What Saving Nuclear Taught Me About Coal
Last November marked the end of Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal’s first year. My goal in creating CGND was to develop and share a practical program for growing nuclear power in America. When we launched CGND, we were ready to look forward.
But that had to be put on the back burner in 2021 as the threat of premature closure grew greater for the Byron and Dresden nuclear plants in Illinois. Planning for tomorrow’s reactors will always be less important than protecting today’s.
Working to keep Byron and Dresden online was a formative experience. Over the last few years, I’ve written op-eds and circulated open letters about the economic and human impacts of closing nuclear plants around the country — including in Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Louisiana, Iowa, Arizona, and New York. But all this advocacy happened from an office in Berkeley, California, far away from the communities facing ruin.
As boots on the ground in Illinois, the stakes were clear. The workers we met with were our fellow Illinoians, and my apartment’s clean power was their livelihood. I drove through Zion, Illinois, a town devastated by the closure of its nuclear plant in 1998. In a brutal irony, Zion’s economic heart had been cut out at the dawn of a carbon-conscious era that should have made it a hub of clean energy. The town’s residents and business owners describe an ongoing, two-decade decline after the loss of the nuclear plant.
So while we started the fight to defend clean, reliable energy, more and more we were forced to see our fight in the most intimate, local, human terms. Instead of fighting as a keyboard warrior in the name of America and Planet Earth, I found myself waving flags in person alongside unions filled with people whose names I knew and whose families I met. I was fighting against the harsh fate immediately visible in towns across the midwest rather than for a lowered line on a graph of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
When the deal to save the plants was almost lost at the last moment because of demands by representatives of coal towns in southern Illinois desperately trying to stave off their own destruction, I had to take a hard look at my own priorities.
I went into the campaign in Illinois critical of coal. After all, it was concern about climate change that brought me to nuclear five years ago while still in college. And in all of the previous campaigns to save reactors, we’ve sounded ominous warnings about dirty coal taking over if nuclear is lost.
Coal is still the second-largest source of power in Illinois after nuclear. Not only does the state use a lot of coal, but it produces a lot as well. Illinois is America’s fourth-largest coal producer after Wyoming, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. If Byron and Dresden nuclear power plants had closed, their energy would have been back-filled in part by power plants burning Illinois’s coal to the tune of 20 million metric tons of CO2. That’s bad, of course, and we stopped it from happening.
But over the course of the 12 month struggle, I found myself in an increasingly uncomfortable position with coal. While campaigning alongside trade unions and workers for the Climate Union Jobs Act, I realized that the coal workers were making the same arguments I was about the nuclear plants: they provide high-skill, high-wage jobs, many of which are union-represented; they are economic engines for the towns they’re located in, creating more jobs outside of the plant and providing the tax base to fund public services; and they bring meaning to the communities that form around them.
In short, coal workers love their plants for good reason and are scared to surrender them. When I thought about the coal plants closing, I couldn’t shake the devastation I saw in Zion.
From the beginning, I wanted CGND to be different from other clean energy NGOs and campaigns. I believe the energy transition should be led by the workers who will be responsible for delivering it. Why should the men and women working at fossil fuel plants be an exception?
It’s not difficult to see why unions and workers are skeptical of the energy transition described by mainstream and progressive environmentalists. Their vision of fossil fuel divestment and closure purposefully puts the cart before the horse. The thought is that by shutting down coal and gas plants today (and nuclear, as environmentalists advocated for in Illinois), we would experience a sharp collapse in electricity generation, forcing painful cuts to consumption and potentially enough renewables would have to be built rapidly to make up for the loss.
Setting aside the danger of dismantling the system that keeps us alive without already-existing replacement, the next issue becomes their preference for replacement: solar and wind. The vast majority of jobs created by solar and wind are temporary, transient, and can’t be created in large numbers in the same places where existing fossil fuel jobs are being lost. Nor do these green jobs offer the pay, benefits, or union organizing potential of the fossil jobs they’re “replacing.”
Policymakers trying to accelerate the green transition have refused to take the concerns of labor seriously. They actively antagonize workers with proposals like the Green New Deal. Academics, NGOs, and activist networks have seized the public lead in decarbonization discourse, and labor has been expected to fall in line. Instead, I believe we should be offering options and empowering workers and energy communities to choose the path that matches their interests and needs.
Obviously, I think nuclear is an outstanding option. If they’re interested, coal communities should explore repowering their coal plant with a nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactors can be placed on power plant sites to take advantage of existing transmission, water, and transportation infrastructure. Nuclear plants need workers with skills and training that can overlap with work at fossil fuel facilities. Because a nuclear plant requires more workers than a coal plant of the same size, this path could potentially alleviate job loss from the mining sector, for coal plants located near active mining regions.
What’s good for workers is also good for communities: nuclear plants are unmatched economic engines, as almost all the cost of operation goes into local labor rather than consumable bulk commodities. Only a tiny fraction of nuclear plant costs is uranium fuel.
However, this option is not available to many coal communities across America. 13 states have moratoria on nuclear power, meaning there are restrictions or outright bans on the construction of new plants. A number of these states, like Illinois, are heavily reliant on coal and have the most to lose or to gain from the transition away from fossil fuels. In 2020, coal made up a quarter of Minnesota’s in-state electricity generation, only second to the power output of the state’s two nuclear plants. In Hawaii, lawmakers are grappling with what will replace the state’s only coal plant when it is shut down this year.
And then there’s West Virginia. In 2020, it was the second-largest coal producer in the nation. While coal remains king in the state — it accounted for 88% of electricity generation in 2020 — the shift away from coal across the country has decimated the state’s mining industry. This shift to cheap natural gas unlocked by the fracking revolution, including in West Virginia itself, has lowered the carbon intensity of electricity and improved local air quality. But the tragic consequences of this transition can be seen in lowered life expectancies, rates of opioid overdoses, and a near doubling of children in foster/kinship care.
There is hope. Just this month, the West Virginia legislature passed legislation to repeal the state’s nuclear moratorium. The measure enjoyed strong, bipartisan support. This comes on the heels of TerraPower’s announcement that it intends to build its new Natrium reactor at a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. Even before voting to repeal his state’s ban, West Virginia Senate President Craig Blair said he’s already heard from companies that would like to see the ban lifted.
West Virginia won’t be the first state to roll back its nuclear ban. Wisconsin repealed its moratorium on new nuclear in 2016. Kentucky followed suit in 2017. Last year, Montana became the most recent state to relax its restrictions, transferring the decision to build new nuclear from the public via referendum to the legislature. Additionally, Montana’s legislature passed a resolution to study the feasibility of replacing the coal-fired units at the state’s Colstrip power plant with small reactors.
There would no doubt be obstacles to repowering energy communities with nuclear. States desiring new nuclear would have to deal with discriminatory financing, an ossified Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a lack of experienced builders with established supply chains. However, West Virginia, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Montana are showing this is a path coal-heavy states want to explore. Moratoria are another way of depriving energy communities of options for the future.
By removing barriers to nuclear power, we can provide coal communities a chance to opt for a future that has never been put on the table before: producing clean electricity without sacrificing the things that make coal valuable.
