Oyster Creek plant closing, will others follow?

On Dec. 8, Exelon announced that the Oyster Creek nuclear power generating facility in New Jersey will be shut down by 2019, roughly 10 years before the plant’s operating license expires. The 619 MW Exelon-owned nuclear plant, the oldest in the U.S., is shutting down instead of building cooling towers that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has been pushing for. Exelon’s Chief Nuclear Officer, Christopher M. Crane, told the New York Times that installing cooling towers “would cost us significantly more than the current value of the plant.”

Exelon received an estimate in 2006 that it would cost $700 to $800 million for the 40-year old plant to install cooling towers. Because every nuclear plant is unique, cooling towers must be designed specifically for each site. When I spoke with plant spokesman David Benson for a story in the October issue of Power Engineering magazine, he also said the retrofit estimate is “more than the plant is worth.”

“If we were forced to put up cooling towers, we would have to close the plant.”

Now, it appears that Benson was correct. Many nuclear power plants in the United States are going through feasibility studies to consider technologies to comply with an expected revision to Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act, which sets out rules related to fish impingement and entrainment. 316(b) requires that the location, design, construction and capacity of cooling water intake reflect the best available technology for minimizing the environmental impact on fish and other aquatic life. Regulations for existing facilities under section 316(b) were previously made known in both 2004 and 2006 under Phase II. Litigation followed both of these actions, and now EPA is looking to combine and re-proclaim rules for all existing cooling water intake structure facilities.

The biggest push has been for power plants to install cooling towers to reduce the amount of water used to cool the plants. EPA estimates that over 200 billion gallons of water per day are withdrawn by manufacturing facilities and power plants.

But Benson said Exelon has made investments over a number of years to reduce the plant’s impact on Barnegat Bay, the body of water that the plant uses for cooling. According to Benson, “DEP has pointed out that we have wedge wire technology that is as good as it gets and we are always looking for updated technology.”

After Oyster Creek is closed by the end of 2019, Exelon will take about two years to put its components in layup. The company has about $750 million for decommissioning, but will not tear down the plant for at least 10 years after closure.

This announcement comes on the same day that The Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm, released a report that said around 11,000 to 12,000 MW of coal-fired generation could retire if cooling towers are mandated.

So the U.S. could see large amounts of power generation begin to go offline, like Oyster Creek, if the EPA does require plants to install cooling tower technology. Although the rule would not pertain to only nuclear plants, in the U.S. 35 of the 104 active nuclear power reactors currently use closed-cycle cooling towers while 60 use once-through cooling technology. EPA said that while their information on impact is limited, the agency claims it does know that trillions of aquatic organisms are impinged or entrained annually. EPA also said that 40 percent of all cooling water intakes are on water bodies that have threatened or engaged species.

“If the new rule is prescriptive and states that everyone needs to install cooling towers, that is huge for the industry,” said Greg Allen, director of environmental and engineering services for Alden Research Laboratory. “It is very difficult to retrofit cooling towers at existing plants.”

So now the power industry must wait for EPA to make a decision on 316(b) in order to determine the fate of numerous power plants. Retrofits may be an option for some plants. But like Benson and Crane said, it can also be expensive. EPA is finalizing an estimation of the proposed rule's likely cost and plans to issue a final rule in mid-2012.