Confessions of a nuclear shill
I’ve talked a lot about wind and solar and batteries in past editions of this newsletter. This week on Bright Ideas, I need to address the source of carbon-free electrons that clean energy advocates love to hate.
Nuclear power plants create a fifth of all the electricity in the U.S. each year. They do not emit carbon emissions. Nuclear is our largest source of carbon-free electrons, more than all the renewables combined. And it works all year long, not just when the weather cooperates.
But it’s hard for anyone to talk dispassionately about this type of power plant. Before we got hip to the climate change threat, environmentalists spent years fighting nuclear power. It creates, as you may have heard, nuclear waste, which is not nice to be around. If you run it like the Soviets, you could even melt down a reactor and cause widespread death and devastation. More recently, new plant construction has ground too a halt because it’s so expensive and seems to require unseemly “corporate welfare.”
Bernie Sanders, champion of the Green New Deal, labeled nuclear power a “false solution” in his presidential campaign platform. He wanted to stop building new plants and even close existing ones. That’s like repeating the first 20 meters in the 100 meter dash to a clean grid, as if the contest wasn’t hard enough already.
The first and only time I was publicly accused of being “a nuclear shill” was for quoting experts who saw room for nuclear in fighting climate change (the accusing Tweet seems to have been deleted, but check out the 400 comments on the inciting article for a sense of the vitriol). In the clean energy yearbook, nuclear’s superlative is “most likely to start a fight.”
I’ll boldly attempt to unpack this controversy, and why it matters, in a few hundred words, by explaining its tragic arc: our biggest source of emissions-free electricity now faces the most difficult and uncertain future.
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‘Square vs. rectangle’ of clean energy
Over the last several years, a quiet internal struggle raged between two camps that, to an outsider, seem in perfect agreement on all key points. One group wanted 100 percent renewable energy. Their bitter nemeses desired 100 percent clean energy.
For a while, the nomenclature mattered little. Then states started passing laws to achieve these visions, and all the sudden word choice mattered a great deal.
Battle lines were drawn around nuclear. If you commit to only renewable energy, as Hawaii did in 2015, you categorically exclude nuclear power. If you commit to 100 percent “clean” or “carbon-free” or “zero emission” power, you leave room for nuclear, and other exotic approaches like burning gas but catching the emissions and stowing them.
My “nuclear shill” reporting questioned whether it made sense for California to limit its grid to only renewables. Presumably, technology will advance in the next 30 years; why lock in a few chosen resources available right now? If you did that 30 years ago, wouldn’t you have excluded wind and solar?
With legislation on the table in the world’s fifth largest economy, the debate wasn’t just academic. (For what it’s worth, California later took the more open-ended clean energy route)
Are you Team Renewables-Only, or Team Carbon-Free? Your squad should see this!
Own worst enemy
There are bad and good reasons to oppose nuclear power.
Safety concerns tend to come up first, but have little bearing on the history of U.S. nuclear power production, which hasn’t killed anybody. At this very moment, the U.S. Navy has dozens of young twenty-somethings operating nuclear reactors to propel submarines and aircraft carriers. They do it without incident, just like the highly regulated civilian operators.
But Fukushima, people say. That disaster showed that meltdowns are possible, even outside of Soviet office culture. But the immediate lesson was positively banal: if you’re building a nuclear plant in a tsunami flood zone, don’t put your backup generators in a place where they’ll get flooded just when you might need them to keep the reactors safe.
Waste scares people, but then again, we know how to store it, because we do it all the time.
However, the really good reason to doubt nuclear power is that the industry has proven incapable of building anything new that’s remotely on time or on budget. Only one plant is getting built in the U.S. right now, in Georgia. It’s years behind schedule and billions over the original budget. Utilities building one in South Carolina gave up without finishing; egregiously, their customers still had to pay the bill, even though it never delivered any electricity.
America has trouble building big things these days. When I lived in the Bay Area, the flashy new bus terminal opened, then promptly shut because it couldn’t hold the weight of buses; the same happened in D.C. when I lived there. Flaws in designing and pouring concrete turn into massive and costly delays for nuclear plants, while solar and wind keep getting cheaper.
Building massive plants can work when the government does it nationwide (see France, South Korea, China). In the U.S., it’s become too hard for any company to take the risk on a one-off.
Look up Oregon’s Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, shown here before demolition in 2006, for a sense of the problems with the old style of nuclear development. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Time for a change
Solar panels ushered in a world of miniature power plants at homes and businesses, in contrast to the beefy centralized plants of the old system. Nuclear needs to go that way too.
The general consensus is that existing nuclear plants can keep running as long as physically possible, but new construction requires a new approach. The hot young technology is “small modular reactors” or SMRs. Instead of an impossible mega project, these would be built and tested in a factory, shipped on a truck bed, and installed for vastly lower cost. Investors support several startups in this vein; one of them is working through multi-year approval from the federal government.
The switch could assuage legitimate opposition to boondoggles and corporate welfare.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the House’s Green New Deal champion, split with Bernie Sanders recently by saying the “the door is open for nuclear.” But it’s up to the nuclear industry to prove it can work in a more nimble, decentralized future.
The Energy Stream
Over the last week, L.A. became a hub for protests against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. L.A.’s massive, militarized response to initial protests, and subsequent escalations, have turned the downtown landscape out my window into one of a heavily armed surveillance state.
To drown out the omnipresent and mind-numbing roar of helicopters, I flipped on Escape from New York (streaming on Amazon and elsewhere). In this 1981 John Carpenter flick, the downward slide of American society prompted the feds to turn Manhattan into one giant, heavily fortified penal colony. When Air Force One crash lands there, the guards send in war-hero-turned-bank-robber Snake Plissken to retrieve the president.
The film feels weirdly relevant, because Kurt Russell’s hairdo as Snake looks like he’s been in quarantine with us for three months.
There’s also a plot device involving a cassette tape (!) that holds supposedly groundbreaking revelations about nuclear fusion, but the script spends as little time explaining that technology as I will in Bright Ideas. Sorry, that’s an energy joke—while nuclear fission powers a fifth of U.S. electricity, nuclear fusion has no more role in the grid than when this movie came out in the early ‘80s.