Nuclear Power, Climate Change Adaptation, and Good Governance
In a reversal of a 2019 decision, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now requiring nuclear reactors to undergo a further environmental review before being granted license extensions to operate for 80 years. This reversal does not guarantee greater scrutiny of how those reactors might respond to the impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise, heat, and more frequent and intense storms and flood events. But it does ensure that the NRC’s decisions about whether to keep old nuclear reactors operational will be informed by ever-accumulating knowledge about climate change and its impacts. Considering additional information about interactions with climate change means that some reactors’ licenses might not be extended. But this reversal supports the viability and social license of the U.S.’s nuclear fleet, thereby helping to preserve a crucial zero-emissions resource for the power sector.
On February 24, 2022 the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) updated the environmental review requirements for nuclear reactor license extensions. Making sense of that decision and its importance requires first explaining three key points of context: nuclear reactors are aging; the pressure to keep them operational is growing; and their exposure to sea level rise and other impacts of climate change is increasing.
Aging reactors
About 20% of the electricity generated in the United States comes from a fleet of 93 nuclear reactors. Those reactors were originally licensed to operate for 40 years, but 40 is now the average age of a reactor in the United States (see the clever figure, assembled by the folks at Carbon Brief, below). Older reactors need more investment and monitoring than newer ones. To address the problems and concerns that follow from this aging, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission must continue to insist on an irreducible minimum level of safety, even if that means refusing to relicense a reactor despite the growing pressure to extend nuclear reactors’ useful lives to not just 60 years but 80.
Pressures to keep operating
Several factors contribute to this pressure. The most fundamental of these is the ever more alarming evidence of what will happen to the climate if we don’t curb greenhouse gas emissions swiftly. Generating electricity without burning fossil fuels is imperative. Other factors include the changing technological and economic profile of electricity generation resources. Variable renewable resources like solar and wind, which can generate large volumes of power cheaply, are burgeoning and displacing greenhouse gas emitting resources as they do. But an electric grid dominated by variable renewables still requires some amount of “dispatchable” generation that can be turned on and off as needed. Energy storage can do some of that job, but, as of now, not all of it.
New nuclear capacity in the United States remains out of reach. The headline-grabbing cancellations of the V.C. Summer reactors in South Carolina in 2017 and persistent delays and cost-overruns of Georgia’s Vogtle project today have dimmed prospects for building a new generation of reactors here. Small Modular Reactors, which are designed to generate power with fewer hazards and better economics, remain a pre-commercial technology in the United States, though a prototype is operational in China. So, our aging nuclear reactors remain useful and their clean generation capacity cannot quickly be replaced.
Exposure to impacts of climate change
The disasters at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 have acquainted the world with the very real dangers posed by safety failures at nuclear power plants. Fukushima, where nuclear reactors experienced an earthquake followed by a tsunami, prompted several examinations — including by the NRC — of climate-driven risks like increased precipitation and flooding to U.S. reactors. A 2019 Bloomberg article titled U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Weren’t Built for Climate Change summarized some key findings:
According to a Bloomberg review of correspondence between the [NRC] and plant owners, 54 of the nuclear plants operating in the U.S. weren’t designed to handle the flood risk they face. Fifty-three weren’t built to withstand their current risk from intense precipitation; 25 didn’t account for current flood projections from streams and rivers; 19 weren’t designed for their expected maximum storm surge. Nineteen face three or more threats that they weren’t designed to handle.
The NRC’s recent decision
All this was in the background when the NRC issued an important set of decisions at the end of February. Most coverage of those decisions highlighted that they reversed the grant of license extensions to reactors in southern Florida and southern Pennsylvania, which would have allowed those facilities to operate until the early 2050s, when they would reach 80 years of useful life. But the crux of the NRC’s decision was about the environmental review required for any such extensions to be granted.
These decisions stemmed from an arcane procedural measure that will fail to elicit clicks from anyone other than a rarified subset of energy and environmental lawyers and nuclear industry aficionados. A quick summary of that issue and its regulatory context illuminates what this reversal could mean as the number of applicants seeking a license extension to 80 years grows.
The National Environmental Policy Act & nuclear reactors
Congress kicked off the modern era of environmental law by adopting the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Courts have come to interpret NEPA as requiring a “hard look” at the environmental impacts of projects licensed or paid for by federal agencies — a procedural requirement that doesn’t include substantive prescriptions. Different types of projects require different types of environmental review to comply with NEPA. Some activities or projects are granted “categorical exclusions,” others required to conduct a searching environmental impact statement (EIS) that explores all significant impacts and considers whether less environmentally damaging alternatives could achieve the project’s stated purpose. Some categories of project receive a layered form of review, starting with features that are uniform across a similar group of projects, and subsequently supplementing that generic review (captured in a generic environmental impact statement or GEIS) with a project-specific one. Conducting a GEIS means that the reviewing agency does not need to examine all features of each project in the project-specific review, only those that are not covered by the GEIS.
The NRC’s 2019 decision
NRC regulations prescribe completion of a thorough environmental review before renewing a nuclear reactor’s operating license. They also specify what that review should consider. Somewhat unusually, those regulations codify the GEIS for license renewals that the NRC developed in 1996 and updated in 2013 (following the Fukushima disaster). In 2019, after the NRC had received applications for “subsequent” license extensions from the Turkey Point and Peach Bottom nuclear facilities (the maps below show where they’re located), it decided that the 2013 GEIS provided a sound basis for extending an operating license to 80 years, not just to 60.
That 2019 decision stated that the regulation was ambiguous about whether that GEIS, and the regulation based upon it, supported only an initial extension or a subsequent, further extension as well. In practical terms, this meant that the NRC decided, in 2019, that no further environmental review was necessary to evaluate these reactors’ impacts on the environment (or the environment’s impacts on them) under NEPA for the next 30 years, during which time:
- they would reach 80 years old
- the climate would continue changing, and
- scientists and policymakers would learn a great deal more about those changes and their impacts on south Florida and the Mid-Atlantic.
In sum, the 2019 decision was problematic even if we ignore whether it was consistent with the law.
The NRC’s reversal — a big deal?
But in late February the NRC, whose membership has changed since 2019, reversed, highlighting that the regulation is not ambiguous about the 2013 GEIS’ application beyond an initial license extension, and instead expressly applies only to “those applicants seeking an initial renewed license.” (Emphasis added.) The NRC’s specific orders about Turkey Point and Peach Bottom were accompanied by a more general one, which states that “the environmental review of the subsequent license renewal application at issue in this case is incomplete,” and directs development of an update to the 2013 GEIS. Broadly speaking, the NRC’s job is to make sure that the design, operation, and maintenance of nuclear facilities in the U.S. is safe, and to ensure that the public has a meaningful opportunity to be heard on decisions that could affect public health and safety. In the United States, we’re entering an era in which very old nuclear power plants will face increasingly extreme weather events while providing a crucial source of dispatchable clean electricity. The stakes are high for the plants’ operation and for the public’s confidence in the safety of that operation.
The NRC’s February 24th decision can be thought of as going back and opting not to cut a small corner. It’s impossible to know if the added layer of review that will follow is going to stave off a disaster in the future, but it might. It will also, as the NRC itself said: “promote the agency’s goals of clear communication with the public and transparency in our actions.” Further, and in keeping with that aim, it will create additional opportunities to pose questions about aging nuclear facilities’ interactions with the environment as more information about how that environment is changing comes to light.
