Energy Technology Exuberance: How a Little Humility is Good for Nuclear, Renewables, and Society
By Todd Allen and Gregory Nemet
An ideal energy system is affordable, clean, reliable, and supports communities by promoting healthy and vibrant lives. That’s nice and easy to say! But real energy systems rely on technologies that face real challenges related to cost, functionality, regulation, and public acceptance. No matter how exciting or promising a particular technology may be, the odds of one energy source overcoming every last challenge to single-handedly deliver all of society’s energy needs are slim.
Ironically, devotion to a technology can actually hamper its success, making it difficult for exuberant supporters to see the need for continual improvement, or to recognize the limits of a technology and the need for complementary sources. We saw nuclear energy proponents walk into this trap and stay there for half a century — only recently acknowledging the value of innovation to push through technical challenges, and the value of partnering with other technologies like wind and solar to meet modern energy needs. With renewables now enjoying a boom of their own, it might be wise to draw some lessons from nuclear’s exuberance and avoid similar missteps. Nuclear and renewables will be better off together if they have the humility to learn from one another and work together toward shared success. They may be an unlikely pair, but so are the rhinoceros and the oxpecker, nature’s ultimate design in humility.
Nuclear Was Unstoppable…Until it Wasn’t
In the 1950s, there was exuberance for nuclear energy and the belief that energy from the atom was the future. Nuclear energy was touted as the answer — from securing U.S. energy independence to ending energy poverty and protecting air quality.
It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast for an age of peace.
— Lewis Strauss, former head of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1954
From roughly 1960 to 1990, nuclear energy grew rapidly worldwide from none to about 325 Gigawatts (enough to power over 200 million typical U.S. homes). With the wind at their backs, nuclear technologists locked into a single commercial design, the large light water reactor. But by the 1990’s, the rate of nuclear additions in the U.S. slowed to a drip. The industry did not innovate as real pitfalls derailed progress.
High-profile safety incidents led to a stifling and expensive regulatory backlash. Construction costs failed to decrease with time and experience, as they do with most maturing technologies. Cheaper energy sources came along, and suddenly nuclear’s low operating costs could no longer make up for the exorbitant capital expense of the gigantic reactor designs we’d locked ourselves into. And the evolving grid had less and less use for new power sources of gigawatt scale, anyway. Along this slow fall from perfection, public sentiment for nuclear power went from exuberance to antipathy or boredom.
So the disco dancing days of the 1970s ended for nuclear without the industry learning any of the new dance steps. Only recently, the nuclear community has embraced the idea that innovation is needed to get beyond a single product and provide new functions demanded by a 21st century energy system. The success of these innovation efforts will strongly influence the extent of the future implementation of nuclear. Nuclear supporters hit a hard realization that the technology wasn’t too perfect to improve upon through innovation, and that many of their problems could have been avoided with a bit of humility and foresight.
Renewable Exuberance
Renewable energy technologies — primarily wind and solar — are hyped today as the obvious pathway to a clean energy future. The enthusiasm is understandable. Wind and solar have sustained mind-boggling annual growth rates of 30% over two decades. According to the IEA, renewable energy is expected to be the largest source of growth in electricity, in terms of both installed capacity and generation, through 2020. The price of solar power in the United States dropped by 70 percent between 2009 and 2015. Like the early nuclear enthusiasts, many renewables advocates optimistically assert a clear, easy trajectory toward an energy future fully powered by their favored technologies.
Once upon a time, people imagined that replacing fossil fuels with renewables like solar and wind would jeopardize the electric grid’s reliability. Then along came some major countries who showed that it didn’t, and that there really are no limits to renewable integration.
— Joe Romm, Center for American Progress, 2016
According to some of the leading advocates for renewables, not only can technologies like wind and solar get us to our emissions targets without help from other low-carbon generation sources — they can do it in their current form, with no need for significant technological advancement. Stop us if this sounds familiar.
Could Renewables Follow in Nuclear’s Footsteps?
Certainly, the challenges that could be obstructed from view behind this extreme confidence in renewables will be different than the pitfalls that took nuclear supporters by surprise. Solar and wind are unlikely to get more expensive over time. Indeed, their costs have steadily declined in recent years. Rather, their challenge will come as they exert increasing strain on the grid, requiring much more flexibility — e.g. increased transmission capacity, storage, and demand response — than today’s power grid can accommodate. Variability issues currently stand as a limiting factor as long as the price of storage remains expensive. While cost-effective storage in the future may solve daily variability problems, it would take much more advanced storage, such as long-term chemical storage, to solve seasonal variability problems. Renewables do require more land area, and this could present a conflict with conservation efforts in some deployment scenarios. Given these and other challenges, continued innovation in renewable technologies is needed to increase their deployment potential and materially address energy problems.
As occurred with nuclear and other technologies, renewable technologies might face their own unique set of challenges that eventually slow their deployment. The pattern is: exuberance and growth, development of new problems, loss of momentum, followed by a late arriving drive toward innovation. The history of nuclear is potentially informative for the future of renewables. Unless we see similar effort at innovation in renewables, they also may reach their own plateau in deployment. One important innovation for renewables would be to capture the synergies of partnering with other technologies, like nuclear.
Cooperation is a Strength, not a Weakness
So how can we build a modern clean energy system that removes the varying barriers that have stagnated nuclear deployments and may threaten renewable deployments? First, we need to work hard to stretch each technology as far as possible, and not be afraid to lean on complementary technologies. We should then advocate for policies that support the development of the best attributes of both nuclear and renewables: strong funding for innovation R&D, power market designs that encourage a mix of resources including enabling integration of a high penetration of renewable energy, and policies that include the cost of externalities like air pollution in the price of energy.
Scientific and technical advances bring unquestioned benefits, but they also generate new uncertainties and failures, with the result that doubt continually undermines knowledge, and unforeseen consequences confound faith in progress.
— Sheila Jasanoff, in “Technologies of Humility”, 2003
First generation nuclear ran into a set of uncertainties and failures that plateaued growth with a humbled nuclear community now looking at how to best innovate to a better future. Ultimately, variable renewable energy technologies like solar and wind are not likely to be able to power the entire electricity grid alone, as they will run into their own set of uncertainties and failures. Humility requires us to identify challenges honestly and work to minimize them, never stop innovating, and get outside our energy advocacy tribes for a discussion of the betterment of civilization. That would be good for renewables, nuclear, and society as a whole.
Todd Allen is a Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Wisconsin and a Senior Fellow at Third Way who believes nuclear energy is important to clean energy goals and that better nuclear products are needed.
Gregory Nemet is an Associate Professor of Public Affairs and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He believes that continued innovation in solar energy and in its surrounding infrastructure will allow solar to play an important role in the transition to a clean, reliable, and affordable energy system.
