The Bright Green Line

Nuclear energy rises from the ashes. Now we get to see who the real “environmentalists” are.

“Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?” - Bjorn Lomborg

At the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, an American film with rather uncanny timing (pun intended) previewed. In The China Syndrome, a television reporter and her camera man happen to be inside nuclear power plant during a turbine trip event and the emergency shutdown process known as a SCRAM.

What unfolds is a story of sticking gauges, panicked plant operations, safety coverups, intrigue, and ultimately State-sponsored assassination to keep a lid on the whole affair, all in order to hide from the public the fact that a power plant outside Los Angeles came dangerously close to a core reactor meltdown.

The film made its debut in American theaters on March 16, 1979. Twelve days later, at around 4:00 a.m., an incident began at a nuclear power plant built on an island in the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. When the dust had cleared at the Three Mile Island (TMI) Nuclear Generation Station, an uncontrolled partial thermal meltdown destroyed reactor unit 2.

At the time of the TMI accident, “environmentalism,” was a growing political force in the U.S., fueled by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), and the discovery in the late 1970s of Hooker Chemical Company’s contamination of the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY. (Love Canal would ultimately lead to the U.S. Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, CERCLA, aka “Superfund”).

After TMI, new nuclear power generation in the U.S. was over, killed by a public fear and panic which no fact, data, reason, or logic would penetrate for nearly half a century. Falling oil and natural gas prices after two 1970’s “energy crises” changed the economics of nuclear energy, to be sure. But, after TMI “environmentalists” (and even fossil fuel interests) exploited the public’s fear of nuclear energy, and it could not be overcome. The Chernobyl disaster seven years later in 1986 was similarly exploited. When the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident occurred 25 years later in 2011, the loudest and most angry voices were “environmentalists”.

More than two decades of long-term epidemiological studies by multiple federal agencies, the state of Pennsylvania, university and other health researchers concluded no deaths or direct health effects were caused by the TMI accident. But afterwards, new orders for nuclear power projects in the U.S. died.

The graph below from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) provides an excellent visualization of what happened to the nuclear power industry. It flatlined after the projects in progress when the TMI accident occurred were completed in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

But almost as quickly as it began more than 40 years ago when the TMI accident crushed the nuclear power industry, the pendulum has swung. Nuclear energy is on the rise, like a Phoenix preserved in its own ashes for nearly half a century that somehow spontaneously sprang to life.

What caused the change in fortune for the nuclear power industry? And what long overdue reckoning will “environmentalism” have to face now that nuclear energy is back in the discussion?

We begin with the easy part: it took nothing more than good old physics to bring nuclear power generation back to life. Doomberg’s concise quip (familiar to many) serves as the perfect framing:

“In the war between platitudes and physics, physics is undefeated.”   

Over the last few years in the U.S., a series of reports from the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), the Regional Transmission Operators (RTOs) that distribute electricity to various U.S. states/regions, and utilities, and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hearings have made it clear that several of the largest RTOs are facing generation shortfalls and potential blackouts during peak winter or summer periods. The cause? Overreliance on wind and solar, retirements/closing of coal-fired power plants, and pending EPA regulations constraining new natural gas-fired power plants. The deadly Texas blackout in February 2021 from Winter Storm Uri transformed the threat from theoretical to empirical.

Physics was becoming too real to ignore. But something more would ultimately be needed to break the anti-nuclear dam.

In an irony for the record books, the tech companies that had been espousing their green virtue, financing “nonreliables” like wind and solar for over a decade with “Renewable Energy Certificates” to pretend to be “CO2 emissions-free!” seem to have been the flood that burst that dam. And electricity demand for their Artificial Intelligence (AI) future did it.

By 2023, that enormous projected demand growth for AI data centers became clear. In our April 2024 post “Natural Gas and Nuclear’s New BFFs”, we summarized some of the enormous electricity demand projections for data centers, and noted:

Big Tech’s data centers require 8760 hours non-stop annual high-quality, uninterrupted, non-intermittent electricity. Battery storage systems with 4-8 hours backup will not solve that problem. Knowing these realities, Big Tech is not going to bet the farm on wind, solar and battery storage.

In 2024, the world’s largest tech companies basically ended the obfuscation that nonreliables can meet AI’s electricity demand. And they did so in the most dramatic way. The month prior to our post on the subject, Amazon Web Services announced the acquisition of Talen Energy’s data center campus. The facility sits adjacent to and receives power from Talen’s 2.5Gw nuclear generation station (the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station), a two-reactor complex in operation since 1983.

Then, on September 20, Constellation Energy announced a 20 year power purchase agreement with Microsoft. The tech giant agreed to pay $800 million per year to purchase all of the output from a restarted TMI unit 1 (undamaged in the 1979 accident) for its data centers. Unit 1 was shut down for economic reasons in 2019 and was slated for decommissioning.

Last month, Oracle founder Larry Ellison told investors on a company earnings call that the company is designing a gigawatt scale data center that would be run on three small nuclear reactors. Not to be outdone, last week Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is eyeing nuclear to power its data centers. 

Also last month, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) released a draft of its “2025 Integrated Resource Plan” (IRP).  Under every baseline scenario considered, TVA sees modest growth of just under 600 megawatts (Mw) new nuclear generation by 2035, all from light-water small modular reactors (SMRs). The amount is modest, but the fuse is short. Ask Nuscale.

The screen shot below describes Scenario 5 in TVA’s draft IRP:

The final report will not be released until summer 2025, so no scenario has been selected. But this scenario contemplates a continued “net zero” regulatory push along with annual economic growth of about 2.3%. The graph below shows TVA’s predicted growth in nuclear generation by 2050 under that scenario:

Source: TVA

The baseline case contemplates over 12 Gw of new nuclear generation capacity, with over 10 Gw coming from large scale reactors like the two new AP-1000’s (unit 3 & 4) at Plant Vogtle in Georgia (each about 1.1 Gw).

TVA’s message seems clear: regulatory-driven “net zero” ambitions combined with even modest economic growth require a major investment in nuclear energy. And most of that will come from proven large-scale light water reactors like the AP-1000s built at Plant Vogtle.

The shifting North American politics toward nuclear became clear in Ontario, Canada last year. In the U.S. it became clearer this March when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced $1.5 billion in DOE loan guarantees to restart the Palisades nuclear plant in Covert Township, Michigan. Six months later, Vice President Harris’ name conspicuously appeared alongside President Biden’s in the DOE press release officially announcing the loan guarantee. The title of the release was carefully scripted: “union jobs” alongside “bringing back” “clean” nuclear energy.  

Democrat’s miraculous political metamorphosis on nuclear energy was not done. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote a letter to the RTO that serves Pennsylvania (PJM) last month after the Constellation/Microsoft announcement to restart TMI unit 1. Shapiro said that “shovel ready resources” should “be allowed to come online as quickly as possible rather than waiting in the queue as if they were an entirely new development.” 

A Democrat governor pleading with his state’s RTO - the same RTO which has warned FERC and its own customers of coming capacity shortfalls and the risk of blackouts - to fast-track the restart of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island? This is Twilight Zone stuff incomprehensible only a few years ago.

Despite nuclear energy’s resurgent momentum in America, it won’t be easy. For starters, the time (~15 years) and cost (about $30 billion, or ~$15 billion per Gw hour) to build the two new reactors at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle will be used as bludgeons by nuclear opponents. Instead of learning from the Vogtle experience, they are using the first new nuclear project build in decades to attempt to thrash any industry renaissance before it can begin.

On his superb podcast, President of Canadians For Nuclear Energy Dr. Chris Keefer has a wonderful series of deep dive discussions exploring the reasons for the delays and cost overruns with nuclear power expert James Krellenstein.  (Dr. Keefer is an outstanding new addition to Substack, and we welcome him and the Decouple team!)

The South Koreans have driven down the cost of large light water reactors to ~$2.5-$3 billion per gigawatt (Gw) over the last twenty years.  And the Chinese are somehow able to build large scale light water nuclear reactors in the AP-1000 class in the same cost range in 5-7 years.

In a post last year, we noted that a 2022 MIT study estimated the “should cost” for the next AP-1000 (overnight capital cost or “OCC”) built in U.S. to be $4.3 billion/Gw, and $2.9 billion/Gw for the following 10th unit (online by ~2045) in 2018 dollars.  Interestingly, the U.S. DOE just released the latest in a series of its “Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear” reports. Its latest “Liftoff” report estimates that with the investment tax credit, AP-1000’s can be built in the range of $4.7 - $5 billion per Gw.  

“Levelized Cost of Energy” (LCOE) will be endlessly used to “prove” that nuclear is “too expensive.” LCOE accounting of the true cost of 24/7/365 on-demand electricity bears the same relation to reality as makes Enron’s accounting look honest.

In retrospect, it didn’t have to be this way. A thought experiment makes the point.

The table below lists nuclear reactors on order as of the TMI accident, including >70 gigawatts (Gw) at more than 60 projects, which were canceled starting in 1980 (including three TVA projects “indefinitely deferred” to this day).

For perspective, the entire current U.S. nuclear power generation fleet, operating 94 reactors at 54 plant sites, has electric generation capacity of approximately 96 Gw.

What if all those projects had been built, and that by building on these successes another 25 Gw of nuclear power generation plants would have been constructed by around 2000. That would be double the current U.S. operating plant total, to about 192 Gw.

And what if a large portion of the nearly $1 trillion the U.S. has spent or committed to address “climate change” since 1998 were directed to build nuclear power plants. At $3-$5 billion/Gw, we might have built another ~50Gw by 2030, with more planned.

By now, we would have nearly 250 Gw of nuclear power generation (possibly more if we presume costs falling below $3 billion/Gw). At that level, nuclear power would be providing around 50% of current U.S. electricity generation (vs. ~19% today).

On August 4^th this year, the U.S. set a record for electricity production from natural gas, generating 7 million megawatt hours (Mwh) or 50% of total U.S. electricity production that day. Natural gas now accounts for about 43% of all utility scale electricity production in America. Hydroelectric projects provide almost 6%.

Aggregating this generation, it is entirely possible natural gas, nuclear and hydropower would be producing nearly 100% of U.S. electricity today. The idea of adding more expensive, intermittent Spinning Green Crucifixes™ and sun catchers would seem absurd, particularly offshore wind. Coal burning might be reduced to industrial process heat applications (the rest left in the ground as a form of strategic national electricity or transportation fuel reserve).

We close noting how, succeed or not, even the attempt to advance nuclear energy is going to cause a long overdue if uncomfortable reckoning.

“Environmentalists” and their NGOs will use the same, well-worn tropes that have succeeded since TMI to obstruct nearly energy. “It costs too much!” (after TMI, they made sure this would be the case). It takes too long (ditto). It isn’t safe (ibid). And the fearmongering trump card, “nuclear waste,” will be endlessly shouted from every rooftop. This is a canard, as no one in any advanced nation has ever been harmed by (intentionally misnamed) partially depleted nuclear fuel. Both temporary and permanent storage are only matters of political will and money, not engineering ability, materials science, or obviously risk management. In case fear does not succeed, laws and regulations (NEPA, EIS, CWA, ESA, others) and federal courts will be weaponized in the battle to stop nuclear energy.

But the nascent nuclear resurgence also sets up a bright line test for “environmentalists,” who have made “climate change” and reducing CO2 emissions their primary mission. That position has come at the expense of many other pressing environmental and human health issues.

True believers that “climate change” is an existential crisis fall into two camps. A first group of a few tens of thousands of scientists with credentials to hold their beliefs and a few hundred thousand non-scientists who have heavily researched the issue. And a second group including millions of concerned citizens who naively or ignorantly believe “anything green = good”, and “renewables will solve climate change”, largely out of fear and repetitive promotion by legacy media, with little to no detailed understanding of the science of climate change, or the tradeoffs, costs or consequences of climate policies.

We respectfully disagree with the first group, believe the second group will come to understand differently, and that both will eventually support nuclear as the best option for “decarbonizing” the electric grid when faced without blackouts (planned or otherwise), unaffordable electricity, economic de-growth, and austerity measures. But neither of these groups are malevolent, and we suspect both will ultimately stand on the side of the bright green line that supports nuclear energy, even if reluctantly.

On the other side will be the anti-industrial, anti-capitalist, anti-economic growth, anti-consumption, “overpopulation,” anti-human, no-nuclear-no-matter-what, neo-Malthusians, misanthropes, and EcoStatists™. They are malevolent, and for too long they have hidden within and even co-opted modern “environmentalism.”  They will never support nuclear energy.

With “environmentalists,” distinguishing between ignorance and malevolence can be tricky. Which brings us back full circle to that fateful 1979 film with the coincidental timing.

Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an Op-ed written by Jane Fonda about nuclear energy and the Constellation/Microsoft deal at TMI. Fonda wrote:

“The recent news about restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant 75 miles west of Philadelphia hit me hard. My heart sank as I thought back to The China Syndrome...”

Naturally, she leveled every criticism we noted above at nuclear energy: cost, time, safety and, of course, “nuclear waste.”   

Life imitates art | Shutterstock

Is it ignorance or is it malevolence? Nuclear is a bright green line test. Watch what “environmentalists” do next.

Like this post to support the nuclear Phoenix rising. And to give Malthusians and EcoStatists the bird.

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