July 16, 2025: The Water Cost of Electricity on the Susquehanna River

May 15, 2025: Data Centers and Nuclear Power on the Susquehanna River: More Questions than Answers

Sep 29, 2024: The case against restarting Three Mile Island’s Unit-1


Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island

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‘Families are dying’: an Ohio town suffering from fallout years after nuclear plant’s closure

As Trump calls for more nuclear power, Piketon, the site of an enrichment facility, knows first hand its ill effects


Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio on 22 June 2000. Photograph: David Kohl/AP

Three years after starting work as an electrician at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Vina Colley started getting sick.

The huge facility in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio was opened in 1954 to enrich weapons-grade uranium for the military as America’s cold war with the Soviet Union ramped up, and later, for commercial purposes.

But in the decades since, Colley, her fellow former workers and the wider Pike county community find themselves paying a terrible price.

Colley, who advocates as president of Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security (Press), says she was exposed to uranium hexafluoride and a host of other dangerous chemicals while working at the facility in the early 1980s.

“We were working in confined spaces; we didn’t have any respiratory protection. Radiation was everywhere in these process buildings,” she says.

Today, her body is hanging on. She’s had a total hysterectomy, found three tumors and suffers from congestive heart failure, peripheral neuropathy and beryllium disease. Her legs sometimes shake uncontrollably.

In 2018, her husband, who did not work at the plant, died of melanoma. Around the same time, her brother-in-law, who did work there, died of lymphoid cancer, as did his wife, who Colley recounts washed his contaminated clothes every day. Colley has lost one brother to small cell lung cancer and several months ago another brother died from pancreatic cancer.

“So many people are suffering with illnesses, not just cancer,” she says.

For decades, the federal government attempted to compensate workers who had suffered health ailments associated with working at nuclear facilities.

But in January, the Trump administration’s overhaul of the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) resulted in the indefinite suspension of review boards that oversee medical aid distribution to more than 700,000 cold war-era government employees who worked at 380 civilian and military nuclear programs around the country. All the while, Trump has called for a renewed push to increase nuclear enrichment activity for energy and national security reasons.

“He has endangered our workers’ lives, and the health of our nation,” says Colley of the move.

She says she blames the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense for the calamity that’s befallen her community.

“They regulate themselves,” she says.

“The big thing here is that there is no overseer – the EPA can’t go in and take their own samples.”

One of just three gaseous diffusion plants of its kind in the US, back in the 1950s and 1960s the 4,000-acre site had its own village of workers and facilities that included a hospital, fire and police departments. During its construction and after it opened in 1954, it provided an economically disadvantaged region with tens of thousands of well-paying jobs.

But all the while, it was making people sick.

Reports have emerged that 10 tons of uranium were released from a now-closed uranium enrichment facility almost nightly into the air between 1955 to 1993, an activity known by people who worked there at the time as ‘midnight rockets’.

“This plant has a vast signature of contamination, mostly from an airborne pathway. It probably extends at least 10 miles in all directions,” says Michael Ketterer, professor emeritus of Northern Arizona University, who has been measuring isotope signatures and concentrations of uranium, neptunium and other radioactive elements in soil, water, leaf matter, ash and other sources around the facility since 2018. Despite this, the facility is not listed as a federal Superfund site, even though several other similarly radioactive contaminated sites around the US are.

“On the mass spectrometer, you see it right away. It’s very apparent and unambiguous.”

The consequences are devastating.

The cancer mortality rate in Pike county for the years 2018 to 2022 was 44% above the national rate and well exceeded the state level. At 70.6 years, Pike county’s life expectancy at birth is nearly eight years below the national rate.

“I don’t think anyone disputes the fact that hosting a former uranium enrichment plant has led to our high cancer rates. The independent assessment showed widespread off-site contamination,” said Matt Brewster, the Pike county health commissioner. “Those samples were taken before open-air demolition began of some of the most contaminated buildings in the world.”

In May 2019, Zahn’s Corner Middle school, located three miles north of the facility, was closed down after reports uranium and neptunium-237 were found inside and outside the building.

Last year, the site was put up for auction by the local school district, unable to pay for its upkeep.

Although the facility ceased enriching uranium in 2001, it continues to pose a danger.

A report by an independent group hired by the City of Piketon found that fractures were located in bedrock underneath an under-construction landfill meant to hold radioactive and other material from the facility.

The area lies 70 ft above the Teays Aquifer, an underground river that stretches for hundreds of miles and supplies water for residents of Piketon and beyond.

It’s also less than a mile from the Scioto River, the largest waterway in the region and a major tributary of the Ohio River which downstream supplies drinking water for millions of residents in Cincinnati, Louisville and elsewhere.

Hundreds of buildings at the facility are currently undergoing an open-air decontamination and decommissioning process that’s renewed fear of recontamination among local leaders.

“Alternatives [to open-air decontamination] are more expensive, but our community shouldn’t be put at an increased risk because it costs a little more to minimize that risk,” says Brewster.

“They have done it in other areas with a much larger buffer than ours – we have no buffer.”

Meanwhile, other parts of the site are being brought back to life.

In 2019, the Department of Energy commissioned Centrus Energy to build a cascade of 16 AC100 centrifuges that would enrich uranium-235 up to 20%, ranking it as the only facility of its kind in the US. Republican politicians in Ohio have this year called for renewed funding for the plant.

The Department of Energy and other federal entities claim, in their own studies, that the levels of contamination they have recorded are within regulatory levels.

Off-site environmental radiological sampling captured within six miles of the facility from 2016 to 2022 by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a federal entity, found that the exposure to radionuclides is “not expected to cause harmful health effects due to the low levels present”.

Emails sent to and messages left with a member of the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site Advisory Board and to the DoE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center were not responded to.

At the same time, not all locals oppose the presence of the facility. As a county with the second-highest poverty level in the state, the economic pull factor of the plant is considerable, with hundreds of locals employed in the decontamination and environmental clean-up operations. The company contracted to provide remediation efforts, Fluor-BWXT, has raised and donated thousands of dollars to local causes.

Today, the former middle school has become a “Kingdom-led” church called Vanguard Ministries, which holds regular services and gatherings at the site. Local media reported in January that the church leaders have ties to the local nuclear industry.

With nuclear back in fashion at the White House for both energy and national security reasons, Colley says the wider public and US political leaders need to know what’s going on in southern Ohio and at a host of other sites across the country.

“Families are dying of cancer and it’s not genetic, and they’re not the same. We can’t get any of our representatives to address it,” she says.

“We need a congressional hearing. They need to hear the people, what we have to say.”

Trump’s nuclear ‘renaissance’ rests on risky plan for radioactive waste

The administration goes all-in on recycling spent fuel, despite a history of spectacular mishaps, including an unintentional atom bomb.
 
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT
 
 
Top: Radiation protection physicist Mark Somerville looks at a spent fuel storage pool in PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in Avila Beach, California. 
Left: Dry spent fuel storage at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. 
Right: President Donald Trump signs an executive order on nuclear power in the Oval Office. 
((Photos by Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images, Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times/Getty Images, Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post))
 
 
 
The Trump administration’s plan to fast-track construction of new commercial nuclear reactors to address a power crunch around the country leans heavily on a small group of start-ups trumpeting a bold claim: that they can make almost all of these operations’ radioactive waste disappear.
 
That effort is already underway, with a company called Oklo announcing this month it will spend $1.7 billion to build an “Advanced Fuel Center” made up of shiny, futuristic buildings on a Tennessee plot where uranium was enriched for the Manhattan Project more than 80 years ago. The first phase of the development, to be completed in the next five to seven years, will use nascent recycling machinery to spin radioactive reactor waste into fresh, usable fuel for plants.
 
Industry and administration officials also plan to recycle into reactor fuel plutonium retrieved from dismantled nuclear weapons, one of the most dangerous materials on the planet. The projects follow a decades-long pursuit of nuclear energy recycling in the U.S. with a history of spectacular failures, including inadvertently helping a renegade nation build an atomic bomb.
 
Even as some prominent nuclear scientists warn Oklo and other start-ups are glossing over major shortcomings in their technology, the companies argue the effort is key to securing enough energy to beat China in artificial intelligence innovation.
 
Oklo presents nuclear recycling as a tidy process: waste gets reformulated into fuel, the nuisance of spent fuel stockpiles goes away, and a small amount of unusable radioactive material is safely buried, perhaps in compact canisters tubed thousands of feet into the Earth’s crust.
 
 
A rendering of Oklo’s fuel recycling facility. (Oklo)
 
 
Military police at Elza Gate in 1945 at the Oak Ridge site of the Manhattan Project. (Prisma Bildagentur/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
 
“We’re moving forward to actually bring this to scale and realizing the benefits of it,” said Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte.
 
Nonproliferation groups and prominent nuclear scholars oppose those plans. They say neither the companies nor the administration has shared the science backing the claim that recycling nuclear fuel at commercial scale using current industry techniques is safe or practical.
 
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has redacted Oklo’s entire project plan at the company’s request. The findings from testing at federal government labs by Oklo’s main rival, a firm called Curio, is kept confidential, citing security concerns.
 
But the details that are public so far, experts say, don’t seem to break new ground.
 
“These are the same technologies that were developed and rejected decades ago,” said Ross Matzkin-Bridger, a senior adviser at the Energy Department during the Biden administration who now heads the Nuclear Materials Security Program at the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative. “They have been rebranded with new names and slight tweaks, but they still have the same problems. The only thing new is misleading narratives that they have solved the safety, security and waste management issues that make these technologies unworkable.”
 
If recycling spent fuel is possible, it would solve a real problem. Some 90,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel sits mostly in casks outside operating and retired plants. Were it all in one place, storing it could require a facility sprawling dozens of acres.
 
“All of that spent uranium fuel from our reactors today is just a growing liability for our country,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a congressional hearing in May. “We have a growing hole, a growing burden overhang on us from this waste,” he said, “A lot of this waste and burden could actually be fuel and be of value to next-generation reactors.”
 
Days later, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the quadrupling of nuclear power in the U.S. and directing his Cabinet to “utilize all available legal authorities” to enable large-scale recycling of nuclear waste. Meeting that goal requires deployment of hundreds of new reactors in communities across the country.
 
DeWitte, Oklo’s CEO, was in the Oval Office for the signing. Before becoming energy secretary, Wright sat on Oklo’s board. He resigned in February and forfeited his unvested shares in the firm. He pledged in his government ethics disclosures to “not participate personally and substantially” in any government matters involving Oklo.
 
 
Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Scott Nolan, CEO of General Matter, right, listen as Jacob DeWitte, CEO of Oklo Inc., speaks before Trump signed executive orders regarding nuclear energy, May 23. (Evan Vucci/AP)
 
Both Oklo and Curio’s methods involve putting spent fuel rods into molten salt and using an electric current to separate out usable fuel. The technique, called “pyroprocessing,” was first developed in the Argonne National Laboratory in the 1960s, but worries about the immense cost and risks the process would create weapons-grade materials kept it from being deployed commercially.
 
DeWitte argues it can now be completed more safely and affordablyin part because it could be used in a new generation of nuclear reactors that would not require as high a level of fuel purity as the existing fleet. Oklo and Curio also say new safeguards make the technology impractical for weapons production, a central claim critics say is not backed by the research they’ve seen.
 
“We didn’t try to go about doing this the way that others have looked at this and which hasn’t really worked out well in the past,” said DeWitte. Earlier commercial efforts separated out usable fuel from spent rods using acid instead of molten salt, a process the start-ups say is more costly and environmentally harmful.
 
The advanced reactors Oklo hopes to fuel don’t yet exist in the United States. Only Russia and China have such commercial “Generation IV” reactors, at deeply subsidized demonstration plants. Test reactors have been built in the U.S. and United Kingdom, but cost overruns and engineering setbacks have long scuttled plans to bring them to market and forced developers to push back target dates for their projects. Oklo is now attempting to build the first such commercially viable reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory by late 2027.
 
 
Panes of glass secure the fuel conditioning facility at the Idaho National Laboratory in Scoville, Idaho, Nov. 14, 2023. (Natalie Behring/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
 
More than 90 percent of the energy in nuclear fuel rods currently goes to waste because conventional reactors cannot extract it before it becomes mechanically useless, according to the Energy Department. Promoters of recycling argue that is like building a Porsche and junking it after one lap around the track. Skeptics have their own car metaphor: They argue the latest iteration of the technology is just a new paint job on the same old, un-roadworthy jalopy.
Former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an MIT physicist, warns that the administration’s push to recycle plutonium from dismantled warheads is particularly worrisome, threatening to create material that can be used in weapons in the U.S. and abroad, drive up the cost of nuclear power and raise the risk of a dangerous radioactive incident. “None of these concerns have been addressed convincingly by new technology, and reviving ideas that have not worked in the past is particularly ill-timed now,” he said in a statement.
 
Those concerns are echoed in a letter that 17 prominent nuclear scholars, NGO leaders and former nuclear regulators sent to congressional committee chairs in July, warning the U.S. could “unintentionally foster the spread of sensitive nuclear weapons-related technology.”
 
The United States largely abandoned efforts to recycle waste for civilian reactors during the Carter administration, after technology shared with India was used by that country to create its first nuclear weapon, according to Frank von Hippel, co-founder of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. The recycling machinery the U.S. helped India build through the “Atoms for Peace” program enabled it to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel, he said, a key step to making a bomb.
 
The companies promoting recycling have launched a public relations blitz to persuade lawmakers and the public that those risks are obsolete, despite experts like von Hippel arguing otherwise.
 
At Curio’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., an office decorated with mid-century nuclear posters and other artifacts from the atomic era’s heyday, CEO Edward McGinnis explained their solution.
 
“We want to make sure that we have a security barrier,” McGinnis, who was a top nuclear and nonproliferation adviser in previous administrations, said as he walked a reporter through a model of the technology. “It is self protecting. If you attempted to get to that plutonium to use it for bad purposes, you’d probably die trying.”
 
 
A rendering of Curio’s NyCycle Plant. (Curio)
 
The industry has won over the Trump administration.
 
“A couple years ago, we would have never thought about using plutonium in reactors,” Bradley Williams, the lead for energy policy at Idaho National Laboratory, where the administration is pursuing recycling research in partnership with companies, said at a recent industry event promoting recycling. “Now it might be a necessity.”
 
He said the challenge of producing enough fuel to power all the new reactors needed to meet America’s surging demand for energy may require it, as the nation seeks to win a global race to develop artificial intelligence and revive its manufacturing sector. “If the U.S. is going to quadruple nuclear production by 2050, fuel availability is quickly becoming the key issue,” Williams said.
 
“Fuel availability and energy security are the new national security interest, and our focus in light of [competition with] Russia and China,” he said. “Nonproliferation is something we continue to worry about. But I’d argue that most of the world is more worried about keeping the lights on right now, and they’ll use whatever fuel they can get, and we might need to use every fuel we can get.”
 
That enthusiasm has spread to the states. Curio, which is also prospecting for a site to build a football field-sized spent fuel recycling plant where nuclear waste would be shipped from around the nation, says officials in several states are courting the firm.
 
The enthusiasm is a marked turnabout from the first Trump administration, which pulled the plug in 2018 on a planned plutonium recycling facility in South Carolina, after nearly $6 billion of tax dollars was spent on building it. The project’s cost had more than tripled by then, and its estimated completion date, according to the Government Accountability Office, had been extended to as late as 2048 — “a potential delay of 32 years.”
The United Kingdom invested decades in a project planned to recycle uranium and plutonium for the type of next-generation nuclear reactors Curio and Oklo are now targeting.
 
But the new reactors did not work out as planned, beset by engineering challenges and cost overruns. And the recycling systems were constantly breaking down. By the early 2000s, it was significantly more expensive to try to recycle spent fuel in the U.K. than to dispose of it at storage facilities. As a result of the failed recycling efforts, the nation was left with one of the world’s largest stockpiles of plutonium, and no place to put it.
 
Japan has had similar problems. A facility it planned to open in the 1990s is still not producing fuel, after its cost exploded to $27 billion. France, which uses an acid process to recycle spent fuel on a large scale, has had more success. But, according to nuclear energy economists, it requires billions of dollars of subsidies and highly secure facilities to keep plutonium from getting into the wrong hands.
 
 
High-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is stored and monitored at a facility in Japan's first spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant under construction by Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. in Rokkasho, Aomori prefecture, Japan, April 16, 2014. (Kyodo News Stills/Getty Images)
 
The National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management's logo on a nuclear waste storage canister at the Cigeo project, a nuclear laboratory and underground storage facility site operated by Andra in Bure, France, March 25, 2019. (Alex Kraus/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
The administration projects confidence those issues are being solved, arguing perfecting the technology is a national imperative at a time when the U.S. is growing ever more desperate for a solution to its power crunch and its nuclear waste problem.
 
Recycling can’t turn all of the waste into fuel. The small amount left at the end of the process is highly radioactive and challenging to dispose of. That has companies exploring technologies to put such waste in canisters that can be sent into boreholes drilled as deep as 15,000 feet underground — a solution on paper, but one that may be no more appealing to the public than foregoing recycling altogether and building a national repository for all of its nuclear plant waste.
 
“The idea that it will be more politically acceptable to build reprocessing plants that are handling intensively radioactive materials, and that also require their own waste repository, doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear and energy policy scholar at Harvard.
 
States courting the projects are largely ignoring such warnings. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a Republican from Tennessee who co-chairs the House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus, said Oklo is just one of several recycling outfits looking to locate in his district, and he welcomes the interest. He’s persuaded the technology is no longer risky.
 
Utah is also positioning to go all-in, after the state’s Office of Energy Development declared in a report that “the risks of recycling are primarily political in nature, all technical risks can and already are being navigated safely around the world.”
 
Curio’s McGinnis got little pushback from lawmakers there when he made his pitch at a legislative hearing last fall. Following his presentation, Utah state Sen. David P. Hinkins, a Republican from Orangeville, pronounced: “You’re welcome here.”
Good morning everyone,
 
Please help amplify today's NuclearCosts blog - Amory Lovin's excellent piece that first appeared in Utility Dive: https://nuclearcosts.org/nuclear-power-is-failing-and-ai-cant-rescue-it/
 
A few short sample posts to share on social media:
__________________________________
 
Sample Post #1:
"Each year, nuclear adds as much net global capacity as renewables add every two days. Soaring renewables generate three times more global electricity than stagnant nuclear ... China added 197 times more solar and wind than nuclear capacity, at half the cost." 
 
Why are we talking about a nuclear renaissance again?
image.png
 
__________________________________
Sample Post #2:
Amory Lovins is right, it's absolutely absurd to believe nuclear power will meet the needs of AI data centers. 
 
☀️ + Microgrids are the way. 
 
image.png
 
[Dr. Gregory Jaczko, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chairman, released the following statement on the Atlantic Partnership for Advanced Nuclear energy, a September 2025 bilateral agreement to expand nuclear domestically and abroad: 
 
“The Atlantic Partnership for Advanced Nuclear Energy between the United States and United Kingdom is a pointless PR effort that weakly mimics the failed 2006 Multinational Design Evaluation Programme (MDEP) initiative. None of it will bring down the cost of electricity for consumers and provide sustainable, clean electricity for the future.
 
The future of nuclear power in both nations can be summarized simply by the enormous sums of money wasted at Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C and Vogtle units 3+4: all billions over budget and over a decade late. The world needs affordable energy today, not 20 years from now. No amount of handshakes or pledges will change the fundamental challenges of building cost effective, timely nuclear power.”]

PJM tries to ease threats to grid from supersize data centers

By PETER BEHR | 09/17/2025 06:21 AM EDT 
 
Under the proposal, the mid-Atlantic grid would turn off power to data centers before ordering rolling blackouts in an emergency.
 
Data centers are in Ashburn in Loudon County, Virginia, on July 16, 2023. The centers house the computer servers and hardware required to support modern internet use, including artificial intelligence. Ted Shaffrey/AP
The potential threat to grid reliability from supersize AI data centers has grid operators searching hard for answers, with the latest initiative a new policy proposal from PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. regional power market.
 
The PJM proposal would impact large new data center operations that are not using energy they have developed or acquired. Under emergency situations, PJM operators would cut off power to these data centers first, before ordering rolling blackouts at utilities or other responses.
 
The same issue confronts grid operators across the United States. PJM’s response stands out because its 13-state region, with 67 million customers, is the nation’s largest, and it hosts “data center alley” in northern Virginia, by far the largest U.S. concentration of the data farm installations.
 
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The North American Electric Reliability Corp., the interstate grid’s security monitor, has a top-level planning committee developing policy proposals for managing data center challenges.
 
“There is already evidence that large loads impact bulk [wholesale power] system reliability,” NERC said in a committee report in July, citing grid disruptions in Virginia and Texas. NERC’s follow-up report with action proposals is scheduled for release later this year.
 
PJM’s policy welcomes the data center boom, joining President Donald Trump and the leadership of the power sector. PJM says it aims to enable “new large loads to connect as rapidly as possible and at the same time determine a plan for how reliability is maintained.”
 
The proposal would keep PJM from having to increase the system’s capacity to meet the peak demand from new data centers. But data centers that didn’t, or couldn’t, acquire enough generation to run their operations would face a risk of unpredictable power cutoffs when the PJM grid is stressed.
 
The proposal does not speak directly to a second critical issue stemming from the AI data center shock wave — how the plan will deal with the rapid increase in utility bills triggered by the data center’s power demands, said Tom Rutigliano, senior advocate for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
 
“Forecasts for data center growth far exceed the rate PJM can add power plants,” NRDC said in a statement Monday. The increased power demand is expected to continue inflating electricity prices now, with faster acceleration beginning in mid-July 2028, NRDC said.
 
NRDC stated, “PJM’s plan aims to prevent blackouts, but fails to protect consumers from ever-increasing bills. Electricity costs in the region are up $12 billion this year alone.
 
“Based on calculations by NRDC using PJM data, under PJM’s plan the public will pay over $20 billion every year from 2028 through at least 2032 as forecast data centers continue to drive up prices,” according to NRDC. “This adds up to a $100 billion or higher bill over this period paid by PJM residents. Virtually all of this will be windfall payments to existing power plants rather than investment in new ones.”
 
Rutigliano said NRDC cost figures derive from existing formulas that PJM uses to establish “capacity” payments in annual auctions. These payments to power plant operators are to incentivize enough generation to keep operating to cover expected power demands in future years. They are ultimately paid by utility customers.
 
NRDC’s calculation assumes that increasing data center power demand will keep capacity prices at established ceiling prices, he added.
 
PJM’s proposal will be open for discussion by PJM’s membership, with a final plan expected to be submitted by this December to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for approval. PJM aims to have it in effect for the capacity auction to secure power supply for the mid-2028 to mid-2029.
 
“To PJM credit, they’re grappling with the problem,” Rutigliano said.
 
“PJM’s proposal is very much a work in progress, and is expected to change,” said PJM senior communications manager Jeffrey Shields. “PJM received significant feedback from stakeholders and is willing to evolve its proposal, drop elements altogether and incorporate entirely new frameworks into its proposal that are proposed by other stakeholders.”
 
“If we do nothing, there is definitely a higher risk of reliability issues including power outages,” Shields added.

US studies show 2050 cost forecasts for solar, wind and batteries far too high

For years, US solar insiders have watched cost forecasts miss the mark. Now, new research confirms what industry trends already made clear by 2023: most 2050 projections for solar, wind, and batteries weren’t even in the same ballpark.

 

Image: Pexels, Kelly CC SA 4.0

From pv magazine USA

Researchers have found that historic projections of solar and energy storage costs have consistently underestimated the pace of price declines. In the study “Are we too pessimistic? Cost projections for solar photovoltaics, wind power, and batteries are over-estimating actual costs globally,” the authors reveal that about half of 2050 cost projections are already on par with today’s prices.

One particularly gobsmacking finding: some 2050 forecasts for utility-scale solar capital expenditures (CAPEX) overshoot today’s market prices by 30%.

In the chart below, the solid black line labeled “Actual CAPEX” represents 2023 values of roughly $500/kW. The surrounding projection lines, which stretch to 2050, show that half of the studies forecast prices above that level, and half below.

It has long been a running joke in the solar industry that the International Energy Agency (IEA) repeatedly underestimates global solar growth. There’s even a now-famous chart lampooning a decade of missed IEA forecasts. The agency’s chronically befuddled outlook reflects its long-standing historical alignment with legacy energy sectors: oil, gas, and coal.

But even within the solar sector, there’s a tendency to temper expectations. Forecasters often strive to appear measured and mature, sometimes to a fault. Wood MacKenzie is known for publishing cautious solar projections, only to revise them upward the following year. BloombergNEF tends to get the trajectory right but still undershoots on volume, with first-quarter forecasts averaging about 10% below actual deployment since 2011.

The researchers compare hardware pricing and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) projections from 40 studies and 150 scenarios across utility-scale solar photovoltaics, rooftop solar, onshore and offshore wind, and lithium-ion batteries.

As the chart above shows, a few studies managed to track the decline in utility-scale solar prices from 2020 to 2022, but none foresaw the steep plunge that followed the collapse in polysilicon prices as COVID-era supply chains recovered.

One example of this widening “Overton pricing window” comes from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which houses some of the most respected solar experts in the country.

“The 2015 ATB report from the NREL estimated the average LCOE for utility-scale PV to be $91/MWh (2024 USD) in the year 2050. Conversely, the latest report from 2024 anticipated an average of $21/MWh (2024 USD) for the same year, a 77% reduction.”

In a separate section, the authors cite similar shifts in projected capex:

“The 2015 ATB estimated the average CAPEX for utility-scale PV to be $1500/kW (2024 USD) in the year 2050. Conversely, the latest report from 2024 anticipated an average of $700/kW (2024 USD) for the same year, a 53% cost reduction.”

That’s more than a 50% drop in the capital required to deploy smarter, longer-lasting hardware, alongside a 77% reduction in its projected cost of electricity. In both cases, long-range projections meant to stretch across 35 years were met and surpassed in less than 10.

For lithium-ion batteries, the story is similar, except we’re still in the steepest and most exciting part of the price declines.

The chart above shows that projections for lithium-ion storage in the 2010s quickly fell behind reality. Prices dropped from $450/kWh to around $175/kWh by 2020, while the most optimistic projections still placed costs around $250/kWh. The data, collected through 2024, show that real-world price declines continue to outpace forecasts.

As usual, long-range forecasts tend to flatten out. Most 2050 forecasts cluster across a wide range of $60-$360/kWh, even though recent bids for near-term projects are already coming in at or below $60/kWh.

It’s tempting to assume that these steep price declines must slow soon. But that assumption keeps being wrong.

How much solar power will be installed in 2025? What about 2026? Despite growing evidence of rapid acceleration, many forecasts continue to lowball solar’s trajectory. The IEA once claimed 600 GW of solar per year was needed to meet climate goals—a target that was met last year. Bloomberg initially projected 700 GW for 2025 but has since revised that number upward. Some analysts now believe global installations could reach 1 TW next year, though caution still prevails in many models.

Efficiency gains may soon become the dominant path to lower LCOE. Li Zhenguo, founder and former CEO of Longi Green, sees the potential for perovskite-silicon tandem cells to reach 44% efficiency. He also noted that every 1% increase in module efficiency results in roughly a 5% reduction in LCOE.

To put that in context: if a 2022 LCOE for utility-scale solar was around $50/MWh using panels with around 22% efficiency, a shift to 43% efficient tandem modules could push LCOE down to $17/MWh.

Dear Indian Point Trackers,

Also

https://www.aol.com/news/10b-plan-could-restart-indian-174500560.html

 

$10B Plan Could Restart Indian Point Nuclear Plant In Buchanan, Company Says: Report

Several years after ending operations, the Indian Point nuclear plant in the Hudson Valley could still be restarted, but it would take billions of dollars, according to a new report by Politico. Kelly Trice, the President of Holtec International, which is in charge of dismantling the facility, told…

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https://northcountrynow.com/stories/hochul-calls-on-feds-to-fast-track-plans-for-nuclear-facility,322642

 

Hochul calls on feds to fast-track plans for nuclear facility

MASSENA -- Governor Kathy Hochul has instructed New York Power Authority officials to build a facility to produce one gigawatt of additional power to meet her state emissions goals but federal roadblocks may slow the process. In response, Hochul said she is appealing to President Donald Trump to fast-track the process so a nuclear facility comes online faster. At a recent press event, Hochul ...

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 NEWS FROM BEYOND NUCLEAR


  For immediate release 

  Contact: Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist, Beyond Nuclear, Kalamazoo, MI, (240) 462-3216, kevin@beyondnuclear.org

  Michael Keegan, chair, Don’t Waste Michigan, Monroe, MI, mkeeganj@comcast.net

Terry Lodge, attorney, Toledo, OH, tjlodge50@yahoo.com

Wallace Taylor, attorney, Cedar Rapids, IA, wtaylor784@aol.com

Arnie Gundersen, nuclear engineer/expert witness, (802) 238-4452

 

Environmentalists' Expert Witness Warns NRC of Yet More Cracking in Palisades Atomic Reactor's Primary Coolant System

Nuclear Engineer Arnie Gundersen Fears Steam Generator Tubes and Tube Sheets May Fail Within Six Months

COVERT TWP., MI and WASHINGTON, D.C., SEPTEMBER 10, 2025--Arnold Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with more than 50 years of relevant experience who serves as expert witness for an environmental coalition opposing Holtec International’s unprecedented restart of the previously closed Palisades atomic reactor, has sent an open letter to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS)

Gundersen invoked the safety engineers who warned in 1986 that the cold temperature launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger was not safe, but were nonetheless overruled by NASA superiors more concerned about meeting the arbitrary launch schedule, with catastrophic consequences.

Gundersen wrote “Never in my 54-year professional career have I been more concerned about the integrity of the reactor coolant pressure boundary than I am about the condition of Palisades.”

Gundersen added: “My concern initially started with the condition of the steam generators, but new Holtec relief requests have identified significant PWSCC [Primary Water Stress Corrosion Cracking] at eight other locations within the reactor coolant system.  The loss of the reactor coolant pressure boundary can lead to previously unimaginable impacts to the general public. I respectfully suggest that the ACRS imagine what could happen in the event of primary coolant system failure or a steam generator tube failure due to years of improper wet layup by Holtec at Palisades.  I pray that you will thoroughly question the integrity of the reactor coolant pressure boundary caused by failure to meet Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) primary and secondary water chemistry standards before allowing Palisades to restart and set a new licensing precedent.”

The letter warns against inadequate analysis of steam generator tube degradation, the safety risk that has dominated attention for the past year. But Gundersen also warns about an additional degradation mechanism, Primary Water Stress Corrosion Cracking (PWSCC), only recently revealed by Holtec, which appears to have impacted multiple locations in Palisades’ Primary Coolant System, also vitally important for safety.

Gundersen added “[t]his is a generic issue, as there are other decommissioned reactors now in the queue to be resurrected that have also not maintained adequate water chemistry during closure.”

Constellation Energy at Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania, and NextEra at Duane Arnold in Iowa, are following Palisades’ closed reactor restart precedent.

As cited by the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB), “Wet layup consists of filling the steam generator completely with water that has been treated with hydrazine and ammonium hydroxide. The high steam generator level minimizes the amount of secondary metal that [sic] exposed to air during cold shutdown.” (United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Technical Training Center, Combustion Engineering Technology Cross Training Course Systems Manual at 2.3.9.1, Sept. 19, 2002, ADAMS Accession No. ML022840127; see footnote #59, on Page 14, of ASLB’s August 5, 2025 ruling.)

Gundersen has dubbed Holtec’s 2022-2024 neglect of such basic safety maintenance as taking precautions against corrosive chemical attack on vulnerable steam generator tubes as a “rookie error” that risks a reactor core meltdown, if enough cracked tubes fail in rapid, cascading succession.

Gundersen has warned the ACRS that “[i]t is not clear that the steam generator (SG) tubes or the SG tube sheet will survive for even half a year after Palisades’ ‘resurrection’ — Holtec’s word choice — is complete.” 

Gundersen also warned that in the event of even a single steam generator tube’s failure, “Palisades’ 60-year old design would use Atmospheric Dumps to discharge hazardous radioactivity directly into the atmosphere.”

Gundersen added: “Now, new information of degradation has become available. In addition to all the steam generator tube and tube sheet indications, on August 20, 2025 Holtec filed a series of relief requests (ML25232A195) indicating that it has discovered Primary Water Stress Corrosion Cracking (PWSCC) in numerous dissimilar metal welds in Palisades’ Primary Coolant System. The affected welds include indications in two hot leg welds, four cold leg welds and two pressurizer welds.”

Gundersen concluded: “Holtec has previously admitted that it did not analyze either primary or secondary water chemistry at Palisades for two years and that it was not in compliance with EPRI water quality guidelines.  Clearly the absence of adequate water chemistry control at Palisades and its effect on the primary coolant system boundary are issues that deserve the thorough attention of the ACRS before allowing Palisades to restart.” 

NRC staff and ASLB panels have already signed off on most, although not all, required approvals for Holtec to restart Palisades, perhaps yet this year the company still claims. This is despite the environmental coalition’s efforts to challenge safety shortcomings at every twist and turn in the ASLB proceedings for the past two years. ACRS sign off is among the very last hurdles before Holtec’s Palisades restart is officially approved by NRC, as is final approval by the NRC Commissioners. The agency’s normally five — but currently three — directors have yet to rule on the environmental coalition’s many appeals of adverse ASLB rulings, regarding multiple Holtec License Amendment Requests, an Exemption Request, a License Transfer Request, and the adequacy of agency environmental reviews, all of which the coalition has contested. 

The intervening coalition includes Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, Michigan Safe Energy Future, Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago, and Three Mile Island Alert of Pennsylvania. The coalition’s co-counsel are Terry Lodge of Toledo, Ohio, and Wallace Taylor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford University professor and author of a large number of technical publications on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and climate change, also serves as an environmental coalition expert witness opposed to Holtec’s Palisades restart scheme.

For more information, see Beyond Nuclear’s “Newest Nuke Nightmares at Palisades, 2022 to Present” — a one-stop-shop of web posts dating back to April 2022, when Holtec CEO Krishna Singh first floated “Small Modular Reactor” construction and operation at Palisades, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer first floated restarting the closed-for-good reactor.

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