The Real Obstacle to Nuclear Power

Nuclear power is in a strange position today. Those who worry about climate change have come to see that it is essential. The warming clock is ticking—another sort of countdown—and replacing fossil fuels is much easier with nuclear power in the equation. And yet the industry, in many respects, looks unready to step into a major role. It has consistently flopped as a commercial proposition. Decade after decade, it has broken its promises to deliver new plants on budget and on time, and, despite an enviable safety record, it has failed to put to rest the public’s fear of catastrophic accidents. Many of the industry’s best minds know they need a new approach, and soon. For inspiration, some have turned toward SpaceX, Tesla, and Apple. (...)

"Why Can't You Build Us a Nuclear Plant?"

When I started reporting this article, I imagined it might be a diatribe against the environmental movement’s resistance to nuclear power. For a generation or more, the United States has been fighting climate change—and all the other ills that result from fossil fuels—with one hand tied behind its back. Bruce Babbitt, a former secretary of the interior and governor of Arizona, was on a presidential commission to evaluate nuclear power after the Three Mile Island plant’s partial meltdown in 1979, the U.S. industry’s worst accident. Though no one died or was even injured—and the accident led to new protocols and training under which the plant’s second, intact reactor operated uneventfully until 2019—the accident hardened the public and environmentalists against nuclear energy. After that, as Babbitt told me, “opposition in the environmental community was near unanimous. The position was ‘No new nuclear plants, and we should phase out the existing nuclear base.’ ” Which was the road the U.S. took. Today legacy nuclear power supplies about 20 percent of American electricity, but the country has fired up only one new power reactor since 1996.

From an environmental point of view, this seems like a perverse strategy, because nuclear power, as most people know, is carbon-free—and is also, as fewer people realize, fantastically safe. Only the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, has caused mass fatalities from radioactivity, and the plant there was subpar and mismanaged, by Western standards. Excluding Chernobyl, the total number of deaths attributed to a radiation accident at a commercial nuclear-power plant is zero or one, depending on your interpretation of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima accident. The Fukushima evacuation certainly caused deaths; Japanese authorities have estimated that more than 2,000 people may have died from disruptions in services such as nursing care and from stress-related factors such as alcoholism and depression. (Some experts now believe that the evacuation was far too large.) Even so, Japan’s decision to shut down its nuclear plants has been estimated to cause multiples of that death toll, on account of the increased fossil-fuel pollution that followed.

The real challenge with giant nuclear plants like Fukushima and Three Mile Island is not making them safe but doing so at a reasonable price, which is the problem that companies like Kairos are trying to solve. But even people who feel scared of nuclear power do not dispute that fossil fuels are orders of magnitude more dangerous. One study, published in 2021, estimated that air pollution from fossil fuels killed about 1 million people in 2017 alone. In fact, nuclear power’s safety record to date is easily on par with the wind and solar industries, because wind turbines and rooftop panels create minor risks such as falls and fire. As for nuclear waste, it has turned out to be a surprisingly manageable problem, partly because there isn’t much of it; all of the spent fuel the U.S. nuclear industry has ever created could be buried under a single football field to a depth of less than 10 yards, according to the Department of Energy. Unlike coal waste, which is of course spewed into the air we breathe, radioactive waste is stored in carefully monitored casks.

And so environmentalists, I thought, were betraying the environment by stigmatizing nuclear power. But I had to revise my view. Even without green opposition, nuclear power as we knew it would have fizzled—today’s environmentalists are not the main obstacle to its wide adoption. (...)

Because solar and wind power are inherently intermittent, they require other energy sources to even out peaks and dips. Natural gas and coal can do that, but of course the goal is to retire them. Batteries can help but are much too expensive to rely on at present, and mining, manufacturing, and disposing of them entail their own environmental harms. Also, nuclear power is the only efficient way to provide zero-carbon heat for high-temperature industrial processes such as steelmaking, which account for about a fifth of energy consumption.

Perhaps most important, adding solar and wind capacity becomes more expensive and controversial as the most accessible land is used up. Nuclear energy’s footprint is extremely small. (...)

Finally, as low- and middle-income countries develop over the next several decades, they will almost double the world’s demand for electricity. Total global energy consumption will rise by 30 percent by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Meeting this challenge while reducing carbon emissions will be much harder, if not impossible, without a nuclear assist.

Recognizing as much, three consecutive administrations—Barack Obama’s, Donald Trump’s, and now Joe Biden’s—have included next-generation nuclear power in their policy agenda. Both parties in Congress support federal R&D funding, which has run into the billions in the past few years. Two-thirds of the states have told the Associated Press they want to include nuclear power in their green-energy plans. “Today the topic of new nuclear is front of mind for all our member utilities,” says Doug True, a senior vice president and the chief nuclear officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. “We have states saying, ‘Why can’t you build us a nuclear plant?’ ”

Thanks to those developments, the table is set for nuclear power in a way that has not been true for two generations. So what is the main problem for the nuclear-power industry? In sum: the nuclear-power industry.

by Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Brian Finke for The Atlantic