What is the Future of Nuclear in the US? First Ensure that Current Nuclear Plants Remain Operational
This is a Cross-Post by ASP Senior Fellow Andrew Holland from the National Journal’s Energy Experts blog. Holland was responding to the question of whether the U.S. should invest in nuclear power?
The U.S. is undergoing a decisive change in how we use and produce energy. A clean-energy revolution is seeing wind and solar power grow at unprecedented rates due to both government incentives and reductions in prices. Meanwhile, this is accompanied by the shale gas revolution that has caused experts to increase estimates of gas reserves to say that the United States has more than a century’s worth of reserves – and had caused a drastic drop in the price of natural gas. The result of these two revolutions is that, since 2008, total electricity produced by wind has increased by over 200%, the total produced by solar has increased by an astonishing 970%, natural gas production has increased by 26% – but from a much higher base. Coal generation has fallen 20% (all numbers from EIA).
Left out of this revolution has been nuclear power. Over that same time period, it has stayed steady at between 19 and 20% of total electricity production.
This baseload capacity that nuclear energy provides, however, is crucial to the rest of the energy revolution. There are real hurdles to continued growth in both renewables and natural gas. Renewable power suffers from problems of variability; it is very difficult to predict how much the wind will blow or how strong the sun will shine. The American electricity grid — built to connect massive, centralized, “always on” power plants to consumers — is unable today to handle the unpredictability that a substantial increase in renewable power would bring. Natural gas, faces economic hurdles — the low gas prices of last year have quickly fallen from memory as consumers and utilities face a rate shock due to the cold winter. We know that natural gas has a history of rapid and extreme price fluctuations: this has made utilities reluctant to rely on it.
For these reasons, it is important that America’s nuclear power plants remain operational. Our electricity system requires a stable, cheap source of energy to provide “always on” baseload power. Coal can provide that, but we know the environmental drawbacks of coal – both the mining of, and the emissions from – are extraordinarily harmful. Nuclear power, on the other hand, can provide emissions-free baseload power at a low cost.
Today, a total of 102 nuclear reactors are operational around the country. No other electricity source can combine the benefits of knowing that it will always be on with its affordability and its lack of emissions.
Opponents of nuclear power will talk about the price of building new nuclear plants. This is true – building them can be very expensive, and they almost always are over-budget and behind schedule. However, once those costs are sunk – as they have been for the country’s 102 nuclear power plants, they provide the cheapest form of electricity — estimated at a third less than coal and half of the price of gas.
This cheap, always available, zero-carbon power is an important backstop to the growth of new technologies. It can help smooth the price fluctuations that natural gas is vulnerable to and it provides the “always on” capacity that renewable power cannot.
For these reasons, the U.S. should not allow short-sighted reactions to either politics or to market prices close nuclear reactors. In a reaction to public pressure after the 2011 disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, the governments of Japan and Germany initiated plans to close their nuclear power plants. The American public — to its credit — was not so reactionary.
However, utilities today are doing what environmental campaigners and hostile politicians could not: closing operational nuclear power plants. When nuclear plants have to compete with low natural gas spot prices or with variable wind prices, utilities are not allowed to think for the long term. We see this with recent decisions to begin closing Vermont Yankee, Wisconsin’s Kewaunee Power Station, and upcoming decisions on other plants.
Many of our nuclear power plants are approaching the end of their initial 40-year life span. So long as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ensures a rigorous review of their safety and risk, their licenses should be renewed. Utilities, likewise, should value the nuclear plants as reliable sources of emissions-free power at a cost that is stable and predictable.
Like any energy source, nuclear has its problems: most notably, our political and scientific leaders have not yet found a long-term solution for storing the spent nuclear waste. This challenge is solvable, but will require hard work, consensus and compromise.
As we look to the future, perhaps it is time for a leapfrog away from current nuclear technology. Instead of building the same nuclear power systems that were built for 1950s- era nuclear submarines, the government’s role should be to fund pathbreaking research and development into the next generation of power plants. This would include small modular reactors in development now, but it should also include a path to fusion energy – the real source for safe, secure, and sustainable energy. Research into fusion has made a series of scientific gains recently, both in the U.S. and in labs around the world, that are proving that it can be an energy source for the future. Fusion Energy Sciences received $500 million in the FY2014 omnibus legislation – a victory that will keep research going. It should receive much more: the American Security Project has put forward a 10 year plan for the development of fusion energy, costing $30 billion – roughly the cost of a week of U.S. energy consumption.
In the short term, we must make sure that short-term market forces do not shut down existing nuclear capacity. In the longer term, the government should make transformative investments into the next generation of technology. Nuclear power has proved itself to be safe, clean, and sustainable. We should benefit from the long-term investments made decades ago to ensure stable power with today’s power plants for decades to come.
