Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

The Democratic Party Is Pro-Nuclear — and Ready to Talk About It

An age-old tension, resolved.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

For as long as I’ve been an energy reporter, I’ve been asked a scoffing question by moderates and conservatives: If Democrats really cared about climate change, shouldn’t they embrace nuclear power?

It’s a fair question. Nuclear energy, after all, can produce vast amounts of electricity without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution. It already generates more zero-carbon electricity in America than wind turbines and solar panels do combined; unlike renewables, it can provide power all day and night, even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The countries that have seen the largest year-over-year drops in carbon pollution — e.g. France — have generally done so by building a new fleet of nuclear reactors.

It’s also a factual question. For years, even as Democrats railed against fossil fuels, they dilly-dallied on nuclear issues. The party’s leaders in statehouses and legislative chambers around the country worked to shut down aging nuclear reactors or approved nuclear-skeptical regulators. President Barack Obama cheered next-generation nuclear in speeches, but appointed extremely nuclear-skeptical regulators to oversee the industry. (One of his first appointees to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, has called for a global ban on nuclear energy since leaving the government.)

Even though nuclear reactors produced most of America’s zero-carbon electricity, they remained the, well, glowing-blue-haired step-child of America’s grid: Democrats regularly railed against fossil fuels, and they felt comfortable paying lip service to far-off atomic technologies, but they did not lavish nuclear with the unqualified support that they gave renewables. Instead, they let the nuclear industry slip into senescence. This mild toleration was punctuated by moments of extreme cognitive dissonance, such as when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021 without lining up new zero-carbon generation to replace it — leading the state’s carbon emissions to soar.

Of course, Democrats didn’t have to do much to kill nuclear: At the same time, the market was doing a perfectly good job of it. As cheap natural gas flooded the American energy system in the 2010s, more and more nuclear plants became too expensive to run. From 2012 to 2022, 12 nuclear reactors shut down in the U.S., taking nearly 10,000 megawatts of low-carbon generation offline.

That was the status quo as recently as 2020 or even 2022. And it has remained the status quo in energy commentary. “What role, if any, does [Vice President Kamala Harris] see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans?” askedThe New York Times columnist Bret Stephens last month, in a column titled “What Harris Must Do to Win Over Skeptics (Like Me).” At the vice presidential debate earlier this month, Republican nominee JD Vance even alluded to the argument amid a broader paean to fossil fuels. “If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you've got to invest in more energy production,” Vance said. “We haven't built a nuclear facility — I think one — in the past 40 years.”

In fact, Vance is wrong: The United States recently turned on two new nuclear reactors in Georgia — the first newly built reactors in America in 30 years. But this idea — Why aren’t we building more nuclear reactors? Why don’t Democrats do more to help nuclear? — has been a throughline of energy punditry since well before Vance was a best-selling author.

So I want to intervene in this conversation and note that the answer has now changed. Democrats are a pro-nuclear party now — not uniformly, but then again, neither are Republicans. Over the past several years, Democratic lawmakers and officials have adopted a slate of aggressively pro-nuclear policies and characterized the technology as pro-climate. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has called for America to build a new wave of conventional nuclear reactors — going much further than Obama ever did. Sometimes working with Republicans — but sometimes working alone, too — Democrats have pushed billions of dollars of support toward conventional nuclear reactors and the nascent advanced nuclear industry.

It’s worth stepping back here and going over what has actually changed.

For the past 10 years at least, both parties have been credibly committed to building up the advanced nuclear industry — the theoretical next generation of nuclear reactors that will be smaller, cleaner, and safer than the behemoths built during the Cold War. During the Trump administration, Congress passed a bipartisan bill meant to push along the advanced nuclear industry. It also passed the Energy Act of 2020, which authorized a demonstration program for advanced nuclear reactors.

The Biden administration has continued this support. The bipartisan infrastructure law created a $6 billion program that would pay existing nuclear power plants to stay open. At least $1.1 billion of that money will go to keeping Diablo Canyon, California’s only operating nuclear facility and its largest power plant, from shutting down; it was originally slated to close in 2025.

Earlier this year, Biden also extended a key program that indemnifies the nuclear industry for the cost of nuclear accidents and disasters above $16.1 billion.

But perhaps the most important nuclear law passed in the past five years is the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate package. For the first time ever, that law embraced the idea of “technology neutrality,” which means that electricity generated by nuclear reactors is now on the same footing as power from wind turbines or solar panels. If a method of electricity generation emits almost no carbon, then the government subsidizes it under the IRA.

The law is already helping restart nuclear reactors that have recently closed such as the Palisades reactor in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The utility giant NextEra is also exploring plans to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, which closed in 2020. If those go through, then it will be able to take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act funding, as well.

Lawmakers from both parties have continued to back advanced nuclear research and deployment. Under Biden, Congress passed the ADVANCE Act, containing a hodgepodge of policies meant to help the advanced nuclear industry. Among other changes, it instructs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to move faster when approving new reactor designs, and it changes that agency’s mission statement to more affirmatively support nuclear development.

Biden administration officials haven’t just backed that legislation, they’ve also asserted that it will “help us build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s,” as Michael Goff, who leads the Energy Department’s nuclear office, bragged in a statement.

The irony is that nuclear plants are now doing well enough that Congress has clawed back some of the money from the bipartisan infrastructure law. The industry, seemingly, doesn’t need it any more, and no additional nuclear reactors have been scheduled to shut down. In 2024, Congress stripped up to $3.7 billion to pay for a program to produce a type of high-assay used in next-generation nuclear reactors.

Democrats have begun to brag about their nuclear policymaking efforts on the campaign trail, as well. In her speech on economic policy earlier this month, Kamala Harris included “advanced nuclear” in a list of technologies that her administration would support.

“We will invest in biomanufacturing and aerospace; remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies; expand our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing,” she said, “so the next generation of breakthroughs — from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear — are not just invented but built here in America by American workers.”

The party’s Senate candidates have become even more positive about nuclear energy. Candidates in Arizona, Michigan, Florida, and Texas have all backed nuclear power, as the reporter Alexander Kaufman at Huffpost has shown.

This transformation has happened even though the big big environmental groups that have historically set the party’s energy priorities have not changed their mind on nuclear. Although many green groups have scaled back or defunded their anti-nuclear activism, their rhetoric remains staunchly anti-nuclear. The Sierra Club calls nuclear power a “uniquely dangerous energy technology for humanity” and states on its website: “The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.”

The party’s approach to nuclear hasn’t informed all its policy yet. The Biden administration’s nominations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been criticized by pro-nuclear advocates for continuing the status quo or for not knowing enough about the advanced nuclear industry.

But Democrats are, by any measure, much more pro-nuclear now than they were 10 years ago — and much more pro-nuclear than they were a decade before that. (It’s often forgotten now that President Bill Clinton’s would-be climate policy, the BTU tax, also would have levied a fee on nuclear reactors.) Republicans also remain fairly pro-nuclear: Donald Trump has promised to approve “hundreds of new power plants,” including “new reactors,” during his presidency.

What remains unclear is whether both parties can persist in this new pro-nuclear formation. Nuclear energy is popular with a majority of the public, but only just; 56% of Americans favor building more nuclear power plants, according to the Pew Research Center. And there are signs, if you squint, of a potential coming era of GOP skepticism of nuclear power — part of the party’s broader turn against science and high-trust institutions.

Signs like: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been added to Trump’s transition team, believes that nuclear power is unsafe and uneconomical. Even Trump himself, in conversation with Elon Musk, has worried about “nuclear warming” — it’s not clear what he was talking about, but it might be nuclear war — and said that nuclear has a “branding problem.” Even if Trump continues to support the idea of building “new reactors,” his potentially illegal plan to claw back the Inflation Reduction Act’s unspent funding may lead to pandemonium in the sector. If the nuclear industry is now planning on receiving IRA subsidies, then ending those subsidies — especially in a messy or chaotic way — could spell disaster.

There are identity-driven reasons for Republicans to turn on nuclear, too: The nuclear energy industry is more unionized than any other energy source, and it requires a highly institutionalized and educated workforce. (Yet not all the trends augur a realignment: Nuclear power remains much more popular with men than women.)

For now, though, both parties — including Democrats — support building new nuclear power plants. The economics are good for once, too. The question now is how long that will hold.

Green

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Electric Vehicles

Tesla Is Now a Culture War Totem (Plus Some AI)

The EV-maker is now a culture war totem, plus some AI.

A Tesla taking an exit.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Tesla

During Alan Greenspan’s decade-plus run leading the Federal Reserve, investors and the financial media were convinced that there was a “Greenspan put” underlying the stock market. The basic idea was that if the markets fell too much or too sharply, the Fed would intervene and put a floor on prices analogous to a “put” option on a stock, which allows an investor to sell a stock at a specific price, even if it’s currently selling for less. The existence of this put — which was, to be clear, never a stated policy — was thought to push stock prices up, as it gave investors more confidence that their assets could only fall so far.

While current Fed Chair Jerome Powell would be loath to comment on a specific volatile security, we may be seeing the emergence of a kind of sociopolitical put for Tesla, one coming from the White House and conservative media instead of the Federal Reserve.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Climate Tech

Climate Tech Is Facing a ‘Moment of Truth’

The uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic policymaking could not have come at a worse time for the industry.

Cliimate tech.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

This is the second story in a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.

Climate tech investment rode to record highs during the Biden administration, supercharged by a surge in ESG investing and net-zero commitments, the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, and at least initially, low interest rates. Though the market had already dropped somewhat from its recent peak, climate tech investors told me that the Trump administration is now shepherding in a detrimental overcorrection. The president’s fossil fuel-friendly rhetoric, dubiously legal IIJA and IRA funding freezes, and aggressive tariffs, have left climate tech startups in the worst possible place: a state of deep uncertainty.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Energy

AM Briefing: Overheard at CERAWeek

On the energy secretary’s keynote, Ontario’s electricity surcharge, and record solar power

CERAWeek Loves Chris Wright
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Critical fire weather returns to New Mexico and Texas and will remain through Saturday • Sharks have been spotted in flooded canals along Australia’s Gold Coast after Cyclone Alfred dropped more than two feet of rain • A tanker carrying jet fuel is still burning after it collided with a cargo ship in the North Sea yesterday. The ship was transporting toxic chemicals that could devastate ecosystems along England’s northeast coast.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Chris Wright says climate change is a ‘side effect of building the modern world’

In a keynote speech at the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told executives and policymakers that the Trump administration sees climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world,” and said that “everything in life involves trade-offs." He pledged to “end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change” and insisted he’s not a climate change denier, but rather a “climate realist.” According toThe New York Times, “Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause.” Wright also reportedly told fossil fuel bosses he intended to speed up permitting for their projects.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow