Recent weeks have been the best of times and the worst of times for proponents of nuclear energy. This week, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry went to the U.N. climate conference (COP28) in Dubai to unveil a 22-nation multilateral commitment to triple global nuclear energy production by 2050. If achieved, the pledge would result in nuclear energy providing about one-third of all global electricity. That could eliminate the vast majority of emissions from the electricity sector, since zero-emission nuclear power is optimally suited to displace coal plants around the world, which account for the lion’s share of pollution associated with electricity production.
Recent weeks have been the best of times and the worst of times for proponents of nuclear energy. This week, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry went to the U.N. climate conference (COP28) in Dubai to unveil a 22-nation multilateral commitment to triple global nuclear energy production by 2050. If achieved, the pledge would result in nuclear energy providing about one-third of all global electricity. That could eliminate the vast majority of emissions from the electricity sector, since zero-emission nuclear power is optimally suited to displace coal plants around the world, which account for the lion’s share of pollution associated with electricity production.
The announcement marked a watershed of sorts for nuclear energy at the annual climate confab. Eight years ago, James Hansen, the father of modern climate science research, and three other climate scientists were roundly dismissed—and even branded climate deniers—for holding a press conference on the sidelines of the COP21 meeting in Paris in 2015 to advocate for nuclear energy as a way to cut emissions.
Today, nuclear energy is increasingly recognized as a critical climate solution. The European Union, after a protracted battle between nuclear-powered France and anti-nuclear Germany, included some nuclear energy activities in its low carbon taxonomy this year, which allows sustainable investment funds to include nuclear in their portfolios. In the United States, the Biden administration has embraced nuclear energy, including by funding the development of new types of reactors. Public opinion on nuclear energy has turned markedly positive, even in Germany.
But when it comes to turning words into actions, the picture is decidedly less rosy. Three weeks before Kerry’s bold announcement in Dubai, the U.S. developer of the first small modular reactor to be licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NuScale, announced that it had canceled its first reactors, slated to receive close to $2 billion in federal grants, due to rising cost and weak customer demand. Two other reactor projects slated for significant government support will release new cost estimates before the end of the year. These will almost certainly show substantial cost increases as well, mainly due to rising interest rates and commodity prices for steel and other costly construction materials.
These U.S. projects have received great interest globally as well, with all three companies announcing a slew of agreements to provide reactors to the United Kingdom, Poland, Romania, and other countries. But those agreements, in virtually all cases, are not worth the paper they are written on. They are simply expressions of interest, establishing that national utilities or governments would like to buy these reactors if the companies are able to license and commercialize them at an acceptable cost.
Other countries that signed the nuclear expansion pledge in Dubai are planning to go the old-fashioned route, intending to build large conventional reactors similar to those in operation today. But large reactors are subject to the same cost pressures today as the newfangled small designs, and it is unlikely that these headwinds will stop anytime soon.
Other clean energy technologies, such as wind and solar, are subject to rising costs and project cancellations, too. But nuclear energy faces exceptional regulatory requirements that have made it virtually impossible for its developers to properly harness innovation in reactor design, manufacturing, or supply chains.
An offshore wind energy developer such as Orsted can easily reengineer its design or manufacturing process to use a different grade of steel, source its steel from a different producer, or tweak the design of its massive turbine blades to more efficiently capture the energy of the wind. Nuclear vendors, however, cannot take similar actions without complicated license amendments and certification processes that can drag on for many years, even for relatively small changes.
If the COP28 announcement is significant, it is because it signals that nuclear energy has achieved a level of acceptance that it did not have before. Policymakers at events such as COP now make grand pronouncements about nuclear energy that they can’t or won’t keep—just like their empty promises to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or provide poor countries with hundreds of billions of dollars for climate adaptation.
For nuclear energy, at least, it’s a backhanded sort of progress. Until recently, nuclear advocates couldn’t even get credentials to attend many COP events. Pro-nuclear activists were unwelcome at climate protests. Even today, the latest climate mitigation report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made just one brief mention of nuclear energy in its 42-page summary for policymakers—the section most people read—even though the scientists who wrote the full report recognized that global nuclear generation may need to triple between now and 2050 to hit climate targets, such as limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.
But that is a far cry from building nuclear plants. The combination of macroeconomic pressures and regulatory restrictions means that neither pledges such as those made at COP28 nor memorandums of understanding with various industries, utilities, and governments should give anyone much confidence that a major expansion of nuclear energy is forthcoming.
Absent significant regulatory reform and hard commitments from policymakers to build actual reactors, an expansion of nuclear energy globally—especially at the scale that many policymakers, climate scientists, and energy analysts believe is necessary—is extremely unlikely.
Turning pro-nuclear talk into action will take much more than pledges. Nuclear regulators all over the world continue to prioritize avoiding infinitesimal radiological health risks over the large and documented benefits of nuclear energy for public health and the environment.
As a result, outside of China and a few other places that have continued to build nuclear reactors, the ability to build them has atrophied—an ability that requires engineering expertise, construction management experience, a skilled nuclear workforce, and the necessary supply chains. Most nuclear nations have also outsourced much of their fuel fabrication and all of their fuel enrichment capacities to Russia, a situation that has become untenable for many since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ultimately, there is no inherent reason that nuclear energy should be expensive. Indeed, nuclear reactors, large or small, based on their basic physical characteristics, should be the cheapest form of energy that we have. Nuclear fuels are denser than any other energy source, which means that fuel represents a tiny share of the cost of producing nuclear energy (unlike power generated from fossil fuels). It also means that a nuclear reactor requires far less material—steel, cement, and other costly inputs—per unit of energy produced than any other energy source. Nor is there any reason inherent to nuclear technology that a small modular reactor should be harder or more costly to manufacture than a large wind or gas turbine.
But byzantine and inflexible regulatory requirements, far out of scale to a technology that has proven over seven decades to be the safest form of energy that humans have ever invented (measured by deaths per unit of power generated), create enormous risks and uncertainties for both nuclear developers and potential customers. As a result, neither commercializing new reactor technologies nor relaunching long-atrophied capabilities to build old ones are likely to happen at a scale consistent with the tripling of global nuclear energy capacity in the coming decades—absent significant changes from policymakers.
Those changes must include, first and foremost, regulatory reform in the United States and many other countries. The sector simply can’t innovate or manage costs effectively under the current regulatory frameworks, which were designed for the large reactors of the mid-20th century and still reflect very outdated understandings of radiological health risk. This reform will also require significant advance commitments to build enough reactors to allow the nuclear industry to learn how to build them cost-effectively, establish robust supply chains, and rebuild the nuclear workforce.
There is no reason that the nations that are serious about nuclear energy can’t do these things. The build-out of nuclear reactors in the 1970s and 1980s in France, Germany, Sweden, and a number of other nations still represents the fastest scale-up of clean energy ever observed, well before much of the world became concerned about climate change. Those nations did so very cost-effectively. Nations and utilities that get a significant share of energy from nuclear reactors tend to have lower electricity prices than those that don’t.
And the recent success of the United States’ Operation Warp Speed, which aided the development of effective vaccines against the COVID-19 virus in less than a year, demonstrates that the combination of regulatory reform and significant advance purchase commitments can be game-changing for technological solutions to vexing problems.
For that to happen, though, policymakers, the nuclear industry, and nuclear advocates alike will have to break with their unfortunate habit of making promises they can’t keep. Instead, they will have to demand policies that are credibly up to the task of revitalizing an industry that the world desperately needs.
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