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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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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.