After a multi-decade winter, nuclear power is starting to heat up. Countries that had previously been actively cutting nuclear plants are beginning to reverse course. COP26, the global environmental conference, had leaders talking about how they could bring it back. The future appears to be small, modular reactors that don’t face the same sort of opposition as the big ones and have much lower regulatory costs. At the same time, the growing presence of wind and solar in the grid is driving home the variability of that source and the fragility of the supply chain for fossil fuels is becoming glaringly apparent (look no further than rolling blackouts in China because of coal shortages or eyewatering price increases for natural gas in Europe). With all that in mind, I thought it would be a good time to touch back on the benefits of reactors.
Nuclear is by far the most reliable source of energy while also delivering electricity at lower cost than any other source at the moment. Let’s return to Europe for an illustration by comparing Germany to France. Germany has achieved a great deal over the past decade in the implementation of wind and solar, but they still are paying nearly double for electricity and emitting far more CO2 per unit of energy created. Why? Germany cut out all nuclear energy production after the Fukushima disaster while France keeps nuclear for over 70% of its energy production.
Nuclear has a bad name because of Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. Two of those events, though, 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 about as much radiation as a chest x-ray. It was, despite the widespread panic, a non-event. Fukushima released even less radiation than that and there would have been no issue at all if they had followed American or French safety protocols. There are detailed records of complaints of lax safety standards well before the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that sparked the leak at Fukushima. Chernobyl’s meltdown was, however, a real disaster by any definition of the word. It 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 an example of successfully implemented safety standards, we have 6,000 combined nuclear reactor years in the US Navy aboard ships with precisely zero incidents of failure. People are able to work in close proximity to extremely powerful engines with no ill effects because of the efficiency of nuclear. By contrast, fossil fuels cause millions of premature deaths every year by damaging the lungs of everyone in a huge radius and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in damage in the form of climate change.
If it is the cheapest form of energy, it’s environmentally responsible, and it’s safe, why are nuclear power plants 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 out of needless fear.
The bright spot in this mess is a new(ish) form of nuclear reactor. Small modular reactors are designed to be manufactured at a factory and sent to their new site to be put into commission. Costs are dramatically lower because after one unit is licensed, subsequent licenses should be much simpler. There are also economies of scale resulting from the construction of the reactors in a designated plant; equipment used to build the reactor can be reused many times over. Some are even designed to house the nuclear waste as well; they are placed in the ground, plugged into the grid, and burn fuel until they no longer work, at which point they are self-contained waste containers.
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 by utilizing our deregulated grid and encouraging more development.