The Case for Nuclear Power
08.27.21
In 2003, Bill Gates’s scientist gave up hope for nuclear. This was a damning opinion coming from Vaclav Smil, perhaps the world’s foremost public intellectual on all things energy (Bill Gates, among other mega-fans, “waits for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.”).
“Looking back after nearly half a generation of commercial nuclear generation,” wrote Smil, “I call nuclear electricity a successful failure.” Successful, in that it once provided 17% of the world’s electricity (before a slew of anti-nuclear policies and China’s surge in coal-fired plants). A failure, in that no developed nation wanted to come near it anymore.
Nearly twenty years later, after France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States shuttered dozens of plants and scaled back their existing commitments to nuclear, Smil felt validated in his earlier prediction. “The West has essentially given up on this clean, carbon-free way of electricity generation,” he observed. A strange paradox for an international community desperate to combat climate change at the upcoming COP26 Conference (the UN’s premier gathering on climate change, scheduled for November 2021).
This sentiment was further reinforced last week when COP26 organizers denied nuclear groups participation in the Green Zone, an influential platform at the conference used to broadcast the world’s most promising plans for sustainability and environmental policies. Several UK environmentalist groups latched onto the news, agreeing that nuclear power had “no place” on the international agenda.
Is nuclear power doomed to extinction, or can it be rescued as a robust national energy source? This issue, we seek to answer the question of nuclear power failure: why are Western nations retiring nuclear plants — the world’s second largest source of low-carbon electricity — at the same critical moment that they hope to rapidly reduce emissions? Is the problem one of cultural ignorance, political failure, or simply poor economics?
Diablo Canyon & Anti-Nuclear Environmentalism
Once upon a time, the prospect of building a new nuclear power plant was no more offensive than the idea of building a new shopping mall. Many conservationists viewed nuclear power as an attractive alternative to unsightly dams, which were clogging up many of the nation’s most treasured waterways (even the Grand Canyon was once up for grabs). “Nuclear power is one of the chief long-term hopes for conservation,” argued Sierra Club President Will Siri in 1966. “Cheap energy in unlimited quantities is one of the chief factors allowing a large, rapidly growing population to set aside wildlands, open space and lands of high-scenic value.”
In no state was this more relevant than in California, which welcomed the first nuclear power plant to its shores — Diablo Canyon, now scheduled for closure in 2025 — in a bid to become the nation’s leading energy provider and atomic homestead. PG&E, California’s favorite energy utility, looked to nuclear power as the “fuel of the future,” easily capable of plugging any energy shortfall for a growing population.
In 1967, the Sierra Club worked in tandem with PG&E to find a suitable site for the nuclear plant and settled on Diablo Canyon, a remote stretch of shoreline formerly used for cattle grazing. In return, PG&E would convert Nipomo Dunes — the original site picked for construction — to parkland. The compromise was viewed as a triumph of conservationists working with industry. “It showed we’re not against everything,” recounted Ansel Adams, the legendary landscape photographer. PG&E celebrated the deal by handing out atomic pins to local politicians and putting up advertisements of young children playing in a futuristic nuclear park.
But the good PR didn’t last long. David Brower, a senior member of the Sierra Club, was so outraged by the compromise that he left the club to start his own faction, Friends of the Earth, now one of the most vocal anti-nuclear environmentalist groups in America.
Anti-nuclear sentiment was soon picked up by other grassroots movements, including the Abalone Alliance and Mothers for Peace, who felt that atomic energy was just another guise for atomic war. In 1979, Hollywood presciently released The China Syndrome, a Jane Fonda thriller whose central plot point depended on the belief that a nuclear meltdown could bore a hole straight to China. Twelve days later, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident struck, no doubt lending credibility to the idea (subsequent studies determined that the accident had no detectable health consequences).
By 1981, protests had reached a fever pitch, and nearly 2,000 citizens were arrested during a blockade of Diablo Canyon, including singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. “The shadow of a devil — a Diablo — hangs over you,” concluded Walter Mondale, whose main talking point as the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee was a nuclear freeze with Russia. Between 1979 and 1988, sixty-seven planned nuclear-power projects were cancelled, and the Department of Energy’s “integral fast reactor” project — an innovative reprocessing system designed to eliminate waste and prevent any possibility of meltdown — was abandoned three years before completion.
Policy Choices Displace Nuclear
In recent years, political favor has fallen on renewables, siphoning funds away from nuclear power and, unwittingly or not, increasing demand for natural gas. Some critics have interpreted the “unholy alliance” between natural gas providers, environmentalists, and renewables (self-proclaimed as the “perfect partners” in many ad campaigns) as a cynical maneuver by big utilities to lock us into contracts with faulty renewables, thereby guaranteeing their own future as a supplementary fuel source.
“The idea that we’re going to replace oil and coal and natural gas with solar and wind — and nothing else –is a hallucinatory delusion,” said journalist Michael Shellenberger, best-selling author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko. “The entire renewables lobby is basically in an open public alliance with natural gas companies, including BP and Shell, actively building solar plants and working with Greenpeace to shutdown nuclear plants.” Whether or not utilities truly believe renewables are viable, it makes sense for them to follow government subsidies. Over the next 20 years, renewables are predicted to capture two-thirds of global investments in power plants until 2040.
One reason PG&E gave for the upcoming closure of Diablo Canyon (California’s last remaining nuclear plant), was California’s electricity regulations. Despite being 360x more land efficient than wind farms, and 75x more efficient than solar plants, nuclear plants come second in scheduling priority to renewables. This would have put Diablo on a half-time schedule, doubling its generation costs. “I am sorry to see it go, because from a national energy policy standpoint, we need greenhouse gas-free electricity,” said Anthony Earley, CEO of PG&E. “But we are regulated by the state of California, and California’s policies are driving this.”
The situation is further exacerbated by cheap natural gas prices, which have only spiked above $5/mmBTU — the price at which gas-fired generation undercuts nuclear — twice since 2011. There are currently 93 operating commercial power reactors in the US, down from a peak of 104 operating in 2012. Four more are scheduled to close this year.
Ecomodernism: Have Your Energy and Eat It Too
Some countries, like China and India, are embracing nuclear power as a cheap, reliable energy source to mitigate widespread air pollution. Of the 50 nuclear reactors currently under construction, 18 are in China and 7 are in India. In just four years, China built 20 new nuclear power plants, doubling their total capacity to 47 GW in 2020. In June, it started building its first small modular reactor (SMR), a compact model more well-suited for boutique applications.
Western demand, on the other hand, is contingent on the growth of electric vehicles, desalinization, energy policies, and public opinion. While many hoped that renewables would offer a “Solartopia” future, problems of land use, waste disposal, and reliability are already coming into focus. (When it comes to recycling time in 2050, the Environmental Protection Agency predicts that each new wind farm “is a towering promise of future wreckage.”)
Nuclear, on the other hand, is increasingly receiving recognition for its low-waste properties, high-power density, and superior safety record. Despite its outsized reputation as an “industry of death,” nuclear power has the lowest fatality rate of current energy sources and is confirmed as the safest form of energy when measured as deaths per TWh generated.
A growing contingent of environmentalists — known as “ecomodernists” on Twitter — reject environmentalism’s traditional orthodoxy and embrace nuclear power as the only viable solution to cap carbon emissions without resorting to eco-fascism or colonialist energy policies.
“Poverty is not my favorite solution to climate change,” said Rachel Pritzker, a prominent ecomodernist and founder of the Pritzker Innovation Fund, an organization devoted to solving environmental problems through technology. “There’s a common assumption in the environmental community that to solve climate change, we basically need to prevent other countries from developing the way we have. And what that amounts to is essentially asking people and countries to use a tiny fraction of the energy we do to stay poor. I just think that’s both immoral and infeasible.”
Rather than resisting modernization, ecomodernists embrace it, touting economic growth, positive thinking, and cheap energy access as the best solutions to global poverty.
Zion Lights, a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, a controversial environmentalist group, sums up the change in sentiment nicely: “I often say that if I save one nuclear reactor from being prematurely shut down, it will make more of a difference than anything I’ve done in over 15 years of climate activism,” she tweeted. “And I went vegan in 2003, was arrested for climate action in 2008, and never learned to drive.”
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