Just announced. Crystal River (Florida) will be permanently closed. A Wisconsin reactor will also close in 2013.
Finnish nuclear reactor Olkiluoto 3 is likely to be delayed to 2016. This will put it 7 years over schedule and massively over budget.
The planned Czech atomic-plant at Temelin is looking unlikely. Additionally the purposed Romanian and Bulgarian reactors are running into financing problems. Private money wants nothing to do with nuclear.
In the meantime, enough solar was installed around the world in the last two years to produce as much electricity as 10 medium sized nuclear reactors. We just passed the 100 GW of installed solar point. The production equivalent of 16 reactors.
Utility scale solar in the US has fallen in price to where it is now cheaper than new nuclear. The most recently disclosed for a large solar installation in New Mexico shows the price of electricity (without subsidies) to be just above 10 cents per kWh. And that is major when you consider that solar supplies power when we would otherwise be purchasing very expensive gas peaking power.
“The Morning Briefing” is SmartPlanet’s daily roundup of must-reads from the web. This morning we’re reading about nuclear power.
1.) Nuclear energy: Flexible fission. At the Baltic Shipyard in St Petersburg squats the hull of the Akademik Lomonosov. It is no ordinary ship. Once it is finished in three years’ time, it will be Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant.
2.) North Korea’s nuclear test. The nuclear explosion that North Korea set off on February 12th deep in a hillside in the country’s north-east would, the regime immediately assured, pose no “negative impact on the surrounding ecological environment.” The negative impact on North-East Asia’s security environment, on the other hand, was instant.
3.) A bad day for the Iranian nuclear crisis. The Western-led effort to slow or halt Iran’s nuclear development suffered two significant setbacks Thursday. Taken together with other events from the past two weeks, it’s hard to see much cause for optimism at the moment.
4.) New nuclear power in the U.K. looking increasingly unlikely. The U.K. government has been planning the development of a ‘next generation’ of nuclear power plants in the region for some time, but with the price of renewables falling quickly and the costs of nuclear rising, it is looking increasingly likely that the plans will have to be scrapped.
5.) Chernobyl: workers evacuated. Workers were forced to evacuate after a roof collapsed at Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, on Wednesday.
Image credit: Blatant World
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