Watch Your Wallets: Dominion Getting License to Build Nation's Most Expensive Nuclear Plant

Erica Gray, Nuclear Issues Chair of the Sierra Club, at a protest against Dominion’s planned North Anna 3 nuclear reactor. Photo courtesy of the Sierra Club.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that within the next few days, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will approve a Combined Operating License (COL) for Dominion Virginia Power’s third nuclear power plant planned for its North Anna site in Surry County, Virginia. That means that as far as the federal agency is concerned, North Anna 3 is good to go.

 As far as Virginia residents are concerned, though, this project has gone way too far already. Dominion has poured hundreds of millions of dollars of ratepayers’ money into NA3, and that’s money we will never see again. But that’s better by far than moving forward with what would be the most expensive nuclear plant ever built in the United States…

• NA3 is a terrible deal for the people who would have to pay for it.

The Attorney General’s office has calculated that the $19 billion price tag for NA3 would increase the bills of Dominion customers by 25% beginning its first year in operation. And that’s if it somehow avoids the cost overruns that have plagued other nuclear plants in recent years… [more]

• NA3 would make our electricity grid more vulnerable to outages.

Concentrating power generation at a single site is a bad idea. If something goes wrong, there is that much more power at risk. This is especially true when the site already has a known vulnerability, in this case its location on a fault line. An earthquake near North Anna in 2011 shut down the existing reactors for three months. A third plant in the same location, on the same fault line, increases the amount of generating capacity that could be forced offline without warning, challenging grid operators to find replacement sources—instantly… [more]

• We don’t need the power.

Virginia is part of PJM Interconnection, a regional power grid that covers all or part of thirteen states plus the District of Columbia, and includes over 1,300 generating units. Today, Dominion buys a portion of its power on the PJM wholesale market, at a price far below the projected cost of electricity from NA3. PJM already faces a power glut. Adding more generation to PJM would be expected to lower wholesale power prices. That would benefit buyers in other states, at the expense of the Virginia consumers paying for NA3.

• Nuclear energy is not a climate solution.

Low-cost wind and solar are increasingly viewed as the backbone of the 21st century electricity grid. Dominion’s latest integrated resource plan recognizes solar as the lowest-cost resource, even compared with “cheap” natural gas. Nuclear is not just more expensive; it is actually incompatible with large amounts of renewable energy. That’s because U.S. nuclear plants are designed to run all the time at a constant level, regardless of demand. At night when demand is low, nuclear plants still have to deliver power to the grid, even if it means turning off wind turbines that could supply free electricity… [more]

…Finally, nuclear waste is piling up with no long-term storage plan in place.

more: Watch Your Wallets: Dominion Getting License to Build Nation's Most Expensive Nuclear Plant