By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, July 28, 2022
Who’s afraid of the carbon fairy?
If nuclear power did not already exist and someone invented it in 2022, he would almost certainly win a Nobel prize — and would be hailed as the greatest environmental champion of his time, and one of the greatest servants of humanity in history.
But nuclear energy already exists — and the environmentalists who should be its most committed and energetic advocates positively hate it.
Mostly.
Which is kind of weird, but not unexpected — once you understand the daft, quasi-mystical underlying cultural politics. The foundering of U.S. nuclear power for a generation — from the 1980s until right about . . . now, really — is a story of missed opportunities: economic, geopolitical, and environmental.
But there are welcome signs of a gradual enlightenment under way.
Start in Europe, where even the goofiest kind of Cold War–hangover politics has not stopped France from generating the overwhelming share of its electricity (about 75 percent) with nuclear power, while Emmanuel Macron, with a wary eye on Moscow, has announced plans for more.
But everybody knows about that already.
In the unlikely event that you are not up on the comings and goings of minority political parties in Finland: This summer brought an interesting piece of news. The Vihreät De Gröna (Green League) — Finland’s junior partner in the country’s current five-party coalition government — has amended its manifesto to include an endorsement of nuclear power. It was the first European green party to do so, and the vote on the question wasn’t particularly close. Finnish public opinion has shifted strongly in favor of nuclear power since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s continued weaponization of the energy trade, with only 18 percent of Finns opposed to expanding nuclear power — down from 42 percent opposition in 2011 in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster. Similar shifts in opinion have occurred in much of the rest of Europe.
The Finnish greens have in mind an ambitious nuclear program. Not only would it extend the licenses of existing nuclear-power plants and replace a planned gas-fired plant — recently scrapped because it would have relied on a Russian state-owned supplier — with a new nuclear facility. More important, the program would streamline the cumbrous and time-consuming licensing system for “small modular reactors” (SMRs), innovative new plants that would bring nuclear power out of the 1970s and into the 21st century.
This is in vivid contrast to green parties elsewhere in Europe, notably in Germany, where Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock, who currently serves as foreign minister, has been put in the ridiculous position of responding to Moscow’s aggression by preparing to reactivate coal-fired power plants as an “emergency reserve.” Even as Germans and their allies in the European Union prepare for a complete shutoff of Russian gas, Berlin has stuck to the decision — catastrophically wrongheaded on economic, security, and environmental grounds — to shutter three of its six remaining nuclear plants in January of 2022, while planning to take the last three offline by the end of the year. Germany — which is, bear in mind, a country officially committed to achieving 100 percent decarbonization in its electricity industry by 2050 — is firing up coal plants, and the country’s leading scientific and government authorities are planning to ration energy consumption for home heating while pleading, helplessly, that “less energy must be used overall,” as public broadcaster Deutsche Welle put it.
If France can muster the technical means to run a safe and effective nuclear program, then Germany can, too. This is undeniably a policy problem, not a scientific or economic problem.
It is a choice — the wrong choice.
Sometimes, it is easier to spot the bad decision-making when it is someplace else. But while the United States happily is not in a European condition of energy scarcity — thanks, fracking! — Americans, too, are suffering from high energy prices and volatile global energy markets, and we are far from insulated against the Kremlin’s war by proxy in the energy markets. And though our Green Party is a political nonentity (the Greens and the Socialist Party USA linked up for a joint “ecosocialist” 2020 presidential ticket and commanded all of 0.2 percent of the nationwide vote), we do have a Democratic Party full of Green New Dealers who spent much of July trying to bully President Joe Biden into declaring a “climate emergency” and imposing a sweeping new environmental policy by diktat. It is far from a dead issue in the United States.
U.S. regulators and industry groups have made some progress toward deploying modern nuclear power. In 2020, NuScale became the first company to receive the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s blessing for a new SMR design, the first of which is planned for use at the Idaho National Laboratory in 2030. But there is a great wide gulf to cross between the plan on paper and new power coming into the market, and the fact is that very little new nuclear power has been brought online since the Three Mile Island–era collapse of the nuclear industry in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The politics aren’t great: Almost half of Americans tell Gallup that they are opposed to nuclear power. While the Democratic Party did take the welcome step of modernizing its platform in 2020 to endorse nuclear power for the first time in 50 years — along with “all zero-carbon technologies” — a decisive majority of Democrats oppose it, as do a large number of influential activists. Young Americans are more likely to oppose it than are older Americans. Democratic figures such as Governor Gavin Newsom and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who are currently working to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant that provides 10 percent of California’s electricity from going offline, as scheduled in 2025, remain outliers in their party. The Biden administration has made some faint sounds about how nuclear power is “a very big part, potentially,” of its climate goals, and it has committed $14 million to a feasibility study for a potential new small modular reactor . . . in Romania . . . but, at home, the full-time green lobby remains largely resistant.
Democrats, environmental activists, and young people: The very ones who say they are most worried about climate change are the most opposed to the one technology that can plausibly do something about climate change.
What gives?
***
Maybe I’m wrong about that hypothetical contemporary inventor of nuclear power. Maybe he wouldn’t get a Nobel prize or be hailed as a hero. Mark Lynas has his doubts.
Lynas, a climate-change writer and pro-nuclear climate campaigner based in the United Kingdom, tells a depressing story. “I ask people to imagine that there’s a magic carbon fairy that could wave a wand and make the whole global-warming problem disappear straightaway. I ask: How many of you would want to wave that wand? And out of an audience of a couple of hundred, the number of hands that go up are only in the single figures. In some ways, nuclear is that magic carbon fairy wand. But people don’t want to solve the problem — they want to do something else. The people who are obsessed with climate change and say it’s the No. 1 issue in the world have a lot more on their agenda than carbon emissions.”
Lynas, who has been a visiting fellow at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and who serves as a climate adviser to the president of the Maldives, is encouraged by the recent news — that nuclear power has made even the slightest inroads with European greens was “previously unthinkable,” he says. “I’ve been campaigning as a pro-nuclear green for a long time, and I don’t feel isolated anymore, particularly given the geopolitical situation with Ukraine.” Closing down nuclear plants in Germany, on the other hand, “looks mad.” In his view, the argument is not a particularly difficult one: “People have to realize that nuclear is the only zero-carbon source we’ve got that works everywhere all the time. We all know that wind and solar are intermittent, that hydro you can only build in the mountains.” Nuclear doesn’t have those disadvantages, and it offers one critical geopolitical advantage. “With nuclear, you can stockpile fuel so that you have energy security for years at a time, without worrying about Middle Eastern despots and Russian dictators.”
While U.S. greens talk about “ecosocialism,” Lynas is an advocate of what he calls “ecomodernism,” which he describes in a Guardian essay as “an attempt to transcend some of the political polarisation in current environment debates with a recognition that human ingenuity and technological innovation offer immense promise in tackling ecological challenges.” The ecomodernists hope that tools such as nuclear power and genetic engineering will minimize the human footprint in the natural world — not a neo-primitivist return to Eden but a science-driven “decoupling.” In the course of trying to launch a new environmental movement for people who take climate change seriously but accept that it is safe to eat GMO foods, he has, naturally, set himself up for abuse from both sides of the political spectrum: from a climate-skeptical Right that wants to use ecomodernism as a cat’s-paw against the mainstream environmental movement, and by a Left that derides ecomodernism as a do-nothing dodge.
American conservatives for the most part do not put climate change at the top of their to-do lists — and a nontrivial share of conservatives believe that it is a hoax — but much of the case for nuclear is the same as the case for unleashing the rest of our country’s rich energy resources: Inexpensive, reliable energy is good for the rest of the economy, and it confers upon those who enjoy it critical geopolitical advantages. At the level of gross political calculation, you would think that the Right would jump on it, because taking up nuclear power as a climate policy gives Republicans an opportunity to blunt Democrats’ overwhelming advantage on an issue that resonates more strongly among independent voters, younger voters, female voters, and college-educated voters — demographics with which the GOP has, to put it gently, room for improvement.
***
In reality, there are two environmental movements. One of them views environmental problems as an opportunity for problem-solving, and the other views them as an occasion for moral improvement.
For the latter faction — for practitioners not of environmentalism but of environmental piety — the question is not one of economic trade-offs, technological development, or policy innovation. It is one of sin.
And the nuclear-power people — with all their talk of being green and clean — are, from that point of view, heretics.
In the theology of environmental piety, the original sin is consumerism. And, for that reason, the environmentalism is based on limiting or eliminating consumption of various kinds: Don’t use straws, don’t eat meat, don’t own a car . . . and don’t have children.
One of the great advocates of not having children is Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, who has been wrong in practically every prediction he has ever made but still holds the status of a prophet among many environmentalists (see “Population Bomb Scare” in the March 17 issue of National Review). Ehrlich is definitely among those who would not want the carbon fairy to wave her magic wand, having famously observed: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
A remarkable bit of history that has been forgotten, perhaps studiously forgotten: In the 1960s and 1970s, environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and progressive champions including Ralph Nader campaigned in favor of fossil fuels — as an alternative to nuclear energy. As Michael Shellenberger told the tale in his 2017 address to the American Nuclear Society, Nader at one time assured his allies that “we have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we’re owning up to,” and that nuclear was unnecessary given our access to “tar sands, oil out of shale, methane in coal beds,” and the like — i.e., all the stuff that today’s environmentalists want to keep in the ground. Shellenberger further noted that a Sierra Club adviser went as far as to contemplate doubling the amount of coal being mined to keep nuclear power at bay. In the 1970s, nuclear power wasn’t seen as a potential solution to a climate problem nobody was talking about yet — it was a tool of capitalism, militarism, and imperialism, at least in the eyes of the Left.
“Nuclear weapons are the origins of it,” Lynas says. “We used to talk about beating our swords into plowshares, but they have stopped campaigning against weapons and started campaigning against reactors — stopped campaigning against swords and started campaigning against plowshares. Who campaigns against nuclear weapons now? Not Greenpeace. And it’s not like the issue went away — we are closer to nuclear Armageddon now than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis.”
The activist class has indeed moved on from swords to plowshares. In November, I attended the United Nations’ big climate confab — COP26, in Glasgow — with my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a market-oriented think tank and the institutional home of Myron Ebell, a leading critic of “global warming alarmism” and “energy-rationing policies,” as his bio puts it. You’d think that the conservative magazine writer and the libertarian wonks from the home of global capitalism would be the least popular people at COP26 — which, as I reported at the time, was much more a tent-revival meeting than a policy discussion — but an invisible cordon was instead drawn around the delegation from the U.S. nuclear-power activists. As one of them told me, practically the only people who spoke to them at all were either curious journalists or angry eco-mystics lecturing them that they didn’t belong there. In fact, most of the nuclear-power groups that applied for credentials were rejected, while the meeting was thick with activists making not exactly plausible claims that the world’s climate challenges could be solved by reverting to Stone Age “indigenous peoples’” technologies.
Nuclear power is exactly the sort of solution that the quasi-religious faction within the environmental movement doesn’t want to see succeed. And so you will hear anti-nuclear activists charge that nuclear power is too expensive to provide a sustainable alternative — while, as Shellenberger pointed out, the Sierra Club and other groups worked programmatically to raise regulatory costs for nuclear power in order to make it more expensive. He quoted from an old internal Sierra Club communiqué: “Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation . . . and add to the cost of the industry.”
The people banging bongos outside of U.N. meetings are a very loud — for years, the loudest — voice in the conversation, but they aren’t the only voice. There is another discussion under way, as former Department of Energy executive John Kotek of the Nuclear Energy Institute observes.
“It’s fascinating to me that there seem to be two different conversations going on,” he says. “In some quarters, particularly those focused on renewables as alternatives to nuclear, conversations that have come from a nuclear-critical perspective, you don’t hear much about nuclear as a solution to the carbon/climate challenge. But if you look at utilities and their planning, nuclear is very much a part of the decarbonization conversation. That’s because the utilities and the PUCs have to do the math and bear the responsibility for ensuring that a carbon-free system is not only clean but also reliable and affordable.”
And that, even more than fanatical religious opposition, is the immediate pressing challenge for the nuclear industry.
***
The industry has a reputation for not finishing things on time or on budget — more often, the story is one of years of delay and expenses that run into multiples of the original estimates. Part of that is a knowledge problem: If you are a production homebuilder who puts up 25,000 slightly different versions of the same two or three basic designs every year, then your crews get really, really good at building those houses. If you are the U.S. nuclear-power industry — which in its recent history has undertaken only one or two major projects every couple of decades — then you don’t benefit from that kind of knowledge-building: In effect, every plant is a prototype.
Kotek and his Nuclear Energy Institute colleagues hope that the industry is turning the page. The aforementioned SMRs — “small modular reactors” — are, as the name implies, smaller than traditional reactors and modular in that they can be chained together in various configurations to fit different situations. The advantage of this, Kotek says, is that workers and managers can build a more functional knowledge base through repetition, and that much of the most difficult work can be done in a factory setting rather than on site. “The new designs should be very conducive to pushing down this cost and learning curve faster than has been the case. We have simpler designs that rely on gravity and natural heat convection rather than pumps and valves to make the plants work.” The new designs are also safer than the old ones, he says. And that may be true, but what everybody seems to forget is that the big story in the worst nuclear-power disaster in U.S. history — Three Mile Island — is that everything worked, and nobody got hurt.
Those who are looking for a more economically intelligent alternative to utopian Green New Deal thinking are generally friendly to nuclear, but what the nuclear-power industry wants for itself is not free-market policy designed by Milton Friedman: They want the same sweet deal that wind and solar have received, more or less. As things stand, it is less expensive to bring new solar online than new coal, but, given the various thumbs on various scales, that isn’t exactly a 100 percent free-market outcome. “Wind and solar didn’t get cheap all by themselves,” Kotek says. “We had federal and private investments in the technology itself, and then they were backed up by renewable-portfolio standards and tax credits at the federal level. A wind project today may cost a quarter of what it cost a dozen years ago, and solar has seen an even more dramatic price decrease, and that is because we had smart policies that gave the private sector confidence. We haven’t used that same tool kit for nuclear in the way that we need to.”
Some friends of nuclear hope that we are on the verge of a renaissance. Kotek thinks we are already in it. “We have seen consistent support across administrations going back to the George W. Bush administration at least,” he elaborates. He even puts in a good word for that project in Romania: “Once you get into the administration and start running the government, you recognize that having a strong civil nuclear export industry is really helpful — not just for job creation. When you work with another country on a nuclear plant, it’s operations, it’s safety, it’s cybersecurity, it’s nonproliferation, and it’s a whole bunch of areas in which you want to see the United States setting the global standard and spreading our norms around the world.”
In the meantime, the Biden administration is also spending not millions of dollars but billions to keep aging U.S. nuclear plants from going offline. These plants are well run, Kotek says. But they have not been economically viable during the last many years of very low natural-gas prices, and they haven’t been especially competitive vis-à-vis heavily subsidized renewables. But gas prices are volatile, and renewables have significant physical limitations, such as the fact that solar power doesn’t work at night. Some of those problems may — may — be mitigated in the future by means of more-efficient power storage, but that day is not yet here.
The question for environmentalists in the here and now is: Do they want to wave the magic carbon fairy’s wand? Because there is a radically low-carbon energy source that is ready to go, right here and right now, and has been for years. What’s holding it back? Mostly fear and superstition.
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