Nuclear Energy and Renewables

The Basics

Overview of nuclear safety

All commercial nuclear power reactors in the USA and almost all in other countries are “water reactors”: Both their coolant and their moderator is the same water. The moderator is required to sustain the chain reaction. Thus in water reactors, loss of coolant is also loss of moderator and results in immediate and complete shutdown of the chain reaction, passively and independently of any other safety systems.

Water reactor designs include pressurized water reactors (PWRs) and boiling water reactors (BWRs): technologies initially developed by the USA in the 1950s. Canadian CANDU reactors are different but they are also water reactors.

There are about 400 large commercial power-producing water reactors currently operating worldwide: 94 in the USA, 55 in China, over 120 in Europe, South Korea 25, India 19, Japan 9, Russia 37 (water reactors, not Chernobyl-style graphite reactors 8 of which still operate in Russia), Canada 19 (CANDU), and about 30 in other countries. About 60 additional water reactors are under construction around the world, and about 100 more are ordered or planned.

Also, the US Navy operates water reactors on 72 nuclear-powered submarines and 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (most with 2 reactors), and the Russians operate them on 58 nuclear submarines, 6 nuclear icebreakers, and a nuclear cargo ship.

As of April 2024 the largest electrical generating station in the world which isn’t a dam is the Kori Nuclear Plant in S. Korea (seven PWRs 7.5GW electrical). The largest in the USA which isn’t a dam is Vogtle (four PWRs 4.5GW electrical). All provide full power nearly 24/7/365.

About 1000 water reactors have operated on land and sea since their invention, totaling at least seventeen thousand reactor-years of operational history. No one has ever been killed by a radiological release from any water reactor (including Fukushima), nor from their nuclear waste.

Nuclear Policy ideas

In the 1970s the US nuclear industry largely pivoted from building and selling nuclear power to selling “nuclear safety” mandated by captured government agencies. Selling safety was easier and more profitable. We should unwind regulatory capture of the relevant agencies (NRC, DOE, etc.) by the nuclear safety industry.

We must unwind the balkanization and short-term profit incentives in the electrical power industry that emerged during the era of break-up and private-equity capture of former public and semi-public electric utilities. The “Enron model” for increasing profits via energy derivatives trading is still going strong resulting in, and profiting from, an increasingly unstable grid.

Standard large-scale water reactors with ~1000 MW output 24/7/365 are proven, reliable, and economical outside of the US, and up through the mid-1970s in the US. They take very little land. They can be sited at the coal plants they replace, utilizing the retired coal plants’ turbines, generators, cooling, and grid hookups.

In some countries water-reactor-based power plants take six years or less to complete from groundbreaking to operation (e.g. S. Korea, Japan, China). They include US designs built by or licensed from US companies. In contrast, the same type of plants in the US now take ~15 years, partially due to the regulatory capture mentioned above.

The cost of any capital-intensive project goes up approximately as the square of the construction time: delay a 5 year project by 5 years and it costs 4x as much as planned. Delay it by 10 years and it costs 9x as much as planned. And that’s assuming interest rates don’t rise.

Large-scale electric power infrastructure projects need streamlined approval and licensing and stable capital costs. This used to be the case in the USA through the early 1970s but is no longer. It is still the case in China, Russia, South Korea, the UAE, and recently in Japan.

For the medium-term future, several nuclear companies old and new have plans (and approved designs & prototypes) for smaller, modular water reactors (SMRs): Essentially scaled-down versions of existing designs. They claim shorter construction times, simpler and more robust supply chains, and economies of scale. Though they cost more per MW they could be deployed in places that only require 10s or 100s of megawatts instead of gigawatts.

Generation IV (Gen IV) reactors - small or large, gas-cooled, salt-cooled, or liquid metal-cooled, fueled with low-enriched uranium, high-enriched uranium, thorium, or mixed fuel - are largely R&D projects with no commercial operational history and are not ready for prime time. While the government should support R&D in these areas it is not necessary for a US nuclear revival.

Gen IV and SMR are independent concepts: a reactor can be Gen IV, an SMR, both, or neither. Large modular Gen III (and Gen III+) water reactors are already deployed worldwide. They work. We should triple our deployment of Gen III+ water reactors over the next decades.

Saying “I’m in favor of nuclear power as long as it’s Gen IV SMRs” is essentially saying “I’m opposed to nuclear power using reactors which already work fine.” (i.e. saying “I’m basically opposed to nuclear power”). This is out of step with other nuclear nations - a list that continues to grow. Such a policy is bad for the environment, US energy security, grid stability, the US economy, decarbonization, and the future of the world.

Renewables

Mandates and taxpayer-funded and ratepayer-funded subsidies for renewables (approaching a trillion dollars worldwide so far) are leading to unstable grids and dramatically rising electricity prices. This is already the case in California and Germany and is starting now in Texas and New York. By contrast Illinois and France - with a large fraction of their electricity coming from nuclear - have stable, low-cost electricity. (though France is complex and arguably starting to screw things up).

Renewables have a place in some locales. But (except for hydroelectric dams) they are always intermittent. The cost of stabilizing intermittents to provide reliable power 24/7/365 (as required) is very high in money terms and in environmental terms.

A several hundred-fold increase in battery deployment alone, and massive new grid infrastructure is required to stabilize intermittent weather-dependent electricity generation. This is not only infeasible (it will cost $trillions) but also inflationary and de-stabilizing - as exemplified by the current situations in California and Germany. 

Scaling wind, solar, and batteries puts our electrical energy security in the hands of foreign (e.g. Chinese and African) suppliers who externalize or locally absorb the environmental and human-rights costs. Intermittents also have big and under-discussed end-of-life disposal problems. They last at most about 20%-30% as long as nuclear plants.

Renewables require a lot of land: farmland, wild-land, ecologically sensitive land such as deserts, and tribal land. Unfavorable conditions (e.g. night) forces them off-line and bad weather can ruin them outright. Offshore wind has many problems too (ongoing, as well as of course decommissioning and disposal), with costs externalized to the ocean ecosystem, the ratepayers, the taxpayers, and the scenery.

Local opposition to wind and solar in the USA has led to cancellation of hundreds of projects. So the renewables industry, in addition to leveraging regulatory capture via mandates and subsidies, is starting to leverage eminent domain. The result is polarization, civil disobedience, legal costs, and higher prices.  We should end subsidies, “incentives”, mandates, and giveaways for the renewables industry (and for other energy industries and the EV industry). They distort the market by externalizing costs while internalizing profits.

Summary

An optimal US electricity mix (for technical, environmental, economic, and political reasons) would consist of reliable base-load power (natural gas, transitioning to nuclear) plus renewables where they make sense. If CO2 is the big problem, nuclear power is the best solution.

Additional Resources

One of the best recent books on nuclear power is The Case for Nukes by Dr. Robert Zubrin - an expert who writes well and makes powerful historical, technical, and philosophical points. He is funny but does not pull his punches. A lecture summary of the book is available (the sound quality at the beginning isn’t great but the content is.)

Meredith Angwin’s book Shorting the Grid is perhaps the most important book on the issues of US electrical power infrastructure.

An excellent summary of many of these issues is Bret Kugelmass’ video Why is Everyone Afraid of Nuclear Energy? (30 min lecture + 30 min Q&A which is important).

My favorite long-form podcast that (usually) discusses nuclear energy is The Decouple Podcast hosted by Dr. Chris Keefer: a Canadian physician who is also an expert on nuclear energy, and a masterful curator and interviewer.

Bret Kugelmass has been running the Titans of Nuclear podcast for years. Over 400 episodes of long-form interviews with nuclear scientists, engineers, regulators, industry leaders, environmental leaders, etc.

Another great resource on energy policy is The Power Hungry Podcast. Over 250 episodes of hour-long interviews with all sorts of energy and environmental experts. Robert Bryce is a great interviewer with great guests. (his podcast is on hiatus as of this writing, but archival episodes are well worth your time).

Although Chernobyl is not relevant to the issue of water reactors, the official United Nations report on the health effects of the Chernobyl disaster puts that event into perspective.

Lastly, related to Indian Point and similar situations, it is unnecessary to use water from sensitive ecosystems to cool nuclear power plants. For instance, as of 2024 the 2nd largest power generating facility that isn’t a dam in the United States is the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station (3.3 GW electrical) in the Arizona desert. It is cooled entirely with treated sewage water from nearby municipalities. 

Appendix - my dialogue with RFK Jr. on nuclear power

Here are my extended replies to two comments RFK Jr. made on a call with me and a few others in April 2024. He has said very similar things in public more recently (although I note since reading this very document it seems he’s stopped saying them. Go RFK!)

1. RFK made a statement on that call that “no one knows what to do with nuclear waste”. This is totally wrong, on many levels. I replied: “The French reprocess their high-level nuclear waste back into nuclear fuel, which is what any sensible civilization should do.” To which RFK replied: “The French dump their nuclear waste into the ocean”.

That’s simply not true. The French stopped disposing of nuclear waste in the sea in 1969 (55 years ago), before the practice was internationally banned by treaty in the 1970s.

2. RFK said “You don’t have to ask me about the safety of nuclear power. The ultimate arbiter of risk in this country is the insurance industry and they will not insure nuclear plants. So the nuclear industry went ‘in the middle of the night’ and got the Price-Anderson act passed, which makes them immune from liability for damage from nuclear accidents. The US nuclear industry is the only other industry besides the vaccine industry that is immune from liability caused by the failure of its products.”

This is largely untrue. The Price-Anderson act actually requires nuclear power plant operators to obtain primary insurance coverage from private insurers. As of 2021, the primary insurance requirement was $450 million per incident. Each nuclear reactor operator is also required to contribute about $137 million per reactor to a pool in the event of an accident. With 94 reactors in the US, this pooled fund provides approximately $13 billion in additional coverage.

There have been no nuclear accidents in the US which exhausted a plant’s primary private insurance coverage and required use of the pooled fund. The most significant nuclear accident in the US, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, resulted in approximately $71 million in payouts which were covered by the operator’s primary [private] insurance.

References: many available on request, here’s one to start: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-04-654.pdf