A New Reckoning for Nuclear EnergyNEWS | 19 December 2024This spring kicked off the best stretch for America’s nuclear industry in decades. It started in April, when, for the first time since 1990, the United States added nuclear capacity for the second year in a row. In June, Congress passed a major law to accelerate nuclear-energy development. The Republican Party’s national platform trumpeted nuclear power, as did Kamala Harris in describing her economic agenda; this fall, three of the world’s largest companies—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—announced substantial investments in nuclear-energy facilities. In November, the U.S. issued official goals to massively expand its nuclear capacity. “We have ambitious targets for the next 10 years,” Michael Goff, the acting assistant secretary of the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me, as well as for the decade after. The DOE aims to add roughly 60 times more nuclear power in a quarter century than the country built in the previous one.
As recently as 15 years ago, or perhaps even five, imagining all of this would have been a stretch. For decades, the industry was stagnant and vehemently opposed by environmentalists. But nuclear energy—a potential source of abundant, reliable, emissions-free electricity—is a powerful tool to fight climate change, and now the federal government, major companies, and a growing number of climate advocates are supporting a series of nuclear-energy projects that could transform America’s grid. This is at least the country’s third attempt to do so—the original push to install a nationwide fleet of reactors ground to a spectacular halt in the 1980s, and a so-called nuclear “renaissance” in the late 2000s, which included dozens of proposed reactors, also failed to materialize. This round, “the industry itself has really got to deliver,” Goff said. The next few years might be the country’s last chance to get nuclear right.
America’s opposition to nuclear power runs deep. Some of the oldest and most influential environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have long opposed the fallout from nuclear-weapons testing and, as an extension, the environmental risk of nuclear-power plants. Broader public attitudes turned against nuclear power when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility suffered a meltdown in 1979. The Democratic Party officially opposed new nuclear plants the following year, and after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, nearly three-quarters of Americans said they were against the building of a nuclear plant within five miles of their home.
Economic factors might have doomed nuclear build-out anyway. Energy companies did build many nuclear-power plants in the 1970s—and those plants still provide about one-fifth of the United States’ electricity today—but skyrocketing costs and interminable construction delays, combined with plateauing electricity demand, eventually made new facilities unattractive investments. The emergence of cheap natural gas in the 2000s has helped doom any nuclear growth since, Jessica Lovering, an expert on nuclear economics and the executive director of the Good Energy Collective, told me. (The Great Recession also helped squelch plans for new facilities, she said.)
The result has been that, from 1979 to 1988, 67 reactors were canceled; for more than three decades, the nation has added barely any new nuclear capacity. The reactors that did open were years behind schedule. Beginning in the 1960s, the number of nuclear-engineering degrees granted each year steadily climbed, to a peak of roughly 1,500 in 1978, then plummeted to fewer than 400 by 2000.
But then, slowly, Americans started studying nuclear engineering again. When Kathryn Huff, who led the U.S. Office for Nuclear Energy for two years prior to Goff, finished her Ph.D. in 2013, more than 1,000 nuclear-engineering degrees were being issued annually, a number that has remained roughly steady since. Huff now teaches nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and she told me that the motivation of her own cohort and her students is clear: “The reason people are in nuclear now is the environment.”
Beginning in the 2000s, greenhouse-gas emissions and all their consequences for the planet were becoming a pressing concern for growing numbers of scientists, government officials, and even corporations. The link between commercial nuclear power and the Cold War and nuclear radiation had faded; more people learned that the technology was safer than fossil fuels, or even wind power, measured by deaths per unit of energy produced. As more places in the U.S. started building more renewable energy, experts found that a decarbonized grid running purely on solar panels and wind turbines might be impossible, or prohibitively expensive. The Department of Energy estimates, for instance, that each unit of energy from a renewable grid with nuclear power will cost 37 percent less than from a grid without. Huff told me her students “understand how much carbon-free power we need, and that’s what’s driving them into nuclear energy—and that’s also what’s happening in the Democratic Party.”
In the past decade or so, more scientists and advocacy organizations began to mobilize around nuclear power. The Clean Air Task Force, for instance, concluded that nuclear energy was the “most advanced and proven” source of carbon-free, weather-independent power, the group’s executive director, Armond Cohen—who was a staunch anti-nuclear activist in the 1980s—told me. In 2015, four of the world’s most influential climate scientists wrote an editorial in The Guardian that called nuclear energy “the only viable path forward on climate change.” A 2018 United Nations special report found that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels would require “unprecedented changes”—including in the world’s energy systems, which made nuclear, as a scalable source of copious and clean electricity, still more appealing.
The support for nuclear power in the U.S.—particularly among climate advocates—is far from unequivocal, but relative to a couple of decades ago, it represents an epochal shift, Ted Nordhaus, an early nuclear-energy advocate and the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center that promotes nuclear energy, told me. In 2020, the Democratic Party’s platform endorsed nuclear energy for the first time since 1972. Bernie Sanders is a long-standing opponent of nuclear energy, but the Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce—a group formed to unify the party’s more moderate and radical wings in 2020—listed nuclear as a key technology for combatting climate change. Federal efforts to build nuclear energy have run through the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies. Republicans have long supported nuclear as a matter of energy security and reliability; President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes substantial incentives for nuclear projects. Billions of dollars in corporate investment have gone to nuclear facilities and start-ups. Similar support exists across states as politically varied as Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and New York.
One more factor has propelled the nuclear industry. After decades of relatively flat power use nationwide, AI and data-center growth are sending projections for electricity demand soaring upward, Goff said. Because many of the companies operating large data centers have made substantial climate commitments, they need abundant sources of carbon-free electricity, and see nuclear as the quickest and most reliable way of generating it. These giant tech firms appear willing to pay above-market rates to get those new nuclear-power sources up and running. “I just can’t think of any precedent for it,” Matt Bowen, a nuclear-energy researcher at Columbia, told me.
Still, to speak of a nuclear “revival” might be premature—it’s more accurate to say that the industry is approaching an inflection point. To meet its ambitious nuclear targets, Goff said, the U.S. will likely need a mixture of existing and more experimental reactors. The next several years will be crucial for demonstrating that America can build a large nuclear fleet. Two recently completed reactors at a Georgia power plant—the project that made 2023 and 2024 the first consecutive years of added nuclear capacity in decades—have made that facility the nation’s largest single source of clean energy, but both were years behind schedule.
Meanwhile, the “advanced nuclear” projects drawing attention from the federal government and tech companies will need to prove their case. These technologies, Lovering said, are smaller and simpler than the behemoth facilities of old, which should reduce costs and construction times. But more advanced nuclear technologies have been the industry’s promised future for decades now, and yet have never made the leap to regular deployment in the U.S. And the first commercial deployments will be expensive (efficiency gains and savings will likely accompany later iterations). Experts I spoke with had mixed opinions about whether a Republican-controlled government will continue the generous loans and tax incentives the initial projects depend on.
Perhaps the greatest risk is that expectations are too high—that politicians and tech companies hope to be awash in abundant, cheap, nuclear-generated electricity within five years, instead of 10 or 20. An industry with so many decades of setbacks and failures cannot afford many more; if nuclear power really is so vital to decarbonization, then neither can the climate. The door is open for nuclear power, Cohen told me. “The question is whether we can have an industry that can walk through.”Author: Elizabeth Rush. Matteo Wong. Zoë Schlanger. Patrick George. Source
