Michael Holahan/Augusta Chronicle via AP Images
A dome is lowered onto a nuclear containment building at the Plant Vogtle nuclear energy facility in Waynesboro, Georgia.
It took seven months on the campaign trail for Cory Booker to emerge as the Democratic Party’s foremost champion of nuclear power. In September, after he unveiled a signature climate plan replete with “$20 billion dedicated to research, development and demonstration of next-generation advanced nuclear energy,” he embraced the technology with unprecedented ardor. “I didn’t come to the United States Senate as a big nuclear guy,” Booker told Grist in an interview. “But when I started looking at the urgency of climate change … nuclear has to be a part of the blend.”
To hear Booker tell it, his evolution on the subject was the product of scientific rigor and anti-ideological clarity on decarbonization. He related this narrative during a media blitz, comparing anti-nuclear Democrats to Republican climate deniers over their rejection of an incontrovertible science, while pledging to usher in a nuclear future that no right-minded person could deny. “Where the science is going, to me, at first sounded like science fiction … new nuclear actually portends of exciting things where you have no risk of the kinds of meltdowns we’re seeing,” he proclaimed at CNN’s climate town hall.
Grandiosity aside, Booker isn’t alone in his nuclear embrace. He’s part of an unlikely pro-nuclear political alliance, an emergent accord that spans the centrist think tank Third Way, Andrew Yang, Jay Inslee, environmental activists, and progressive commentators alike. “The left should stop worrying and learn to love existing nuclear power plants,” wrote New York’s Eric Levitz in a subsequent send-up of Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s twin commitments to phase out the technology.
In a world where the rapid deployment of zero-carbon energy production is urgent, nuclear power, the argument goes, represents the only proven bet. As it stands, nuclear is currently the largest single source of near-zero-carbon energy generation in the United States, providing 20 percent of our total energy mix. And while the waste may be dangerous, and the risks associated with meltdowns cinematically seared into our collective memory, the technology is actually safer than burning fossil fuels—one study found that per unit of electricity generated, oil is 263 times more deadly than nuclear, on account of air pollution alone. With 11 years, per the U.N.’s 2018 IPCC report, to overhaul our energy system, to be serious about decarbonization is to find a place at the table for nuclear.
It’s an alluring idea. Already, this logic has been embraced in states like Ohio and Booker’s New Jersey, which have been allocating green tax subsidies to nuclear projects. And while it’s largely played out in the background, the question of what to do about nuclear has vexed Green New Dealers since the rollout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s framework in February. While plane travel and hamburgers raised hackles in the press, one of the first clauses to be deleted from the initial proposal pledged to phase out the technology altogether.
So does the Green New Deal need nuclear to achieve its lofty goals? Does zero-carbon energy infrastructure necessitate a nuclear buildout, or at least an embrace of already-existing nuclear as a bridge fuel, as countries like Sweden have done? Unfortunately, the case for nuclear as a green technology is not so simple—the technology faces a spate of environmental and economic challenges, while its track record as a bridge fuel shows it may be more rivalrous than concomitant with renewables. In fact, it may be the nuclear industry that needs the Green New Deal, not the other way around.
DESPITE THE NEWFOUND exigency of overhauling the country’s energy mix, this is not the first time America’s energy system has arrived at a crossroads in the last ten years, nor is it the first time nuclear has been trotted out as its last, best hope. In the late aughts, with oil prices soaring and production stagnant, policymakers made a commitment to expanding American nuclear generation. An era of so-called “nuclear renaissance” began, with four next-generation reactors commissioned at two plants, one in Georgia and the other in South Carolina.
Since nuclear energy was first announced as a civilian project in 1953, its promises of worldwide abundance have far outpaced its production.
Now, over a decade later, that project managed to bankrupt its construction company, Westinghouse, nearly taking down the entire Toshiba conglomerate, Westinghouse’s parent company, with it. The two reactors in South Carolina were abandoned, while the Southern Nuclear and Georgia Power utility companies assumed control of the remaining two reactors in Georgia, the Vogtle 3 and 4. But even a cash infusion from Georgia ratepayers, who began subsidizing the completion of the project in 2011, was not enough to keep the project close to its budget or timeline. Initially expected to come online in 2016-2017, the Vogtle plant has run some $14 billion over budget. Its completion dates have been deferred to 2021-2022. There’s currently no other active nuclear development in the United States.
That timeline should be particularly alarming for nuclear enthusiasts. If it’s going to take 10 to 15 years to see a plant through to completion, even with massive financial backing, that’s seemingly impossible to square with the 11 years to decarbonize. At the very least, we’d need hundreds, if not thousands of plants already under construction just to make a dent. Booker, Yang, and other advocates are betting that R&D might accelerate that process, but in a real sense it’s already too late.
So if new construction can’t be counted on, and the window for adding new nuclear to the fleet has already shut, what about the reactors we currently have? Has their environmental potential gotten short shrift?
While nuclear fission emits far less carbon dioxide than energy production by oil and gas, the process of getting to that energy generation complicates nuclear’s claim to zero-carbon status. Uranium mining, processing, and transport are all carbon-intensive procedures done by diesel-powered heavy machinery. Instead of carbon, the plants themselves emit heat, often in great quantities, which can warm nearby air and water dramatically, killing fish and wildlife and afflicting neighboring habitats.
And while nuclear may maintain a cleaner sheet than fossil fuels when it comes to CO2, its record on H2O is less rosy. An American nuclear plant can require between 19 million and 1.4 billion gallons of water a day, just for purposes of cooling. Because of that implacable thirst, it’s imperative that nuclear plants are constructed near major water sources.
Thus, nuclear plants dot our rivers and coastline, each of which carries with it its own climate-specific challenges. Plants built near abundant freshwater—rivers and lakes—have been forced to contend with the twin challenges of too much water and not enough. In recent years, nuclear reactors, like those on the Great Lakes, have been forced to shut down when droughts have plagued rivers and lakes, reducing water levels to perilous lows. Meanwhile, in places like Nebraska, flood risks have necessitated shutdowns. And in France, which sports one of the most robust nuclear programs in the world, heat waves have caused water temperatures to surge to the point of shutdowns multiple summers in a row.
In fact, a 2012 study published in Nature Climate Change forecasted a decrease in thermoelectric power generating capacity of up to 19 percent in Europe and 16 percent in the United States for the period 2031-2060, just due to lack of cooling water. Extant nuclear plants may not accelerate a rapidly warming climate, but it remains to be seen if they can functionally exist in one.
Coastal plants face climate-induced challenges of their own. Hurricane Sandy, which laid siege to the Atlantic coast in 2012, forced seven nuclear plant shutdowns due to flooding, storm debris, and wind damage. Earlier this year, Bloomberg Businessweek identified 19 U.S. nuclear plants under threat from rising seas, and 54 facilities (out of a national total of 60) that “weren’t designed to handle the flood risk they face.” And that was before a November report found nearly four times as many people as previously thought are living on land that is likely to flood at least once a year on average by mid-century. Large-scale retreat from low-lying coastal cities is going to be a reality, and nuclear power plants can’t move with a shifting coastline. Even if they could, plants that draw on saltwater for cooling would suffer similarly diminished capacity as global ocean temperatures rise, as well.
Those rising sea levels are also a problem for the ever-perplexing, still unresolved issue of waste disposal. Beyond the controversial Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada, which has failed to get off the ground, much nuclear waste is simply stored on site. At the now-decommissioned San Onofre plant in Southern California and the Pilgrim plant in Cape Cod, the waste is buried beneath the sand at the water’s edge. “Four decades of radioactive waste being stored right there on the water line,” says Kate Brown, a professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. “It’s a short-term solution for a long-term problem.”
That also means that sea-level rise threatens waste disposal, and with no way to check for leaks, the impact of rising seas on that waste remains largely unknown. But in the Marshall Islands, the site of one of the largest American nuclear waste disposal venues, known as the Runit Dome, the effect of sea-level rise is certain: The concrete encasement is now at risk of collapsing as rising seas encroach.
If nuclear is too costly to factor in long-term, and too unstable to subsist in the present, the question remains of when to begin the transition away from it. The concern that an immediate shutdown of existing nuclear plants would lead to accelerating carbon emissions from either coal or natural gas as a substitute has led certain countries, like Sweden, to favor a slow phaseout of its nuclear fleet. France, too, despite heavy reliance on nuclear, has been discussing a slow, partial phaseout, in accordance with that rationale.
This was the fear when Germany, not long after the Fukushima meltdown, announced it would quickly shutter its entire nuclear power program. Initially, those concerns seemed vindicated. Carbon emissions spiked, as reliance on coal production increased. The country was quickly branded as a cautionary tale. But just a few short years after this campaign was waged, that analysis has changed dramatically. “Today renewables account for 40 percent of German energy production; 15 years ago it was in the single digits,” says Greg Jaczko, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission under Obama. Not only have renewables taken over the energy share once produced by nuclear, “they’ve done enough of a build that they’re going to eat into coal.”
It’s the same story in Japan, where emissions spiked briefly after Fukushima caused a wide-scale shutdown. Even today, only a couple of the country’s nuclear reactors have been brought back online. But thanks to an aggressive build-out of renewables, emissions are below where they were with a fully operating nuclear fleet. Countries that have chosen to decommission slowly have seen their renewable build-outs stymied accordingly; dependence on nuclear has decelerated an inevitable process. Sweden’s reliance on nuclear has been an impediment to renewable development, which is part of the reason the deadline for decommissioning keeps getting pushed. Bridge fuels have a way of making themselves permanent.
WHEN DID NUCLEAR get this environmental rebrand? Until very recently, the industry hadn’t led with its environmental chops. In fact, for years, nuclear buddied up with the coal industry, courting the Trump administration for subsidies, while the Nuclear Energy Institute supported the Department of Energy’s failed coal and nuclear bailout, and lauded Ohio’s controversial coal and nuclear subsidy package earlier this year.
For as long as it’s existed, nuclear has been an aspirational technology as much as an extant one. Since Eisenhower first announced nuclear energy generation as a civilian project in 1953, its promises of worldwide abundance have far outpaced its production. Twenty years later, in 1973, Richard Nixon pledged to have 1,000 nuclear plants online by 1980, a goal that never approached realization. Since then, the magical thinking of the nuclear industry has taken different forms. Over decades, breeder reactors, salt reactors, large-scale fusion have all been the nuclear future just over the horizon. “The industry that people talk about is a theoretical industry,” says Jaczko. “The actual industry is not that.” Since the development of nuclear weapons, the non-military nuclear energy program has always been a PR charge as much as it was a serious proposal. “Historians have determined that the rollout of civilian nuclear power in the 1960s had as much to do with Cold War PR as the need for electricity,” says Brown.
Nuclear’s pivot to unlikely environmental champion and running mate of the Green New Deal is far from a happy accident. It’s a deliberate posture, informed as much by shrewd marketing as Booker’s data-driven rationale. With the rapid development of solar and wind, nuclear is now far more expensive to produce in terms of dollars per kilowatt hour. With the rapid growth of renewables, nuclear now finds itself on the wrong side of free-market forces, in dire need of public subsidy to stay afloat.
So the enthusiasm for the public investment of the Green New Deal is primarily a tactical one, with the promise of a massive outlay of public funds enticing an industry in need of a lifeline. “Of course the nuclear industry is trying new alliances; they are desperate.” says Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. Cutting them in would be an unforced error for GND legislation—the money that would be spent making nuclear viable, shielding it from an array of climate disasters, and figuring out what to do with its waste would be much better spent figuring out battery storage or something else to stitch in the gaps in renewable generation.
Looking closer at Booker’s proposal, it’s not clear even he believes the sales pitch he’s making. Despite his lofty pronouncements, the climate plan, which sums to $3 trillion, allocates just two-thirds of 1 percent to nuclear development. The $20 billion is barely enough to cover the cost overruns of the two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle plant. The notion that such a paltry sum would finally put the industry over the top after decades of malaise, indeed, sounds like science fiction.
