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Here’s what you need to know about the nuclear power comeback — including what’s going on, what’s new this time, and is it safe?
For a while there, nuclear energy looked like it was on its way out. After taking off post-World War II, it lost momentum toward the dawn of the 21st century, when sagging public support and mounting costs led to dozens of cancellations in the U.S. and drove the rate of new proposals off a cliff. Only a few reactors have been built in the U.S. this century; the most recent, Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4, were years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Vogtle-3 came online last summer, with Vogtle-4 — which was delayed even further by an equipment malfunction — expected to follow early this year.
It’s funny how time works, though. With demand for reliable zero-carbon energy rising, a new wave of nuclear developers is trying to recapture some of the industry’s long-lost momentum. They’re entering the race to net-zero with big ambitions — and much smaller reactor designs. Whether you’re wondering about the state of the U.S. nuclear power sector, what’s new about new nuclear, where the nuclear waste is going, and of course, whether it’s safe, read on.
Let’s start with the basics.
Nuclear reactors generate electricity using a process called fission. Inside the reactor’s core, a controlled chain reaction splits unstable uranium-235 into smaller elements; that process releases heat — a lot of heat.
The reactors in today’s U.S. nuclear fleet fall into two categories: boiling water reactors and pressurized water reactors. Each circulates water through the reactor core to manage the temperature and prevent meltdowns, and both use the heat produced by fission to create steam that powers turbines and thereby generates electricity. The main difference is in the details: Boiling water reactors use their coolant water to produce electricity directly, by capturing the steam, whereas pressurized water reactors keep their coolant water in a separate system that’s under enough pressure to prevent the water from turning to steam.
Some experimental reactors and newer commercial designs use different cooling systems, but we’ll get into those later. Lastly, while nuclear energy is not considered renewable, in the sense that it relies on a finite resource (enriched uranium) for fuel, it is a zero-emission energy source.
The sector emerged in the late 1950s and expanded rapidly over the next several decades. At its peak, the country’s nuclear fleet included 112 reactors — a number that has declined to about 90 today. Most of the surviving plants were built between 1970 and 1990.
The shrinkage has partly to do with the nuclear disarmament movement, which arose during the Cold War and grew to encompass nuclear power development, as well. (As it happens, much of the present day environmental movement has its roots in anti-nuclear activism.) Then there was the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, which intensified existing public opposition to nuclear energy projects. That growing pushback, combined with reduced growth in electricity demand and the significant up-front investments nuclear plants required, caused some projects to be scrapped and fewer to be proposed. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears.
Interest began to reemerge in the U.S. in the early 2000s as the budding public awareness of climate change cast doubt on the future viability of fossil fuels, but the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident quashed many of those plans. The last U.S. nuclear plant to start up before Vogtle-3 entered construction in 1973 but was suspended for two decades before its completion in 2016.
As of 2022, 18.2% of U.S. electricity came from the country’s remaining nuclear reactors, according to federal data. That’s less than we’ve seen in decades.
The share of nuclear power on the grid has been slowly dwindling as aging reactors are shut down and other resources — mainly natural gas and renewables — have taken on a greater proportion of the country’s electricity-generating burden. The share of electricity from renewables surpassed energy from nuclear for the first time in 2021; in 2022, renewables contributed 21.3% of U.S. electricity.
Like coal and gas plants (and renewables when paired with sufficient storage), nuclear provides baseload power — meaning it sends electricity onto the grid at a consistent, predictable rate — as opposed to sources like wind and solar on their own, which provide intermittent supply. Electric utilities depend heavily on nuclear plants and other baseload resources to match supply with continuously fluctuating demand, accommodating the variability of wind and solar without sending too much or too little power onto the grid, which would cause power surges or blackouts.
Generating electricity using nuclear fission remains a divisive issue that cuts across partisan lines. In the inaugural Heatmap Climate Poll, nuclear came in a distant last among clean energy sources people feel comfortable having in their communities.
Some major environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace maintain that the risk of serious disasters at nuclear power plants poses an unacceptable risk to communities and ecosystems. Others, including the Nature Conservancy, view it as a reliable low-carbon energy resource that’s — crucially — available to us today, while promising but immature options such as long-duration energy storage are still catching up.
Historically, nuclear has caused far fewer fatalities than fossil fuels, which generate all kinds of toxic, potentially deadly pollution — and that’s without factoring in their contribution to climate change and its associated disasters.
The companies now hoping to pioneer a new generation of nuclear reactors in the U.S. say their designs incorporate the lessons learned from the accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima, putting even more safeguards in place than the fleet of reactors operating across the country today. (There’s still a debate over whether the proposed reactors will actually be safer, though.)
Spent uranium fuel is radioactive, and will remain radioactive for a very long time. As a result, there’s still a lot of disagreement about where that waste should go.
The federal government tried in the early 2000s to create a national repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, but the project was stopped by intense local and regional opposition. The Western Shoshone, a tribe whose members have long faced exposure to radioactive fallout from nearby nuclear tests, sued the federal government in 2005. Harry Reid, a former U.S. Senator from Nevada who served as Majority Leader from 2007 to 2015, also fought against the repository.
In the absence of a central repository, the waste produced by nuclear plants is usually stored in deep water pools, which keep the spent fuel cool, or in steel casks onsite to keep the radiation from escaping into the surrounding environment.
If a repository eventually opens, some existing waste will likely be moved out of temporary storage and relocated there.
In short, the concrete behemoths that have long been the norm in the U.S. are really, really expensive to build. They also — like the two new Vogtle reactors — have a tendency to go way over their deadlines and budgets. That makes the electricity nuclear plants generate particularly expensive.
The vast majority of U.S. coal plants were built during the same few decades as most of the country’s nuclear reactors. But when utilities started to face more pressure to reduce their carbon emissions, toppling coal’s reign over the power sector, utilities wound up preferring to build cheaper — and, at least at the time, less controversial — natural gas power plants over nuclear power plants.
But public opinion is beginning to shift. About 57% of American adults favor building new nuclear power, a Pew Research Center survey found last year, compared with 43% in 2016. Though support is higher among Republicans than Democrats, it’s on the rise within both parties.
Today’s electric grid is a far cry from the 20th-century grid that traditional nuclear reactors were built for, and the new reactor models that are making the most headway reflect those changes. In general, these designs are smaller, cheaper (at least on paper), and more flexible than those already in operation.
Unlike traditional reactors, which generally require a lot of custom fabrication to be completed at the project site, small modular reactors — such as the ones being developed by NuScale Power — have components that are meant to be made in a factory, assembled quickly wherever they’ll operate, and combined with other modules as needed to increase power output. Fast reactors (so-named for their highly energized neutrons), like Bill-Gates-fronted TerraPower’s Natrium design, circulate coolants other than water through the core. (Natrium uses liquid sodium.)
Advocates of next-generation nuclear power are optimistic that the first such reactors will come online before the end of the decade. Several of the leading proposals have run into financial and logistical troubles over the last couple of years, however. In November, NuScale canceled its flagship project at the Idaho National Laboratory. It had been on track to be the first commercial small modular reactor built in the U.S. but was thwarted by rising costs, which caused too many expected buyers of its electricity to pull their support.
Nuclear’s image is recovering globally, too. Some of the companies working on demonstration reactors in the U.S. have been outspoken about wanting to see their designs supplant fossil fuels and provide abundant energy all over the world. Meanwhile, many countries are devoting plenty of their own resources to nuclear power.
Japan, which shuttered its sizable nuclear fleet in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident, is slowly bringing some of its nuclear capacity back online. In December, Japanese regulators lifted an operational ban on the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear plant in the world.
Nuclear power is also enjoying renewed popularity in parts of Europe, including France and the U.K. In France, where the long-dominant technology has faltered in recent years, a half-dozen new nuclear power plants are in the works, and even more small modular reactors could follow. The U.K. is also planning a new wave of nuclear development.
Elsewhere, including in Germany, nuclear hasn’t found the same traction. After delaying the closure of its last three nuclear reactors amid natural gas shortages caused by the war in Ukraine, Germany closed the reactors last spring, eliciting a mixed reaction from environmental groups.
Meanwhile, China has close to 23 gigawatts of nuclear capacity under construction — the “largest nuclear expansion in history,” Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, told CNBC last year.
It’s still early days for most of the world’s next-generation nuclear reactors. With even the most promising designs largely unproven, there’s plenty of uncertainty about where today’s projects will ultimately lead. That makes it tricky to predict what role nuclear power will play in the energy transition over the coming decades.
There’s plenty of interest in building more capacity, however. In December, at COP28, the U.S. and 24 other countries — including Japan, Korea, France and the UK — signed on to a goal of tripling global nuclear energy capacity by 2050 in order to stay on track to reach net-zero emissions by then. Nuclear plants could also be an important source of carbon-free energy for producing green hydrogen, a nascent industry that got a major boost from tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act.
But the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s most recent capacity forecast projects that the total amount of electricity from the country’s nuclear plants will decline in the coming decades — representing just 13% of net power generation by 2050.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”