Sign In or Create an Account.

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

Politics

Congress Might Be on the Verge of Passing the Year’s First Climate Law

Turns out, nuclear energy is the rare point on which Democrats and Republicans can all agree.

Nuclear power.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Congress appears to be very close to passing the first climate law of 2024. But don’t look for the word ‘climate‘ in it.

On Wednesday, the House voted overwhelmingly to pass the Atomic Energy Advancement Act, a bill designed to update nuclear energy laws and regulations to better accommodate newer, advanced nuclear reactor designs.

Nuclear plants are the largest source of clean energy in the U.S. and building more of them is one of the rare climate solutions that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Electricity demand is surging for the first time in decades, thanks in part to the boom in domestic manufacturing of electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and other devices needed for the energy transition. In addition to not producing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear plants are uniquely equipped to help meet that demand because they are extremely reliable and can run at near-full capacity pretty much 24/7.

And yet nuclear technology is in an awkward phase in the U.S. Recent attempts to build old-school reactors have ended up years behind schedule and gone billions over budget. Meanwhile, there are lots of companies itching to deploy newer designs, but U.S. nuclear policy is geared toward the older tech and it’s not easy for newer ideas to break through.

The House bill aims to address this, first and foremost, by directing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal body that issues nuclear plant licenses, to update its mission statement. The new vision for the agency would be to operate “in a manner that is efficient and does not unnecessarily limit the potential of nuclear energy to improve the general welfare and the benefits of nuclear energy technology to society.” Though it’s not spelled out explicitly, that includes the climate benefits.

Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, who was one of the bill’s lead sponsors, said in a statement that expanding U.S. nuclear “both here and abroad” is essential both to reducing emissions and to “building durable economic and strategic relationships around the world” — a reference, most likely, to the growing nuclear ambitions of China and Russia. But he was also motivated by challenges much closer to home.

“South Carolina is growing which means our power demand is increasing,” Duncan said. “My home state uses twice as much energy as we produce which is leading to a resource adequacy crisis in the state — while the Nation also sits on the precipice of an energy crisis. The good news for South Carolina is that we are blessed with expertise in nuclear technology.”

The bill comes on the heels of COP28, the United Nations Climate Conference held in December, wherethe Biden administration signed on to an international declaration to triple nuclear energy by 2050 in order to reduce emissions and keep global temperatures from climbing to catastrophic heights.

The change in mission statement is particularly important, Adam Stein, the director of the nuclear energy innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute told me. He said the NRC has a fairly broad mandate from Congress, but unlike other federal agencies that consider costs and benefits in their decision-making, the Commission currently focuses exclusively on safety. “The agency's self-imposed limitations prevent a comprehensive evaluation of its role in addressing crucial societal challenges such as climate change and clean energy adoption.” He said the amendment would empower the Commission to consider a wider array of factors, including public health, environmental protection, and national energy goals.

To live up to this new ethos, the Commission would have to establish practices for evaluating applications that enable faster and more predictable reviews. The bill directs the NRC to streamline environmental assessments, in line with the National Environmental Policy Act reforms Congress passed last summer, and establish nuclear-specific “categorical exclusions,” or actions that do not require environmental review. It also boosts the NRC's staffing capacity to process applications more efficiently.

The NRC would also have to develop an expedited process for applicants using previously licensed reactor designs and that plan to build on or adjacent to an existing nuclear plant. Today the process can take five years, and the Commission must limit it, in these cases, to 25 months max. The Commission would also have to lower the fees it charges companies to apply for licenses.

The bill contains other reforms, including directing the Commission to create a separate regulatory framework for fusion reactors. The Department of Energy would have to update export requirements to encourage the deployment of U.S. technologies abroad. The bill also creates a pilot project, directing the DOE to enter into a long-term power purchase agreement with a yet-to-be-built, first-of-a-kind nuclear plant by the end of 2028. Such an agreement would give the lucky developer the certainty they need to finance a riskier project.

Now, the legislation will head to the Senate, which will have to reconcile it with a bill passed last summer called the Advance Act that contained many — but not all — of the same policies and programs.

“I think when you compare those you'll see relatively broad agreement between the House and the Senate that something needs to be done here,” Evan Chapman, the U.S. federal policy director at Clean Air Task Force, told me.

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

There Has Never Been a Better Time for EV Battery Swapping

With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.

A battery with wheels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.

That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Energy

AM Briefing: Record Renewables Growth

On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture

Low-Carbon Sources Provided 41% of the World’s Power Last Year
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Estimated losses from recent severe U.S. storms top $80 billion

The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Economy

Tariffs Just Killed the Last Hope of a U.S. Mining Boom

Mining companies have asked for federal support — but this isn’t what most of them had in mind.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

It took Donald Trump just over two months to potentially tank his own American mineral supply chain renaissance.

At the time Trump entered office, it looked like the stars could align for an American mining boom. Mining jobs had finally recovered to pre-COVID levels, thanks in part to demand for the metals required to engineer the transition away from fossil fuels (and, paradoxically, continued demand for coal). A lot of the gains in mining stocks were thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered a huge tax break to mining and metal processing companies and mandated that the consumer EV credit apply only to cars with a certain percentage of domestically-sourced material.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue