Utilities are discovering that nuclear power plants are not economically viable:

The nuclear industry is wrestling with that question as it tries to determine whether problems at reactors, all designed in the 1960s and 1970s, are middle-aged aches and pains or end-of-life crises.

This year, utilities have announced the retirement of four reactors, bringing the number remaining in the United States to 100. Three had expensive mechanical problems but one, Kewaunee in Wisconsin, was running well, and its owner, Dominion, had secured permission to run it an additional 20 years. But it was losing money, because of the low wholesale price of electricity.

“That’s the one that’s probably most ominous,” said Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former head of the Public Service Commission in New York. “It’s as much a function of the cost of the alternatives as it is the reactor itself.”

While the other three, San Onofre 2 and 3 near San Diego and Crystal River 3 in Florida, faced expensive repair bills because of botched maintenance projects, “Kewaunee not only didn’t have a major screw-up in repair work, it didn’t even seem to be confronting a major capital investment,” he said.

This is a turnaround because until recently, the life expectancy of reactors was growing. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began routinely authorizing reactors to run 20 years beyond their initial 40-year licenses, people in the electricity business began thinking that 60 was the new 40. But after the last few weeks, 40 is looking old again, at least in reactor years, with implications for the power plants still running, and for several new ones being built.

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Even if the economics do not result in retirements, they do mean setbacks. Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear operator, set out a few years ago to invest $2.3 billion in its existing reactors and raise their generating capacity by 1,300 megawatts, a little more than one new reactor would generate. But after completing about a quarter of the plan, it dropped the rest, and said it would pay its suppliers $100 million in penalties for the cancellation, because the economics were no longer favorable.

The economics of nuclear power were never favorable.

When you look at the subsidies involved in mining, fuel processing, shipping, and in the disposal of the waste, nuclear power is arguably the only industry in the United States more heavily subsidized than agriculture, and it’s still not viable.