Tuesday, July 19, 2022

The Blue-State War on Nuclear Power

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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