Back to the future in nuclear energy

In the 1950s, nuclear was deemed the energy of the future. Unfortunately, the world’s ardor for replacing fossil fuels with clean atomic energy hit a brick wall in the 1970s. It is only recently, after decades of false hopes, that we may be entering a new age of U.S. nuclear power.

Today, nuclear power represents no more than 20% of U.S. electricity, and that may be an overstatement. The industry’s brick wall occurred in March 1979 at Three Mile Island in Middletown, Pennsylvania. A partial meltdown of their Unit 2 reactor released a small amount of radioactivity.

I remember it well. The leak resulted from equipment malfunctions, design-related problems, and worker errors. At first, no one knew the extent of the problem. Fears that we were facing a major nuclear disaster only 75 miles from Philadelphia swept the country. Despite the initial panic, the accident had no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public. It didn’t matter. It set in motion a deep and long-lasting distrust of nuclear energy among the population.

The public’s fears seemed justified when just seven years later, the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 in northern Ukraine created the costliest nuclear disaster in history. It is estimated that the cost was more than $700 billion and caused the evacuation of 70,000 people.

In the mid-2000s, there was an effort to revive the industry. A flood of proposals to restart nuclear energy in the U.S. was short-lived. A combination of the fracking boom, which brought in quantities of cheap natural gas, and yet another nuclear disaster sidetracked that effort.

In 2011, an earthquake and tsunami sparked a nuclear disaster in Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Three of the plant’s six reactors sustained damage and released both hydrogen and radioactive materials. There were no deaths and no adverse effects among non-worker residents, but it is regarded as the worst nuclear incident since Chornobyl.

Construction of nuclear plants has been at a standstill in the U.S. for a generation until now aside from one huge project. The Southern Company’s two new reactors in Georgia took two decades to complete and ran massively over budget.

What has changed? Electricity demand for one. U.S. electricity use is exploding after going nowhere for 15 years because of new factories, EVs, climate change, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The AI revolution, for example, is being created on the backs of countless data centers throughout the country. Those data centers require enormous amounts of electricity. The Energy Department projects that almost 25 gigawatts of new data center electricity demand will hit the grids within the next six years.

The major players in AI see the obvious choice to supply that power as the construction of new nuclear facilities. This future demand would be the equivalent of the output of roughly 29 average nuclear power plants.

Their idea is to place as many new AI data centers near start-up nuclear plants as possible. That way it saves companies billions of dollars in grid upgrades such as new transmission lines, rerouting power lines, etc.

Last month, Open AI pitched a plan to the White House to build multiple, 5-gigawatt data centers across the U.S. Each would require the equivalent of five nuclear plants to fuel those centers. The Biden Administration was receptive to the idea given that it had just finished closing on a loan to resurrect the decommissioned Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. That project will take two years to reopen.

Microsoft and Constellation Energy also announced a $1.6 billion power purchase deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in 2028. And 14 of the world’s largest banking institutions pledged to support tripling global nuclear energy capacity by 2050.

While all the above is commendable and maybe even doable, the facts are that nuclear energy is expensive. It is both costly to build and to operate. It doesn’t have to remain that way. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, construction costs were declining rapidly. The more we built, the more we learned. Production increased and costs went down.

After Three Mile Island, safety became the primary objective and of paramount importance. The public demanded it and the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima reinforced those demands. As such, new and stringent rules were applied to plant construction.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA became far more concerned with the safety factors of the industry and much less about the economic viability of nuclear power generation. Regulations proliferated. Neither agency has any mandate to increase nuclear power generation, nor any goals based on its growth, nor do they benefit when power plants come online. The approval process now takes several years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Biden Administration is working on a plan to bring additional decommissioned nuclear power reactors back online. That is in addition to developing small modular reactors (SMRs) for certain applications and building advanced nuclear reactors.

The benefits of a revival of nuclear power generation are obvious. It is a scalable source of on-demand, emissions-free energy. It takes up little land, consumes a small amount of fuel, and produces little waste. It is a technology that could solve the world’s need to beat back climate change and energy poverty. The question is will we be willing to take the risk that future accidents in the industry are worth the benefits.

Bill Schmick is a founding partner of Onota Partners, Inc., in the Berkshires.