Our hyperlinked world presents us with a day-to-day flood of events, so fast that we sometimes miss the patterns. But here’s one worth watching: organizations that in the past did not say nice things about nuclear energy are chiming in lately to recognize its value: to clean air, climate, preservation of fragile wilderness environments and national security.
The way nuclear power plants generate energy has not changed, although the plants have modernized and are running more efficiently than ever. What has changed are market forces in the broader economy that threaten the continued operation of some plants, combined with ever-increasing concerns about climate.
Worry over climate is becoming acute. Leading scientists now give us a shorter timeline to prevent even greater impacts from climate change. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a dire update in October, predicting severe effects by 2030. It identified nuclear as one of the key technologies necessary to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
That’s why the Union of Concerned Scientists, whose most prominent statements on nuclear power are usually about technical issues, said in a report in November that “our ability to fight climate change will become much weaker” if nuclear power plants are replaced with natural gas or coal plants. UCS President Ken Kimmel added that it’s important that “we keep an open mind about all of the tools in the emissions reductions tool box—even ones that are not our personal favorites.”
And a few days later, the Boston Globe editorialized that nuclear plants were important to limiting emissions of climate-forcing gases, and that “the potential to lose those resources could undo the nation’s recent progress in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.”
These are not isolated sentiments. Bloomberg said in January that states should amend their “renewable portfolio standards,” which are essentially quotas for solar and wind, into clean energy standards, which would include nuclear. “Nuclear power is crucial to the effort to stop climate change,” Bloomberg said.
It’s not just editors and people concerned primarily with energy. In June, a group of 77 prominent Americans concerned with defense, including retired admirals and generals, ambassadors and national security officials, called on Energy Secretary Rick Perry to “take concrete steps to ensure the national security attributes of U.S. nuclear power plants are properly recognized by policymakers and are valued in U.S. electricity markets.”
One of the signers, John Warner, a former U.S. Senator from Virginia and Secretary of the Navy, said in an Op-Ed in The Hill that along with everything else in America, military bases run on the power grid, which is dependent on nuclear reactors. He also pointed out that the civilian industry and the military share an industrial and engineering base which is a national security asset.
And Google, which has a long-standing policy of shrinking its carbon footprint, issued a report that said that yes, it buys a lot of renewable energy, but no, that doesn’t make it carbon-free, because the wind and solar generation alone don’t match its pattern of demand. But nuclear energy on the grid does help advance its goal, Google said. (Google doesn’t purchase nuclear power specifically; it recognizes nuclear’s presence on the grids that serve its data centers.)
The growing and diverse groups standing behind nuclear as a key part of the climate solution should continue to grow in the coming year.
Beyond reports and opinions, 2018 was the year that New Jersey passed legislation to compensate its nuclear reactors for producing carbon-free electricity, and Connecticut regulators took major steps toward towards implementing the system its legislature passed in 2017 to allow Dominion Energy’s Millstone Power Station to bid into markets with other zero-carbon energy sources like wind, solar and hydropower. These follow actions by Illinois and New York, and court decisions affirming the actions taken by those states.
Looking ahead to 2019, the nuclear industry will move towards the deployment of new reactor fuels. The Department of Energy is providing development money to three fuel vendors, who will be placing test assemblies of seven different types into reactors in 2019. The goal of all seven is a more robust fuel that will demonstrate the nuclear industry’s ability to allow the plants to remain economically competitive with other rapidly advancing energy technologies, while simultaneously giving plants additional operational flexibility that could reduce the chance of fuel damage during an accident.
Legislatures in Pennsylvania and Ohio are also likely to consider steps to preserve the reactors in their states. The debate will take place amid growing recognition that if reactors in the region are prematurely retired these states will lose a substantial amount of emissions-free generation. A report earlier this year from the Brattle Group estimated that Ohio and Pennsylvania would reverse the emissions benefits of all the renewable generation installed in PJM, the regional electricity market, over the past 25 years if nuclear plants close prematurely.
We should all hope that in 2019 more lawmakers will listen to the growing number of voices in neighboring states and around the country who are supporting nuclear.
