Kaufman, in an article originally published by HuffPost, and re-published in Canada's National Observer, in early December, 2021 reported that the exceptionally well-documented article responded to the title question that the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster is a recent and painful memory in Japan. Yet in the lead-up to last month’s United Nations climate summit, newly elected Prime Minister Fumio Kishida vowed to restart the reactors the country shut down after a tsunami flooded the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011 and caused a meltdown that contaminated more than 300 square miles with hazardous levels of radiation [Fact Check: Bias Alert - Fear Pandering.... The level is very low, but detectable (more)].
Japan was hardly alone in rediscovering its enthusiasm for nuclear power. As negotiations to phase out coal fizzled, the United Kingdom announced an investment in Rolls-Royce’s next-generation nuclear reactors. Ghana and Indonesia unveiled plans for their first reactors. And China, the world’s No. 1 carbon emitter, promised to construct an unprecedented 150 new reactors in the next 15 years ― more than the entire world built in the last 35.
In the United States, where nuclear power plants have been steadily shutting down for the past decade as they struggle to compete with natural gas and renewable energy sources, the Biden administration pledged to shore up existing reactors and invest in new ones. The $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed into law Nov. 15 provides aging, financially troubled nuclear plants a $6-billion lifeline to stay open and directs billions more for research into next-generation mini-reactors. The $1.7-trillion Build Back Better legislation currently being negotiated in the Senate adds billions more in tax credits for nuclear generation. The Energy Department recently approved the country’s first permits for a next-gen small reactor and helped broker a deal for a U.S. nuclear startup to build one in Romania.
Nuclear is even getting a boost on the state level. Unlike New York and California, where nuclear plants are shutting down, Illinois passed a clean-energy law in September that boosted cash-strapped reactors with new subsidies. The flurry of new policies and announcements raises the question: Are we at the dawn of a nuclear renaissance?
After discussions on the fear of radiation and the handling of "waste" reactor products, Kaufman concluded that:
A. Downsizing for the Future
If nuclear power does make a comeback in the U.S., its future may rest in a frontier coal town in western Wyoming. In tiny Kemmerer ― population just a little over 2,700 ― the startup TerraPower plans to replace an aging coal-fired plant with a set of its mini-reactors by 2028. The plant could become the commercial breakthrough the next-generation nuclear industry has been awaiting. Traditional reactors are enormous, expensive and rely on expertise that has become rarer over the last decades. But the modular reactors TerraPower plans to make are typically about one-third the size and can be assembled in a factory and transported to the plant location. This, at least in theory, dramatically cuts down the construction costs and time.
Various companies and countries are competing to bring the first small modular reactors to market. Russia recently deployed a small reactor on a floating barge and docked in a Siberian port city, where it was used to heat and power homes, and it has announced plans to build more. China started building its first commercial small modular reactor on the southern island of Hainan this summer. The British government’s pledge to fund Rolls-Royce’s small modular reactor project turned out to be one of the most significant announcements of this month’s UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
TerraPower ― which billionaire Bill Gates co-founded and backed ― is charging ahead with a small modular reactor uniquely cooled with sodium, which has a higher boiling point than water and can store excess electricity for hours. It has competitors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in the final stages of certifying a design from NuScale Power, based in Portland, Ore., that will likely be used for a dozen of its scaled-down water-cooled reactors at an Energy Department facility in Idaho, which will sell power to a local utility. If it wins final approvals, it would be the first small, modular reactor to get a green-light from U.S. regulators. There are roughly 20 other companies working on similarly sized, or even smaller, reactors.
Small reactors have their critics. David Schissel, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said small reactors have the same problems but in a different package. “In the 1950s, they said atomic energy would be too cheap to meter, but it hasn’t worked out that way and it won’t work out that way,” he said. “Plus, the question still remains: Where are they going to put the nuclear waste? Nobody wants it.”[Fact Check: Bias Alert. Typical unfounded anti-nuclear BS]
Even writer Michael Shellenberger, one of nuclear power’s most fervent evangelists, warned in a recent newsletter that “futuristic nuclear plants are a long ways off, which means it’s misleading at best, and self-destructive at worst, to hype nuclear technologies that only exist on paper.” Instead, he said, countries should follow the lead of France, which generates the vast majority of its electricity from nuclear reactors, and build more traditional plants. BloombergNEF’s Gadomski said small reactors just need a strong first test case to show investors that the technology is commercially viable. But neither BloombergNEF nor Wood Mackenzie expects the industry to start taking off until the 2030s.[Note: Others say that SMRs will be here by the end of the decade, which means they could be available sooner than expected [SMRs)].
B. Climate Changing Around Nuclear
And yet nuclear power remains deeply unpopular. Dogged by pop-culture references like HBO’s Chernobyl series and the careless plant-safety operator Homer on The Simpsons, just 49 per cent of U.S. adults said they favor nuclear power in a 2019 Gallup poll, down from a record high of 62 per cent in 2010. Overwhelming majorities of self-identified Democrats, women and those without college degrees opposed nuclear power.
An August 2020 survey from Morning Consult found one in three U.S. adults thinks the country should keep existing nuclear plants open but not build any new reactors. Just 16 per cent of respondents said the U.S. should build more reactors, and just six per cent said the country should keep current plants running, build more reactors and promote nuclear power programs overseas. But nuclear power suffers from a “perception gap,” according to an analysis last year from Bisconti Research, a polling firm that frequently examines public attitudes on atomic energy and has routinely found more favorable opinions than other surveys.
“The U.S. public perceives public opinion toward nuclear energy as less favourable than their own opinion. This perception gap can lead persons who favor nuclear energy to fear speaking out in support of nuclear energy,” the analysis concluded. “That silence, in turn, could reinforce erroneous perceptions of public opinion.” Nuclear power advocates hope those numbers could start to shift as the scale of the planet’s emissions crisis comes into clearer focus.
“There have been years of indecisiveness, but the climate is changing around nuclear,” said Kirsty Gogan, managing director of the British clean-energy think tank Terra Praxis. Another is that renewables alone have not proved to be completely reliable. Throughout this past summer and autumn, Europe experienced less wind than usual, adding to the energy crunch that has sent prices soaring across the continent. The British power company SSE, for example, said the lack of rain and wind led its hydropower and wind turbine facilities to produce 32 per cent less electricity than expected.
It remains unclear why the wind stopped blowing as hard, but recent studies have shown that climate change could reduce gusts in what one researcher called the threat of “global stilling.” Though few credibly argue against investing in renewables, the shortfalls show the need for more zero-carbon sources of power that can run with as little interruption as fossil fuel plants. She compared the role nuclear could play to the way plant-based meat giant Impossible Foods offered a compelling substitute for beef.
“We need impossible burgers for energy, a drop-in substitute,” she said. “We’re not bending the curve on emissions because in the power sector we still need reliability, making the idea that we’re going to phase out coal unforgivably unrealistic right now.”
[But the move into nuclear is underway (more) and (more)]
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