Foreign Policy: Will Washington Stop Nuclear Power
Foreign Policy: Will Washington Stop Nuclear Power
As Biden administration climate czar John Kerry rightly put it: “We don’t get to net zero by 2050 without nuclear power in the mix.”
It is not often that John Kerry says something that is smart and needs to be repeated often.
For anyone hoping to reboot the nuclear power sector as a source of zero-carbon energy in the age of climate change, the news has not been good. On Feb. 28, the staff of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) forwarded a proposed licensing framework for next-generation reactors to the agency’s five politically appointed commissioners. That proposal came little more than a year after the NRC summarily rejected Oklo Power’s license application for its Aurora reactor. The application was the first attempt to obtain a license to operate an advanced nuclear reactor in the United States.
Net-zero or zero-carbon energy is a utopian fantasy. In reality, it would result in a rollback of civilization for the vast majority of people on Earth. One would expect that governments and the elite would live blessed lives. Need evidence. How many people flew in for COP27, the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference? That could all have been done remotely, but that won’t ever happen.
Climate alarmists aren’t honest or informed. Going back to the global temperature manipulations uncovered at East Anglia and eventually termed Climategate, even the baseline data is suspect. However, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is reliably known going back many centuries. More carbon dioxide isn’t likely to be good.
Wind power is based on mechanical devices that aren’t likely to be substantially improved. Solar power has theoretical limits. Both of these modes of generating electricity are unreliable and require substantial energy storage or backup generators to be a general solution. Both can work well in specific situations.
Nuclear power is the only technology that can currently provide safe and clean electricity generation.
The new rules, mandated by the U.S. Congress, were supposed to provide a modern, streamlined licensing process for the new small reactors in advanced stages of development by multiple U.S. and international companies. Instead, the NRC staff simply cut and pasted the existing rules for large conventional reactors into a mammoth 1,200-page regulation for new reactor types.
Small reactors are standardized and passively safe. Using regulations to make them impractical in the US puts us at a big disadvantage. China is building a new nuclear reactor every two years.
For this reason, global progress in lowering carbon emissions may ultimately be determined not by fossil fuel companies, climate activists, or elected officials, but by an insular and deeply conservative regulatory agency.
I don’t know in what sense the agency is deeply conservative.
Nuclear regulation has always been predicated on the notion that the technology is exceptionally dangerous. The actual track record of civilian nuclear energy, however, suggests the opposite.
As unlikely as it sounds, nuclear energy is safer than solar energy. It isn’t unusual for a solar panel installer to fall off of a ladder.
In 1986, at the Chernobyl plant in what is now Ukraine, Soviet authorities managed a trifecta of shocking negligence: They chose a reactor design known to be prone to a runaway reaction, built it without a containment system to keep radiation from spreading widely in case of accident, and neglected to take simple protective actions after the accident that could have mitigated the public health consequences.
Chernobyl was a great TV show, but the accident happened at Soviet facility almost 40 years ago. That bears little relationship to the modern nuclear power plants used in France.
Two decades ago, the World Health Organization expected 4,000 excess long-term cancer deaths from radiation exposure at Chernobyl, mostly from thyroid cancers. By 2008, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation said it had found no evidence of any measurable increase in cancer risk among the general population.
The WHO considers radiation exposure at any level to be dangerous. That simply isn’t the case. Our bodies routinely repair minor damage. Side Note: Two of my former students were children evacuated from Chernobyl. Not really a data point, but both are doing fine.
Due to fundamental properties associated with their designs, most advanced nuclear reactors are inherently much safer than conventional reactors. They are smaller and contain far less fissile material. They utilize fuels that are less prone to runaway reactions and less capable of melting down. And they are not cooled by water, which means they do not require any mechanical pumping of coolant through the reactor at high pressure.
There is much more in the article, but the upshot is that modern nuclear reactors are very safe compared to reactors from 40 years ago and to other practical energy sources.