WASHINGTON - By the standards of the U.S. nuclear energy industry, Texas’s two nuclear plants are fairly new. Neither one is more than three decades old, while many nuclear sites across the country are nearing the five-decade mark.

But as the economics of nuclear power in this country continue to slide, even the futures of the South Texas Project, near Bay City, and Comanche Peak, located 60 miles southwest of Dallas, are far from certain.

When Manan Ahuja, senior director of North American power at the research firm S&P Global Platts, recently updated his firm’s list of nuclear plants at risk of closing, he listed both Texas plants at “moderate” risk of closing as early as 2030 - despite the fact that NRG Energy recently renewed its operating license for the South Texas Project for another 20 years.

Ahuja explained that while the plants were “of a much more recent vintage,” low power prices in Texas and state regulators’ policy of not paying plants for their ability to ease power shortages at times of high demand or for generating carbon-free energy - like other states have done - left the two facilities vulnerable.

“It’s a game of chicken. Do you sit around and wait for those high prices, which could happen this summer because there’s been some (coal plant) retirements,” he said. “The prices are fairly weak, even in a fairly hot July last summer.”

Both NRG and Vistra Energy, which operates Comanche Peak, maintain the plants are economic and have no plans to close them.

“Given Comanche Peak is one of the youngest plants in the country, significant decisions on license renewal are a few years away, but the plant is currently well-positioned, and we have no plans to close the it prematurely,” a Vistra spokesman said in an email.

The situation in Texas mirrors one states across the country are grappling with, as nuclear power plants face increased pressure to reduce costs to compete with a surge of cheap natural gas and increasingly efficient wind turbines and solar plants.

At a time countries the world over are grappling with trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power plants’ ability to produce large quantities of carbon-free power should be a clear winner. But the industry’s relatively high costs and potential for meltdown, long a point of tension with environmentalists, have not made them an easy sell.

“We’re looking for the answers to a question that vexes us right now,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said at the CERAWeek conference in Houston last week. “I don’t know how anybody who cares about the environment can’t be for nuclear.”

According to S&P, over the next six years more than 10 percent of the nuclear power plants operating in this country have either announced they are closing or are at “high risk” of doing so - with another 15 percent at “moderate risk” of closure by 2033.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is in the midst of a more than year-long study to determine whether the closure of nuclear plants, along with coal, is likely to lead to wide-scale power outages, as Perry and others in the Trump administration argue. Were they to find that to be the case, nuclear operators would likely expect some move by Washington to improve their revenues.

But many states are not waiting around. New York and Illinois have already created subsidies for nuclear energy, and legislatures in both Pennsylvania and Ohio are considering similar action to prevent the closure of plants there, including the infamous Three Mile Island facility, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 and the license for which is now coming up for renewal.

“There was an expectation carbon pricing (to tax greenhouse gas emissions) would come online and help, but that hasn’t been the case,” said David Tamasi, a public relations executive and spokesman for the Ad Hoc Utilites Group, which represents a group of nuclear power operators. “At some point you have to figure out how you’re going to reconcile nuclear plants with gas and some of these other energy sources, particularly when there’s been a lot of subsidies for renewable sources.”

Price supports

The Texas Public Utility Commission has shown no such plans. And so far, power companies in Texas are not pressing the case.

But after a wave of recent coal plant closures, policy makers earlier this year adjusted the mechanism by which power rates are determined at times of high demand in hopes of propping up prices.

“We hope this change will bring increased investment in the wholesale market,” Julia Rathgeber, president of the Association of Electric Companies of Texas, said in an email. “In fact, in February, a group of large generators announced plans to invest $100 million in existing power plants to get more power onto the grid this summer.”

None of those plans call for more nuclear technology.

The cost of building new nuclear reactors has skyrocketed in recent decades. The construction of two new reactors at the Vogtle nuclear facility in Georgia, which Perry visited Friday morning to announce the extension of another $3.7 billion in federal loan guarantees, is now expected to exceed $25 billion - up from an initial estimate of $14.3 billion.

NRG had been looking at expanding the South Texas Project for years but pulled funding from the project in 2011 after determining the costs would be too high.

When NRG Chief Executive Mauricio Gutierrez was asked during the CERAWeek conference whether those efforts might be revived, he demurred, saying he was satisfied with the company’s current nuclear fleet.

“The (South Texas Project) continues to be economic,” he said. “What I expect is that in the foreseeable future it will continue to be economic.”

james.osborne@chron.com

Twitter: @osborneja