The owner of Iowa’s only nuclear plant announced Friday that the plant will close in late 2020, the latest blow to the fading U.S. nuclear power industry.
NextEra Energy said it would shorten the term of their power purchase agreement with Alliant Energy by five years, prematurely ending the life of the 615-megawatt Duane Arnold Energy Center in Palo.
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The plant has been producing nuclear power since 1975.
“The eventual closing of the Duane Arnold Energy Center is a difficult decision because of the approximately 500 highly skilled men and women who consistently have made it one of the top-performing nuclear facilities in the county,” NextEra’s President and CEO Armando Pimentel said in a press release.
Alliant Energy, a public utility, said the move to close the nuclear plant early would save Alliant’s customers about $300 million over 21 years, starting in 2020.
A spokesman for Alliant, Justin Foss, told the Gazette, an Iowa newspaper, that nuclear power has become more costly than renewable energy sources, especially wind. Iowa gets more than 35 percent of its electricity from wind, one of the highest rates in the country. As part of the agreement to close the nuclear plant early, Alliant will purchase about 340 megawatts of energy from four existing NextEra-owned Iowa wind facilities.
Nuclear’s struggle in Iowa follows a national trend, which the Trump administration is concerned about and wants to address. The Energy Department, on the orders of President Trump, is considering using emergency powers to subsidize coal and nuclear plants slated to close, citing national security risks.
Some Democrats and environmental groups also fear the closure of nuclear plants, because nuclear power does not emit planet-warming carbon dioxide. Lost nuclear power is often replaced by natural gas, a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide, albeit half as much as coal.
The U.S. depends on the nation’s 99 nuclear power plants for 60 percent of its carbon-free electricity.
Some states, including Illinois and New Jersey, have acted to save their nuclear plants by adopting zero-carbon energy credits, by which the state issues credits to nuclear plants for generating carbon-free power, which they can sell on the open market to raise revenue.
The U.S. power grid faces the potential loss of more than 228,000 gigawatt hours of carbon-free nuclear generation because of nuclear plant closures, according to an April report from ScottMadden Management Consultants.
Other clean energy advocates and climate hawks, however, argue that wind and solar, which have seen huge reductions in development costs, are ready to replace nuclear power.
Most of America’s new power-generating capacity over the past two years has been wind and solar.
