>Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is a political move, this is quite likely just economics.
Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is likely economics, RTFA at least a few paragraphs:
Granite Shore Power, the company that owns the coal plant in Bow, New Hampshire, said they ceased commercial operations September 12th, about a year and a half since they announced they would retire their facility by 2028 as part of a settlement agreement with environmental groups.
It's going to be a mix of both. If it were massively profitable, they'd just pay up whatever they need to, get whatever influential politicians on their side, do a bunch of marketing, and then continue operations.
Yes, natural gas is now cheaper than coal for power generation, and solar has become much cheaper. Even disregarding environmental concerns, it's just not a good choice any more.
I'm curious, in case anyone knows, how much of the economic disadvantage of coal is because of environmental reg compliance versus other, more fundamental costs?
A slurry is transported in one variety of these. The trick is to induce a swirl in the flow, so even though particles are constantly falling out of suspension, they stay suspended. It's mathematically analogous to how putting a twist in magnetic field lines in a tokamak (or stellarator) prevents ExB effects from driving the plasma into the wall, as they would in just a plain toroidal magnetic field.
Lots of water is needed and drying the coal before burning it adds cost.
Acre-feet as a unit just made me realize how many options you get for volume with multiple base units (a foot-mile-inch is ~12m³ in case anyone was wondering). The non-metric system continues to impress (not in a good way)!
I'm not a coal proponent, just trying to understand the veracity of an argument that I think R's make sometimes (that coal isn't economically viable primarily because state regs make it too expensive).
Coal requires manual labour and mining so even without environmental regulations it's expensive. In the US coal use decrease had very little to do with environmental factors most of it was because fracking brought in cheap natural gas and pushed coal out.
Its does, but you should see the machines they use for coal mining these days, particularly in Wyoming. A giant strip mine seems to require like 20 workers, but with giant trucks and excavators.
Even for underground mines, check out the massive longwall mining machines they use- it's kind of astonishing. They pretty much take all the coal.
I think this is lost in the political talk about protecting mining jobs- the main original competition is more efficient mining operations.
Anyway, it really says something that natural gas and solar are cheaper than coal given this context.
It's a bit dated (completed in 1978) and cost approximately $100 million. At one point it was the heaviest land vehicle, clocking in at 13,500 tons. It's since been succeded, but this bucket-wheel excavator needed only five people to operate. Those five people could mine 240,000 tons of coal[8] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden (rock/soil on top of the coal) per day. That's 2400 coal wagons!
After totally tapping out all of the coal at the Tagebau Hambach mine, in 2001, it took a crew of 70 together to move it 14 miles to the next mine. This move cost 15 million German Marks.
I think it's primarily a fundamental cost issue. It's simply far cheaper to get an equivalent amount of energy from fracking a natural gas formation than having to literally dig coal out of the ground.
(disclaimer that I manage a climate&energy research group)
Most of the comments here are speculative.
The TLDR is that coal plants have trouble ramping their production up/down quickly, unlike natural gas which can do so in minutes. So, if you have a grid that is being thrashed by variable production (renewables), this results in variable pricing and demand for baseload. Coal cannot economically compete in that market (and neither can nuclear, which has the same problem).
Given that renewable power power is self correlated (all the solar panels are producing at once - or they’re not, all the wind turbines are turning at once - or they’re not) - renewable energy leads to low prices when it’s produced and high prices when it’s not.
Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?
Batteries are also highly useful for relaxing transmission constraints. I've seen a claim that sufficient storage (at various places in the network) could increase the energy transmittable over the existing grid by a factor of 3.
An analogy here is natural gas pipelines with intermediate storage caverns, which allow the pipelines to operate more steadily even if demand various greatly over the year.
> Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?
Even better, if you have a functioning wholesale electricity market, you can put those batteries on the grid and benefit everybody.
No, because as the parent comment suggests, if you have solar+wind backed by natural gas and battery storage, if the battery storage isn't enough the natural gas plants can quickly fire up. But coal plants don't have this ability, so it doesn't work as well in this environment (which is today's environment).
Yeah, but sometimes the intermittency is pretty extreme, and you can get away with significantly less overpaneling and storage if you have a mix of power sources. Not many experts advocate for 100% renewables.
Right; batteries aren't really suitable for the low frequency part of the supply/demand mismatch. Daily storage, great, perhaps up to 1 week, but lower frequencies they are increasingly expensive.
But there are other storage ideas that do much better for that. For example, burning an e-fuel like hydrogen, or ultra low capex thermal storage.
Well, if you want to answer that question, you probably also need to figure out the hypothetical cost of the other power sources minus environmental regulations.
Nuclear would be (and used to be) massively cheaper, before regulations went wild against it.
I'm deliberately saying 'went wild', because the earlier nuclear power generation that was built to saner standards also has turned out to be incredibly safe already.
(Basically, anyone who avoided insane Soviet bullshit had safe nuclear power, as measured in eg fatalities per Joule of electricity generated.)
The regulatory costs of nuclear are mostly occurred in the design phase. Those costs are sunk and mostly irrelevant for new builds of old designs.
The fact that old designs like the AP1000 are crazy expensive to build has a lot more to do with the fact that the US sucks at building mega projects than anything else.
Interestingly, one of the reasons the design phase for nuclear is so onerous is the sheer amount of red tape involved due to compliance and other regulatory reasons. You wanna know something funny? You know what's really good at generating piles of convincing sounding bullshit that it's possible no one even actually reads, and looks like it's totally going to insert fuel rods into the nuclear power industry?
Other countries are better at building particular types of mega projects. Some are better at transit, others are better at building tunnels, others are better at building massive ships, et cetera. But in regards to nuclear, I believe you're right.
I'm getting the impression the problem isn't any particular regulation, but rather than because regulations exist, the design is fixed.
Getting a design approved means a specific design is approved. So, the power plant must be built as designed, no changes. And apparently ensuring you built exactly what the design specifies is really expensive.
What's needed to reduce this cost is having some way to get a whole cloud of closely related designs approved, so that reasonable deviations from the design are also approved. This is equivalent to saying only the most critical part of the design would need to be built as designed, everything else would be allowed some slop. With something like this, one might (for example) be able to build the confinement building with less tight control on the configuration of the reinforcing steel.
I'm don't know how one would get such a cloud of designs approved. Maybe this is a problem that could be solved by massive computation? Run billions of mutant designs through a simulation gauntlet to see how sensitive it is to various perturbations? Or maybe add more defense in depth, like devices that scrub radioactive elements from steam (such things exist) so the tolerable chance of meltdown can be allowed to increase while keeping expected damage in check?
Sounds kind of like hyperparameter search - you're searching the design space for the bounds of the different parameters. I don't know if parametric design is possible on reactors, but would be neat if possible.
I'm mostly curious if there's any world in which coal beats at-scale solar production, or if it's totally moot. To be clear, I'm not rooting for that so much as looking for an ironclad case against.
Nuclear is a whole can of worms because of its PR problems.
It wasn't just spiraling costs, but also the collapse in the steady 7%/year growth in electrical energy demand. Without transparency on demand growth, very long term investments become risky (a risk reflected in the bankruptcy of WPPSS). The passage of PURPA in 1978 also didn't help with this as it allowed a flood of non-utility generation onto the grid, helping soak up what demand growth there was.
It looks like the top-end estimate is that the Fukushima disaster may have caused up to 500 additional total lifetime deaths from cancer. Roughly 23,000 people per year died of diseases attributed to coal power plants in the United States alone from 1999-2020.
Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.
500 deaths at $12M per life is $6B. This is a small fraction of the total cost of Fukushima.
People say LNT overestimates deaths, but what they don't realize is that even if you take LNT at face value the cost of deaths from a nuclear accident isn't really that high. A regulatory regime where reactor operators that have accidents are charged the inferred cost of the expected deaths could work.
People whose metabolic reserve is low often die when you stress them.
I saw a study claiming 440 excess deaths from the Los Angeles fires. I'll make an assumption that permanently moving old and health impaired people from the Fukushima exclusion zone had a similar increase in mortality. And then a bit of looking leads me to this.
"The evacuation itself also was not without severe consequences. The accident was in the winter, and the evacuation of 840 patients or elderly people in nursing homes and health-care facilities apparently resulted in 60 immediate deaths due to hypothermia, dehydration, trauma and deterioration of serious medical conditions (Tanigawa et al 2012) and upwards of 100 deaths in subsequent month"
Fatalities per Joule of generated electricity is extremely low for nuclear power, even if you add not just Fukushima but also Chernobyl.
So if you'd scale up, and keep that level of safety, it would be fine. Even less safety would be fine. After all, we accept much less safety in eg natural gas or even solar power. (Solar power is extremely safe once running, but if you look at casualties over the lifecycle, you get a few people falling off roofs when installing residential solar power. It's a very small number, but nuclear is so safe, that the roof-fall incidents of solar are a big number by comparison.)
NE is starved for natural gas. They replaced the coal plants with gas and didn't bother to build enough pipelines (and even blocked them). We are getting a lot of our gas from Tankers from Europe and even Russia before the war. So now NE has nearly the highest electricity costs in the country even though we're not far away from some of the most abundant natural gas in the planet.
Including regulatory and litigation expenses, this is simply not true. That said, coal is very dirty and is not the best choice for power generation because of pollution. Coal is pretty cheap, and it's take most of my lifetime to change the cost through regulation, litigation and lawmaking.
Unlikely. The ISO has 3.5GW of solar and nuclear capacity equally (I’m aware of capacity factor of solar vs nuclear, but the ISO also reports ~6GW of behind the meter distributed solar which only manifests as reduced demand). The ISO needs more batteries, renewables, and transmission from hydro in Quebec, Canada (1.2GW), but nuclear is not needed to succeed long term and those two generators will eventually be decommissioned, as their license only extends their operating period to ~2050. Twenty five years is plenty of time to replace their 3.5GW of output; 18GW of battery storage, 17GW of wind, and 13.5GW of solar is in the ISO’s interconnect queue or has been proposed by developers.
https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-re... (NextEra, which owns the Seabrook nuclear power plant in N.H., stands to lose tens of millions of dollars every year if the NECEC comes online and attempted to use political donations to scuttle the Quebec Hydro transmission line)
https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/ne... (“The new transmission line between Quebec and Maine will provide 1,200 megawatts (MW) of renewable hydroelectric power to the New England power grid in Lewiston, Maine, sufficient to meet the demand of 1.2 million homes. Once built, NECEC will be New England's largest renewable energy source, saving customers $190 million per year.”)
Yup, I've been watching the NECEC story unfold over the years. Boston's giant natural gas Mystic Generating Station was closed in anticipation of the power being replaced by NECEC.
There is an interesting podcast about Quebec hydropower, it's quite an accomplishment, not without controversy.
Apropos nothing,
what would happen if that transmission line simply didn't get completed till, say 2028? Hydro power sounds like something woke people might like, and dear leader says we can't have that.
Canada may cut you off eventually because the population is rapidly growing and it will want the power for itself. Hopefully New England is preparing for that eventuality.
> Canada may cut you off eventually because the population is rapidly growing and it will want the power for itself. Hopefully New England is preparing for that eventuality.
Trump just closed the already approved largest solar power project in the US. That’s political.
I’m all for fusion but we need power now for the transition. Losing the solar project for 3 million people is a big loss. it takes a long time to get any type of big power up to speed.
I understand the problem is transmission much more than generation. There's a backlog of power sources waiting to come online for infrastructure to catch up. Or so I heard.
I believe it was an episode of the podcast "Shift Key". Season 2, episode 5 is called "A Beginner's Guide to the Interconnection Queue". The hosts talk to some industry people who present the case. They say that there practical reasons why the interconnection queue is slowing down renewable generation deployment significantly.
I don't know if this podcast presents a balanced view, but it sounds convincing to me.
Second US organized market to do so, and third in the region, after NY(ISO) and Ontario (IESO).
With HQ there as well, it’s actually quite a large coal-free chunk of grid.
What will be interesting is the extent to which offshore wind and imports from HQ will be able to materialize according to plan. OSW is having a hatchet being taken to it in the US currently, and imports from HQ into NY and NE have been way down recently while big new lines are also built.
Not exactly in the ISO forecasts, but very much supported by state policy has been the rapid expansion of behind the meter solar in New England. Really taken the edge off of summer days in particular, although also susceptible to smoke from Canadian wildfires.
Not the most exciting markets day-to-day, but interesting long-term things happening.
Overall this isn't the W you think it is; New England still leads the nation in heating oil consumption by a large margin.
Nearly 2M households in New England heat their homes with oil (usually boiler, sometimes furnace). For those unfamiliar, a tanker truck comes by your house every couple of months and pumps diesel fuel into a tank down cellar, which literally gets burned like a flamethrower to boil water to heat your home. It's dirty but keeps your home toasty warm when it's -20 outside.
Maine in particular has very little natural gas infrastructure. Electric is impractical as New England winters are cold as balls and the houses are usually old and not that well insulated.
Electric is extremely practical - I know a lot of New Englanders who have replaced oil burners with heat pumps and made back the investment quite quickly and warmly (it’s easy when a fill up of oil can cost close to a thousand dollars, and you will probably need two in a winter). Insulation helps a lot of course, but the main difficulty is just the upfront cost, time, and structural issues with houses that don’t have central air.
My father replaced oil burning with an air-water heat pump. That is, the heat pump heats water that circulates in the same pipes and radiators that were used previously. Apart from installing the heat pump in the boiler room, no other changes in the house were necessary.
In my experience, sometimes the heat pump cannot keep up with the rate of envelope heat loss below certain temperatures (think a mid January polar vortex with sustained temperatures under -10F for days in the Midwest). Also, loss of power will mean loss of heat, where at least with a fossil gas furnace, as long as you have enough power to ignite the burners and run the blower, you’ve got heat (I’ve been able to run this with a vehicle inverter on an EV and a “suicide” extension cord with male plugs on both ends, isolating the furnace circuit; would’ve been perfect if it could’ve generated its own power for the blower while consuming fossil gas for heating).
Looking for a self sustaining cogeneration unit that can produce heat and power if needed, if anyone has recommendations, for when I need to recommend it. Heat pump whenever possible, but backups when needed.
If the heat pump is optimally sized, the time over which the backup resistive heater is used will be nonzero (assuming cost of the heat pump scales with its capacity). This is because spending extra to have it cover that last part is not worth it. This ignores its use for A/C; if in a place where the A/C load dominates the sizing then this argument doesn't apply.
> For those unfamiliar, a tanker truck comes by your house every couple of months and pumps diesel fuel into a tank down cellar
Huh, how un-insulated are those houses really? I grew up in an area with climate slightly colder than New England, and our house was heated with an oil boiler (not literally boiling, it was just warm water circulating in the radiators, not steam). Consumption was about 1000L per year, and the tank was big enough that one fillup per year was enough.
There actually is some coal in New England, and if there was (for some reason) a desire for New England to be energy independent, coal might be part of the mix as a result. This article discusses some less-successful attempts to get into that coal.. and it’s delightful to see the date of its publication.
What's wrong with burning trash? It means there's much less material to send to landfills, plus it's one of the most economical ways to recycle metal from household waste streams.
'Old school' trash burning can produce quite nasty emissions. Not much of an issue with modern plants that burn at higher temperature and have some amount of flue gas filtering etc. Certainly beats landfilling and producing that same power by burning fossil fuels.
> In Maine, a paper mill burns coal to power their own operations.
I guess burning coal is cheaper than buying power from the grid and installing solar would be a huge outlay? But this sentence just sounds crazy to me in 2025.
Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is a political move, this is quite likely just economics.
Peak coal was in 2007, and has been falling rapidly since. We are currently generating about 1/3 the electricity from coal in 2023 vs 2007[0].
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
>Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is a political move, this is quite likely just economics.
Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is likely economics, RTFA at least a few paragraphs:
Granite Shore Power, the company that owns the coal plant in Bow, New Hampshire, said they ceased commercial operations September 12th, about a year and a half since they announced they would retire their facility by 2028 as part of a settlement agreement with environmental groups.
It's going to be a mix of both. If it were massively profitable, they'd just pay up whatever they need to, get whatever influential politicians on their side, do a bunch of marketing, and then continue operations.
Is a settlement agreement w/ environmental groups considered political?
Yes, natural gas is now cheaper than coal for power generation, and solar has become much cheaper. Even disregarding environmental concerns, it's just not a good choice any more.
I'm curious, in case anyone knows, how much of the economic disadvantage of coal is because of environmental reg compliance versus other, more fundamental costs?
You can't put coal in a pipeline.
You have to physically handle every piece of coal. Extract, load ship, unload.
Natural gas is shooting out of the ground in North Dakota.
You can compare to wind and solar also.
The economics aren't favorable.
> You can't put coal in a pipeline.
Yes you can!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pipeline
A slurry is transported in one variety of these. The trick is to induce a swirl in the flow, so even though particles are constantly falling out of suspension, they stay suspended. It's mathematically analogous to how putting a twist in magnetic field lines in a tokamak (or stellarator) prevents ExB effects from driving the plasma into the wall, as they would in just a plain toroidal magnetic field.
Lots of water is needed and drying the coal before burning it adds cost.
Really interesting, thanks for the link!
Acre-feet as a unit just made me realize how many options you get for volume with multiple base units (a foot-mile-inch is ~12m³ in case anyone was wondering). The non-metric system continues to impress (not in a good way)!
Thats the wrong question. The question to ask is what is the death rates per unit of electricity production: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Coal beats everything else by a mile. We also get mercury pollution for free, so no more eating fish.
I'm not a coal proponent, just trying to understand the veracity of an argument that I think R's make sometimes (that coal isn't economically viable primarily because state regs make it too expensive).
Coal requires manual labour and mining so even without environmental regulations it's expensive. In the US coal use decrease had very little to do with environmental factors most of it was because fracking brought in cheap natural gas and pushed coal out.
Its does, but you should see the machines they use for coal mining these days, particularly in Wyoming. A giant strip mine seems to require like 20 workers, but with giant trucks and excavators.
Even for underground mines, check out the massive longwall mining machines they use- it's kind of astonishing. They pretty much take all the coal.
I think this is lost in the political talk about protecting mining jobs- the main original competition is more efficient mining operations.
Anyway, it really says something that natural gas and solar are cheaper than coal given this context.
You should see this one! https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow
It's a bit dated (completed in 1978) and cost approximately $100 million. At one point it was the heaviest land vehicle, clocking in at 13,500 tons. It's since been succeded, but this bucket-wheel excavator needed only five people to operate. Those five people could mine 240,000 tons of coal[8] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden (rock/soil on top of the coal) per day. That's 2400 coal wagons!
After totally tapping out all of the coal at the Tagebau Hambach mine, in 2001, it took a crew of 70 together to move it 14 miles to the next mine. This move cost 15 million German Marks.
(Just watch the linked documentary.)
I think it's primarily a fundamental cost issue. It's simply far cheaper to get an equivalent amount of energy from fracking a natural gas formation than having to literally dig coal out of the ground.
(disclaimer that I manage a climate&energy research group)
Most of the comments here are speculative.
The TLDR is that coal plants have trouble ramping their production up/down quickly, unlike natural gas which can do so in minutes. So, if you have a grid that is being thrashed by variable production (renewables), this results in variable pricing and demand for baseload. Coal cannot economically compete in that market (and neither can nuclear, which has the same problem).
Given that renewable power power is self correlated (all the solar panels are producing at once - or they’re not, all the wind turbines are turning at once - or they’re not) - renewable energy leads to low prices when it’s produced and high prices when it’s not.
Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?
Batteries are also highly useful for relaxing transmission constraints. I've seen a claim that sufficient storage (at various places in the network) could increase the energy transmittable over the existing grid by a factor of 3.
An analogy here is natural gas pipelines with intermediate storage caverns, which allow the pipelines to operate more steadily even if demand various greatly over the year.
> Why not put massive, grid scale batteries “behind the meter” at a nuclear or coal plant to enable continual production but only sell power when prices are high and store power when prices are low?
Even better, if you have a functioning wholesale electricity market, you can put those batteries on the grid and benefit everybody.
No, because as the parent comment suggests, if you have solar+wind backed by natural gas and battery storage, if the battery storage isn't enough the natural gas plants can quickly fire up. But coal plants don't have this ability, so it doesn't work as well in this environment (which is today's environment).
Once you have batteries you may do so with solar or wind
Yeah, but sometimes the intermittency is pretty extreme, and you can get away with significantly less overpaneling and storage if you have a mix of power sources. Not many experts advocate for 100% renewables.
Right; batteries aren't really suitable for the low frequency part of the supply/demand mismatch. Daily storage, great, perhaps up to 1 week, but lower frequencies they are increasingly expensive.
But there are other storage ideas that do much better for that. For example, burning an e-fuel like hydrogen, or ultra low capex thermal storage.
> neither can nuclear
Nuclear can load follow to some extent (my previous comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254716
But regulations and economics don't encourage it. Also note that NuScale appears to be designed to be dispatchable
Well, if you want to answer that question, you probably also need to figure out the hypothetical cost of the other power sources minus environmental regulations.
Nuclear would be (and used to be) massively cheaper, before regulations went wild against it.
I'm deliberately saying 'went wild', because the earlier nuclear power generation that was built to saner standards also has turned out to be incredibly safe already.
(Basically, anyone who avoided insane Soviet bullshit had safe nuclear power, as measured in eg fatalities per Joule of electricity generated.)
The regulatory costs of nuclear are mostly occurred in the design phase. Those costs are sunk and mostly irrelevant for new builds of old designs.
The fact that old designs like the AP1000 are crazy expensive to build has a lot more to do with the fact that the US sucks at building mega projects than anything else.
Interestingly, one of the reasons the design phase for nuclear is so onerous is the sheer amount of red tape involved due to compliance and other regulatory reasons. You wanna know something funny? You know what's really good at generating piles of convincing sounding bullshit that it's possible no one even actually reads, and looks like it's totally going to insert fuel rods into the nuclear power industry?
LLMs!
This will definitely make the nuclear industry perceptibly safer. How soon can we start?! /s
Nuclear power is arguably way too safe.
It’s not just the US that sucks at mega projects. It’s everywhere that’s not china.
Other countries are better at building particular types of mega projects. Some are better at transit, others are better at building tunnels, others are better at building massive ships, et cetera. But in regards to nuclear, I believe you're right.
I'm getting the impression the problem isn't any particular regulation, but rather than because regulations exist, the design is fixed.
Getting a design approved means a specific design is approved. So, the power plant must be built as designed, no changes. And apparently ensuring you built exactly what the design specifies is really expensive.
What's needed to reduce this cost is having some way to get a whole cloud of closely related designs approved, so that reasonable deviations from the design are also approved. This is equivalent to saying only the most critical part of the design would need to be built as designed, everything else would be allowed some slop. With something like this, one might (for example) be able to build the confinement building with less tight control on the configuration of the reinforcing steel.
I'm don't know how one would get such a cloud of designs approved. Maybe this is a problem that could be solved by massive computation? Run billions of mutant designs through a simulation gauntlet to see how sensitive it is to various perturbations? Or maybe add more defense in depth, like devices that scrub radioactive elements from steam (such things exist) so the tolerable chance of meltdown can be allowed to increase while keeping expected damage in check?
Sounds kind of like hyperparameter search - you're searching the design space for the bounds of the different parameters. I don't know if parametric design is possible on reactors, but would be neat if possible.
I'm mostly curious if there's any world in which coal beats at-scale solar production, or if it's totally moot. To be clear, I'm not rooting for that so much as looking for an ironclad case against.
Nuclear is a whole can of worms because of its PR problems.
The American nuclear industry was collapsing due to spiraling costs before TMI happened.
This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data.
It wasn't just spiraling costs, but also the collapse in the steady 7%/year growth in electrical energy demand. Without transparency on demand growth, very long term investments become risky (a risk reflected in the bankruptcy of WPPSS). The passage of PURPA in 1978 also didn't help with this as it allowed a flood of non-utility generation onto the grid, helping soak up what demand growth there was.
Yes, regulations started tightening before TMI.
> This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data.
No, we have data about costs in those earlier times, and we know what regulations came in when.
Given the cleanup costs of the early nuclear program maybe they learned a thing or two preventing the externalization of costs?
DOE report: Cost to finish cleaning up Hanford site could exceed $589 billion
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-04-17/article-6942/doe-report-...
Sellafield cleanup cost rises to £136bn amid tensions with Treasury
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/23/sellafield-...
Except of course, Fukushima. Or any nuclear plant that gets hit by tsunami, earthquake, terrorism,or other natural disaster.
It looks like the top-end estimate is that the Fukushima disaster may have caused up to 500 additional total lifetime deaths from cancer. Roughly 23,000 people per year died of diseases attributed to coal power plants in the United States alone from 1999-2020.
Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.
500 deaths at $12M per life is $6B. This is a small fraction of the total cost of Fukushima.
People say LNT overestimates deaths, but what they don't realize is that even if you take LNT at face value the cost of deaths from a nuclear accident isn't really that high. A regulatory regime where reactor operators that have accidents are charged the inferred cost of the expected deaths could work.
Were there any deaths from the Fukushima nuclear disaster?
A large area was evacuated and "human costs" were great. But as I recall, no deaths from radiation.
People whose metabolic reserve is low often die when you stress them.
I saw a study claiming 440 excess deaths from the Los Angeles fires. I'll make an assumption that permanently moving old and health impaired people from the Fukushima exclusion zone had a similar increase in mortality. And then a bit of looking leads me to this.
"The evacuation itself also was not without severe consequences. The accident was in the winter, and the evacuation of 840 patients or elderly people in nursing homes and health-care facilities apparently resulted in 60 immediate deaths due to hypothermia, dehydration, trauma and deterioration of serious medical conditions (Tanigawa et al 2012) and upwards of 100 deaths in subsequent month"
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0952-4746/33/3/49...
Like the Grapes of Wrath where the family starts out for California and the grandparents both die on the way.
Yes, If there were 20x nuclear power stations, there would probably have been 20x Fukushima scale incidents.
Murphy's law is real...
Fatalities per Joule of generated electricity is extremely low for nuclear power, even if you add not just Fukushima but also Chernobyl.
So if you'd scale up, and keep that level of safety, it would be fine. Even less safety would be fine. After all, we accept much less safety in eg natural gas or even solar power. (Solar power is extremely safe once running, but if you look at casualties over the lifecycle, you get a few people falling off roofs when installing residential solar power. It's a very small number, but nuclear is so safe, that the roof-fall incidents of solar are a big number by comparison.)
NE is starved for natural gas. They replaced the coal plants with gas and didn't bother to build enough pipelines (and even blocked them). We are getting a lot of our gas from Tankers from Europe and even Russia before the war. So now NE has nearly the highest electricity costs in the country even though we're not far away from some of the most abundant natural gas in the planet.
Including regulatory and litigation expenses, this is simply not true. That said, coal is very dirty and is not the best choice for power generation because of pollution. Coal is pretty cheap, and it's take most of my lifetime to change the cost through regulation, litigation and lawmaking.
https://www.eia.gov/dashboard/newengland/overview
Solar makes up 4% of New England electricity. Not much sun there. Needs nuclear to succeed
Unlikely. The ISO has 3.5GW of solar and nuclear capacity equally (I’m aware of capacity factor of solar vs nuclear, but the ISO also reports ~6GW of behind the meter distributed solar which only manifests as reduced demand). The ISO needs more batteries, renewables, and transmission from hydro in Quebec, Canada (1.2GW), but nuclear is not needed to succeed long term and those two generators will eventually be decommissioned, as their license only extends their operating period to ~2050. Twenty five years is plenty of time to replace their 3.5GW of output; 18GW of battery storage, 17GW of wind, and 13.5GW of solar is in the ISO’s interconnect queue or has been proposed by developers.
https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2025-01-03/central-maine... (“Central Maine Power aims to finish controversial western Maine power corridor in 2025”)
https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-re... (NextEra, which owns the Seabrook nuclear power plant in N.H., stands to lose tens of millions of dollars every year if the NECEC comes online and attempted to use political donations to scuttle the Quebec Hydro transmission line)
https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/ne... (“The new transmission line between Quebec and Maine will provide 1,200 megawatts (MW) of renewable hydroelectric power to the New England power grid in Lewiston, Maine, sufficient to meet the demand of 1.2 million homes. Once built, NECEC will be New England's largest renewable energy source, saving customers $190 million per year.”)
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/government-industry-affairs/new...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/northeast-...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NE-ISNE/live/fif...
(Quebec, interestingly, has ~40GW of hydro generation capacity)
Yup, I've been watching the NECEC story unfold over the years. Boston's giant natural gas Mystic Generating Station was closed in anticipation of the power being replaced by NECEC.
There is an interesting podcast about Quebec hydropower, it's quite an accomplishment, not without controversy.
https://outsideinradio.org/powerline
Apropos nothing, what would happen if that transmission line simply didn't get completed till, say 2028? Hydro power sounds like something woke people might like, and dear leader says we can't have that.
Or it gets built, but NextEra convinces the dear leader to tariff energy imports. Or Canada just cuts us off for being jerks.
Canada may cut you off eventually because the population is rapidly growing and it will want the power for itself. Hopefully New England is preparing for that eventuality.
> Canada may cut you off eventually because the population is rapidly growing and it will want the power for itself. Hopefully New England is preparing for that eventuality.
Canada's population growth has stalled. Here's what it means for the economy - https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/canadas-population-growth-... - September 30th, 2025
Canada's population growth almost flat in 2nd quarter as number of non-permanent residents declines - https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-q2-population-1.7642... - September 24th, 2025
its an economic move but it would be good not bad if it were a political move coal is bad and we should be moving away from it faster
Trump just closed the already approved largest solar power project in the US. That’s political. I’m all for fusion but we need power now for the transition. Losing the solar project for 3 million people is a big loss. it takes a long time to get any type of big power up to speed.
I understand the problem is transmission much more than generation. There's a backlog of power sources waiting to come online for infrastructure to catch up. Or so I heard.
Transmission wasn’t the problem with this project. It was cancelled out of spite
Where did you hear this?
I believe it was an episode of the podcast "Shift Key". Season 2, episode 5 is called "A Beginner's Guide to the Interconnection Queue". The hosts talk to some industry people who present the case. They say that there practical reasons why the interconnection queue is slowing down renewable generation deployment significantly.
I don't know if this podcast presents a balanced view, but it sounds convincing to me.
Second US organized market to do so, and third in the region, after NY(ISO) and Ontario (IESO).
With HQ there as well, it’s actually quite a large coal-free chunk of grid.
What will be interesting is the extent to which offshore wind and imports from HQ will be able to materialize according to plan. OSW is having a hatchet being taken to it in the US currently, and imports from HQ into NY and NE have been way down recently while big new lines are also built.
Not exactly in the ISO forecasts, but very much supported by state policy has been the rapid expansion of behind the meter solar in New England. Really taken the edge off of summer days in particular, although also susceptible to smoke from Canadian wildfires.
Not the most exciting markets day-to-day, but interesting long-term things happening.
For those who have trouble parsing this HQ is HydroQuebec.
Overall this isn't the W you think it is; New England still leads the nation in heating oil consumption by a large margin.
Nearly 2M households in New England heat their homes with oil (usually boiler, sometimes furnace). For those unfamiliar, a tanker truck comes by your house every couple of months and pumps diesel fuel into a tank down cellar, which literally gets burned like a flamethrower to boil water to heat your home. It's dirty but keeps your home toasty warm when it's -20 outside.
Maine in particular has very little natural gas infrastructure. Electric is impractical as New England winters are cold as balls and the houses are usually old and not that well insulated.
Electric is extremely practical - I know a lot of New Englanders who have replaced oil burners with heat pumps and made back the investment quite quickly and warmly (it’s easy when a fill up of oil can cost close to a thousand dollars, and you will probably need two in a winter). Insulation helps a lot of course, but the main difficulty is just the upfront cost, time, and structural issues with houses that don’t have central air.
My father replaced oil burning with an air-water heat pump. That is, the heat pump heats water that circulates in the same pipes and radiators that were used previously. Apart from installing the heat pump in the boiler room, no other changes in the house were necessary.
Does that cool through the radiators as well as heat? It seems like it could but I've never heard of heat pumps being used like that.
No, heating only. I'd imagine trying to use them for cooling in the summer would easily lead to condensation and attendant moisture damage.
Heat pumps (they work down to -10F, and can be supplemented with fossil or wood heating, if needed).
https://www.nhpr.org/new-england-news/2024-07-24/new-england...
https://portal.ct.gov/deep/energy/new-england-heat-pump-acce...
Even if powered by gas combined cycles generators, heat pumps use less natural gas than a gas-fired condensing furnace.
In my experience, sometimes the heat pump cannot keep up with the rate of envelope heat loss below certain temperatures (think a mid January polar vortex with sustained temperatures under -10F for days in the Midwest). Also, loss of power will mean loss of heat, where at least with a fossil gas furnace, as long as you have enough power to ignite the burners and run the blower, you’ve got heat (I’ve been able to run this with a vehicle inverter on an EV and a “suicide” extension cord with male plugs on both ends, isolating the furnace circuit; would’ve been perfect if it could’ve generated its own power for the blower while consuming fossil gas for heating).
Looking for a self sustaining cogeneration unit that can produce heat and power if needed, if anyone has recommendations, for when I need to recommend it. Heat pump whenever possible, but backups when needed.
If the heat pump is optimally sized, the time over which the backup resistive heater is used will be nonzero (assuming cost of the heat pump scales with its capacity). This is because spending extra to have it cover that last part is not worth it. This ignores its use for A/C; if in a place where the A/C load dominates the sizing then this argument doesn't apply.
> Electric is impractical as New England winters are cold as balls and the houses are usually old and not that well insulated.
They have the same situation a bit further north in Quebec, same vintage of houses, possibly colder winters. Yet they manage with electricity somehow?
It helps that they have cheap hydro out the ass so you don't really care if you need heat pump auxiliary heat, it kind of inverts the equation:
Cost of electricity in Montreal: 8c/kWh
Boston: 47c/kWh
New York: 58c/kWh
Source: https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/compa...
That's New York City, which is more than 3x the cost I pay in Ithaca, NY.
We have a heat pump, btw.
> For those unfamiliar, a tanker truck comes by your house every couple of months and pumps diesel fuel into a tank down cellar
Huh, how un-insulated are those houses really? I grew up in an area with climate slightly colder than New England, and our house was heated with an oil boiler (not literally boiling, it was just warm water circulating in the radiators, not steam). Consumption was about 1000L per year, and the tank was big enough that one fillup per year was enough.
Since replaced with a heat pump, FWIW.
There actually is some coal in New England, and if there was (for some reason) a desire for New England to be energy independent, coal might be part of the mix as a result. This article discusses some less-successful attempts to get into that coal.. and it’s delightful to see the date of its publication.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/massachusetts-coa...
Unfortunately (and unbelievably!), Massachusetts still burns trash.
> There are more than 100 municipal waste combustion facilities in operation across the United States. Five of these are located in Massachusetts.
https://www.mass.gov/guides/municipal-waste-combustors
What's wrong with burning trash? It means there's much less material to send to landfills, plus it's one of the most economical ways to recycle metal from household waste streams.
'Old school' trash burning can produce quite nasty emissions. Not much of an issue with modern plants that burn at higher temperature and have some amount of flue gas filtering etc. Certainly beats landfilling and producing that same power by burning fossil fuels.
https://www.gem.wiki/Merrimack_Station
Meanwhile, just last week:
Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45545277
California will also soon stop using coal. Currently there's just one coal generating station left, in Utah.
California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45567645 - October 2025
Sadly, still quite a lot in PJM, the highest power usage grid in the nation (DC region): https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
Unless "coal generating station" means something in particular, this isn't true at all, there's around 200 coal power plants in the US
They mean station powering California, not in the US overall.
FTA:
> In Maine, a paper mill burns coal to power their own operations.
I guess burning coal is cheaper than buying power from the grid and installing solar would be a huge outlay? But this sentence just sounds crazy to me in 2025.
Yay for fracking!
Yay for natural gas!