Alain Pitton/NurPhoto via AP
More than 3,500 people demonstrated in Toulouse, France, as the United Nations Climate Change Conference continued in Glasgow, Scotland, November 6, 2021.
This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
A strange thing happened on the way to COP26. Japanese voters returned the Liberal Democratic Party to power, and its leader, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, is a supporter of nuclear energy and of restarting the country’s sidelined nuclear plants. Elsewhere, French President Emmanuel Macron once wanted to backtrack on France’s all-in nuclear strategy, but now he intends to bankroll a new generation of nuclear facilities to replace its aging plants. The United States trumpeted its pursuit of state-of-the-art nuclear reactors, while Britain crowed about its commitments to nuclear energy. For its part, concerned about long-term reliance on nuclear power and waste storage issues, Germany stands firm on its post-Fukushima retreat from nuclear energy—and it’s not likely that the French, the world’s leading nuclear energy adopter, will make much headway with the Germans on the subject.
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You might suppose that the planet’s premier international climate conference could be a safe space to thrash out the varying takes on the role of nuclear energy in dealing with the climate crisis and getting to net zero. But the world’s second-most widely used clean-energy source has had something of a pariah status at COP26. The climate summit’s refusal to acknowledge nuclear power’s singular role in global energy production and its possible viability as a bridge fuel says more than streets full of anti-nuclear protesters ever could about the controversial space that nuclear energy occupies in the global decarbonization debate.
Nuclear advocates and organizations like the World Nuclear Association criticized the COP26 snub, which facilitated their participation but kept them out of public view. Eleven nuclear workers’ unions issued a call for an “active industrial strategy underpinned by investment” in nuclear energy. “There seems to be a real power struggle in Europe right now, and it doesn’t look like Germany is going to be backing down,” says Bob Walker, national director of the Canadian Nuclear Workers’ Council, which signed the letter. “It’s been very discouraging.”
A decade ago, support for nuclear power plummeted in both Germany and Japan after the tsunami spawned by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, leading to a cataclysmic meltdown. Wind and solar power emerged as primary beneficiaries of the disaster, which cratered interest in nuclear as a bridge fuel to a net-zero world. About 10 percent of the world’s electricity came from nuclear power in 2019 before scheduled retirements, maintenance shutdowns, and reduced electricity demands took hold in 2020.
But in 2021, as developed countries tried to restart their pandemic-addled economies, an energy crisis seized Europe. A historic decrease in wind speeds over Ireland and the United Kingdom earlier this year (a cautionary tale for the U.S.) magnified renewable energy’s intermittency problems. The Netherlands has all but shut down Europe’s largest natural gas field to alleviate earthquakes. An increased demand for natural gas sent prices skyrocketing, which prompted Germany and other nations to shift to cheaper, and dirtier, coal to produce electricity.
Over the past year, then, nuclear energy has gained new respect, due primarily to wind and solar’s energy storage and intermittency issues across much of Europe. Until the renewables sector solves the intermittency question and can harness stored energy when winds are calm and skies overcast, nuclear is the only other net-zero source already in use. “Nuclear, solar, and wind can all survive in a zero-carbon world; they all play different roles,” says Christopher Knittel, a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “But unless we get the right incentive structures in place, I fear, what we’ve seen in some markets is replacing a zero-carbon source with another zero-carbon source and that’s not doing anything to help the climate.”
Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), a next-generation technology, are key to the nuclear countries’ renewed bullishness on climate, though they exist only on drawing boards. Seventy percent of France’s electricity already comes from nuclear energy, easing the way for Macron to initiate an SMR ramp-up. Although Britain plans to push forward with one large conventional-scale plant, it’s also moving ahead with SMRs.
Nuclear energy is the single largest source of clean energy in the U.S., and the Biden administration has leaned into a Foundational Infrastructure for Responsible Use of Small Modular Reactor Technology (FIRST) program that provides a tiny amount of funding, $5.3 million, to boost international research and development partnerships. One such deal, an agreement between NuScale Power (a Portland, Oregon–based firm) and Nuclearelectrica (the Romanian national nuclear company) to build an SMR plant, got a shout-out from the White House.
Nuclear construction in the U.S. has all but ground to a halt since its apex beginning in the 1970s. Currently, there are about five dozen nuclear plants with licensed reactors providing 20 percent of the country’s electricity. The misadventures surrounding the Vogtle project in Georgia, which is years behind schedule and billions over initial cost projections, have doomed conventional projects of one gigawatt or more that were already faltering because of astronomical costs and safety fears.
The world’s most widely used clean-energy source has had something of a pariah status at COP26.
Now, the cost savings and safety enhancements that come with the SMRs have created new interest in the nuclear option, though such plants are still roughly a decade away from commercial deployment in the U.S. and Canada. Smaller SMRs run up to about 300 megawatts, are factory-built—that is, cheaper—and can be sited in locations that cannot support conventional plants, which must be built near large bodies of water to provide a source for reactor cooling. The smallest subset of advanced nuclear reactors are micro reactors of one to ten megawatts that are suitable for deployment in remote, hard-to-reach communities. “The whole idea behind the SMRs,” says Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security and a former Department of Energy official, “is that you are able to manufacture these modules and hook them together to create a designer output.”
SMRs could minimize intermittency issues. “When people talk about the complementarity between nuclear and renewables, you would have a smaller steady output, as well as this intermittent output, and the nuclear part would take over when the renewable part wasn’t producing,” explains Luongo, who oversaw DOE’s arms control, nonproliferation, and nuclear materials portfolios. Utility-grade energy storage that could render intermittency obsolete in wind and solar is also years away, and batteries come with their own hazards, as a September overheating incident at Moss Landing, a former California power plant turned site of the world’s largest battery complex, demonstrated.
An International Atomic Energy Agency explainer notes that these modular reactors rely on a mix of inherent safety features and passive systems that utilize gravity, self-pressurization, and other physical attributes that do not need humans to step in if and when something goes wrong. These systems also would have smaller amounts of volatile materials on-site than conventional nuclear plants and can be returned to a factory site once the fuel is spent. SMRs are being designed to withstand certain types of impacts and sited in such a way to be hardened against sabotage and natural disasters.
On Capitol Hill, there has been rare bipartisan agreement that nuclear has a role to play in the U.S. energy mix. The Trump administration signed two nuclear power research and development bills, the Energy Act of 2020, which aids existing power plants, and the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act of 2017, which facilitates building privately funded demonstration reactors at Energy Department sites.
Whether smaller equals better and alleviates, if not completely banishes, public fears about the dangers of nuclear power, remains to be seen. Promising theories that pan out in controlled demonstration settings can fall apart in the real world. SMR research and development projects, such as FIRST, the international R&D program, have teed up enough theoretical credibility to secure public seed money. But the technology is still in the R&D phase, and until SMRs are thoroughly tested, licensed, and online, it is impossible to gauge how markets will respond or if the safety theories hold. The Seattle Times reported that a Washington state next-generation small nuclear reactor plant being developed and constructed by X-energy, a Maryland-based firm, stands to haul in $2.2 billion, thanks to the recently signed bipartisan infrastructure legislation. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also branched out into SMRs. His TerraPower company is building an SMR plant at a shuttered coal plant in Wyoming, the country’s largest coal-producing state.
On Capitol Hill, there has been rare bipartisan agreement that nuclear has a role to play in the U.S. energy mix.
Color the Union of Concerned Scientists dubious about the benefits touted by TerraPower and X-energy. Its March report, “‘Advanced’ Isn’t Always Better,” found that many of the companies’ suppositions rest on half-century-old ideas about safety, security, and cost savings that have never been tested. Moreover, their within-the-decade deployment targets are wildly optimistic: Factoring in the necessary federal regulatory testing regimes adds on another decade, the group suggests. UCS goes even further, recommending suspending federal demonstration programs until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decides how to proceed with testing and commercial licensing.
For their part, environmental organizations are split on nuclear energy. Groups that planted their flags on the hill of the anti-nuclear movement, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, still oppose nuclear energy. Organizations like the Nature Conservancy embrace both renewables and nuclear energy. UCS supports renewables and decarbonization policies, as well as safety enhancements for existing nuclear facilities.
In COP26’s first week, climate negotiators made significant strides by agreeing to curtail methane emissions and dial back deforestation. The most surprising shift was a commitment to a two-pronged phaseout of coal supported by developed countries and developing countries alike (although the U.S., U.K., and Canada declined to make the leap, pledging only to end investments in fossil fuel plants abroad). But with European Union countries at odds on nuclear, and facing an imminent EU financing decision on which energy sources the bloc counts as green, COP26 opted to keep the nuclear question as unanswered, and undiscussed, as possible, and accorded the lowest of low profiles to the nuclear energy advocates in attendance.
The choices confronting the international community about nuclear power are both urgent and difficult. Countries have to balance concerns over the economic role, as well as the safety and security, of a net-zero energy source already in use against the reality of rapid planetary degradation. That explains the recent dash of some political leaders to SMRs, which give the appearance of being a viable technology though they are years away from deployment. What’s emerging is a discordant free-for-all that edges nuclear energy forward without coordinated leadership, much less consensus. Or, as IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, who was advised to stay home but showed up at COP26 anyway, brazenly told Bloomberg Green, “The message to the public is that nuclear will be a very useful element in the equation, whether you like it or not.”
But if COP26 can’t offer a viable forum to kick-start the debate about the role of nuclear energy and new technologies on the road to net zero, just how, when, and where on Earth does it happen?
This article has been corrected to reflect nuclear power’s number two ranking as a global clean-energy source. Hydropower is the mostly widely used.
