Don Hughes, photo by Susanne Farrington
by Don Hughes
On Sept 5th 2024, NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research & Development Agency, held a major energy summit in downtown Syracuse. Governor Hochul came to announce that the state was worried about meeting electrical demand while meeting the schedule in the state’s Climate law (CLCPA). Her solution? Build new nuclear power plants using new designs. That same day, the state released its draft “Blueprint-for-Consideration-of-Advanced-Nuclear-Technologies,” which was more like a term paper discussing the current state of nuclear technology, hardly a blueprint.
Environmental groups, led by Alliance for a Green Economy (AGREE), quickly mobilized in advance of the summit, crafted a letter to the governor requesting that she put aside consideration of nuclear, and instead focus on a rapid buildout of solar, wind and energy storage projects. Over 150 groups, including the Sierra Club, signed on to the letter. The Atlantic Chapter sent in detailed comments on the nuclear “blueprint” on November 8th . I contributed to those comments, posted here.
Nuclear is anything but “clean.” Sure, it doesn’t emit planet-warming carbon dioxide once it’s built, but construction of reactors has a large carbon footprint. And the nuclear fuel cycle is highly toxic. Uranium mining in the American Southwest has littered the land with piles of tailings (residues of processing the ore) and contaminated the groundwater, exposing local, especially Indigenous, communities to radioactivity and high cancer rates.
Nuclear energy creates highly radioactive waste which must be stored at the reactors since there’s no permanent repository to put it in. And how do you ensure safe containment of something that emits deadly radiation for the next 200,000 years?
Proponents of nuclear are pushing a new nuclear design called “Small Modular Reactors” which are supposed to be cheaper and faster to build. Evidence has shown they are anything but. NuScale Power, an Idaho-based company which is promoting SMRs, had to cancel its project last year after costs ballooned from $3 billion to $9.3 billion and investors backed out. M.V. Ramana, Professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, predicted the collapse of this project in 2020. Earlier this year he wrote “the financial challenges and cost trends witnessed in [the NuScale project] will afflict any small modular nuclear reactor project. In a rational world, no utility or government would invest another dime on these theoretical reactor concepts.”
The high cost of nuclear is not just the opinion of a professor in western Canada. In April 2023, Lazard, a financial firm, estimated that the unsubsidized levelized cost of electricity from new nuclear plants in the U.S. will be between $141 and $221 per megawatt hour. In comparison, a newly constructed utility-scale solar facility, with battery storage to provide power after the sun sets, will produce power at an unsubsidized levelized cost of between $46 and $102 per megawatt hour. Recent nuclear projects in France (Flamanville 3) and the US (Vogtle units 3 & 4) have experienced both delays and huge cost overruns. The Georgia-based Vogtle reactors, when construction began in 2009, were originally estimated to cost $14 billion, to be operational in 2017, but ended up costing $35 billion, and seven years behind schedule.
In contrast, solar panels and batteries have become cheaper and are expected to decline further.
Nuclear power has a history of accidents and near mishaps. The most recent major accident occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, in 2011. Not only did three of the reactors experience meltdowns, but fuel stored on-site overheated leading to explosions and release of additional radioactivity. Daniel Ford described the incident in his 2022 New Yorker article, “How Safe Are Nuclear Power Plants?”
The containment facilities at the Japanese plant, while not leak-tight, reduced the release of radioactive materials and provided enough time for more than a hundred thousand people to escape immediate harm from the fallout. On the other hand, more than a decade later, some thirty-five thousand people are unable to return to their homes, many of which have been contaminated with cesium-137, a long-lived radioactive substance that emits intense gamma radiation and raises the risk for cancer. Perhaps most alarmingly, the accident at Fukushima nearly caused a fire in a spent-fuel storage pool that was outside the [containment structures]. According to recent analyses by von Hippel and others, if that had happened, the release of radioactive material could have multiplied a hundredfold, potentially requiring the relocation of as much as a quarter of the Japanese population, depending on which way the winds were blowing.
Proponents of nuclear energy conjure up a vision of compact power plants that quietly churn out steady electricity while not emitting greenhouse gases. The reality is that it’s an unaffordable, slow to build, and highly toxic process that has no place in a clean energy future.