With his polling numbers in a free fall and his campaign now on a starvation diet, Cory Booker’s once-promising presidential bid is barely holding on by its fingernails. This is the point when jittery young staffers frantically text friends to find new jobs. Those who do will leave behind a candidate who, in the waning weeks of his campaign, opted to make his mark as the most pro–nuclear power Democratic presidential candidate since, well, ever.
“My plan says we need to be at a zero-carbon electricity by 2030,” Booker told CNN’s Don Lemon during the network’s seven-hour climate-palooza in September. “People who think that we can get there without nuclear being part of the blend just aren’t looking at the facts.”
He pressed the point further in a HuffPost interview where he opined, “As much as we say the Republicans when it comes to climate change must listen to science, our party has the same obligation to listen to scientists.”
Booker hasn’t always promoted nuclear as the alpha male of energy—let alone slammed skeptical Democrats as dolts. Up until this fall, he hardly said a word about nuclear. Instead Booker presented himself as a staunch foe of fossil fuels and an ardent backer of the Green New Deal, which itself carefully sidesteps any mention of nukes. Nuclear power didn’t even make it onto Booker’s campaign website’s list of 18 “immediate steps” a President Booker would take to combat the climate crisis. Instead he’d refer to nukes obliquely as “clean energy.” He’s even gone so far as to characterize it as a “renewable”—even though the term is reserved for solar, wind, geothermal, and other power sources that don’t generate tons of radioactive waste that’s deadly for thousands of years.
But Booker’s had good reason to be mindful what he says about nuclear power, especially around Democrats who’ve never been big on nukes to begin with. A Gallup survey in March revealed that while some 65 percent of Republicans are pro-nuclear, roughly 58 percent of Democrats are against it (independents oppose nuclear by a similar margin). Much of the opposition is driven by women, whose support hovers at less than 40 percent.
That’s not to say Booker hasn’t spoken out for nuclear this year. Long before his appearance on CNN, he’s had an atomic monkey on his back, but he’s only talked about it in places progressives are unlikely to wander.
One is the pages of the Washington Examiner, the shrill right-wing tabloid owned by right-wing billionaire Philip Anschutz.
In its March 26 article “Cory Booker Goes Nuclear,” the Examiner observed that “Booker knows that other Democrats and some voters are anti-nuclear power, but he is not worried about how his position on nuclear energy will affect his chances in the Democratic primaries.”
“If you don’t like my views, it doesn’t mean I’m going to contort myself to fit some kind of view of what somebody somewhere might want,” said Booker, adding, “This is not an election for people who are fearful and faint of heart.”
(Note: Booker’s office turned down requests to be interviewed for this article. Faint of heart indeed.)
A Perfect Storm
Booker’s support for nukes comes at a time when the industry is on the ropes. It’s been that way for a while. Flat electricity demand, low natural-gas prices, aging reactors, and soaring costs have put nukes on the endangered-species list. The industry’s trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), also points its finger at “subsidies (that) distort energy markets.” That’s its way of describing incentives that promote renewables. David Wright, one of the leaders of Nuclear Matters, a project of NEI, told a 2015 conference of state lawmakers that it was “a perfect storm” of challenges. In 2017, President Trump named Wright to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
Mel Evans/AP Photo
The Salem Nuclear Generating Station in Lower Alloways Creek, New Jersey, which is operated by the Newark-based Public Service Electric and Gas
Booker took nuclear power’s woes to heart and became a vigorous advocate for the industry on Capitol Hill. Speaking at an April 21, 2016, hearing of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Booker remarked that “by 2050, meeting the Paris Accord targets would require us cutting greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70 percent while producing 70 percent more electricity. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do, to produce 70 percent more electricity than we do today while at the same time emitting 70 percent less carbon.”
“In order to avert the worst effects of climate change, we do not see any way around the idea that we must substantially increase our nuclear energy capacity in the coming decades. … We have no choice but to increase nuclear capacity,” Booker said.
Benjamin Sovacool sees things differently. Sovacool is professor of energy policy at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex in the U.K. and the director of the Center for Energy Technologies at Aarhus University in Denmark. He’s also lead author of the next U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report.
“Most scenarios show electricity demand shrinks, it doesn’t grow, and there are a lot of other low-carbon options besides nuclear that can do the job,” Sovacool said, singling out wind, solar, geothermal, bioenergy, and hydro, as well as heavy investments in energy efficiency.
Indeed, any number of corporations have decided that the smart money is in renewables.
The Marketplace Has Chosen
Greg Wetstone is the president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE). These aren’t people reading dog-eared copies of Small Is Beautiful. ACORE is backed by Morgan Stanley, GE Energy Financial Services, IBM, Lockheed Martin, and other corporations that are backing renewables for distinctly non-idealistic reasons.
“Last year, we put over 19,000 megawatts of new wind and solar power on the grid,” Wetstone said. “That means that in one year we’ve been able to put just shy of 20 times the aggregate amount of new nuclear power over the last two decades.” During the last eight years, he added, renewable energy has been the leading source of private-sector infrastructure investment in the U.S.
“It is no longer a matter of whether we get to a renewable-energy economy; it’s a question of when,” Wetstone said. “The marketplace has chosen.”
Gregory Jaczko agrees, and he knows a thing or two about nuclear power. After serving seven years on the NRC, the last three as its chair, Jaczko has become the nemesis of the nuclear industry as he makes the case that the dangers and high cost of nuclear power far outweigh its value in combating the climate crisis.
“In terms of future investment, nobody’s seriously considering nuclear or even worried much or advocating for keeping nuclear units around—unless you happen to be one of the few companies that has them,” Jaczko said.
“If you really care about climate change, then you have to do something about natural gas,” Jaczko said. “It’s a race between gas and renewables. It has nothing to do with nuclear.”
The environmental movement agrees; the only question is how quickly America should close the book on nuclear power. Friends of the Earth, the most militant of the established environmental groups, has called for closing existing nuclear reactors and “fighting proposals to design and build new ones.” While also eschewing building more nukes, other groups have called for a slower phaseout. The Union of Concerned Scientists argues that if the plants can be operated safely, some nukes should stay in operation until renewables take their place. But no credible environmental group is advocating building new ones. Putting aside any concerns over safety, proliferation, and waste, the cost of building new nukes is so high that almost no one in the industry takes the idea seriously.
It Sounded Like Science Fiction
Consider the two new reactors at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle, now the only commercial reactor under construction in the U.S. It’s more than five years behind schedule, and the original cost estimate of $14 billon has ballooned to $28 billion. If it weren’t for federal loan guarantees the project would have gone belly up years ago. Why hasn’t it been scrapped? Because, in the words of one member of the Georgia Public Service Commission, Plant Vogtle is “too big to fail.”
And as to a new generation of just possibly less bank-breaking plants on the horizon—what’s being billed as next generation, or “advanced nuclear”—mainstream environment groups are extremely skeptical. They argue it would have, at best, a minuscule impact on the climate crisis. Better, they say, to put more money into renewables. Booker, by contrast, has become next-gen nukes’ champion. Buried in his otherwise well-received 7,100-word climate change plan, Booker calls for spending $20 billion on advanced nuclear.
John Bazemore/AP Photo
Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Georgia
“Next generation nuclear, where the science is going, is to me, at first it sounded like science fiction,” Booker told Don Lemon in his CNN appearance. But, he added, “New nuclear actually portends of exciting things where you have no risk of the kind of meltdowns we’re seeing, where they eat spent fuel rods. We actually can go to the kind of innovations that make nuclear safer or safe. And so, this is the point I’m making. I’m a competitor. I’m a baller. I played football in the Pac-10. Go Stanford. Now Pac-12. And I’m a competitor.”
The reactors Booker is promoting would use different kinds of fuels, cooling systems, and moderators (a substance used to slow down neutrons to make them more efficient in a nuclear fission chain reaction). Today, advanced nuclear is usually shorthand for small modular reactors, or SMRs, which would produce no more than 300 megawatts electric (MWe), compared to an average of roughly 1,000 MWe that can be generated by today’s commercial nuclear plants. The “SMR community”—their term, not mine—says they would produce less waste, they’d be safer to operate, and easier to protect from terrorists, too. But what they stress most is their cost and versatility. Guided by an atomic Fordism, SMR makers would build sections of their reactors in what are essentially factories and then ship the components to be built onsite. They say it could all be done at a fraction of the price of today’s nukes. What’s more, the parts could be bought individually and combined depending on the need. Imagine a giant nuclear Lego set.
In fact, you need to do a lot of imagining when it comes to SMRs because they don’t actually exist. The furthest along is a reactor designed by the Portland, Oregon–based NuScale Power. Though its plans are still under NRC review, NuScale has found one customer: UAMPS, the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems.
Return of the Atari Democrats
But Booker’s not the only Democrat with a thing for SMRs. There’s Third Way—upscale, culturally liberal, and business-friendly. Many would say too friendly. But unlike its predecessor, the more gladiatorial Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Third Way’s promotion of advanced nuclear is more reminiscent of the Atari Democrats of the 1980s, pols like Gary Hart who were smitten with high-tech entrepreneurialism. (That’s a good description of Booker himself, who, while mayor of Newark, launched Waywire, a video curation startup whose investors included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner.) In Booker, Third Way found a kindred spirit.
Booker’s relationship with Third Way began in 2016 when he spoke at its Advanced Nuclear Summit and Showcase in Washington, D.C., a daylong get-together where the SMR community rubbed shoulders with scientists, philanthropists, and politicians. It was Booker’s kind of crowd: smart, tech-savvy, innovators.
“I believe this room holds a tremendous amount of potential for the world and the globe as a whole,” Booker began. “Now, I come to this [climate] crisis in a different way than I imagine most of the people here,” he added. Then, as he often does, Booker presented his audience with a slice of Newark life.
“The last 20 years of my life I’ve lived in the inner city and I’ve seen things that have frustrated me beyond belief that Americans just aren’t conscious enough of, one of those things is just simply that the number one reason why kids miss school in America today … is asthma.” While the child asthma crisis can be traced to a series of factors—decrepit housing and air pollution caused by traffic congestion, to name two—Booker singled out “particulate matter pouring into New Jersey’s airspace because of things like burning coal.” It’s another reason why America desperately needs carbon-neutral energy. But not just any kind.
“Nuclear energy,” Booker said, “because wind and solar is not enough to get us there.”
After a diatribe against government regulation of nuclear worthy of a séance with Ronald Reagan, Booker recited the nuclear industry’s standing wish list: “public-private” partnerships, an unlimited amount of federal R&D money, and rewriting regulations to the industry’s liking. Add lower taxes and it wouldn’t be much different from the kind of thing you’d hear at a Chamber of Commerce lunch.
Booker backed up his words with deeds. The New Jersey senator’s fingerprints are all over legislation to prop up the advanced nuclear industry. Among the bills were the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (NEICA) that requires the NRC to join forces with the industry to test and demonstrate advanced reactor designs, and the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA) to force the NRC to speed up the time it takes to come up with regulations and fast-track the licensing process for advanced reactors. Now, he’s a principal co-sponsor of the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act (NELA), which would require the secretary of energy to “establish advanced nuclear goals, provide for a versatile, reactor-based fast neutron source, make available high-assay, low-enriched uranium for research, development, and demonstration of advanced nuclear reactor concepts, and for other purposes.”
NELA is so extravagant that Katie Tubb of the Heritage Foundation, no foe of nuclear power, slammed the bill, saying it “quite literally proposes to do the work of the companies for them.”
Booker’s support for the industry hasn’t gone unnoticed or unappreciated. The NEI even paid tribute to him in a paid supplement to Politico, the daily gazette of political junkies, entitled “The Unsung Hero of Clean Energy.” NEI quotes Booker saying, “We need to figure out greater ways to drive investment, to remove the bureaucratic barriers, and to allow one of the greatest things we have going for us as a country—those innovators and those investors—to unleash the promise of new nuclear technologies. … Doing so will make millions of Americans, including the children of Newark, Patterson and other U.S. cities, breathe easier.”
But contrary to Booker’s claim, the biggest problem facing SMRs isn’t “bureaucratic barriers.” It’s that the electricity they’d generate would cost so much that they’d be priced out of the energy market. It’s all about economies of scale. Though a 1,100 MW traditional nuclear reactor costs roughly three times as much to build as a 180 MW SMR, it would generate six times the power, making the capital cost per kilowatt twice as high for the smaller reactor. Throw renewables into the mix and SMRs fare no better. The federal Energy Information Administration estimates that by 2023 the cost of using wind will be roughly one-third below the cost of advanced nuclear to generate the same amount of power. As a consequence, SMRs are a product that no one especially wants to buy.
That’s not the view at Third Way, however.
The Invisible Hand
“We’ve heard from a number of utilities that they are interested in advanced nuclear—Southern Company, Excel, Exelon. There’ve been a number of smaller utilities, co-ops and publicly owned, that have also said we’d like to learn more,” says Josh Freed, the founder and leader of Third Way’s Climate and Energy Program and one of the country’s principal advocates for new reactor technology.
Freed and the people at Third Way aren’t dummies. They know that the invisible hand of the marketplace would toss SMRs into the Dumpster. That’s why Third Way sought out Boundary Stone Partners (BSP), a Washington lobbying and PR shop founded by Obama-era Energy Department officials. Third Way tasked BSP with opening the sluice gates to the federal dollars and regulatory fixes to give SMRs the support that private investors won’t. BSP boasts that, thanks to its handiwork, “advanced nuclear legislation attracted bipartisan support and passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming margins … (and) unlocked millions of dollars for advanced nuclear companies (and) streamlined the licensing process.”
While garnering bipartisan support in Congress for almost anything beyond naming post offices is no small feat, nuclear power has always been different. To ease anxiety over nuclear weapons, the Eisenhower White House cooked up “Atoms for Peace.” At its core was the promise that nuclear power plants would generate unlimited amounts of cheap energy that would save dollars for U.S. consumers and lift an impoverished world out of misery. The upshot is that, since 1948, 48 percent of all federal R&D funding for energy technology has gone to nuclear. Renewables? Toward the end of Harry Truman’s presidency, his administration had come up with a plan for solar development. If you’ve never heard about that, it’s because Ike and the boys tossed the plan and capped federal research for solar at $100,000 annually.
It isn’t simply tradition or inertia that’s driven federal support for the nuclear industry, of course. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2018 the “unequivocally opposed to nuclear power” Sierra Club spent $470,000 on lobbying, not only on energy, but on a raft of other issues, too. In contrast, the heavily nuked-up Exelon, which owns six major utility companies, spent more than $5.6 million. That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s chump change compared to the electric utility industry as a whole, which spent a cool $122 million on lobbying that year.
Cal Sport Media via AP Images
The Public Service Electric and Gas building in Woodbridge, New Jersey
The Long Shadow of PSE&G
But the industry has never had to twist Booker’s arm. Instead he’s been careful to avoid locking horns with the state’s principal electric utility, the Newark-based Public Service Electric and Gas (PSE&G), even though retail electric prices in New Jersey are higher than in all but ten states (and D.C.). After his election as Newark’s mayor in 2006, the only business leader named to Booker’s transition team was PSE&G’s president, Ralph Izzo, who’s now chairman and CEO of the company’s parent, Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated (PSEG).
It’s a relationship that’s paid big dividends. Case in point is Izzo’s 2012 pledge to commit to a 15-year lease renewal on PSE&G’s 26-story tower complex in Newark. Had Izzo decided to move out of Newark, as some feared, it would have been a major blow to Booker’s redevelopment plans. Little wonder that Booker has been a committed supporter of the company, not only as mayor but as a senator.
In 2017, Booker supported the company’s drive for state legislation to enable it to charge customers $300 million annually to subsidize three South Jersey nuclear plants. By one estimate, even without those subsidies, the company stood to make as much as $477 million annually over the next ten years. Following the script of other nuclear utilities, the company dropped $3.7 million on a lobbying campaign, claiming that without more money it would have no choice but to shut the plants down. The usual suspects lined up to support the subsidy: Third Way, the Building and Construction Trades unions, and a host of industry allies, including NEI (whose board PSE&G’s Izzo now chairs).
It was an issue Booker could have easily sidestepped. Almost the entire New Jersey Democratic congressional delegation did. Instead, Booker submitted a letter to a hearing on the measure, in which he deftly avoided terms like “subsidy” and “utility rate increase” to claim that he was speaking on behalf of the “need for sound long-term government policies that will maintain the existing (nuclear) fleet.” Should that happen, Booker wrote, the industry “expects to hire 25,000 new workers over the next several years.” With the support of Governor Phil Murphy, the PSE&G subsidy plan became law.
The Boss
But PSE&G goofed. What it had intended to be a $55,000 dark-money contribution to the General Growth Fund, a 501(c)(4), went instead to General Majority PAC, which, unlike the fund, is legally required to reveal its donors. Both are said to be closely tied to George Norcross III, a multimillionaire insurance broker and the unquestioned boss of South Jersey Democratic politics. (Norcross also sits on the board of Holtec International, a company that decommissions old nuclear plants, and which was granted a $260 million state tax subsidy to build a complex in Camden where it plans to mass-produce SMRs. Holtec was one of several companies linked to Norcross that received hefty tax breaks. In 2017, its CEO, Krishna Singh, loaned $250,000 to General Majority PAC.)
While PSE&G contributing to the wrong PAC came as a surprise, the idea that Norcross would have a hand in passing the bill didn’t, especially since one of his closest political allies was state Senate President Steve Sweeney, a principal backer of the subsidy.
Not unlike Tammany Hall of old, Norcross has created a machine that rewards its friends, but isn’t so nice to them that aren’t. One way it’s done is by deciding which would-be Democratic nominee has “the line” in a primary election. It’s usually, but not always, the first column on the left-hand side of the ballot. County Democratic chairs who are part of Norcross’s machine make sure that’s where the names of his chosen candidates appear, usually with a heading identifying them as having been endorsed by the county Democratic committee. That’s not to say their opponents aren’t listed on the ballot, but it’s often where they go unnoticed. Sue Altman, director of New Jersey’s Working Families Alliance, the counterpart to New York’s Working Families Party, points out that “having the line is essentially like starting a primary race 40 points up. Those who don’t get it sometimes drop out because they’re convinced they stand no chance of winning.”
In 2013, when Booker decided to run to complete the unexpired term of the recently deceased Senator Frank Lautenberg, he understood that Norcross’s support was essential to nailing down the vote in the South Jersey counties where the boss had sway. Booker courted Norcross, who shared his passion for getting private businesses involved with running public schools.
“Ideologically, Cory and I are much closer than the others,” Norcross said when he announced his support for Booker. “I think we have found many of the people from our part of the state are fiscally conservative, socially progressive—who believe in advancing the interests of the students within the state.”
Thanks in part to Norcross’s backing, Booker won the nomination with a lopsided 59 percent of the vote, taking all but three of the state’s 21 counties.
Booker is still popular, but less so since announcing his candidacy. An April 2018 Monmouth University poll showed him with a 54 percent approval rating among registered voters, but by September of this year his standing had slumped to 45 percent. Part of the drop reflects the belief that Booker bears either a great deal (28 percent) or some responsibility (23 percent) for the elevated lead levels in Newark’s water supply. Though he’ll be cash-starved and weaker than when he began his White House run, no one in the state’s political class doubts Booker will be re-elected to the Senate next year. But Booker needs to win big—not necessarily to make another bid for the White House, but, as some speculate, to one day run for governor.
Now that his presidential campaign is flatlining, it’s time for Booker to think about his Senate race next year and perhaps a move to Trenton sometime after that. Norcross may prove helpful in those ventures. Then again, the fact that Booker, the Democrats’ most outspoken supporter of SMRs, is beholden to the South Jersey boss who sits on the board of a company that plans to be one of the biggest SMR makers in the world—one whose CEO made a quarter-of-a-million-dollar loan to General Majority PAC—could just prove a hindrance.
That might compel Booker to take a look at political baggage he’s been piling up. Some of it may be radioactive.
