Foolish Greens and regulators are threatening to revive nuclear vitality – are you okay with that?
By Duggan Flanakin
April 16, 2024
Despite its commitment to “no more gas, oil or coal,” Friends of the Earth has launched a campaign against one of the country’s “greenest” governors, Gavin Newsom of California. Your goal? To prevent the U.S. Department of Energy from spending $1 billion to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant (there is no gas, oil or coal there) operating beyond its scheduled 2025 closure date.
Newsom, whose policies are among the world's most aggressive against gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles and tools, said last year: “The Diablo Canyon Power Plant is important to supporting energy reliability as we continue progress toward our clean energy and climate goals.” “Accelerate.” Diablo Canyon now supplies almost a tenth of California’s electricity.
The aptly named FOE claims that “the environmental impacts of extending the life of this aging power plant have not been adequately addressed or disclosed to the public at this time.” Other groups are also spreading fear about nuclear power. But by far the biggest obstacle nuclear energy enthusiasts must overcome lies with the federal government.
While nuclear power accounts for about 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S. and provided nearly half of the country's carbon-free electricity in 2023, a new report from the Government Accountability Office says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs to more fully consider the potential impacts Climate change is affecting the country's mostly outdated nuclear power plants.
The message? The GAO report said climate-related threats to nuclear power plants range from worsening droughts that dry up water supplies needed to cool reactors to sea level rise and storm surges. Despite its regulatory ambiguity, the report said the NRC should “incorporate data” from future climate projections [scary scenarios?] in security risk assessments along with the historical data on which the NRC relies. All of this incurs additional costs.
Douglas McIntyre, the former editor-in-chief of 24/Wall St., said last month that despite the obvious need for nuclear power, “many Americans who may remember Three Mile Island don't want nuclear power to be part of the solution.” And a recent Pew Research survey found: “Critics emphasize the high cost of nuclear power projects and the complexity of dealing with radioactive waste.”
In contrast, the U.S. Department of Energy has argued that the U.S. will need an additional 550 to 770 gigawatts of clean, firm capacity to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions, and that nuclear power is one of the few proven options that can meet this need . In addition, nuclear power plants create well-paying jobs with concentrated economic benefits for the communities most affected by the energy transition.
These dichotomous messages from DOE and NRC are highlighted in a recent article by Robert Hargraves, co-founder of ThorCon International, who bluntly stated that the US is not building commercial nuclear power plants – while 16 other nations are doing so – “because NRC and EPA Regulators do so “so misinformed about radiation.”
Regulatory overkill is likely a cause of the failed six-reactor, 462-megawatt project that NuScale planned in collaboration with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, part of the DOE's Carbon Free Power initiative for small modular reactors. Several cities withdrew from the project and fell as the estimated price of electricity rose from $58 per megawatt hour (MWh) to $89 per MWh.
Misguided security assumptions have led to a regulatory jungle so complex that startup Atomic Canyon is offering AI to help applicants navigate the NRC's database of 52 million documents. Hargraves accused U.S. nuclear energy regulators of failing to analyze data on the effects of radiation from nuclear energy on human health; Instead, they rely on a groupthink consensus developed in NGOs that was originally misled in the 1950s by geneticists looking for grants.
For decades, these geneticists claimed that radiation damage to chromosomes was increasing. But when the children of survivors of the atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima showed no such effects, anti-nuclear scientists moved on to alleged cancer effects. And a major flaw in their analysis is that the cost of nuclear power has skyrocketed.
While studies of these survivors found no excess cancers in people who received less than 0.1 gray (joules of energy absorbed by a kilogram of tissue), regulators set public radiation limits 100 times lower and erroneously limited the cumulative ones dose as the dose rate. In practice, setting a maximum daily dose of 0.02 Gray (instead of the current maximum annual cumulative dose of 0.001 Gray) would provide a large margin of safety.
Danny Ervin, a finance professor at Salisbury University, mocks the fears of nuclear adversaries, saying, “The next nuclear wave can’t come soon enough.” That “next wave” includes scalable nuclear reactors, particularly those pioneered by Bill Gates called TerraPower Initiative. This advanced facility, coupled with a molten salt energy storage system, will be able to increase production for nearly six hours during periods of peak demand, which is expected to cost approximately $4 billion.
The plant is powered by a modern sodium reactor that is cooled with liquid sodium instead of water [eliminating one concern of skeptics]. With a capacity of up to 500 megawatts, it will provide enough energy to power around 400,000 households.
Equally important, the location in a former coal-fired power plant in Wyoming allows for easy integration into the existing power grid while boosting the local economy. This is in contrast to wind turbines and solar systems, which are often located far from existing transmission lines, require large footprints, and operate intermittently, requiring backup power generation.
In England, X-Energy, in collaboration with Cavendish, a subsidiary of Babcock International, has proposed developing a 12-reactor plant using the company's Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled reactor design. The Teesside array, due to come online in the early 2030s, is the first of what the companies hope will be a fleet of up to 40 of the 80MWe power stations at sites across the UK.
Mick Gornall, managing director of Cavendish Nuclear, boasts: “A fleet of Xe-100s can complement renewable energy by providing constant or flexible power, generating steam to decarbonise industry and producing hydrogen and synthetic fuels for transport. He said the effort would also create thousands of high-quality, long-term jobs across the country.
Uranium-rich Nigeria believes it has a solution to the problem of radioactive waste disposal, a major problem for the nuclear energy industry worldwide. The solution is based on the NST SuperLAT, which Dr. Jimmy Etti-Williams, co-founder of NuclearSAFE Technology, described it as “a breakthrough in nuclear waste management.”
According to Etti-Williams, SuperLAT will process, package, load, store and transport nuclear waste in casket containers several thousand feet underground, where it can be retrieved when needed as fuel in reactors to produce energy with a low carbon footprint. This geological nuclear waste disposal technology is designed to isolate and dilute nuclear waste in accordance with universal regulations.
SuperLAT technology should address concerns from the International Atomic Energy Agency and other stakeholders about nuclear waste storage accidents, leaks or terrorism risks, according to Etti-Williams. He boasts that Nigeria can have its own uranium facilities to advance its own and pan-African development efforts.
There's an old saying that first appeared in Puck's Magazine in 1902 that says, “People who say it can't be done shouldn't interrupt those who do it.” Many now believe that it's high time that the negative regulators stop impeding nuclear progress.
And there is good news on this front too. Nuclear Matters has announced an online meeting, “The Road to Progress: Modernizing the NRC,” scheduled for May 2.
At the event, a four-member panel moderated by John Kotek of the Nuclear Energy Institute will discuss the urgency of NRC modernization to harness the benefits of nuclear technology innovation to revitalize the U.S. nuclear energy industry.
The anti-nuclear enemies (sic) will have little to argue about if these and other innovative nuclear projects prove successful and safe when brought to the forefront in other countries – countries like England and Nigeria. But those looking for reliable, safe and clean technologies to generate the electricity needed tomorrow will only be satisfied if the outdated rules can be redesigned to accommodate them.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a variety of public policy issues.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Like this:
Is loading…
Comments are closed.