasoned atomic power producers in France, Japan and the United States. It will be the first time South Korea is building a nuclear plant overseas.

ENEC is the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corp., which will operate the facility. The first reactor is expected to go online in 2017.

I’ve no real point here – well, maybe that the UAE has been remarkably determined to get a nuclear energy infrastructure up and running and have wasted no time doing so. We’ve been following this since at least 2008 when it still looked as though Abu Dhabi would go it alone with the help of the British. And now ENEC is assembling the pieces it needs to be online by 2017. All this activity has an almost old-fashioned vibe to it, doesn’t it?  - to a time when essential infrastructure projects could go from ideation to fruition in no time flat. (We should note that the American projects in Georgia and South Carolina are zipping right along, too.)

A model of the UAE nuclear energy facility. I may have overlooked it, but it seems not to be named yet. Maybe it’ll be Al Ruwais after the nearest town.

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Can California Survive Climate Change Without the Help of Nuclear Power?

California’s Environmental Protection Agency is required to prepare what are called “periodic science reports on the potential impacts of climate change on the California economy.” This is carried out by the Climate Change Center within the California Energy Commission. The overarching findings contained in the most recent report, ‘Our Changing Climate 2012,’ are seemingly stark:

• “Temperatures in California will rise significantly during this century . . . by 2050, California is projected to warm by approximately 2.7 degrees F above [year] 2000 averages, a threefold increase in the rate of warming over the last century.”
• “Springtime warming – a critical influence on snowmelt – will be particularly pronounced.”
• “Summer temperatures will rise more than winter temperatures . . . Heat waves will be more frequent, hotter, and longer.”
• “Wildfire risk in California will increase as a result of climate change.”

The report (to watch the press conference announcing the findings, click here) also delves into energy use in the state the result of a dramatically warmer climate. No surprise: the report posits longer and appreciably hotter summers will “notably” increase annual household electricity consumption for air conditioning. “Increases in average temperature and higher frequency of extreme heat events combined with new residential development across the state will drive up the demand for cooling in summertime,” the report says.

More than 20 percent of California’s electricity generation today comes from hydro, and of that generation, more than 150 hydro plants – 75 percent of the hydro fleet – are located in high elevation (above 1,000 feet). These sites will be vulnerable to the effects of dryer, warmer conditions, creating diminished snowpack, the report says.

It’s impossible to read the climate change impact report and not conclude that if the projections come to pass, even greater stresses will be placed on California’s baseload generation in the years ahead. In fact, the report concludes the state will need to build more baseload capacity in response to changing conditions. “In the near term, higher temperatures in the next decade could increase demand by up to 1 Gigawatt during hot summer months – a substantial amount that would require the construction of one large new power plant in California or the purchase of costly peak power from external sources.”

Hard to imagine any new coal plants getting sited in California, and there’s a moratorium on building new nuclear. Meanwhile, anti-nuclear groups like Friends of the Earth have swarmed into the state this year and noisily advocated for the permanent shuttering of San Onofre, one of the state’s two nuclear power plant sites, and home to 2,200 megawatts of electricity generation. 

Researchers and environmental scientists in no small numbers believe these forecasted climate conditions are already set in motion, without much hope for reversal, at least not in the next couple of decades. They believe it’s getting hotter and hotter in the Golden state, and that energy consumption will have to rise. Meanwhile, California has mandatory greenhouse gas reduction targets to be met, the first arriving in less than 10 years’ time.

Here at NEI, we take pains to point out that we are not climate scientists, and therefore can't and won't pass judgement on projections like these. If policymakers in California are using this document as a guide for future actions, we can only ask this: can the state and its economy possibly move forward without a clean, reliable and emission-free source of baseload electricity like nuclear energy?

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Upside Down Down Under

I mentioned the other day that nuclear energy is not everyone’s best friend – sad but true - and named Australia as having a particularly long-lived animus toward it. That’s been crumbling over the last few years, as Australia has found it difficult to move forward with its carbon emission reduction plans.
According to the World Nuclear Association, in 2009 Australia generated almost 54 percent of its electricity from black coal, 22 percent from brown coal and 15 percent from natural gas.
That’s not the mix that will achieve the country's goal. Hydro is on the list at 4.5 percent, but other renewables barely register. Australia is rich in resources, a net exporter of coal and uranium (more on this below). And of course, it is blessed with considerable sunshine and wind.
In the meantime, the country has taken an exceptionally aggressive stance on greenhouse gasses by passing new energy legislation (think cap-and-trade married to a carbon tax), encouraging energy efficiency and implementing (and incentivizing) wind and solar energy installations.

The Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency – a nice descriptive title – has more on this.

This aggressive effort to rein in greenhouse gasses may be a bit implausible. The Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank, gets to the heart of this about as well as we could:

Although Australia has approximately 23 percent of the world’s uranium reserves, there is currently no political support for building nuclear power stations. These factors highlight that reducing CO2 emissions from the electricity sector will be significantly more challenging for Australia than for the U.S.

Brookings also offers a chart that updates the World Nuclear Association’s chart of Australia’s energy sources to 2011 – and they’re the same as in 2009.

That may help explain why there has been some thaw among the antipodeans regarding nuclear energy.

Neither major political party formally backs domestic nuclear power, but the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bob Carr, has said it should remain an option and the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, has insisted it is still ''a live debate in Australia, despite the best efforts of the Greens and non-government organizations to demonize the discussion''.

(The major parties are the Liberals – who are <sigh!> conservative – who names these parties, anyway? - and Labor – who are the liberals. Labor has the majority currently, with Julia Gillard as prime minister.)

Some thaw, I admit, not a full-bore melt. At least this leads to an exceptionally lively debate. Imagine an American anti-nuclear group amping up the message to 11 and you get this:

The report on the catastrophic potential of nuclear warfare has important implications for the ongoing debate over nuclear power. Apologists for the nuclear industry trot out any number of furphies [tall tales] in their efforts to distance nuclear power from weapons of mass destruction proliferation, but the facts are in. There is a long history of ostensibly peaceful nuclear programs providing political cover and technical support for nuclear weapons programs — and an expansion of nuclear power can only exacerbate the problem.

Yes, the facts are in. The human race is doomed. Visit www.nei.org for a full measure of furphies.
In contrast, nuclear energy advocates will rarely tread into panacea or utopia-like territory. Still, the more careful language does have an impact:

Nuclear power should be considered if the carbon tax does not make renewable energy competitive against coal and fossil fuels, former chief scientist Robin Batterham has said.

His comments echoed those of the chair of climate change at Adelaide University, Barry Brook, who said last week that it was ''inevitable'' Australia would be forced to choose nuclear power, most likely by 2020.

''If geothermal doesn't deliver fairly quickly, that takes that off the list,'' Professor Batterham said. ''If wind doesn't get its economics an awful lot better fairly quickly, there isn't going to be a big increase [in wind power].''

Well, nothing’s “inevitable” except death and taxes, but Brooks’ insistence does have a zeal to it.  The story goes on to say that Batterham believes that nuclear energy is not the slam dunk Brooks imagines. Still, he says, “Let's make sure we shake a few [energy] alternatives as well as seeing nuclear coming to a house near you.''

So – new nuclear build in Australia next year? Let’s not get crazy. But the presence of a bracing debate and support from key government officials – plus the country’s determination to meet its greenhouse gas emission targets – brings it closer than it’s ever been. Hmm - maybe New Zealand is not as out-of-the-question as it once seemed.

The Ranger uranium mine. Did we mention that Australia has uranium? A lot of uranium. According to the World Nuclear Association, “Australian exports over the last five years have averaged just over 10,000 tons/year U3O8, and in 2009 provided 15.7% of world uranium supply from mines.   Uranium comprises about 35% of the country's energy exports in thermal terms.” Australia holds about 23 percent of the world’s uranium reserves, the largest in the world. Talk about energy security! Now it just needs the facilities to be secure with.

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By the Numbers: The Benefits of New Hampshire’s Seabrook Nuclear Station

Today, the Seabrook Public Library is showing a film that highlights the start of the anti-nuclear power community. The film is about a long-ago protest in 1977 in which activists opposed to nuclear energy tried to occupy the Seabrook plant site during construction. Seabrook finally got built, and in the 22 years since it began producing electricity, it has amassed an impressive record of economic and environmental benefits.

Reliable Electricity

According to the Energy Information Administration, the Seabrook nuclear power reactor (1,247 MW) is the largest in New England and provided 42 percent of New Hampshire's 2011 electricity generation. Since it began commercial operation in 1990, the unit has produced a total of 189,684,433,000 kilowatt-hours, or more than enough electricity to power New York or Illinois for a year.

According to NextEra, its owner, Seabrook generates enough power to supply the annual needs of 1.4 million families and businesses.

Environmental Benefits

If Seabrook wasn’t in operation, the electricity for those 1.4 million families and businesses would likely be generated from fossil fuel plants. In 2011, based on data from EIA and EPA, Seabrook’s clean nuclear electricity avoided the emission of 6,200 tons of sulfur dioxide, 1,400 tons of nitrogen oxide, and 4.0 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that would have otherwise come from fossil fuel plants.

That volume of carbon dioxide is equivalent to the CO2 emissions from 774,000 cars each year. For perspective, there are only 619,000 cars in New Hampshire.

If a coal plant had been built instead of Seabrook, it would have emitted nearly 190 million metric tons of CO2 over 22 years - more than the CO2 emissions from the entire state of New York in 2009. If a natural gas plant had been built instead of Seabrook, it would have emitted nearly 94 million metric tons of CO2 over 22 years - nearly equal to all of Arizona’s CO2 emissions for the whole of 2009. (For background, one metric ton of CO2 is emitted for every megawatt-hour (MWh) generated by a coal plant. Similarly, one-half of a metric ton of CO2 is emitted for every MWh generated by a gas plant.)

Natural Resources Saved

Besides avoiding emissions, operation of the Seabrook nuclear station also avoids massive quantities of coal, natural gas and land resources that would otherwise be consumed in replacing Seabrook’s electricity output.

The amount of coal saved since 1990 is about 95 million short tons, or nearly the amount of coal consumed in a year by Texas - the largest state consumer of coal.

Had Seabrook been a natural gas plant, 1.5 trillion cubic feet of gas would have been consumed since 1990 which is more gas consumed in a year than each of the three largest state consumers of gas: Louisiana, Florida and New York.

(Based on EIA figures, about half a short ton of coal is consumed to generate one MWh and about eight cubic feet of gas is consumed to generate one kWh.)

Besides the amount of coal and gas avoided by Seabrook, it’s useful to point out how much land would be required if the unit were replaced by wind turbines or solar panels. In order to produce the same amount of electricity in a year as Seabrook does, you need about 290 square miles of wind turbines or about 80 square miles of solar panels. The Seabrook station, on New Hampshire’s coast, covers 1.5 square miles.

(The source of the renewable land info is found here and the calculations above account for solar and wind’s low capacity factors.)

Although it doesn’t burn coal or gas, Seabrook does use nuclear fuel. Since it began operation 22 years ago, Seabrook has used 550 metric tons of nuclear fuel. This quantity is small enough to store on Seabrook’s site and even small enough to fit on a Best Buy parking lot, including the fuel assemblies and protective covers.

Economic and Community Benefits

According to NextEra’s website, Seabrook provides many economic benefits to its employees and the community. During normal operations, the station employs 1,100 people. During the refueling and maintenance outages that take place every 18 months, the number of employees doubles to 2,100.

Further, each year, the plant pays $100 million in employee salaries which then trickle down through the economy, and another $20 million in property taxes that goes to the local communities to pay for schools, roads and other public services.

Many More Years of Service

Seabrook is one of the younger nuclear stations in operation and has another 18 years before its current 40-year license expires. The unit has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate for 60 years and there is much discussion and research going on in the industry to determine how nuclear plants can operate for 80 years. Seabrook could be around for quite a few more generations -- helping to avoid emissions and save resources while providing substantial economic benefits and reliable electricity to its community, New Hampshire and New England. As the nuclear critics will celebrate their efforts, in reality, it’s a great thing for the community, and the country, that the station was actually completed and put into service.

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