The Nuclear Option

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken

Understanding risk and reward, cost and benefit, is a key to surviving and thriving as an adult. Whether you live a subsistence lifestyle in the unforgiving Arctic or in a vertical, highly-dense, concrete urban hell environment, failure to understand these tradeoffs can make your life miserable, or worse.

Suppose you lived a subsistence lifestyle in northern Alaska, in a small cabin you built with your own hands. One evening, just as your supper is about to burn on your small stove, a polar bear busts down the door to the cabin. In the blink of an eye, you are faced with an existential crisis. Your choices: save your supper or reach for your shotgun. Which would you choose?

I smell stew! | Source: USFWS

Environmentalists don’t seem to be sure. The “shotgun” most likely to eliminate their professed existential threat is at their fingertips. If they honestly believed “climate change is an existential crisis,” we think they would be reaching for the shotgun: the “nuclear (power) option.” But instead, they keep reaching for the skillet.

Modern environmentalism is rooted in two distinct fears emanating from western civilization in the 1960s: pesticides/chemicals and nuclear weapons (and later, nuclear power). Rachel Carson’s famous 1962 book Silent Spring started widespread concerns about pesticides and chemicals. Then the 1970s Love Canal incident in Niagara Falls, NY gave birth to Superfund and permanently cemented chemical and hazardous waste worries in the American psyche.

Greenpeace USA notes on its website that it “got its start protesting nuclear weapons testing back in 1971. We’ve been fighting against nuclear weapons and nuclear power ever since.” Greenpeace International’s website similarly notes (emphasis ours):

Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants.

We became wealthy enough to pass laws and rid ourselves of the worst industrial excesses of the 20th century (Love Canal, Times Beach, Cuyahoga River on fire), but we never fully got over Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, and the 2011 accident in Japan at Fukushima dredged up those memories. This fear has cost America, and western civilization, dearly.

We already know what is not going to work to replace 100% of fossil fuels. We are seeing it in electricity rates in California, where the state is hanging on to its last nuclear power plant by a thread, versus Georgia where the state has completed construction of the first two new commercial nuclear power plants in 30 years. We witnessed it firsthand in Europe and especially in Germany in 2022. In the latter, the net effect of its genius Energiewende (energy “transition”) is that lignite coal (the dirtiest form of coal on earth for power generation) made up 82.4% of power generation (3,650 of 4,427 Megawatts) for RWE, Germany’s largest utility, on the evening of April 29^th:

Surely the Democrat party and its hard-core environmentalist wing would recognize blatantly obvious truths at this stage of the game and openly and enthusiastically embrace nuclear power, right?

Wrong. Or, more precisely, dunno yet.

In February, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (AOC) visited the Tokyo Electric Power Fukushima Daiichi power complex, site of the major 2011 nuclear power plant accident. On Instagram, she posted about the experience in a manner that made many hopeful for the future of America’s nuclear power industry:

But when AOC and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey reintroduced the New Green Deal two weeks ago - on the fourth anniversary of its first Hindenburg voyage - strong support for nuclear energy was conspicuous by its absence. In fact, in our review of the fourteen pages of Markey’s Senate Resolution and the ninety-four page companion Green New Deal Implementation Guide on AOC’s House website, we did not find the word “nuclear” mentioned even once, despite the term “renewable(s)” appearing 28 times in the text of the two documents.  

AOC’s “Implementation Guide” lays out the twelve key goals of the Green New Deal’s ambitious ten-year plan and details its funding in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The Guide states the third goal as:

“Meeting 100 percent of U.S. power demand through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources”

From our vantage point, this goal is entirely impossible without nuclear energy making up the bulk of U.S. electricity generation. We have reviewed studies by celebrity professors whose spreadsheets and computer models assure the world that it can be done easily and at cost parity with present energy systems and services (including one with a propensity for resorting to litigation as recompense for public disagreement). We think they are simply wrong, especially in the face of the empirical evidence: no single large city - much less country - has ever obtained 100% of its energy from renewables for a full year. Including hydroelectric projects, Costa Rica and Norway generate nearly 100% of their electricity from renewables thanks to natural geographic advantages and state investment. But, in terms of total primary energy use, the International Energy Agency data show a different story, mostly related to transportation. In Norway, for example, EVs still only make up about 20% of all the country’s vehicle stock.

The amount of funding for nuclear in the IIJA was ~$25 billion and in the IRA, it was ~$32 billion. By contrast, the amount of funding for all other climate-saving solutions and infrastructure investments in both bills was over $1 trillion. About two-thirds of the total cost of all the measures are funded through the IIJA and about one-third through the IRA.

Sources: Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act / Inflation Reduction Act

On a global scale, all of our reductions in CO2 emissions will be more than offset by China’s increase. They are still building coal-fired power plants at the rate of about one every two weeks and have been doing so for more than ten years.

For perspective, the U.S. has about 200 gigawatts (GW, equal to one-thousand megawatts or MW) of coal-fired power plant capacity. China approved construction of 106 GW last year alone, more than four times the prior year’s amount, and now has over 1,000 GW of operating coal-fired power plants.  This makes any reductions in CO2 by the U.S. in terms of the effect on global temperature by the year 2100 almost irrelevant. And we have not even begun to include the effect of CO2 emissions from future economic growth in India, Indonesia, Africa, or Latin America.

Michael Crichton working for Xi Jinping could not have produced a better plan to co-opt neo-environmentalism to help China get even with the West for its 19^th century trade wars.

Over more than 20 years, America spent ~$1 trillion on everything (wind, solar, biofuels, biomass) except the one proven technology that would decarbonize electricity generation the fastest, and support “electrify everything” at the greatest scale with the most consistent on-demand performance. Advanced nuclear energy would also help decarbonize some critical but high-emitting industrial processes, holds great promise for synthetic fuels, and has other add-on benefits. All of these will someday truly transform America’s energy generation, transmission, and consumption. Instead, over the next decade, we’re poised to spend another $1 trillion on …(wait for it)… renewables.

Three of the most common objections to nuclear energy are safety, cost, and partially depleted nuclear fuel (commonly/incorrectly termed “nuclear waste”). Each could be the subject of a year’s worth of posts.

Nuclear power plants have operated, and safely stored partially depleted fuel on site, for decades in America, France, Germany, South Korea, and many other countries without a single fatality from radiation. Not a single worker was killed as a result of radiation in the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Chernobyl’s Soviet-era design would not be considered in any western country, nor its testing or operational procedures. Dozens of workers are killed all over the world annually in wind turbine construction, maintenance, and repair accidents. A brief OSHA web page on Green Job Hazards gives examples, including the unfortunate death of three U.S. workers in common wind turbine accidents. Those three accidents alone killed more people than have ever been killed from radiation from an operating nuclear power plant or handling of partially depleted nuclear fuel in the U.S.

Regarding cost, a 2022 MIT study concludes that, despite the enormous delays and cost overruns at Plant Vogtle, the cost of building similar AP-1000 reactors should drop dramatically. It calculates the overnight capital cost for Vogtle Units 3 and 4 at $7,956/kilowatt (kW), and finds the overnight capital 'should cost' of the next AP-1000 in the U.S. to be $4,300/kW, then $2,900/kW for the following 10th unit (online by around 2045), deployed in series, based on 2018 dollars. That would be a reduction of 65% in ~20 years.

The situation with partially depleted nuclear fuel storage is non-trivial. But, whether the Yucca Mountain Repository or anything like it ever gets built, we believe these are engineering challenges that the advanced world will overcome.

We will not catch up from three decades of failure to invest in nuclear energy quickly, or without major reforms to federal regulations and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Even if those changes occur, the supply chain, engineering and construction hurdles are constraints that will take a lot of time, effort, and money to resolve.

But first, we’re going to get more cosplay.

Returning to the third goal of the reintroduced Green New Deal - “Meeting 100 percent of U.S. power demand through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” – America is now more than 20 years into the transition to renewables. How are we doing toward that goal so far?

The graph below shows the share of total U.S. electricity generation, as well as subsidies received, for nuclear versus renewables (excluding hydroelectric) in 2016, the last year for which EIA published detailed comparisons:

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Seven years hence, EIA reports that for 2022, 18.2% of US electricity generation came from nuclear vs. 15.3% from renewables, excluding hydroelectric. (We do not count hydroelectric in “renewables,” because “environmentalists” rail against it and because most hydroelectric projects long pre-dated the concept of “renewable” and “sustainable;” they were not constructed for either purpose.)  Clearly, we have a long way to go to get to 100% zero emissions energy. And that is not even counting vehicles and transportation.

How costly is all this? In July 2022, EIA estimated that annual tax expenditures (subsidies) for wind, solar, biomass and geothermal going forward will range from $4.7 billion (reference case) up to $9 billion. For the period 2023-2050, that would be a cumulative cost of ~$127 billion - $243 (in 2021 dollars).

One month later, the IRA passed on pure party line votes. Every Democrat voted in favor and every Republican voted against it in the House of Representatives and Senate. It committed another $369 billion over 10 years (about $37 billion/year) for climate change.

In addition to hundreds of billions in discreet taxpayer funding for various provisions, IRA included certain uncapped credits – some for clean vehicles and others for clean energy production - that appear as sort of “off balance sheet” financing. Goldman Sachs has estimated that these uncapped credits increase the real cost of the IRA to over $1.2 trillion.

We have already spent ~$1 trillion since 1999 on “climate change”. An additional $1 trillion (at least) is now committed over the next ten years through the IIJA and IRA. With respect to the technology needed for the deepest decarbonization of our electricity generation – nuclear - we have built a sum total of two new nuclear reactors at one site in Georgia. For $2 trillion, America could roughly double the current fleet of ~92 operating nuclear reactors. These reactors would generate CO2-emissions free electricity for 50-75 years, while the current generation of renewables we’re building will all go in landfills in 25 years. According to Energy Information Administration (EIA) data, America nuclear power facilities generated electricity at 92% of their maximum rated capacity on an annual basis in 2022 compared to 25% for solar and 36% for wind. This picture is absurd and shameful.

Looks innocent enough | Photo Credit: Silian via iStock

We are fuel agnostic, not favoring coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear over renewables if the latter could provide all the equivalent services of these energy dense fuels. But they can’t.

We also understand the laws of physics and thermodynamics and relative risk (based on empirical evidence) of operating advanced nuclear power plants and partially depleted nuclear fuel. As Doomberg says frequently: “in energy, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”  

We draw two conclusions from the combination of the IIJA, the IRA and the reintroduction of the Green New Deal:

First, it’s time to accept the reality of the situation: either climate change is an existential crisis for humanity - in which case all options must be on the table, including nuclear energy – or it’s not. If it’s not, we need to immediately stop harming and constraining human prosperity and the world’s poorest the most by policies and expenditures that aren’t really going to solve it (or are really even about it).

We will not reach “100 percent of U.S. power demand through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” by 2035 or by even by 2050 (sorry, Mr. Kerry and President Biden) with the current plans.

Second, Markey’s and AOC’s kabuki theater is mostly about trying to keep “environmentalists” on side after the Biden administration’s energy actions, despite its legislation and rhetoric. It seems like an attempted plea to environmentalists: “After we drained 1 million barrels of oil per day from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve for 6 months straight to keep gas prices down to win an election to remain in power, and after we approved the Willow oil project in Alaska, don’t abandon us – at least we didn’t say “nuclear” and look at all the green grift we did get!”

The environmental movement is realizing it has marched itself into a box canyon on climate change, relying on renewables together with its decades-long opposition to nuclear energy, with no easy way out. A splintering in the movement is just around the next curve, and nuclear energy is the fork in the road that will cause it.

The “Precautionary Principle” cannot be hidden behind this time. That principle (the abuse of which helped bring us to this condition) deals mostly with the unknown but potentially catastrophic effects of new products or processes. The current fleet of ~92 operating U.S. nuclear reactors has never had a single incident involving loss of life or serious injury from radiation during operation or storage of partially depleted nuclear fuel, in over 50 years of continuous operation.

You can see the tide changing in the direction of nuclear power among political opponents and even popular opinion. For those Charlaticians™, activists, and citizens still living in the logic-deficient dark tunnel of belief that renewables can save us from climate change, Germany and Europe should have been the canaries in the coal mine. The RWE electricity generation graphic we included above could not be singing more clearly.

When, not if, environmentalism does a broad scale about-face on its enthusiasm toward nuclear energy, hysteria over climate change will cease and the foundation for the next two centuries of incredible human advancement, prosperity, and environmental improvement will be set.

Perhaps no one put it more succinctly than University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. on Robert Bryce’s Power Hungry podcast last week. He said, “we’re getting much closer to reconciling commitments and promises with time scales of democratic elections and I think we’re going to see a lot more realism and pragmatism in climate politics going forward.”

We agree. Physics and economics will have the last say. That day can’t come quickly enough.

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