By Nate Hochman
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
My friend Chris Barnard, the national policy
director at the American Conservation Coalition — a centrist environmentalist
group that works with a number of Republicans on conservation and climate
issues — has an important piece on nuclear energy in the Wall Street
Journal this morning. The article, titled “The Global Nuclear Power Comeback,” rightly takes the irrational anti-nuclear energy policies of Western
countries such as Germany to task, pointing out that
even before the current global
energy crisis, experts warned for years that nuclear phaseouts like Germany’s
would crunch energy supply at a time when countries are shifting from fossil
fuels to meet climate mandates. Nuclear energy has been on the decline for
decades. In 1996 it provided about 17% of global energy production; today it’s
around 10%. After the 2011 Fukushima accident, anti-nuclear sentiment swept the
world, with Japan and Germany leading the way to complete nuclear phaseouts. In
the U.S., 12 reactors have been closed since 2012. The Energy Information
Administration projects that the nuclear share of American power generation
will decline to 11% by 2050, from 20% today.
But “some countries are reconsidering,” Barnard writes.
“The war in Ukraine has led even fervent nuclear critics to face the reality
that trading domestic nuclear energy production for reliance on Russian fossil
fuels has been counterproductive. A prime example is the European Union’s
recent decision to classify nuclear energy as ‘green,’ potentially opening up
billions of euros in investment.”
There are numerous examples of this: As Barnard points
out, “Belgium’s Green Party did an about-face to extend the life of the
country’s remaining two reactors by a decade,” “Poland is building its first
plant,” the Czech Republic is planning to build “several reactors,” France is
“now doubling down on nuclear energy, including next-generation designs,” and
“the Dutch government is moving toward construction of two new plants in
response to war-induced energy shortages.”
The one important point to add is that — even amid the
potential European nuclear-energy renaissance that Barnard details — the U.S.
is trailing behind. Barnard argues that America “seems to be changing course,”
pointing to Biden’s “$6 billion in aid to struggling plants such as Diablo
Canyon,” the flurry of private investment in “next-generation nuclear designs,”
West Virginia’s repeal of “its decades-long ban on nuclear power,” and the
approval of new nuclear reactors in states such as Wyoming. But major problems
persist — and ironically, they are often worst in the states that are most
committed to clean energy. Twenty states have something called “Electricity Portfolio Standards” (EPS) — a regulation that
mandates that a certain amount of electricity must come from renewable energy
sources. But most of those portfolios don’t classify nuclear as an
eligible renewable resource.
That isn’t just disastrous for the future of nuclear
energy in America — it’s also completely utopian in terms of state energy-grid
capacity. California, for example, has a particularly aggressive EPS — the
Golden State is mandating 60 percent renewable energy by 2030. But it doesn’t
include nuclear energy. In fact, it’s been accompanied by an active war on
nuclear power in the state: As the Guardian reported last month, “the many [nuclear] plants that
once dotted California have closed one by one, and a law passed in 1976 banned
new construction of nuclear stations until waste could be permanently disposed
of.” (Given that there is no permanent method for disposing of nuclear waste on
the horizon, that’s a de facto outright ban.)
In the face of looming energy problems, California
lawmakers have begun to rethink their efforts to close Diablo Canyon, the last
nuclear plant in the state. While the plant, which began operating in 1985, was
originally slated to close in 2025, it “still provides roughly 9% of the
state’s energy — the largest single source of electricity and enough to supply
more than 3 million residents,” the Guardian reported. And
given that “the state is still far from finding a reliable and climate-friendly
replacement, and concerns are rising that it will fall back on fossil fuels to
fill the gap . . . a diverse league of advocates — including energy officials,
scientists, California’s governor Gavin Newsom, and even the musician Grimes —
are pushing for renewed life for Diablo Canyon.” But even if Diablo
Canyon were to be saved, the victory would be too little, too
late for California’s energy grid, so long as state lawmakers persist in
pushing for a majority-renewable energy grid that omits nuclear power.
Nuclear is by far the most reliable and high-capacity
clean energy source. As it stands today, a 60 percent renewable-energy grid
composed exclusively of wind, hydro, and solar energy is essentially impossible
without severe cuts to the state’s energy capacity. On top of that, it’s a
recipe for more rolling blackouts — a problem that California is already struggling with. Renewable energy sources such as
wind and solar are plagued by what scientists describe as the “intermittency
problem”: Because they depend on intermittent inputs such as wind or sunshine,
they are far less reliable than constant energy sources. Nuclear plants, on the
other hand, do not face such a problem.
Cleaner energy grids are a laudable goal — not just in
the fight against climate change, but for an array of crucial national-security reasons. But they
cannot come at the expense of the American way of life. The irrational,
ideologically driven effort to decarbonize without nuclear energy is a fool’s
errand. And to mandate that such a transition occur in the span of a decade is
verging on suicidal. American policy-makers should learn from the experience of
our European friends, rather than set the country on a quixotic path back to
the dark ages.
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