The single best measure of a developing nation’s prosperity is not GDP. GDP is difficult to measure in a cash-based economy with large informal sectors. It is energy consumption. We need energy for everything. In advanced economies, energy intensity (the amount of energy needed for a given amount of economic output) has declined over the last few decades. Innovation, though, has followed the path of least resistance when it comes to energy requirements. The likelihood of a technology’s realization from a futurist’s prediction from yesteryear is highly correlated to the energy intensity of that prediction (see chart below). Even some of the most promising computing technologies are limited by our ability to create energy cheaply. After the advent of nuclear power, some thought it would be too cheap to meter. Instead, there would be some low-cost subscription.
Unfortunately, the dream of effectively costless energy never materialized. Part of the issue is portability. There is not currently a fuel that is sufficiently energy-dense to put in an airplane and make the cost of travel cheap enough to make supersonic flight affordable. There are some promising things on the horizon for our grid, though. States with deregulated electricity supply have seen prices drop as private companies can compete over how to best deliver energy cheapest over the existing power grid. Solar and wind, once a distant dream, are dropping in price and gaining efficiency so quickly that some investors are reluctant to put their money to work because their investment will become obsolete so quickly.
The single cheapest and most reliable power source in existence emits no CO2 and also happens to be the safest. That power source currently makes up 72% of the power supply in France, giving them more than 40% cheaper energy than next-door Germany at a fraction of Germany’s carbon intensity (despite Germany’s enormous investments into wind and solar). France’s secret is nuclear power.
Nuclear has a bad name because of Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. Two of those events were much less significant than is widely believed and the third happened at a Soviet powerplant that doubled as a uranium enrichment facility. Three Mile Island, despite gross mismanagement, released enough radiation to give people in the immediate vicinity a chest x-ray. It was, despite the widespread panic, a non-event. Fukushima released even less radiation than that with an entirely preventable problem. If the operators had used protocols in place at modern French or American plants, there would have been no radiation leakage at all. Chernobyl, the biggest nuclear disaster to date, caused an exclusion zone that will not be lived in by humans for generations. The cause of that disaster involved some of the mechanics of the core, which was only designed that way in the interest of creating enriched uranium for usage in the manufacture of bombs. It would not have been replicable in any powerplants ever used in the US. For context, we have 6,000 combined nuclear reactor years in the US Navy with precisely zero incidents of failure.
If it is the cheapest form of energy and it’s the safest form of energy, why are nuclear powerplants becoming uncompetitive in the US? Obtaining a permit and building the powerplant might be prohibitively expensive, but surely if running the powerplant was cheap, they would continue to maintain existing plants. Unfortunately, annual regulatory costs PER PLANT range from $7.4 to $15.5 million. Most of this is spent on paperwork compliance. Essentially, we are regulating our best form of power out of business because of an imagined danger while thousands die every year from the health effects of other power sources such as coal. Bill Gates has invested in a company that may have found a way around it by creating prefabricated nuclear reactors that can then be installed in a distributed fashion, but the company has not shipped a single reactor since its establishment 14 years ago and there is not currently an ETA on the first.
Solar and wind may present a way out for the bulk of our energy needs should the costs continue to plummet, but they are both intermittent sources and they are both highly dependent on favorable weather for their particular form of energy gathering. Part of that could be solved with the installation of a better power grid. Some of our power grid still dates from close to 100 years ago. China has established high-powered direct current lines that now criss-cross their nation and allow them to send power from one region to another nearly instantaneously. We will need a better power grid to suit modern needs.
The future could be bright – both literally and figuratively – if we allow it to be. The inflation of energy costs over time is one of the great tragedies of our time and can be laid almost exclusively at the feet of regulation without thought to the burden placed on producers. Deregulated markets will help create healthy competition among producers, but leaving existing regulatory burdens in place would prevent nuclear from competing on even grounds. France provides us with a way forward on nuclear. We can make it distinctly American with some healthy competition.