| Energy Secretary Chris Wright, center, visited the National Reactor Innovation Center near Idaho Falls, Idaho, last month. Josh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
Trump’s plans for nuclear power lurch aheadPresident Trump wants to quadruple nuclear power production in the United States by 2050. To get there, developers would need to build about a hundred times as much nuclear capacity in the next 25 years as they did in the past 25. In recent weeks, a series of government announcements have nudged the country a bit closer to that goal. Nuclear power has broad bipartisan support in Congress, and many climate experts have embraced it as a low-emissions source of energy. Others experts remain opposed, arguing that it is too expensive or that the safety risks are too high. “The challenge is that there’s a big gap between these announcements and putting one foot in front of the other, taking steps to actually get new reactors built,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for energy and climate at the center-left research organization Third Way. “They are much more focused on securing headlines than making headway,” he said of the Trump administration. Four projects hit milestonesTraditional nuclear reactors are time-consuming and expensive to build. In recent years, companies have been trying to develop smaller, easier-to-produce designs. To date, only two are up and running, in Russia and China, according to the World Nuclear Association. The Trump administration has made nurturing this new generation of power plants, sometimes called advanced or small modular reactors, a key piece of its nuclear strategy. It has offered funding and lowered regulatory hurdles for some U.S. companies. Last May, President Trump issued an executive order challenging the builders of advanced nuclear reactors to reach a milestone called criticality by July 4 of this year. Criticality is a sustained, stable fission reaction, said Koroush Shirvan, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You can think of it as a physics test,” he said. Four new designs have met the goal, the Energy Department announced last week. But the real accomplishment was more regulatory than technological, Shirvan said. The government waived a paperwork requirement for the companies that joined its pilot program, speeding things up by a year or more. And while Shirvan sees the milestone as a signal that the government can help companies speed up development, he said the new reactor designs had a long way to go. Some of the companies that achieved criticality did so using older designs and materials. “From a scientific point of view, it becomes very uninteresting,” he said. Looser rules, low-cost loansAs my colleague Brad Plumer wrote last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposed an overhaul of its safety rules regarding radiation exposure, part of a series of sweeping regulatory changes the agency has been pursuing that could make it cheaper and easier to build nuclear plants in the United States. And in June, the Energy Department announced that it was offering up to $17.5 billion in low-cost loans for utilities to build large nuclear reactors, Plumer reported. Certain parts of nuclear power plants, like reactor vessels, which hold fuel, can take years to manufacture. The idea for the loan program is that the government will help U.S. utilities come together to submit bulk orders for these components, saving time as they finalize their plans. It’s a little like ordering a special oven with a three-year wait list before the start of a renovation: The floor plan may not be finalized, but the kitchen will definitely need an oven. And if the renovation never happens, the oven can be resold. It’s not clear whether the program will find any takers. Even with extra financial support, large nuclear plants are a risky business. The only two large reactors that have been built recently in the United States took 15 years to complete and cost a total of $35 billion, double the initial estimates. In the long term, Freed, of Third Way, said that what may matter the most for the next generation of nuclear power stations is the support they have already garnered across several consecutive presidential administrations. “Nuclear has had the certainty from the federal government at the broadest level that very few other energy sources have had,” he said. | OTHER CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT NEWS | | | | | | | | |
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