The Vermont Yankee Emissions Challenge

At 12:12 pm on December 29, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant was disconnected from the grid. With it went 72.3% of the electricity generation in Vermont. The operators cited economic pressures for the closing, but no matter what the reason, the closure represents a major climate challenge.

It would be one thing if the power from this nuclear plant was to be entirely replaced by other emissions-free sources like wind or solar. But it's almost impossible to see how that will happen. Indeed, the Vermont Yankee closure illustrates the difficulty of replacing a decommissioned nuclear plant—600 Megawatts of carbon-free electricity—with an equivalent amount of non-nuclear carbon-free electricity. Why? Two words: natural gas.

The percentage of New England's electricity generated by natural gas has risen from 30% to more than 52% in the past decade and is expected to increase. According to the Energy Information Administration, gas is projected to account for half of the new capacity to be added in the region in the next two years. And although the other half of the new capacity is planned to be wind power, the 468 MW, Massachusetts-based Cape Wind project is at serious risk of cancellation. That would bring us back again to natural gas.

In much of the country, the increasing use of natural gas for electricity generation has been a boon for emissions reductions, because it replaced higher-emissions coal. The calculus changes dramatically when nuclear power is displaced instead. If even 50% of Vermont Yankee's energy is being replaced with natural gas, then we calculate that Vermont is adding an additional 257 million pounds of CO 2 to the atmosphere every year.* That is equal to roughly 29,000 new cars on the road; it is not the kind of move this country should be making in the face of a climate crisis.

This situation isn't unique to Vermont. For example, some activists object to the continued operation of New York's Indian Point plant, which supplies a whopping 2,045 Megawatts to New York City. The economic, environmental, and reliability consequences of losing Indian Point would be severe and long-lasting. In all, the Department of Energy estimates that more than one-third of the nuclear power plants in the United States are at risk of closure due to economic pressure and a variety of regulatory issues. Closing a third of our nuclear fleet would cause a national increase of at least eight percent in power-sector emissions. In the coming months, Third Way will be doing more to raise awareness about the dangers posed by shutting down a portion of our nuclear fleet.

Assuming 421 Gwh of electricity production as noted by the Energy Information Administration; 50% new capacity as noted by the Energy Information Administration; 1.22 lbs of CO2 per kwh of natural gas as noted by the Energy Information Administration; 1,000,000 kwh/Gwh.