Above, Bill Gates in a recent interview coinciding with a groundbreaking for a new nuclear plant incorporating “next generation” technology. He acknowledged that the current generation of reactors has proven “way too expensive.”
Interviewer Margaret Brennan, to her great credit, asks Gates about the HALEU problem – HALEU is “High Assay Low Enrichment Uranium”, a type of fuel that in recent years has been available only from Russian sources. The invasion of Ukraine spotlighted the flaw in that plan, and threw a wrench in a number of “new generation” nuclear plans.
Gates answered that new subsidies will jumpstart production for that fuel in the US, and that in the interim, alternative sources in South Africa and the UK would help, “with the federal government helping us figure that out”, a US source would be established.
Gates cited the potential for weapons proliferation as one of the primary reasons for government support of a US nuclear industry “you want your eye on making sure that it’s not feeding into some military related activity.
In any case, this is the answer whenever anyone says “Renewables are too dependent on subsidies”.
The Senate voted nearly unanimously Tuesday evening to pass major legislation designed to reverse the American nuclear industry’s decades-long decline and launch a reactor-building spree to meet surging demand for green electricity at home and to catch up with booming rivals overseas.
The bill slashes the fees the Nuclear Regulatory Commission charges developers, speeds up the process for licensing new reactors and hiring key staff, and directs the agency to work with foreign regulators to open doors for U.S. exports.
The NRC is also tasked with rewriting its mission statement to avoid unnecessarily limiting the “benefits of nuclear energy technology to society,” essentially reinterpreting its raison d’être to include protecting the public against the dangers of not using atomic power in addition to whatever safety threat reactors themselves pose.
“It’s monumental,” said John Starkey, the director of public policy at the American Nuclear Society, a nonprofit of academics and industry professionals that advocates for atomic technology in the public interest.
The NRC, he said, “is a 21st century regulator now.”
“This has been a long time coming,” Starkey said.
In a rare show of bipartisan unity on clean energy, the House of Representatives voted 365 to 36 last month to pass its version of the legislation, called the ADVANCE Act. All but two senators — Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) — supported the bill in Tuesday’s vote or abstained, with a final tally of 88-2. The proposal will now go to the White House, where President Joe Biden is all but certain to sign it into law.
It is widely considered the most significant clean-energy legislation to pass since the president’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
“Republicans and Democrats recognize the development of new nuclear technologies is critical to America’s energy security and our environment,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the bill’s lead sponsor, said on the Senate floor Tuesday evening. “Today, nuclear power provides about 20% of our nation’s electricity. Importantly, it’s emissions-free electricity that is 24/7, 365 days a year.”
In a joint statement with the ranking Republican colleagues on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) called the legislation a “much needed modernization of our nuclear regulatory framework.”
The U.S. led the world in developing nuclear energy in the 1950s and went on to build by far the largest fleet of power plants, with more than 110 reactors providing more than one-fifth of America’s electricity. But as growth in electricity demand slowed in the 1970s and public concern over radiation issues grew, utilities struggled to afford the high cost of building new reactors.
As climate change put a new premium on nuclear energy’s massive output of low-carbon electricity, the U.S. looked to restart its reactor program in the early 2000s. But right as the cost of first-of-a-kind projects ballooned into the billions of dollars, the U.S. saw a drilling boom that increased the domestic supply of cheap natural gas. Coupled with inexpensive wind turbines and solar panels from overseas, U.S. nuclear companies lost deals to supply power. As a result, more than a dozen reactors have shut down over the past decade and just two new reactors were built.
That pair of reactors, which just came online last month at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia, cost more than $30 billion. As the expenses mounted, other projects to build the same kind of reactor elsewhere in the country were canceled.
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At the same American Nuclear Society conference in Las Vegas, Southern Co. CEO Chris Womack, whose utility giant built the two new reactors in Georgia, warned that any future projects still depend on the federal government providing more money and financial backing.
“What I hear you saying, Chris, is there needs to be more than what we’re putting on the table, and that’s hard to hear because we’ve just put billions and billions and billions on the table,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, a fellow panelist, said in response. “I don’t know what the delta is between what you think is necessary and what it would actually take to build up.”
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Tim Echols, a Commissioner on the Georgia Public Service Commission, tweeted:
“the current generation of reactors has proven
“way too expensive.””
We have to eliminate emissions way before 2050 if we want civilization & nature to have even a bad chance of surviving. So yeah, let’s give this dangerous uncertain expensive non-existent way-too-slow technology huge new subsidies. It’s already gotten 50 times more in subsidies than renewable energy, a vast understatement, not to mention its enormous externalities, while fossils have gotten 100 times more, also a lowball…a total of well over $13 trillion a year in subsidies & externalities.
Gates skips over the ‘how could you value nukes for being green when they’re absolutely not?’ question.
Despite nukes’ 10 year head start in China, both wind & solar are each providing more new generation every year.
And where are those mining-opposed anti-renewable fanatics when you need em?
“We have discussions with utilities about building tens of these, but we really only have huge impact and success if we get past a hundred.”
I see two different problems in that statement: (1) Getting to one hundred seems like it would be a tough slog in terms of getting buy-in, ramping up HALEU production and fighting the headwind of competition from wind/solar/battery.
(2) The more HALEU-dependent reactors you have, the greater the vulnerability (“surface area”) to proliferation.
[I grew up with the threat of global nuclear war, but have no experience of nukes being used, and yet I’ve seen lots of examples of what conventional weapons, international hacking, a pandemic, disinformation science, the Great Recession and catastrophic climate change can do. I think this is why I have such a “meh” attitude toward nuclear proliferation: We have plenty of much cheaper and more insidious ways to effectively attack each other that the hassle of acquiring and delivering a nuclear weapon seems like so much more trouble. Even Kim of North Korea, who seems to use nuclear tests as a form of extortion (while his people starve), could do more than enough damage throwing conventional bombs with his missiles, including fairly low tech needed to bomb the hell out of nearby Seoul with its 10 million residents.]
there would be no war in Europe now if Ukraine had been allowed to keep their
nuclear weapons.