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Editorial: Waste-to-energy plant at least as green as tiny N-reactors

Fri., March 13, 2015

City of Spokane officials have tried repeatedly to get electricity produced at the Waste-to-Energy Plant reclassified “green” because that power commands a premium from Washington utilities.

No luck, and no effort this year to take another run at the issue, although it remains on the city’s legislative agenda.

But the Washington Senate on Tuesday did vote to classify nuclear energy as “green” as part of a package of legislation intended to encourage adoption of small modular reactors, or SMRs, as an alternative to other energy sources, and make the state an attractive location for SMR manufacturing.

Washington utilities want green power because by 2020 they must obtain 15 percent of their electricity from wind, solar, geothermal or biomass generating facilities. Although the Waste-to-Energy Plant had been considered green before 2006, Initiative 937 knocked it off the list.

But if the House approves SB 5091, the 1000-megawatt Columbia Generating Station at Hanford, the only nuclear generating plant in the Northwest, will be green.

Not so for the 26 megawatts the Waste-to-Energy Plant can produce, eliminating about 800 tons of municipal waste in the process. The plant, completed in 1991, has also become the hub of the city’s composting and recycling programs, which were taken to another level with the addition of the single-stream recycling plant two years ago.

How can this not be green, when a nuclear plant is? There’s no arguing that nuclear plants have substantially reduced greenhouse emissions in the United States, but that virtue is an incomplete accounting of their environmental impact. For one, this country still has no permanent repository for nuclear waste, and will not for the foreseeable future.

SB 5091 absolutely should not become law without an amendment that reclassifies the output from the Waste-to-Energy Plant as green.

The related legislation has not advanced as far, and with the Legislature halfway through its work – maybe – the bill’s way forward is not clear.

The critical bill, SB 5114, would exempt SMR manufacturers from Washington’s sales and user taxes. The goal, say its Tri-Cities sponsors and supporters, is to leverage that area’s “nuclear-literate” workforce into an asset that might attract companies developing technology that is safer, more efficient and affordable, and scalable: The Senate bill would apply only to SMRs smaller than 50 megawatts.

Such units can be factory-made, then transported to scattered sites, unlike the huge central station plants like Columbia that are custom built in a single location. In theory, they would be taken back to the factory for decommissioning when their life-cycle has ended.

It’s an intriguing concept, but tax incentives can be mischievous, as they have proven in the ramping up of alternative energy. Small nukes have a long way to go before establishing a position among other solutions to climate change. A tax incentive might move that process along, and put Washington among the leaders if SMRs do become an acceptable technology.