Last month, Vogtle Unit 3 sent electricity to the grid for the first time. This marked a major milestone for the power plant, as Units 3 & 4 will be the first new nuclear units built in the U.S. in more than 30 years. Despite the enormous amount of carbon-free electricity it’ll produce for decades to come, Vogtle is used by anti-nuclear activists as proof positive that nuclear power isn't the answer to our climate woes.
The refrain being trumpeted by the anti-nuclear choir is that it’s too slow. Vogtle has given these trumpets plenty to trumpet about as the project has been beset by delays. So much so that Vogtle’s electricity generation announcement, made on April Fool’s Day, almost felt like a cruel joke. Surely Vogtle must be delayed again, there’s no way this is actually happening.
To be fair, the trumpets have a point. Vogtle started construction in 2013, was supposed to go online by 2017, and is finally going live six years late.
🎺 U.S. nuclear development is like an aging turtle 🐢, slow and only getting slower. 🎺
But why is it so slow? And why are timelines to build new nuclear getting longer and longer instead of shorter and shorter??
To understand why, we turn to the epic boondoggle that is the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. On its surface, the story of Yucca Mountain is a story of how we handle nuclear waste. Dig a layer deeper, and you realize that it perfectly demonstrates why nuclear went from the promise of “too cheap to meter” to the current trope of “too slow to matter.”
All energy production processes create waste. The challenge, then, is to convert energy into useful work while minimizing harm stemming from any unwanted waste streams. One of the (many) beauties of nuclear is its ability to produce an enormous amount of energy with a ridiculously small amount of fuel. Because of its energy density, nuclear power produces a minuscule amount of waste per unit of energy generated.
Of the comically small amount of waste that is produced, the primary area of concern is the dangerous radioactive material (aka high-level nuclear waste, aka spent fuel) created as a byproduct of nuclear reactions. Spent fuel is a solid material (not a green goo) containing unstable atoms that release energy (aka radiation) in order to reach a more stable state. In the U.S., spent fuel is placed into dry casks (made of steel and concrete) and stored on the site of the reactor itself. These casks are immune to pick-your-favorite man-made or natural disaster and closely monitored for leakage.
Most importantly, this dry cask storage method easily contains the radiation stemming from spent fuel (the casks are safe to touch) and has an impeccable safety record. There hasn’t been a single documented death from handling the nuclear waste produced by commercial reactors… ever. Said another way, more people have been killed in their sleep by a cow falling through their ceiling than by nuclear waste.
As far as non-problem problems go, you’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger one than nuclear waste. In fact, we’d go as far as to say that waste is a strength of nuclear power, not a weakness. Don’t get us wrong though, high-level nuclear waste fresh out of a nuclear reactor is extremely dangerous. But that’s what we humans do - we make dangerous stuff boringly safe.
However, onsite dry cask storage was never intended to be a long-term solution for nuclear waste. In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) which called for the development of an underground facility specifically designed for the permanent storage of high-level nuclear waste. Five years later, Congress amended the law to tell the Department of Energy to concentrate on Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the repository site of choice.
Yucca Mountain never stood a chance as it faced intense heat from Nevada residents and endless environmental reviews by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The project was all but put on death row after Allision Macfarlane was installed as chairman of the NRC in 2012. Here’s how The Breakthrough Institute describes it (emphasis added):
“Among the Democrats who installed her at the NRC, Macfarlane’s primary qualification to be the NRC chair was that she had published critically about the suitability of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository. Opposition to Yucca Mountain was, for many years, the primary litmus test for Democratic nominees to the NRC.”
When the NWPA passed in 1982, the goal was to have a repository site opened by January 31st, 1998. Over $15 billion has been spent on environmental studies, safety analyses, and initial construction, but it’s unlikely that the site will ever go live. In what can only be described as a cruel irony for those who understand nuclear’s superiority over solar and wind, recently proposed legislation urges using Yucca Mountain for the development and storage of renewable energy. Ffs 🤦🏻♂️.
To make matters worse, the failure of Yucca Mountain has hamstrung a generation of U.S. nuclear development and innovation. Specifically because there wasn’t an operational central waste repository, twelve states placed restrictions or bans on the development of new nuclear plants and the federal government continuously blocked proposals to develop advanced nuclear energy technologies.
The Yucca Mountain debacle almost makes you forget one key detail: nuclear fuel is recyclable!
Over 90% of the potential energy from the original nuclear fuel remains in spent fuel. Meaning, we can process nuclear waste and recycle it back into reactors. And this isn’t equivalent to saying “a lot of Sun rays hit the Earth, that’s theoretically a lot of energy.” The technology and commercial operations for nuclear waste recycling exist and are routinely deployed in countries such as France, Japan, and Russia. The eventual waste would still be buried, but the volume would be evennnn smaller. For those worried about how long nuclear waste lasts, we’d recommend this video produced by the great folks over at Decouple Media.
Unfortunately, President Carter banned the recycling of nuclear fuel back in 1977 due to (now largely disproven) concerns that spent fuel could/would be used to make nuclear weapons. Momentum has never picked up to repeal this ban, especially since new nuclear fuel has remained cheap and existing U.S. reactors aren’t designed to handle recycled fuel. But hell, why not give it to our Canadian friends up north?
Yucca Mountain is a perfect representation of the nuclear power circle of death:
…a scared, misinformed public leads to anti-nuclear ideologues being placed in government and regulatory agencies which leads to ridiculous red tape and government bloat which leads to overly complex solutions to reduce negligible risks which leads to a scared, misinformed public and on and on and on…
Saying nuclear is too slow is equivalent to cutting off your own leg and then complaining about being too slow. The “slowness” is entirely self-imposed.
It’s misleading to call the next generation of nuclear power plants “safer.” Would you call your next drink of water wetter? Water is wet. Nuclear is safe. We’ve let the anti-nuclear activists control the narrative. Just a little safer. Not safe enough yet. Just a little safer.
In another example of the circle of death, this never-safe-enough mentality led to the as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA) regulatory standard. Here’s how fellow Substack-er Jack Devanney breaks it down:
"The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators. In this case, the regulators came up with ALARA, the principle that no level of radiation exposure is acceptable if the plant can afford to reduce it further. As oil and coal prices rose through the 1970's, ALARA guaranteed that nuclear costs would rise accordingly. ALARA inspired design changes also extended construction times.
Worse, Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter. This backfitting often meant redesign, ripping out portions of partially completed plants, and then repeating the process. In the USA, the learning curve never had a chance.”
The times they are a-changin’, though. Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), more noise is being made to streamline the federal permitting process for infrastructure projects. At the same time, more and more unique voices are changing the nuclear narrative. The momentum is palpable. Once the public changes its mind, bureaucrats will fall in line quickly and reform will become a real possibility. To get a taste of how quickly large energy projects can move when permitting is streamlined, we’d suggest looking at Germany’s breakneck pace of LNG import terminal development over the past year.
We won’t be this dumb forever, it’s simply impossible to avoid the inherent qualities of nuclear power - energy density, abundance, safety, affordability, versatility, and near-zero emissions. Nuclear will eventually dominate our global energy system - it’s only a question of how much time we waste before get there.
Don’t waste time, hit that “♡ Like” button!
This article lays out a very compelling case for nuclear energy as an answer for our environmental and energy concerns. An open mind to factual information and solutions that aren't always popular is critical to our future.
Excellent article. Nuclear really is the answer. The obstacles are all political, which while formidable are solvable. Whereas the Laws of Physics will never make wind ans solar reliable. You might like my new article advocating for much more nuclear power in UK energy policy.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-everywhere-all-at-once