Perusing many news articles and many business reports it appears that the issue of moving to nuclear as a future energy generator is a dominant consideration across the country as energy leaders worry about meeting the nation’s future demand for energy. The issue is also emerging as a strong consideration in Montana.
According to the Department of Energy (DOE), nearly one-third of existing U.S. coal plants are scheduled to shut down by 2035, as has been mandated by the federal government. At the same time demand for electricity is rising faster than at any time in “the past five or more years.”
Bear in mind, at the recent Southeastern Montana Development Energy Open Conference it was reported that both, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have predicted that demand for electricity in the future will be two -and -a -half to three times higher than it is today.
Other energy experts are predicting wide spread black outs in store for the country, in the near future – a reality that is already being experienced.
A primary contributor for the trend for more energy are tech companies — often among the first to endorse climate change fears and demand net-zero carbon goals– but who are now realizing they will need large amounts of energy to operate future data centers. An article in Epoch Times said that the tech companies are cutting side deals with nuclear power plants to get first call on their base-load power.
A regulatory agency charged with assessing grid reliability, North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), cited “clear evidence of growing resource adequacy concerns over the next 10 years.”
Coal generation produces 16 percent of the US energy needs. The options to fill that gap, if coal is abandoned, are wind, solar, natural gas, and nuclear energy. Those in fear of potential impacts of possible climate change believe that wind and solar are the solutions, arguing that they are the cheapest and cleanest options, but the fact is they are not the cheapest, when calculating in the cost of back up resources. Wind and solar require expensive backup power generation when they fail to produce.
Some analyst say that more wind and solar capacity could be paying more for less, as these sources fail when consumers need it.
“We built a heck of a lot of wind capacity in 2023 in the United States, but the actual amount of wind electricity produced went down, simply because you have wind droughts,” said energy economist Dan Kish, senior vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research (IER).
“The windiest spots have been hit pretty hard with wind turbines, so now they’re going to places that are less prolific in terms of wind, and the result is you’re getting less wind per installed megawatt of wind power than you did before.”
According to the EIA, while overall “renewable” energy production grew by 2 percent in 2023, largely because of the subsidized increases in biofuels and solar energy, consumption of wind energy declined for the first time in 25 years.
“Our entire grid has been built with the goal of moving power to people when they need it,” Kish said, but noted that, increasingly, this is shifting to providing electricity “whenever the wind blows or the sun shines.”
Coal plants, while emitting more carbon dioxide (CO2) than some alternatives, has provided an affordable, reliable, and flexible supply of “dispatchable” electricity, which can be ramped up or down to meet demand.
Natural gas has been the prime beneficiary of the transition away from coal — both as a supplier of base-load power and as a backup to wind and solar when the weather doesn’t cooperate.
According to EIA, U.S. natural gas consumption reached a record 89.1 billion cubic feet per day in 2023 and has increased by an average of 4 percent per year since 2018. The report said that natural gas consumption set new records every month between March 2023 and November 2023, as coal-fired electric-generating capacity declined.
Unlike coal, however, gas is not stored onsite at power plants but rather delivered just in time via pipelines, a process that holds its own risks. During winter storm Uri in Texas, for example, freezing temperatures and electricity outages disrupted gas deliveries, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reported, exacerbating the crisis that ended with widespread blackouts and the deaths of an estimated 246 people.
Despite the many attributes of natural gas it doesn’t fit with the politics of climate worries or the government decreed goals of “decarbonizing” energy and reducing global emissions by at least 43 percent by 2030, 60 percent by 2035, and reaching net-zero by 2050.
Given that, nuclear energy is increasingly being touted as the ideal solution.
According to Brian Bird, CEO of the NorthWestern Energy (NWE), even though the company is exploring the possibility of moving to nuclear, there are two factors that detract from nuclear – the length of time it takes to permit and the cost.
The construction costs of Georgia’s Vogtle Nuclear Plant, which was expected to set a new standard for cost-effective nuclear production, reportedly ran $16 billion over budget, and the project was completed more than six years behind schedule, according to Epoch Times.
The 54 U.S. nuclear plants and 93 U.S. nuclear reactors, located across 28 states, currently generate about 19 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to the EIA.
A nuclear plant’s capacity factor, which measures the amount of usable energy it produces as a percentage of the maximum it could potentially produce, is the highest of all power sources, averaging more than 92 percent, according to the DOE.
By comparison, the capacity factors for wind and solar are the lowest of all major U.S. energy sources, at 35 percent and 25 percent, respectively.
Nuclear power plants are designed to run 24 hours per day, seven days per week, making them ideal for reliable, base-load electricity.
And advancing technology is making nuclear an ever improving option.
Energy economist Ryan Yonk, a director at the American Institute for Economic Research, said the safety of nuclear plants has improved with time, and although risk has not been completely eliminated, this leaves nuclear as the “no-carbon energy” of the future, provided that the industry can build plants that address risk concerns and regulatory concerns.
“If you really care deeply about CO2 and view it as a substantial problem, we have an established technology that doesn’t produce CO2, that produces large amounts of low-cost energy at relatively low risk,” he said.
The logic of nuclear is convincing more and more of those involved in finding energy solutions. Even the federal government seems to be testing the waters. The Inflation Reduction Act enacted by the administration offers a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for new nuclear projects – – which are going to be quite expensive until the technology is refined.
And, the White House is signing -on to last year’s multi-country declaration at COP28 to triple nuclear energy capacity globally by 2050; developing new reactor designs; extending the service lives of existing nuclear reactors; and growing the momentum behind new deployments. The government initiatives was $6 billion in new loans, grants, and tax credits for nuclear facilities to keep aging plants up and running and restart some that had been shut down.
Among the first to take advantage of the government’s subsidies is Bill Gates who is building Naughton Power Plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
Others are in the wings. A little over a year ago it was announced that a “wave of advanced nuclear reactors could be coming to Wyoming.” TerraPower and PacifiCorp, a nuclear developer and electric utility aiming to build a first-of-its-kind facility at a retiring Wyoming coal plant before the end of the decade, announced they were considering adding up to five more of the same design by 2035.
Other reports that will benefit nuclear is legislation that will
streamline the approval process, and provide more staffing for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which would theoretically speed the licensing process, reduce fees for plant applicants, and update the NRC’s mission statement, stipulating that it will not “unnecessarily limit” the production of nuclear energy.
The DOE is also working to ease the conversion of existing coal plants to nuclear. The agency stated that more than 300 existing and retired coal plants could be converted to nuclear energy, and this would increase the U.S. nuclear capacity by more than 250 gigawatts, nearly tripling its current capacity of 95 gigawatts.
The DOE is also collaborating with private industry through an initiative called the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN), which provides government support to commercialize nuclear energy technologies and to “educate those new to nuclear on its benefits. . .”
The average life of a nuclear power plant is about 40 years, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Some say the new technology could last longer than that.
As of April, the average age of U.S. commercial nuclear reactors was 42 years old.
Based on its annual assessment at the end of 2023, the IAEA stated that, worldwide, it “now sees a quarter more nuclear energy capacity installed by 2050 than it did as recently as 2020, underscoring how a growing number of countries are looking to this clean and reliable energy source to address the challenges” facing the world energy demands.”
Concerns about nuclear energy still linger from the plant meltdowns of the past.
These concerns stem from the fact that nuclear energy creates nuclear waste.
Dean Cooper, leader for energy at the World Wildlife Fund, said
“The truth is that the construction of new nuclear power generation capacity is too slow, too expensive, and too risky to make a difference. .. Rather, governments must prioritize investments toward energy efficiency and deploying renewables, such as wind and solar, to decarbonize the grid.”
According to an Aug. 5 survey by the Pew Research Center, 56 percent of American adults polled said they wanted more nuclear power plants as a solution.
While this number is below the 78 percent who prefer expanding solar power and the 72 percent who favor expanding wind power, the survey noted that support for solar and wind power fell by double digits percentage points since 2020 while support for nuclear power grew by 13 percentage points.
Some critics charge that the government has become too overbearing in directing and controlling the U.S. energy industry through a deluge of new laws, regulations, subsidies, tax benefits, and cap-and-trade schemes.
Government intervention at the federal and state level is manipulating the industry away from what it can realistically achieve, they say, making the electric grid both more fragile and more expensive while disregarding Americans’ growing need for affordable, reliable energy.
“One of the major issues that comes up in the energy mix is that because we’ve spent so much time regulating and subsidizing within it, we don’t have a real clear sense of what the mix would be if it were based on consumer demand and the market’s capacity to provide,” Yonk said.
“One of the ways to get closer to that is to deal with the regulatory problems and to remove the subsidies so that we start to see the emergence of a mix that matches consumer demand; at the moment, we don’t have that.”
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Data and statements in this article came from a compilation of reports.
