Michael Shuman, The Main Street Journal.
The United States has been on the precipice of a “nuclear renaissance” for four decades. And I can tell you right now, with confidence, that it will never happen. Why? Because nuclear power is getting more costly while solar alternatives are getting cheaper. By a lot. And the persistence—by politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul, by policymakers on both sides of the aisle, and even by smart analysts like Ezra Klein—to wish nuclear back into competitiveness suggests why we localists should always be skeptical of top-down theories of change.
Basic facts:
- Over the last 30 years, exactly four new nuclear reactors have come online in the United States, each with a capacity of 1.1 gigawatts.
- The most recent two, Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia, collectively cost $36.8 billion. The capital cost is $16,700 per installed kilowatt, which implies a production cost of 17-22 cents per kilowatt-hour. (The actual cost consumers pay, which includes utility overhead and transmission and distribution, is more than double.)
- The capital cost for onshore wind projects is $1,150-1,800 per kilowatt in 2026, which—accounting for the intermittency of wind in most sites—implies a production cost of 2.5-5 cents per kilowatt hour.
- Utility-scale solar is generally cheaper than wind. So nuclear power is about 8-10 times more expensive than its truly renewable alternatives.
- The intermittency of wind and solar is becoming largely irrelevant because large-scale storage is becoming inexpensive as well. Earlier this year, California announced that it had deployed battery blocks to store and dispense the equivalent of 12 nuclear power plants. In other words, in one year, the state deployed three times more power capacity than the entire national nuclear industry in three decades.
- More importantly, as I showed in my recent paper for the City of Irvine, it is cheaper for the city, its residents, and its businesses to solarize with batteries than to use any utility electricity whatsoever. Over the next 20 years, if Irvine does nothing, it will spend about $58 billion with the local utility, Southern California Edison. Complete solarization would cost $16 billion and thus save the city $42 billion.
The bottom line: Nuclear power has become completely uneconomic. Fahgettaboutit!
Nuclear supporters nevertheless insist that new generations of small modular reactors (SMRs) will be magically cheaper. In fact, a recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Finance Analysis concludes: “SMRs still are too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning from fossil fuels in the coming 10 to 15 years.”
This is great news for those who care about sustainability. Nuclear power generates radioactive waste that still lacks a safe storage solution (my father worked on the earliest solutions in 1949). Nuclear power risks costly accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. (One estimate puts the long-term costs of the Chernobyl disaster at $700 billion.) Most importantly, it spreads nuclear technology and materials that make nuclear bomb-making easier and nuclear war more probable. Consider that our entire fight with Iran right now is over that country’s use of nuclear power to develop nuclear weapons.
Which brings us to Abundance, the much-discussed book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. In their very first chapter, they write: “By some counts, nuclear power is safer than wind and cleaner than solar.” Huh? Perhaps if you completely ignore the problems of nuclear waste, safety, and weapons proliferation. “By some counts,” bleach cures COVID-19.
Klein and Thompson then claim that the failure of the U.S. nuclear industry “is not a failure of the private market to responsibly bear risk but of the federal government to properly weigh risks.” In other words, nuclear power could still save us through government fiat.
This is complete nonsense. The nuclear industry has been the beneficiary of at least $85 billion in federal subsidies since 1948, plus loan guarantees, tax credits, enrichment subsidies, waste disposal subsidies, and much more. The Vogtle reactors would never have been built but for $12 billion in federal loan guarantees. Nor will the private market ever “responsibly bear risk,” because of the Price-Anderson Act’s low limits on liability for nuclear power operators. Despite massive, unprecedented federal support, the nuclear industry is becoming less competitive by the day.
The fact that Abundance leans on an example like nuclear suggests how flimsy its central thesis really is. Abundance asserts that America—or at least the Democrats’ America—should be developing big plans and rolling them out across the country, and the way to do this is to crush local opposition and a vast array of environmental protection laws.
As Mike Lofgren notes in Salon: “The idea (of Abundance) was that Democrats should drop their phobias about environmental degradation, urban sprawl, interstate highway construction, and other quality-of-life considerations, and instead engineer the economy to crank out more stuff for the masses—housing, green energy jobs, infrastructure. All they have to do is defang regulations contained in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, zoning restrictions, and other examples of Luddite do-gooderism. Grateful voters would flock to the Democratic Party, and right-wing extremism would lose its steam.”
In the case of nuclear power, Klein and Thompson would spread unaffordable electricity generation across the country—the most costly tool for achieving decarbonization—even if it put communities everywhere into bankruptcy. This is exactly what happened when the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) tried to build five nuclear power stations, better known as “Whoops!”, 40 years ago. Their Abundance-like quest wasted billions of dollars—communities be damned—and led to the second-largest municipal bond default in U.S. history.
Localists are rightly skeptical of big anything—big government, big business, big labor, big energy projects from big thinkers. What will really unlock “abundance” in America is a federal government that enables communities to choose the decentralized futures they want, not a deadly nuclear future imposed by beneficent technocrats.
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