Local Group: Only a nuclear reactor can make Pueblo "whole" after Xcel Energy closes last coal-fired plant

[NNadir]

Only a nuclear reactor can make Pueblo “whole” after Xcel Energy closes last coal-fired plant, local group says

Subtitle:

After a 10-month study, a community-based committee says the only energy technology that can make up for lost jobs, taxes and economic activity is an advanced nuclear power plant

Mark Jaffe, Colorado Sun, Jan 8, 2024.

Excerpt:

PUEBLO — The only way Pueblo can be “made whole” after the closure of Xcel Energy’s massive, coal-fired Comanche Station is for the utility to replace it with an advanced nuclear power plant, according to a community-based energy committee.

“Comanche has been an economic generator for this community for a long time,” Frances Koncilja, co-chair of the committee, said Friday at a press conference. “The closure is going to have a big economic impact.”

The Pueblo Innovative Energy Committee was formed 10 months ago, with support from Xcel Energy, to look at ways to offset the losses in tax base, jobs and economic activity the 2031 closure of the Comanche 3 unit will bring.

With the shutdown of the first two Comanche units, in 2022 and 2025, tax payments to Pueblo County will have dropped by 21% and when the third unit is shuttered in 2031 tax payments will drop another 69% to $7.1 million...

... The committee looked at a variety of energy technologies — such as compressed air energy storage, flow batteries and solar — and concluded in its report that from the standpoint of jobs and taxes the only comparable replacement was a modular nuclear plant.

“The only way we don’t feel pain is a nuke,” said Jerry Bellah, a committee member and the vice president for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers District 8. The committee was composed of prominent business, labor, education and civic leaders...

As a long time advocate of nuclear energy, our last best hope, often attacked on NIMBY grounds, it calls up memories of my Bob Dylan phase as a kid, a strangely relevant first verse:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’...

The Times They Are A-Changing

Indeed the waters have grown, surging over the shore for sure. It's called "climate change."

[Charlie Chapulin]

1. Pueblo, CO

That’s in Boebert’s district that she’s abandoning.

[NNadir]

2. And...?

[keithbvadu2]

3. Surely Boebert has been holding hearings and attending meetings for her constituents.

??? ... Maybe she has.

When she has not been at the theater.

[NNadir]

5. Pueblo tends to vote Democratic, so given her partisanship and stupidity, she probably hates the city.

Pueblo voting, Denver Post

[Igel]

4. Sounds great.

Except expense, made much worse by layers and layers of bureaucracy all but explicitly intended to hobble and impede nuclear energy.

Even some initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act got body-slammed by regulations and bureaucrats, to the sponsors' great irritation--many of whom supported the regulations when they served their interests in getting in the way of agents and industries that they and their donors or constituents didn't like.

It's fine to salt the enemy's fields--but once it's your land, you're stuck with salted fields.

[NNadir]

6. I hate to be an optimist in dark times, but I personally believe that all that will change...

...because it has to do so.

As for salt, it's a topic about which I've been thinking a great deal owing to my ideas about massive supercritical desalination as a tool for restoring groundwater.

The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

The problem has been one of establishing safe salt gradients. I believe I've stumbled across an interesting solution to this problem of solution, but I have not found time to write about it and may never do so.