{"id":2160,"date":"2025-03-18T14:29:07","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T19:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dda.ndus.edu\/ddreview\/?p=2160"},"modified":"2025-04-09T13:34:43","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T18:34:43","slug":"nuclear-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dda.ndus.edu\/ddreview\/nuclear-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T<\/span>here was remarkably little fanfare for the 70th anniversary of President Eisenhower\u2019s December 8, 1953 \u201cAtoms for Peace\u201d speech before the United Nations. Seven months before that anniversary, Time Magazine featured an essay headlined, \u201cNuclear Energy\u2019s Moment Has Come,\u201d by Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of the man who led the Manhattan Project. History, however, shows that scientists of Eisenhower\u2019s era believed that moment had already arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only four years after Eisenhower\u2019s speech, America\u2019s first nuclear-electric generating plant was completed in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Just three years later, Illinois\u2019s Dresden plant came online, the first to be privately funded. In 1962, President Kennedy asked the Atomic Energy Commission to take a \u201chard look\u201d at the prospects for nuclear power. At that time, the nascent industry enjoyed broad bipartisan support, but even so, not everyone supported \u201ctaming the atom.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many will remember a 1970s mantra adopted by the global anti-nuclear movement, \u201csplit wood, not atoms.\u201d On April 30, 1977, that slogan graced the placards of some 2,000 protesters who occupied the construction site for the planned Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear station. That protest resulted in one of the largest mass arrests in US history. While protests and legal interventions failed to stop that plant\u2019s completion, the resulting delays helped induce an 800 percent cost overrun for Seabrook. Similar tactics and consequential cost overruns became increasingly common.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you, and therefore before the world, its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma\u2014to devote its entire heart and mind to finding the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.<\/strong> <\/p>

\u2014 President Dwight D. Eisenhower<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Such protests were mounted across the country, often at epic scales. In 1978, Helen Caldicott, an Australian firebrand and physician, published Nuclear Madness,<\/em> which served as a kind of new testament to the previous decade\u2019s environmental bible, Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring.<\/em> Despite the confusing comingling of protests over nuclear energy and atomic weapons, nuclear construction continued apace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three Mile Island<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Then, infamously, it all came to a crashing halt. On March 28, 1979, one of two nuclear reactors located at Three Mile Island on Pennsylvania\u2019s Susquehanna River suffered a meltdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, just weeks earlier, theaters were featuring a movie, \u201cThe China Syndrome.\u201d That \u201cB\u201d movie, one of a spate of similar \u201cdisaster themed\u201d movies then in vogue, was the perfect set-piece for credulous reporters. The movie, the protests and the media made implicit and overt allusions to the possibility of an atomic-bomb-class explosion in the event of a nuclear \u201cmeltdown,\u201d that is, if a runaway chain reaction caused tons of uranium to superheat and melt through the steel containment vessel and continue to, ostensibly, unstoppably burrow into the earth; hence \u201cChina syndrome.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Media coverage featured apocalyptic headlines and storylines, including \u201cthe day we almost lost Pennsylvania\u201d in the cartoonish language of the movie\u2019s engineers. Following that accident that captivated the world, polls found more Americans could identify \u201cThree Mile Island\u201d than they could then-President Jimmy Carter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, not a single human being was injured by that billion-dollar accident. Nor was an atomic-bomb-class explosion averted; it was never even a remote possibility because of the physics of nuclear reactors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The commercial nuclear industry immediately mounted major campaigns to combat \u201cfake news\u201d and growing protests. Despite those efforts, public opposition soared, construction programs slowed, and every planned reactor order was cancelled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chernobyl<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Then, on April 26, 1986, a Russian nuclear power plant suffered a catastrophic accident. Unlike Three Mile Island, tragically nearly three dozen employees died, and a highly radioactive plume spewed into the atmosphere leading to detectable contamination as far downwind as Sweden. That Russian design was inherently unsafe (unlike the coda of \u201cinherently safe\u201d for Western designs). It also lacked the massive, concrete containment dome standard for all Western reactors. But such facts mattered not a whit to the alarmists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fukushima<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The third accident that ended prospects for a vibrant nuclear industry, followed the tsunami on March 3, 2011, that overwhelmed the inadequate sea wall at Japan\u2019s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site. It was predictable and predicted that no workplace or public injury would result from that accident itself. Those that occurred came from ill-advised mass evacuations. But global nuclear construction slowed or stopped. Several European nations shut down all operating reactors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, for 30 years, the number of operating global nuclear reactors has remained largely unchanged, and, in the U.S., just three new plants have been built. The split-wood activists got their wish. Today, all the world\u2019s nuclear power plants combined supply less than half as much global energy as does burning wood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This history of the rise and fall of \u201catoms for peace\u201d is particularly relevant today, as we supposedly face the moment of a nuclear resurrection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Onshoring”<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the past year or so, numerous countries have announced plans to revive commercial nuclear programs, while several U.S. states have rescinded statutory bans. The secretary of energy recently proclaimed that America needs to triple its nuclear fleet. France\u2019s president pledged to double theirs. Japan is restarting its shut-down plants. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley potentates are rushing to fund startups featuring designs for tiny nuclear plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even some in Hollywood, which played a pivotal role in the demise of the nuclear industry, have called for a resurgence, including a June 2023 pro-nuclear documentary from Oliver Stone, \u201cNuclear Now,\u201d chronicling the \u201crise of the anti-nuclear movement.\u201d Ironically, Michael Douglas, who directed \u201cThe China Syndrome,\u201d recently said, \u201cI have to say I changed my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why the change? One could invoke an aphorism from Philip K. Dick, whose science fiction has inspired several Hollywood movies: \u201cReality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn\u2019t go away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One reality is that technological progress always leads to more electricity demand. The past couple of decades of flat electricity growth was an interregnum, not a new normal. American utilities now report that expected near-term demands will vastly exceed plans for new supplies. Part of that comes from bipartisan efforts to \u201creshore\u201d manufacturing, especially for computer chips, hatched without thinking about the power needed. Every $1 billion of new chip factories brings about $30 million a year in new electricity demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hundreds of billions of dollars in factory spending are coming. Add to this, the implications of more electric vehicles (EVs). Every $1 billion of EVs put on roads adds about $20 million in annual electricity demand. And then there\u2019s the epiphany that all things digital use electricity, especially artificial intelligence (AI). Roughly every $1 billion in new datacenters brings about $60 million a year in electricity demand; that demand doubles or triples if AI is used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Renewables<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Second, the illusion that wind and solar energy can meet the scale of growth in today\u2019s electricity demands has been shattered. To meet the scale of demand for reliable power, utility executives are petitioning the government to postpone plans to force the shutdown of any conventional power plants, including coal. Even stalwart champions of an \u201cenergy transition\u201d are calling for more \u201cdispatchable\u201d power. \u201cDispatchable\u201d simply means a power plant delivers electricity when customers need it, not when nature makes it available. (The fiction that batteries can solve that problem is a non-starter in the real world.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Security<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The third reality is the (re)discovery that security and geopolitical factors matter. Despite subsidies and exhortations, China remains the primary upstream supplier of materials used to build all things \u201cgreen\u201d (wind, solar, batteries) with a market dominance that is double OPEC\u2019s share of world oil markets. And we should expect analysts will discover that sprawling acres of wind or solar hardware are not only easy targets for potential enemy military forces but are also vulnerable to nature\u2019s predations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nuclear Benefits<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Nuclear power plants require comparatively trivial use of real estate and can operate continuously regardless of supply-chain disruptions caused by natural or non-natural, disasters. No other power system can store, on-site, years of fuel supply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nuclear\u2019s operational security derives from the under-appreciated energy density of nuclear phenomena. In energy-per-pound terms, nuclear fuel offers a theoretical potential one million-fold greater than hydrocarbons, and 100 million-fold over lithium chemistry, the latter being essential to convert episodic solar\/wind into reliable power. Today\u2019s nuclear technology can, so far, \u201conly\u201d realize a one-thousand-fold energy density advantage over petroleum (and a million-fold over solar\/batteries).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lise Meitner<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Discovery of the physics of fission stands in history as consequential as Sadi Carnot\u2019s century earlier framing the Laws of Thermodynamics. But it bears noting a name often missing from history, Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, who should have been at least co-awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics. While records credit Meitner as one of the research scientists working alongside Otto Hahn (who got the Nobel Prize) and Fritz Strassmann, both chemists, it was Meitner who first published the correct theoretical interpretation in 1938, before she fled Nazi Germany. Nobel Committee records, now public, reveal they had debated including her. (One might imagine why she was left out.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Early Rush<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The realization of the astonishing physics of E = MC2 is what inspired the wild rush in the 1950s in the first place, and not just for big power plants, but also nuclear-powered planes, trains, automobiles, ships and spaceships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enthusiasms weren\u2019t mere musings of futurists (though the Ford Nucleon car design was affirmatively silly). The U.S. Air Force spent over $1 billion designing and prototyping a nuclear airplane, including ground testing in 1956 a GE-built ultra-compact 2.5 MW molten-salt reactor. (President Kennedy cancelled the program.) Also built in 1959, a 600-foot, 60-passenger, $600 million (today\u2019s dollars) commercial nuclear ship, the NS Savannah (still afloat at a Baltimore, MD, pier). In those heady days, designs were drawn up for nuclear locomotives and a rocket program, which ran from 1959 to 1973 entailing 20 different nuclear engines, some nearly as powerful as the chemical ones later used for the space shuttle. Tiny reactors for high-power satellites were launched into orbit both by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. NASA\u2019s nuclear programs continue to this day. (The reality is, Elon Musk\u2019s hyperbole aside, Mars missions will need a nuclear rocket.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1954, the U.S. Army deployed seven micro-nukes with electrical output of 1 to 10 MW that operated (some for a decade) in places such as Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone, Antarctica and Wyoming. Now, a 2018 Army analysis imagines reanimating that program with up to 100 micro-scale reactors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s nuclear technology can, so far, \u201conly\u201d realize a one-thousand-fold energy density advantage over petroleum (and a million-fold over solar\/batteries).<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Patience, Please<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This history contains a lesson for today\u2019s nuclear aspirations: in a word, patience. Foundationally new technologies take time. The advent of nuclear fission was arguably as foundational as internal combustion, realized first as the steam engine that vaulted civilization into the industrial revolution. But that took a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steam engine technology involved a long march of continual engineering advances from Newcomen\u2019s first invention, circa 1710, to the 1760 arrival of the Watt engine, followed by another five decades to the steam-age apotheosis in the mid-1800s. Steam\u2019s successor, Rudolph Diesel\u2019s revolutionary 1893 patent, started a new era with a similar trajectory and ultimately didn\u2019t replace steam, but supplemented the pantheon of energy-machine applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reflex, that \u201cthis time it\u2019s different,\u201d is belied by reality: long timelines are an inherent feature of deploying all industrial-class technologies at scale. To continue the steam analogy, nuclear energy, now with decades of improvements in collateral materials and technologies, is at a pivot comparable to the arrival of Watt\u2019s 1760 design superseding the 1,500 Newcomen engines built after its 1710 introduction. (What will be the nuclear equivalent to Rudolph Diesel\u2019s disruption? Odds favor micro-nukes, not fusion.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Options<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Today we have only two nuclear options: gigawatt-scale reactors we know how to build, and those we\u2019d like to build, someday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world has built over 500 of the gigawatt-scale light-water reactors (440 are still operating, 93 in the US). The supply chain, safety record and costs are well-established, even if the necessary materials and skills infrastructures have atrophied in the U.S. Meanwhile, over one-third of all nuclear plants under construction are in China; in the US, none. With political willpower, we can rekindle the American infrastructure\u2014from mines and fuel fabrication through nuclear-qualified welders. While rekindling will take time, it can happen faster than the maturation of next-generation designs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Odds are that amongst the amazing array of dozens of new designs for smaller nuclear reactors, all will work, technically. But none are yet built, and time is necessary to meet the non-trivial engineering challenges of manufacturing at scale and cost-effectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the U.S. faces a near-term shortfall of hundreds of gigawatts. Some of the latest hyperscale datacenter proposals each approach one gigawatt of demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gigawatt-class, light-water reactors have been built overseas in five to six years. When they become available, to match the output of the big nukes, we will need tens of thousands of the tiny multi-megawatt-class reactors. It\u2019s not unreasonable to believe that\u2019s possible. Industry builds several thousand of the 10 to 50 megawatt-class (gas turbine) engines annually for aircraft, a task of comparable engineering complexity. But it took decades after inception for the latter industry to expand and mature. (As a practical matter, soaring near-term electricity demands will be met, mainly, with aeroderivative gas turbines, the technology that traces its lineage to the discovery of internal combustion.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The energy bottom line is that even if the world completes all the nuclear plants now under construction and planned, burning wood will still be a bigger global source of energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Impediments<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A future with far more nuclear electricity requires policymakers to embrace more gigawatt-scale nukes while also ensuring today\u2019s operating plants are not shut down. Chip factories and datacenters can\u2019t run on dreams of future small reactors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next step also falls to policymakers, not engineers or financiers. Further regulatory reforms are needed to allow American firms to build at the velocity of Chinese firms. The challenges for nuclear energy\u2019s future are political, not technical. We\u2019ve known how to build nuclear at scale for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, regulatory tweaks can help accelerate the work engineers and investors do to prove out fascinating, even radical new kinds of small nuclear plants. Realizing the benefits from that will require patience\u2014a rare political virtue. But it\u2019s worth noting the reason America\u2019s nuclear industry is in the doldrums now is precisely because of (bad) decisions made decades ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, back to Hollywood: Anti-nuclear activism is wired into the \u201csource code\u201d of the environmental movement. It is na\u00efve to assume that\u2019s changed. For example, a recent National Resources Defense Council report has already fired a warning shot across the bow, opposing any rush to revive nuclear. They aren\u2019t alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for those environmentalists proclaiming support for nuclear because it\u2019s \u201ccarbon-free,\u201d such support is focused on future plants we can\u2019t build yet. States lifting nuclear bans have done so for tiny reactors that don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a history to that. In 1962, the Audubon Society opposed the proposed Storm King Mountain hydro dam on the Hudson River, promoting instead a gigawatt-class nuclear plant, Indian Point. Activists eventually succeeded in getting that plant prematurely shut down in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History, as they say, often rhymes. \u25c9<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is reprinted with the permission of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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