What is true about the desirability of real estate is also true of nuclear power— location, location, location. A map of the nuclear reactors in the United States (Figure 5.2) can be overlaid with the picture of lights at night in the United States (Figure 4.3) and it is pretty clear that reactors are where most of the people are—the eastern part of the country. This greatly reduces the need for costly and

U. S. Operating Commercial Nuclear Power Reactors

environmentally damaging new transmission lines. These are also regions of the country that have relatively poor solar and wind resources.

Nuclear reactors use the most concentrated form of energy known—the energy released by splitting a nucleus of uranium—to provide huge amounts of power in a single power plant.4 The footprint of a nuclear power plant is less than half a square mile to produce one GW or more of electricity. This small footprint con­trasts greatly with the approximately 50 square miles of solar panels or nearly 500 square miles of wind turbines to provide a similar average amount of power (see Chapter 4). Thus a nuclear reactor can be located near cities where the power is needed and not make an impact on the landscape or the environment. Two or more reactors can be put at a single site, doubling or tripling the amount of power without increasing the footprint appreciably. The 104 reactors operating in 2012 occupied only 65 locations around the US with about half of the sites containing two reactors and several sites containing three (Figure 5.2) (4).

Nuclear reactors last a long time. Reactors in the US were originally licensed for 40 years and half of the reactors are approaching that lifetime. While a few will be decommissioned, 71 of them have received license renewals to operate for a total of 60 years and others will most likely do so as they approach the 40 year license deadline. To do this, the reactor owners have to go through an extensive process through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the US organization that is charged with ensuring the safety of nuclear reactors. The Department of Energy (DOE) is even studying the possibility of extending the life of existing reactors to 80 years after careful research on the effects of long-term irradiation and heat on reactor materials (7). Solar panels have a typical warranty lifetime of 20 years, though the efficiency goes down by 1% a year so they will have lost 20% of their output by 20 years, and wind turbines have lifetimes of 15 to 20 years. The wind and solar farms will need to be rebuilt two to three times during the lifetime of a nuclear reactor, a factor that is seldom taken into account in discussions about these forms of power plants.