New Nuclear Energy: Why and How
Executive Summary
There has been a resurgence in interest and optimism for
nuclear energy. This post discusses reasons
why new nuclear energy may be desirable and necessary, examines issues
surrounding the technology, and suggests actions states might take to lead in
the development of new nuclear electricity production and industrial capacity.
A key consideration is that nuclear energy could scale to the developing world. This is important because U.S. emissions are less than 15% of the world’s total. Our nation cannot protect itself from the impacts of global climate change with national GHG reductions only. Needed are actions that facilitate the development of clean electricity generation that will be adopted by developing nations.
Reasons for a fresh look at nuclear include:
· Could scale to the developing world
· Low CO2 emissions· Ability to provide fuel and energy security
· Vast energy potential
· Waste is currently managed safely
· Small footprint relative to electricity generated
· Relatively little need for additional infrastructure
· Fuel resource possibilities could be inexhaustible
· Ability to provide intense heat for industrial processes; wind and solar power cannot provide heat
· Ability to provide good jobs; highest economic impact of any power source
· Low demand for critical minerals and key bulk materials compared to solar and wind
· Mining impacts are relatively minimal with current technology
· Insignificant radiation releases from operating plants
· Insignificant concern about security and weapons proliferation with current safety systems
Given nuclear energy’s many potential advantages, the speed
with which more nuclear energy could come online is important. In the 1970s and
80s, nuclear capacity grew rapidly in some regions such as France, which now
gets 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear. The U.S. was among the leaders in nuclear
development as well.
A growth rate rivaling this will be difficult to achieve
today without new initiatives. Reasons include
high capital costs and associated financial risks, labor constraints, supply
chain constraints, fuel supply chain constraints, and a time-consuming and
expensive licensing regime.
· Identify and recommend milestones for new clean energy generation capacity and GHG emissions reductions that if not achieved, signal the need for additional actions
· Track the prospects of new nuclear energy designs with the goal of identifying one or more designs that appear to present the best value for New Jersey
· Identify potentially suitable sites for locations of new plants of various sizes by evaluating current conditions at sites of plants permitted historically but never constructed, retired fossil fuel plants and brownfield locations.
· Research and communicate funding opportunities to potential interested parties and offer assistance in obtaining funds
· Offer tax credits, grants, and low-interest loans for nuclear plant construction
· Leverage federal support, such as through the DOE’s Loan Program Office, Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, and IRA tax credits
· Explore and then implement methods of providing predictable cost recovery. A variety of cost recovery and financial risk reduction measures could be considered, including changing the subsidy landscape to include new nuclear energy. Aspects of existing subsidies should be reviewed and revised.
· Establish a Nuclear Power Advisory Commission charged with studying and reporting in a timely manner how nuclear energy could be incentivized to play a larger role
Introduction
Internationally and in the U.S., there has been a resurgence
in interest and hope for nuclear energy.
More than two dozen startups are developing a new generation of small,
innovative designs. At the recent COP 28 meeting, the U.S., along with 21 other
nations including Canada, the UK, and France, pledged to triple nuclear power
capacity by 2050 ( (Lu, 2023). The
Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits that could reduce costs of a
nuclear project, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $2.5 billion to
fund construction of new designs (Karma, 2024).
Many nations have goals to expand nuclear capacity. The U.S. Congress
has expressed strong bipartisan support for steps to accelerate the deployment
of new nuclear energy facilities with the June 18th passage by the
Senate with an 88 to 2 vote of the final version of the Accelerating Deployment
of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act (U.S. Senate,
2024). The bill was signed into law July
9, 2024. The U.S. Department of Energy
has expanded several programs supporting nuclear research and demonstrations of
next-generation technology (DOE, 2024a; DOE, 2024c).
The Need for Increased Adoption of Clean Energy
Sources
It is expected that electrification of currently fossil-fuel-powered
sectors including transportation and building heating will approximately double
U.S. electricity demand by 2050. The
recent increase in electricity needs by data centers and related efforts
including crypto-currency mining could enlarge the electricity demand further,
with some regions perhaps seeing 12% more electricity consumption by 2030 than
heretofore anticipated (EPRI, 2024).
Other developments could include evidence of growing risks
to grid stability. Some studies (Angwin,
2020) indicate that a loss of grid stability, manifesting as either an
increased number of power outages and/or declines in power quality, may become increasingly
likely as the percentage of intermittent sources (such as solar or wind) in the
electricity grid increases.
It is virtually certain, based on many studies (Baik, et
al., 2021; Jenkins, et al. 2018, Angwin, 2020), that regardless of the pace of
development of clean energy supply, some backup dispatchable power will be
necessary to maintain adequate electricity quality and supply in a
cost-effective manner. Power system
decarbonization modeling, regardless of the level of renewables deployment,
suggests that the U.S. will need around 550 to 770 GW of additional clean, firm
capacity to reach net zero, and that decarbonizing the last 20% of the grid
will be difficult and expensive without firm power (DOE, 2023). (Firm capacity
is the amount of electricity that can be provided by a source at any time that
it is needed; it is also sometimes referred to as “dispatchable” power.)
One study (Jenkins, et al. 2018), based on a review of 40
studies of pathways to deep decarbonization, found that a decarbonized grid
that was powered by renewables and energy storage only would require generation
and storage capacity of many times the peak system demand, whereas if
sufficient firm resources were available, much less would suffice. The study found that challenges associated
with the variability of wind and solar increase nonlinearly as the share of
energy from these sources rises, and that total system costs increase
nonlinearly as well. The authors found that most of the challenges associated
with high shares of wind or solar energy can be avoided by adopting a more
balanced portfolio of resources that includes firm, dispatchable power that can
provide power in periods of low sunshine and low wind that can occur on
seasonal timescales. They concluded that, while it is tempting for policy
makers and others to bet exclusively on solar PV, wind, and battery storage to
be the winners in the effort to decarbonize, doing so would be a mistake. A better path, they stated, would be to
expand and improve a wide set of clean energy resources, of which nuclear power
is an example.
Currently, single cycle natural gas combustion turbines
provide a major portion of many states’ backup capacity. To replace this capacity with carbon-free
power will require either carbon capture and storage systems at existing gas
plants, replacement of natural gas with hydrogen or biogas produced using clean
energy, broad implementation of grid-scale storage, new nuclear energy capacity,
geothermal energy (not likely feasible in much of the U.S.), new technology that
is currently unknown, or a combination of some or all of these. According to a recent PJM report, if
additional storage resources do not get built at pace, immense pressure will be
placed on natural gas to supply the ramping needs for the system. The report stated that changes to market
mechanisms should be evaluated to ensure that adequate resources are
incentivized to help PJM manage increasing system uncertainty and volatility
(PJM, 2024).
Nuclear
plant basics
There are two basic types of nuclear reactors: thermal
reactors and fast reactors. Both cause
reactions that break apart, or “fission” atoms, releasing energy and also
releasing particles, typically neutrons, that break apart more atoms. This causes
a chain reaction that releases enough energy to heat water or another fluid
which then drives turbines or similar units that convert the heat into
electricity.
Only some atoms are capable of undergoing fission to the
degree necessary to maintain a chain reaction.
One element that includes a fissionable isotope is uranium, about 0.7%
of which is the fissionable isotope U-235.
Most uranium is the isotope U-238, and to be suitable as a fuel for most
of today’s nuclear reactors, uranium must be “enriched” by increasing the
concentration of the U-235 isotope. Enrichment
is typically achieved with a series of centrifuge steps. When U-235 fissions, it
produces enough byproduct neutrons to maintain a chain reaction. Another isotope, plutonium-239, is also
readily fissionable.
Thermal
Reactors
A thermal reactor employs neutrons, which have been released by the fission of certain isotopes, such as uranium-235 or uranium-233, and whose movement has been slowed down with a moderating material. The moderator in most of today’s reactors is normal water (“light water”) under high pressure. There are two types of these; pressurized water reactors (PWRs), which operate with the moderating water at a pressure of about 155 bar (155 times normal atmospheric pressure), and boiling water reactors (BWRs) which operate with the moderating water under pressure of about 75 bar (Hargraves, 2024). These are typically called light water reactors (LWRs). Slowed-down neutrons are better able to split the fissionable atoms, thus keeping the chain reaction going. (They are called “thermal” neutrons because their kinetic energy is comparable to particles such as gas molecules that are in thermal equilibrium with their surroundings at room temperature.) The pressurized water is heated by the nuclear reactions and kept at the proper temperature and reaction rate using “control rods,” typically made of boron, hafnium, or cadmium, which absorb neutrons and can be raised or lowered to increase or decrease the flow of neutrons and thus maintain the plant’s desired temperature and pressure. The pressurized water system is paired with a second system of water which, heated to steam, drives an electricity-generating turbine. Most current nuclear plants, so-called generation II plants, use this system. They operate well above atmospheric pressure and require “active cooling” – they need a constant electricity supply to maintain the circulation of the water necessary to moderate the reaction. If the electricity supply fails, these plants can overheat. It was a failure of active cooling that led to the well-known accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Improved versions of this design, termed generation III or generation III+, have passive cooling systems that can cool down a plant even if the electricity supply fails. One generation III+ design is the Westinghouse AP1000. Two of these units have recently come online at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. In China several similar plants have been completed and more are under construction. An advantage of these designs is that they use low enriched uranium (LEU), which has a well-developed and well-understood fuel supply system.
There are relatively similar designs that use “heavy” water, D2O, which contains deuterium atoms (hydrogen with an additional neutron) instead of normal hydrogen. There are a number of such reactors operating in Canada, called Canadian Deuterium Uranium, or CANDU reactors. Heavy water doesn’t absorb as many neutrons as normal water, so the CANDU design supports a chain reaction that can use natural uranium, spent fuel from LWRs, or thorium mixed with enriched uranium or plutonium as fuel. Offsetting this advantage however is the high cost of D2O.
A problem with both types of thermal reactors is that they
extract less than 1 percent of the energy in the original uranium; most of the
energy is left in the nuclear waste. In
the case of light water reactors, much of the energy is left in “depleted
uranium tailings” that are the byproduct of the enrichment process. Although heavy water reactors can burn
unenriched uranium, they still use less than 1 percent of the uranium’s energy.
The fission reactions create various byproducts, some of
which are smaller atoms, called “fission products.” Fission products are highly
radioactive, and typically have relatively short half-lives. Some byproducts are larger than the parent
atoms, having absorbed one or more neutrons.
These larger atoms, called “transuranics” or “actinides,” don’t fission
well and thus accumulate in the fuel assemblies and remain in the spent fuel. Many of them are also unstable, and
eventually decay, primarily by releasing alpha particle radiation. Many of the
transuranics have long half-lives, extending to thousands of years.
Fast Reactors
The other major reactor type, the fast neutron reactor, doesn’t moderate, i.e. slow down, neutrons. Instead of water, fast reactors use liquid sodium, molten salts, liquid lead, or other substances including gases to remove the heat produced by fission. Fast reactors capture much more of the energy of uranium ore than thermal reactors; they are approximately 60 times more fuel efficient. Some fast reactor designs, so-called breeder reactors, can produce more fissionable material, typically plutonium 239, than they consume. But many designs are net consumers of fissionable material, including plutonium. Fast reactors burn up the transuranics produced during the fission process, which means they produce far less of these wastes and can use nuclear waste from LWR reactors as a fuel. Some designs also can use thorium as a fuel.
The higher internal energies of the reactions in a fast reactor present materials challenges, but their much more efficient use of uranium resources and their ability to burn up transuranics makes fast reactors likely to eventually become the mainstream nuclear energy technology. Most of the new nuclear designs, generation IV, are fast reactors. A downside is that many fast reactor designs require high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel for the first 5 to 15 years of their operation. HALEU has a U-235 content of between 5% and 20% instead of the 5% or less U-235 content of the LEU used by thermal reactors. After this start-up period, most fast reactor designs breed enough fissionable material to operate without the need of HALEU, and can be fueled with un-enriched uranium or depleted uranium, a left-over from the enrichment process.
Currently, the only company selling commercial shipments of HALEU is TENEX, part of Russia's state-owned energy company Rosatom. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), aided by funds provided through the Inflation Reduction Act, is actively encouraging the development of a domestic HALEU supply chain. The DOE is also working with Canada, France, Japan and the UK to catalyze public and private sector investments that will expand global uranium enrichment and conversion capacity (NEI, 2024). There are concerns that enrichment levels that approach 20% present a threat of nuclear weapons proliferation (Kemp, et al., 2024). However, with current strict regulations on nuclear fuel, such concerns may be more hypothetical than practical (Marshall, 2024).
It is useful
to consider new nuclear energy designs as falling into the following categories:
Gen III+ large, Gen III+ SMRs, Gen IV HTGRs, Gen IV metal/salt cooled, and
microreactors. The Gen III+ units are
thermal reactors; most of the Gen IV units are fast neutron designs. Table 1 provides more detail on these designs.
Table 1. Categories of some advanced nuclear reactors (DOE, 2024c)
Table 2, below, lists most of the currently proposed small
modular reactor (SMR) advanced fission reactor designs. SMR designs include
both thermal and fast reactor types. New designs are varied, and the field is
evolving rapidly. Not included in the
table is the Westinghouse AP1000, which is a large reactor. Its design is
currently permitted, as is the NuScale VOYGR design.
Table 2. Advanced
Fission Reactor Manufacturer Designs (NH
Commission, 2023)
In Table 2, TRISO
stands for tristructural-isotropic particles, which are kernels of fissile
material such as uranium surrounded by three layers of protective coatings. LEU is low-enriched uranium, typically less
than 5% U-235, and HALEU is high assay low-enriched uranium, which has a U-235
content between 5% and 20%.
Military
Nuclear Reactors
The discussion above does not include military nuclear reactors. The U.S. Navy has operated nuclear powered ships since 1954. Currently, its nuclear-powered ships include 70 submarines, 10 aircraft carriers and one research vessel. Collectively, Navy nuclear ships have amassed over 5700 reactor-years of operation without significant troubles. These ships are powered by what are, in fact, small modular reactors. They differ from designs intended for civilian use in that they use highly enriched (weapons grade) uranium, with a U-235 content in the range of 93%. The 70-year history of U.S. Navy nuclear power demonstrates that this SMR design is well-established, and the consistent use by the U.S. Navy is evidence of U.S. competence in design and construction of SMRs.
Advantages of nuclear energy
A comparison of key attributes of nuclear energy with other
sources of electricity is presented in Figure 2, below. Specifics of a number
of potential advantages of existing and new nuclear energy technologies are
discussed further below.
Figure 2. Select
Elements of Nuclear’s Value Proposition as Compared to Other Power Sources (DOE,
2024c)
Low CO2 emissions
The carbon intensity of an electricity source is of prime importance in efforts to decarbonize the grid. Carbon dioxide is emitted during the entire life cycle of all power sources, including minerals extraction/refinement and construction/manufacture as well as operation. Not surprisingly, fossil fuel-burning technologies are vastly more carbon intensive than other power sources, as shown in Table 3 below (IPCC, 2014). Similar data is available from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL, 2021). Both data sources indicate that nuclear energy emits carbon dioxide at the low end of the range of sources, comparable to wind and solar.
Table 3. GHG emissions
of selected electricity supply technologies (gCO2eq/kWh) (IPCC,2014)
Nuclear energy
provides fuel and energy security
As discussed elsewhere, the intermittent nature of wind and solar power can be problematic, especially on seasonal and yearly timescales. Gas plants can have their own weather-related problems, especially if periods of unusual cold interfere with gas transmission systems; fuel for gas plants is supplied in a just-in-time manner. Nuclear plants however are typically refueled only every year or 18 months, which means they usually have enough fuel on-site to continue operating in emergency situations.
Further, nuclear plants are designed to run continuously,
providing 24/7 power, thus augmenting the State’s baseload power currently
provided by existing nuclear plants, and potentially displacing baseload power
currently provided by combined cycle natural gas plants.
Nuclear fission has vast energy potential
The energy of chemical bonds, which holds atoms together and which can be released by combustion, is a tiny fraction of the energy that holds the nuclei of atoms together. The energy that can be released by fission – the splitting of nuclei - amounts to about 80,000,000 megajoules (MJ) per kg, over two million times the energy density of coal. Not all of the energy in coal or in uranium can be turned into electricity. Nevertheless, the difference in energy density is huge.
It is this vast energy potential that has driven and
continues to drive research and development efforts to harness the energy of
the atom for peaceful and productive purposes.
Nuclear power is capable of a significant growth of much-needed
capacity.
Nuclear waste is currently managed safely, although
the need for long-term management remains a concern
A variety of wastes are classified as nuclear waste. These include wastes generated from nuclear power plants, hospitals, research facilities and industry. These wastes are categorized based on radioactivity and decay time. There are two main categories; high-level radioactive waste (HLW) and low-level radioactive waste (LLW). HLW includes spent nuclear fuel as well as wastes from reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and certain byproduct materials from processing of uranium or thorium-containing ores, and also includes materials contaminated with transuranics (elements with an atomic number greater than 92) above a certain concentration. LLW is classified as either class A, B, C, or greater than class C, according to the specific radionuclide present in the waste and its concentration. (EPA, 2025). Acceptable management of LLW depends on its classification. Most LLW is typically sent to land-based disposal immediately following its packaging for long-term management (WNA, 2025).
In discussions regarding nuclear energy, the management of
spent nuclear fuel (i.e., high-level nuclear waste) is often mentioned as an
unsolved and potentially intractable problem. This view is supported by the fact that the
U.S. Department of Energy as so far failed to site, build, and operate a deep
geologic repository for the disposal of high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel,
despite being directed to do by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (EPA,
2025a). In the absence of a final repository, the continued storage of spent
nuclear fuel at nuclear plants is of concern.
Three considerations offer some perspective on this
issue. First, the total mass of spent
nuclear fuel is relatively small compared to quantities of other wastes of
known toxicity such as coal ash. A
person’s lifetime use of electricity produced from nuclear power plant would
produce only a few kilograms of waste, and the nation’s entire stockpile of
nuclear waste if all of it were able to be stacked together, not including
shielded packaging, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less
than 10 yards (DOE, 2023).
Second, nuclear waste is currently managed on site with
minimal difficulty. Initially, the waste
is stored under water in spent fuel pools for several years until it has
cooled, and the most intense radiation has dissipated. Then it is transferred to dry casks. These are steel-lined casks of concrete that
prevent the escape of significant radiation.
An evaluation of the safety of dry cask storage in the face of events
including dropping the cask during handling, and external events during onsite
storage such as earthquakes, floods, high winds, lightning strikes, accidental
aircraft crashes, and pipeline explosions was done by the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission. The evaluation found that
the overall risk of dry cask storage was “extremely low” (NRC, 2007). See Figure 3.
In addition, emergency response planning and preparation are mandatory not
just for spent fuel pools but also for dry cask storage installations.
Figure 3,
Dry cask storage at the Palo Verde power plant in Arizona
Third, unlike many other wastes (e.g. those contaminated
with heavy metals such as coal ash) nuclear waste becomes steadily less toxic
with time due to radioactive decay. Dry
casks have an expected lifetime of 100 years, so the entombed waste will need
to be repackaged periodically. But
because the waste becomes steadily less radioactive, the repackaging operation
will become simpler. It is true that nuclear waste will emit radiation for
thousands of years. But within the first
100 years, most of the intense radiation will disappear (Kosson & Powers,
2008; Hargraves, 2024; Conley & Maloney, 2024). After 600 years the
penetrating form of radiation, photons (gamma rays), is essentially gone. The radiation that remains is virtually all
in the form of alpha particles and electrons (beta particles) mostly coming
from the decay of transuranics (elements with an atomic number greater than 92)
created during the fission process.
Alpha particles are easy to block; a piece of paper or a few centimeters
of air will do it. Electrons typically
will not penetrate human skin. Both types of radiation require little or no
shielding. At this point, the waste would have to be ingested, or dust from it
would have to be inhaled, for it to be harmful.
Preventing such exposures would require the waste to be kept away from
drinking water and food supplies and exposure to the air. These exposure routes should be possible to
protect with reasonable caution and diligence
See Figure 4.
Figure 4. Dose
Rate at Surface of a Used Fuel Element (Devanney, 2024)
Units in
Figure 6 are grays (Gy), which are equivalent to sieverts (Sv) for beta and
gamma radiation. A "gray" is
the international unit used to measure the absorbed dose of radiation, with one
gray equaling one joule of energy per kilogram of matter; essentially, it
measures how much energy is absorbed by a material when exposed to radiation. A “sievert” is the international unit used to
measure the biological damage caused by radiation; one sievert is equivalent to
100 rems (see Table 5). The green dashed line represents the level at which the
waste could be handled with no shielding.
Efforts to find a repository for the long-term storage of
nuclear waste from U.S. powerplants have not been successful, although there is
a long-term storage site for military nuclear waste, the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. This site is a deep depleted salt mine that has
been geologically stable for thousands of years. The site reportedly has room
for much more waste, although efforts to
expand the site’s waste input to include that from U.S. domestic reactors have
been unsuccessful; currently there is no spent nuclear fuel stored there. Funds are available to further develop this
site, or to research and develop another. Nuclear plants are required to set
aside a fraction of a penny for each kWh produced; if a large reactor runs for
its full lifespan, this could total half a billion dollars (Conley &
Maloney, 2024).
Given that on-site storage of nuclear waste in dry casks is
working, the concept of finding a deep geological repository for nuclear waste
may actually make little sense because the waste from today’s reactors is
energy dense. Today’s reactors extract
less than 1% of the energy in the uranium that is mined. Most of this energy
remains in the spent fuel that becomes waste.
New reactor designs (Generation IV) that use fast neutrons could use
this waste as a fuel, making existing nuclear waste – with the assumption that
it is rigorously managed and monitored - a resource that perhaps should remain
accessible.
Nuclear energy could scale to the developing
world
Calls for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions often stress the necessity of doing so to protect a state or the nation from the impacts of climate change. But state or national U.S. actions by themselves will not prevent these impacts. Climate change is a global phenomenon driven by global GHG emissions, which are increasingly coming from developing economies. See Figure 5.
Figure 5, Global emissions of carbon, gigatons per year (Hansen,
et al., 2023)
Even if the U.S. eliminated all emissions of GHGs, it would
remain vulnerable to sea level rise, extreme weather, and the other potentially
catastrophic impacts of climate change.
The key to preventing the worst impacts of climate change for all of the
U.S. is to facilitate the developing world’s access to zero-carbon
electricity. Access to electricity makes
for a better lifestyle, and the developing world is striving for more electric
power. If developing nations cannot get electricity
from clean sources, they will get it by burning coal and natural gas. The developing world’s need for electricity
has the potential to double the world’s electricity demand and drive GHG
concentrations steadily higher. See Figure 6.
Figure 6. Potential global electricity demand growth with
development (Hargraves, 2024a)
The height of each colored block in Figure above represents
the average electric power consumption per capita. The width is proportional to
the regional population, so the area represents regional average electric power
generated and used. If citizens of developing countries use as much power as
Europeans, electricity demand will rise by about 3,318 GW.
New nuclear, should it be cost effective, could be widely feasible. the U.S. could help lead the initiative to a low-carbon future for the entire planet as it has done with other environmental issues, including hazardous waste management, mercury and other air emissions control, wetlands protection, municipal waste management and recycling, use of GIS systems, and more.
Nuclear
energy has a small footprint
Nuclear energy has small footprints, arguably smaller than all other sources when all land use impacts are considered. See Figure 7.
Figure 7, Land use of energy sources per
unit of electricity (Ritchie, 2022)
It is not clear whether Figure 7 includes the space taken up by on-site storage of nuclear waste storage casks. This is relatively minimal, however. For example, the dry cask storage pad of the Connecticut Yankee power plant, which operated for 28 years, takes up a little over 1/3 of an acre to a height of 6 meters. This was a 620 MW plant that occupied 10 acres and produced 110 billion kWh in its lifetime. End-of-life solar panels that would have been necessary to produce the same amount of power, if crushed flat, would take up the same amount of area but to a height of 160 meters; in use those panels would have covered an area of 4,000 acres (Conley & Maloney).
Not included in Figure 7 is the emergency planning zone
(EPZ) that is required around nuclear plants.
The 10-mile radius represents the area within which residents could be
harmed by a direct release of a plume of radioactive material from the
plant. The 50-mile radius is the area
within which radioactive materials could contaminate water supplies, livestock,
or food crops.
New designs that feature enhanced safety features are likely
to require smaller emergency planning zones.
For example, the NuScale Power Corporation, which received NRC approval
for its VOYGR small modular nuclear plant, also received approval from the NRC
for its methodology for determining the appropriate size of plume exposure EPZ
(NRC, 2022). In its approval of the
methodology, the NRC stated that application of this methodology could produce
a very small distance for the EPZ (plume exposure) boundary. (The approval did not address the ingestion
pathway, stating that the determination of this distance is largely
site-specific.) NuScale has interpreted
this approval as indicating that a plume exposure EPZ as small as the site
boundary is achievable for a wide range of potential plant sites (NuScale,
2022).
Nuclear energy
will need little additional infrastructure
Nuclear plants are designed to provide continuous power. Their inclusion in the electricity grid will not require the addition of storage capacity. Nuclear power also has lower transmission requirements than many other generation sources. This is because it can typically be sited closer to demand, has a high power density and a high capacity factor, which means less transmission must be built to deliver the same amount of energy. Also, it may be feasible for utilities to leverage the same transmission infrastructure as retiring fossil fuel plants, with potentially significant savings – the Idaho National Laboratory estimates that additional overnight-capital cost savings from coal-to-nuclear conversions for example could range from 15% to 35% (DOE, 2023). Depending on the size of a new nuclear plant, there may be sites in New Jersey that could be suitable and might need little new transmission infrastructure, including perhaps certain brownfield sites or sites of retired coal plants A recent DOE report (DOE, 2024b) indicates that there is room in New Jersey for a 600 MW nuclear plant at the site of a retired nuclear plant, presumably the retired Oyster Creek plant.
Fuel for nuclear energy, depending on the technology, can be essentially inexhaustible
Uranium is approximately as common as tin or zinc in the Earth’s crust; it is a constituent of most rocks and is present in sea water at approximately 0.003 ppm (WNA, 2024). There are plentiful supplies of uranium in many nations. Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada have especially rich deposits, accounting for 28%, 13%, and 10%, respectively, of the world’s reasonably assured and inferred resources (WNA, 2024).
The world’s fleet of light-water nuclear reactors, with a combined capacity of about 400 gigawatts, requires about 67,500 metric tons of uranium each year. Considering the cost category of three times or less than present spot prices, there are about 6.1 million tons of uranium reserves available, which represents about 90 years of supply. Should world nuclear capacity grow, the supply could be expected to dwindle proportionately (WNA, 2024).
However, quantities of mineral resources are relative to
both market prices and cost of extraction.
The world's known uranium resources increased by at least one-quarter in
the last decade due to increased mineral exploration (WNA, 2024). One study, based on analysis of U.S. mining
records, found that each time the uranium ore grade (i.e. percent of uranium)
is cut in half, about 8 times more uranium becomes available; the study
concluded that the supply of uranium will not be a limiting factor in the development
of nuclear power (Deffeyes & MacGregor, 1980).
Further, as noted above, uranium is present in seawater at a
concentration of approximately 0.003 ppm, which translates to 3 mg of uranium
per cubic meter. Therefore, the 1.3
billion cubic kilometer volume of the world’s oceans contains a total of 4
billion tons of uranium. The uranium in seawater is in a steady-state
concentration between the water and uranium-bearing rocks in the world’s
watersheds; if uranium is extracted from seawater, continuous leaching from the
rocks will re-establish the steady-state concentration. Uranium can be efficiently removed from
seawater with artificial sponges, and an extraction method recently developed
in India is reported to be able to remove 90% of the uranium in a volume of seawater
in two hours instead of the current sponge-harvesting cycle of 90 days. (Conley
and Maloney, 2024). Extraction of uranium from seawater extends the world’s
supply, assuming the fuel use efficiency of current thermal reactors, by a
factor of 1000.
In addition, as discussed above, many of the generation IV
designs under development are fast reactors, capable of more efficient use of
uranium, including using spent nuclear fuel (i.e. nuclear waste) and depleted
uranium as fuel. With a significant
portion of these reactors in the mix, there is enough fuel stockpiled in
nuclear waste and by-products of nuclear weapons production to supply fuel
needs for a thousand years, and with fast reactors coupled with seawater extraction,
there is enough uranium to run nuclear power plants for several billion years,
making nuclear energy as inexhaustible as energy from the sun (Hansen,
2009).
Nuclear energy can
provide heat as well as electricity
Fossil fuel combustion is widely used to provide heat for space heating of buildings, and conversion to heat pumps powered by electricity is a prime decarbonization strategy. But providing carbon-free high-temperature heat for industrial processes will be more challenging because solar and wind sources do not produce heat, and heat pumps are not well adapted to producing the intense heat needed for some industrial processes.
Heavy industry produces roughly 22 percent of global CO₂ emissions, and about 40% of these emissions are from direct combustion of fossil fuels to produce high-quality heat, which for some industrial processes must be provided continuously or on demand. Important heat-intensive industries include cement, steel, refining, petrochemicals, glass, ceramics, pulp and paper, and fertilizer production. Because global markets govern the price for many of these industrial commodities, efforts to decarbonize domestic heat-demanding industries run the risk of offshoring of these industries, resulting in domestic job losses and other negative economic impacts. (Friedmann, et al. 2019)
Fission does produce intense heat, however, and a nuclear
plant designed to produce heat alone would not need the expensive supercritical
steam turbine generator necessary to produce electricity. A U.S. start-up,
Kairos Power, has received a construction permit from NRC to build a high-temperature
thermal reactor designed to produce heat rather than electricity at Oak Ridge,
TN near the Clinch River nuclear power plant site. This plant will also produce
35 MW of electricity. Other heat-producing designs are under development as
well. NuScale Power Corporation has
signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Nucor Corporation to
explore co-locating its VOYGR small modular nuclear reactors at NuCor’s steel
manufacturing sites to provide electricity for the electric arc furnaces the
company uses. It is not clear if the
provision of heat as well could be included (NuScale, 2023). Electric arc steel plants use electricity in
pulses instead of continuously however, so ideally a behind-the-meter reactor
at such an industrial site would need to feed electricity into the grid at
certain times.
Nuclear energy’s power production is not limited by the
energy harvestable from the wind or the sun in a geographic area. A small region with a large amount of nuclear
capacity could supply 24/7 electricity and continuous high-quality heat to
other regions and to new industries.
These new industries could include those that sequester carbon by
pulling it from the air or from the ocean, that capture hydrogen from seawater,
and that use captured CO2 and hydrogen to produce new fuels, such as
dimethyl ether, (a drop-in replacement for diesel fuel), methanol, and
synthetic gasoline. These types of
processes (as well as the use of computer power for data processing and other
artificial intelligence development efforts) are all likely to be energy
intensive. The ability of a concentrated
heat source such as nuclear to power plasma-arc furnaces, which can destroy
most wastes or turn them into inert slag, could add further value to a region
with ample nuclear capacity. Should New Jersey elect to expand its nuclear
capacity, it could become a hub for the development of new industries that
could facilitate decarbonization and carbon dioxide sequestration.
Nuclear energy
provides significant economic benefits
Nuclear power has the highest economic impact of any power generation source; nuclear plants have about three times the number of jobs per gigawatt compared to wind power, and the pay of nuclear workers is ~50% higher than in the wind and solar sector. Nuclear power is also compatible with unionized labor, as the jobs typically require more training and a wide variety of skills. Further, the various efforts involved with expanding nuclear energy can be expected to contribute to the scale-up and reshoring of the industrial base in general (DOE, 2023).
Low materials demand
Studies by the World Bank and the International Energy Agency indicate that decarbonization will be materially intensive (World Bank, 2017) and that the supply and investment plans for many critical minerals fall well short of what is needed to support the accelerated deployment of renewable electricity and electric vehicles (IEA, 2021). The IEA looked at minerals it considered to be critical in the manufacture and deployment of energy sources and transportation and estimated the demand for such minerals in these technologies, as pictured in Figure 3 below. Nuclear energy was found to have a lower demand, in terms of total critical minerals per kWh of electricity produced, than other clean energy sources. See Figure 8.
Using the IEA data pictured above, and multiplying the
pictured capacity values by estimated capacity factors of 85% for coal and nuclear,
60% for gas, 35% for wind, and 25% for solar, and assuming operational
lifetimes of 60 years for nuclear, 50 years for coal, 30 years for gas, and 25
years for wind and solar, the critical minerals required per unit of electricity
can be estimated, as shown in Figure 9 (WNA, 2024). In this case also, nuclear
energy was found to have a lower requirement than other clean energy
sources.
Figure 9. Critical minerals required per unit of
electricity produced (WNA, 2024)
Use of key bulk materials such as concrete,
steel, aluminum, and copper are also relevant.
Table 4 depicts results of a report on the use of these materials by
selected energy sources by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE, 2015). In total bulk materials requirement, including
upstream energy collection technology and generators, nuclear energy is lower
than all electricity sources except hydropower.
Table
4. Range of materials requirements (fuel excluded)
for
various electricity generation technologies (DOE, 2015)
It is not clear whether these materials use analyses account
for the full mass of resource extraction from Earth’s crust, including uranium
mining. A study that looked at what it
termed the total material requirement (TMR) of nuclear power (Nakagawa, et al. 2022)
found that this TMR was considerably lower than fossil power generation and on
a par with renewables. These researchers
also noted that nuclear energy’s TMR varied depending on uranium mining
methods, with in-situ leaching having the smallest footprint. (In-situ leaching is discussed further under the
Uranium mining impacts… heading below.)
Uranium mining
impacts are relatively minimal, and an improved method, in-situ mining, has
little environmental impact
The early days of uranium mining and milling were associated with numerous cancers and mortalities, mostly among the Navajo Nation with local labor. Cigarette smoking was common at the time, and it turned out that inhalation of mining dust and high levels of radon gas were contributing factors at underground metal mines in general, not just uranium mines. The situation was worsened by wind-blown dust from abandoned mine tailings and waste rock. Today, regulations and oversight have improved, and casualty rates are reported to be on a par with levels found in other underground metal mining operations. Today, most uranium miners do not go underground. This is partly because of automated mining equipment, and also because a majority of the world’s uranium, and virtually all uranium mined in the U.S., is now being extracted by in-situ leaching. In this process, a leaching solution is injected into a uranium deposit. Pumps withdraw the solution, which now contains dissolved uranium, and it is piped to an on-site facility where the slurry is dried and filtered. No waste rock or tailings are generated in the process. Approximately 40% of the world’s uranium, especially that coming from two large producers, Australia and Canada, is still produced via underground mining. The current production of uranium mining does not appear to be capable of supporting a large build-out of nuclear energy, but emerging technology could make more fuel available. This technology includes reprocessing of used fuel, the extraction of uranium from seawater, and the use of Gen-IV designs that can burn depleted uranium (what’s left after enrichment removes some of the U-235), reuse spent nuclear fuel (i.e., nuclear waste), or breed new fuel from natural uranium and thorium (Conley & Maloney, 2024). For more on the potential supply of uranium fuel, see item 9) “Fuel for nuclear energy…” below.
Radiation releases from operating plants are insignificant, and radiation releases from nuclear accidents have not been as serious as at first feared
A long-standing view regarding radiation is that there is no safe dose, that any amount of radiation could cause harm, for example the induction of cancer. This so-called “linear no threshold hypothesis” may be accurate, and is supported by the National Academies BIER VII report (NRC, 2006). Controversy remains however, and there is evidence that there is a radiation threshold below which there will be no adverse health effects due to the body’s inherent repair mechanisms (Hargraves, 2024).
It is also true that everyone is exposed to measurable amounts of background radiation, and many people receive significant radiation doses from medical procedures. Nuclear plants are strictly regulated; the NRC’s standards for reducing cancer risks related to radiological exposure are 100 times stricter than EPA’s rules for air pollution exposure (Stein, et al., 2023). The radiation released by the normal operations of a nuclear plant are trivial compared to these levels, as shown in table 5, below.
Table 5. Average Annual Exposure to
Radiation for People in the U.S. (Spiro,
et al., 2012)
Dose units in this table are millirems (mrem). A millirem is one
thousandths of a rem. A rem (roentgen-equivalent-man)
is the amount of radiation that produces the same biological effect in a person
as 1 Roentgen (R) of X-rays. A Roentgen is
a measurement of exposure to radiation; 1 R = the amount of radiation that,
passing through 1 cm3 of air (at STP) would create one electrostatic unit (2.08
× 109 times the charge on an electron) each of positive and negative charges. The preferred international unit for
radiation exposure is the Sievert (Sv).
One Sv is equivalent to 100 rems, so the average yearly dose to a U.S.
person of approximately 600 mrem is equivalent to 6 millisieverts (mSv).
As is the case with every
large-scale industrial process, accidents happen. There are three nuclear accidents that have
been burned into the consciousness of virtually everyone at all concerned about
the issue: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Yet as frightening as these events have been,
the passage of time and the gathering of long-term data has shown them not to
be as serious as at first thought.
The scientist John Gofman, a
supporter of the linear no-threshold hypothesis, predicted in 1979 that 333
excess cancer or leukemia deaths would result from the 1979 Three Mile Island
accident. He asserted at that time that promoters
of nuclear power were committing a crime against humanity (Gofman, 1979). However,
a 20-year follow-up study of residents living within a five-mile radius of the
accident found that, although certain potential dose–response relationships could
not be definitively excluded, there was no consistent evidence that
radioactivity released during the accident had a significant impact on
mortality (Talbott, et al., 2003).
Three months after the 1986
Chernobyl disaster, Gofman predicted it would eventually cause 475,000 fatal
cancers plus about an equal number of non-fatal cases (Gofman, 1996). However,
as of 2008, the only proven toll from the Chernobyl accident was about 50
people who died, including 28 emergency workers who died almost immediately
from radiation sickness, about 15 who died of fatal thyroid cancers (this
cancer is not usually fatal), and about 6,000 children in Russia, Belarus and
Ukraine who suffered thyroid cancers that were successfully treated. There was no persuasive evidence of any other
health effect in the general population that could be attributed to radiation
exposure (Lynas, 2013). A full report on
the long-term health effects from the accident, prepared by a team of experts
from seven United Nations organizations that included representatives from the
governments of Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation, was published by
the World Health Organization in 2006.
It projected that eventually 4,000 people in the exposed population may
die from cancer related to the Chernobyl accident (CNSC, 2022). In that population, about 100,000 people will
die of cancer anyway; 4,000 additional deaths from cancer, if they occur, is
within the level of natural statistical variation and is not readily
distinguishable as an impact.
The Chernobyl accident included a
fire and explosions that spread radioactive debris across a wide region. Initially some plants and animals, especially
pine trees, died from the radiation.
Now, although some places in the exposed region have background
radiation not much higher than normal background levels, (Fox, 2014) hot spots
remain with levels of radiation that, if you stayed there for a year, would
cause an exposure of 35,000 mrem, about 100 times higher than typical
background levels. People were required
to evacuate an area half the size of Yellowstone National Park around the
stricken reactor.
Wildlife has benefitted more from
the departure of humans from the area than it has suffered from the relatively
high background radiation that remains. Today, as detailed by Mary Mycio
(Mycio, 2005) and others, this exclusion zone has become a wildlife preserve
where birds and mammals, many of them rare and endangered, thrive. Large mammals in the zone, not found much
elsewhere in the region, include boars, red deer (elk), roe deer, European
bison, moose, wolves, foxes, beavers, and Przewalski’s horses, a species of
wild horse that has been brought back from the cusp of extinction.
The 2011 accident at Fukushima,
Japan is the most recent. It revived anti-nuclear sentiment in many places,
such as Germany, leading to accelerated phase-outs of nuclear reactors. But once again, the aftermath of Fukushima is
showing that low-level radiation is not the danger it was thought to be.
The accident featured meltdowns of
the cores of three of the six reactors at the Daiichi nuclear power plant site
near Fukushima, and a partial melting of spent fuel rods from a fourth reactor.
The intense heat involved caused a build-up of pressure of steam. The steam, reacting with the zirconium alloy
that cladded the core structures, produced hydrogen gas, which added to the
pressure build-up. To prevent an
explosion, the pressure was vented, releasing some hydrogen and also
radioactive fission products. Nevertheless, hydrogen explosions occurred in two
of the reactors, blowing apart a secondary containment building. Leakage of radioactive fission products also
occurred from the third reactor. All in all,
the accident released about 18% of the “iodine-131-equivalent” radioactivity
released by Chernobyl (Fox, 2014). More radiation was not released because,
unlike with Chernobyl, the primary reactor containment structures were not
destroyed; the radiation was released only in three major spikes that occurred
within several days after the accident began.
(Chernobyl had a flimsy, essentially non-existent containment structure.)
The Fukushima nuclear accident
occurred in the context of a huge natural disaster including an earthquake and
a tidal wave. A year after the disaster,
19,000 people had died and 27,000 had been injured. Four hundred thousand buildings were
destroyed and nearly 700,000 more were damaged (Fox, 2014).
However, none of these casualties
were caused by radiation, and the number of additional cancer cases in coming
years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable (Johnson, 2015). In a sense, 1,600 people did die from the accident:
not from radiation, but from the stress of forced relocations, including the
highly risky evacuations of hospital intensive care units. An area 20 kilometers in radius around the
plant was evacuated. Had the evacuees
stayed home, their cumulative exposure over four years in the most intensely
radioactive areas would have been about 70 millisieverts (about 7000 mrem),
which translates to about 1800 mrem per year; about six times typical
background levels. But most residents in
that zone would have received far less; on the order of 400 mrem per year
(Johnson, 2015).
The public health impacts at both
Chernobyl and Fukushima were significantly reduced because protective actions
were taken by government officials to minimize exposure and risk of
exposure. This emphasizes the necessity
of maintaining emergency response capability.
The accidents also point out a
vulnerability of current nuclear technology; each accident was caused by a
failure of cooling which enabled the reactive cores to overheat, leading to
releases of pressure and radiation and explosions.
The Three Mile Island accident was
caused by human error when night-shift operators made a series of mistakes in
judgement and turned a minor problem, a failure of a cooling pump, into a major
one as they turned off an emergency cooling pump. This allowed the core to overheat and
eventually melt. The operator’s confusion at the time was fed by lack of proper
monitoring systems and malfunctioning alarm signals.
The Chernobyl disaster was caused
by an unauthorized experiment. The operators were curious if the reactor’s
dynamos could deliver enough energy to shut down the plant if the power was
lost. During a scheduled shutdown, they
turned off an emergency cooling system to conserve energy. Next, they withdrew control rods, which
normally moderate a fission reaction to keep it under control, to increase the
power output from the plant as its power production wound down. More errors were made, and the reactor’s operation
rapidly destabilized, fuel disintegrated, and huge steam explosions occurred
throwing burning blocks of graphite and spewing a plume of radioactive debris
that rose 10 km into the air.
The Fukushima accident was the
result of a hammering by natural forces.
First, a magnitude 9 earthquake, the largest to ever strike Japan and
one of the largest on record anywhere, occurred at sea 95 miles north of the
plant. (The earthquake magnitude scale
is logarithmic; a magnitude 9 earthquake is 100 times stronger than the largest
earthquakes ever to strike the continental U.S., which were category 7
earthquakes in California.) The reactors at the plant withstood this quake and
immediately shut down as they were designed to do when the quake caused a loss
of electric power. The plant’s emergency
diesel generators then kicked in, also as designed. But not long after that a 45-foot tsunami
smashed over the plant’s approximately 30-foot protective wall, flooding the
generators and stalling them out.
Limited additional power from battery back-up was insufficient. At that
point, with no power to run the cooling pumps to keep the reactor cores from overheating,
the situation rapidly got out of control, with explosions and releases of
radiation soon following.
The Chernobyl reactor was a type
of reactor currently used only in the former Soviet Union. It had essentially no containment structure
to hold radiation released by an accident, and its fission reaction was cooled by
water and moderated by graphite, which is combustible. This combination is dangerous; water absorbs
some of the neutrons created during fission, and so slows down the fission
reaction (Fox, 2014). But, if the water turns to steam, it cannot absorb as
many neutrons and so the fission reaction speeds up. This “positive void coefficient” aspect means
that when the reactor started to get out of control, it turned water into
steam, accelerating the fission rate, turning more water into steam, and so on. This positive feedback loop drove the
reaction out of control.
The reactors at all three plants
were so-called Generation II designs.
All such reactors share a common feature; they require continuous
electric power to run their cooling systems.
Thus, if they have to shut down and cannot provide their own electric power,
they must get it from somewhere else. If
the grid goes down, and their emergency power supply systems fail, they are in
trouble.
Today’s generation III+ and IV designs
have passive cooling systems that even if electric power supply fails still prevent
the core from overheating. This makes these modern designs unlikely to face the
type of cooling emergencies that led to the three famous accidents.
Security and weapons proliferation fears are unrealistic
A nuclear reactor cannot explode like an atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons use highly enriched uranium,
with >90% U-235, or plutonium that is mostly Pu-239. Nuclear reactors use either low-enriched
uranium (<5% U-235) or, as in some Gen IV designs, high assay low enriched
uranium (~20% U-235). Nuclear weapons are designed to nearly instantaneously attain
uncontrolled, explosive fission, whereas nuclear reactors are designed to
maintain a steady, controlled chain reaction. With thermal reactors, using
moderated neutrons, the presence of lots of uranium in the core means that the
chain reaction will stop if the neutrons are not moderated, and the chain
reaction will cease. (Muller, 2008). The
reactor can still heat up if the cooling system fails, as happened with Three
Mile Island and Fukushima, but it cannot explode with the force of an atomic
weapon. Fast neutron reactors have a
variety of fail-safe design features, including a variety of passive cooling mechanisms,
to prevent out-of-control fission.
Concerns have been raised that the
Pu-239 present in nuclear waste could be used to make a bomb. But this Pu-239 is mixed in with lots of
other isotopes, not suitable for making a bomb without a difficult reprocessing
process. The presence of nuclear power plants doesn’t infer that nuclear
weapons programs will exist; any more than the presence of fertilizer plants
means that nitrate-based explosives will be produced. Many nations have nuclear power and do not
also have nuclear weapons.
To prevent terrorists from gaining
access, today’s nuclear plants have physical barriers, restricted access, and
various technical controls such as radiation detection portals, surveillance
cameras and X-ray scanners, and interior and exterior intrusion detection
sensors (Stein, 2024).
Timeline for
Deployment of New Nuclear Energy Facilities
The U.S. and 21 other nations have called for tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 (Lu, 2023). In her remarks celebrating the startup of the new unit 4 at the Vogtle, Georgia plant, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that the U.S. must at least triple its current nuclear capacity to reach the goal of net zero by 2050 (Granholm, 2024). How realistic are these prospects? Nuclear capacity and the resulting production of electricity has been added rapidly in the past. See Figure 10.
Figure 10 (data from EIA/SEDS, 2024; Energy Institute, 2024;
NJCleanEnergy, 2024)
New Jersey’s build rate averaged 225 kWh per person per year
during the period 1976 to 1986, amounting to an average growth in nuclear powered
electricity production of about 1.7 TWh per year. The growth in nuclear capacity during this
period represents the construction of the state’s three currently operating
nuclear plants, Salem Nuclear Power Plant units 1 and 2, and the Hope Creek
Nuclear Generating station, adjacent to the Salem plant. These three units have a combined capacity of approximately
3600 MW. If this growth rate could be duplicated today,
or even increased to rival the growth rates exhibited by France and Sweden, New
Jersey could add massive amounts of clean power to the mix by 2050. Other states could do likewise.
Unfortunately, a growth rate in this range will be difficult
today without major advancements. As
noted in a 2023 Department of Energy report, the nuclear industry was perceived
at that time as being at a commercial stalemate. While utilities and other potential customers
recognize the need for more nuclear energy, perceived risks of uncontrolled
cost overruns and resulting project abandonments had limited orders for new
reactors (DOE, 2023). The DOE’s update
to this report (DOE, 2024c) is more hopeful.
The recent trend in load growth, driven by
artificial intelligence and data centers with a particular need for carbon-free
24/7 generation concentrated in a limited footprint, provides a set of
customers who are willing and able to support investment in new nuclear
generation assets. Combined with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) incentives,
this demand has created a step change in the valuation of the existing fleet
and new reactors. In 2022, utilities were shutting down nuclear reactors; in
2024, they are extending reactor operations to 80 years, planning to uprate
capacity, and restarting formerly closed reactors (DOE, 2024c).
Costs of Nuclear Energy
Nuclear energy need not be
expensive. As noted earlier in this report, requirements for both key minerals
and basic industrial commodities such as steel and concrete are lower for
nuclear plants than for virtually all other power sources. Further, nuclear
energy’s small footprint, and the likelihood that many new installations could
make use of existing transmission infrastructure, should serve to lower costs
further. A study that gathered data on the cost history
of 349 reactors built in seven nations including Japan, South Korea, and India
found that costs have varied significantly, and that there have even absolute
cost declines in some countries and specific areas (Lovering, et al., 2016). China seems to be building nuclear plants on
time and on budget with a design that is similar to the Westinghouse AP1000
design of the two units recently completed at the Vogtle plant in Georgia.
These two new units at the Vogtle plant have unfortunately become poster children for cost overruns and delayed completion. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and in 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. It is now clear that the total cost of the project was more than $30 billion (EIA, 2024), amounting to an overnight capital cost[1] of over $10,000 per kW of capacity (DOE, 2023).
However, according to the update of the referenced 2023 report (DOE, 2024c) the cost of Vogtle Units 3 and 4 is not the correct anchor point for estimating the cost of additional AP1000s given costs that should not be incurred again. Vogtle began construction with an incomplete design, an immature supply chain, and an untrained work force. Now, the AP1000 design is complete, there is a supply chain infrastructure, and Vogtle trained over ~30,000 workers. The next AP1000s would also realize substantial cost reductions with benefits from the IRA, including the investment tax credit of 30-50% and Loan Programs Office loans for up to 80% of eligible project costs (DOE, 2024c). Further, if the lifetime of these units could be 80 years as claimed (Southern Co., 2024) and given that the capacity factor of nuclear power plants is typically greater than 90% and fuel cost is a relatively minor cost factor, the cost of the electricity they will provide should be reasonable.
Lazard Financial Services Company, in their June 2024 levelized cost of energy (LCOE) analysis, estimated the LCOE of the new Vogtle units at $190/MWh (Lazard, 2024). It should be noted though, that the LCOE metric does not capture the full benefits of nuclear as a clean firm resource. These benefits include the value of an 80-year operating asset, the value of firm generation to provide power during key periods of grid need or when other variable resources are not generating, and the value of low carbon emissions. LCOE also does not fully account for the value of carbon-free heat for industrial steam, which is critical to many industrial processes and has few decarbonized alternatives (DOE, 2024c). A comprehensive discussion of Lazard’s cost estimates of nuclear energy and other power sources as they apply to New Jersey is available (O’Donnell, 2025).
South Korea has reportedly achieved overnight costs in the range of $2,300 per kW for 7 large reactors built over the last 20 years; this has amounted to a 50% overall reduction in capital costs over the same period (DOE, 2023) and would likely represent a LCOE in the range of $45/MWh. Several studies have suggested that future deployment of nuclear energy in the U.S., due to learning curve and related factors, could see overnight capital costs come down to the range of $3,600 per kW (likely about $70/MWh) (DOE, 2023).
A recent MIT study found that large reactors such as the
AP1000 could be economically competitive.
The study stated that the next AP1000 overnight “should” capital cost in
U.S. could be as low as $4,300/kW (likely about $85/MWh) and $2,900/kW (likely
about $57/MWh) for the following 10th unit (online by ~2045), deployed in
series, based on 2018 dollars. However.
the study further stated that these “should costs” could be escalated due to
what it reported as a loss of on-site construction productivity in the U.S. (in
all sectors) since the 1980s by as much as 1.33x. The study also noted that
with the recent rise in materials costs, the cost could be further escalated by
as much as 1.2x. This means that the next AP1000 could cost as high as
$6,800/kW and $4,500/kW (likely about $133/MWh and $88/MWh) for the following
installed 10th unit, based on 2022 dollars.
The study also stated that while the levelized cost of electricity
(LCOE) at these capital price points is not currently competitive in most U.S.
markets, long term decarbonization goals combined with the long lifetime of the
plant could translate to a LCOE of less than $30/MWh for 40-60 years, and that
this “..should motivate revisiting the AP1000 economic feasibility if
decarbonization targets are taken seriously..” (Shirvan, 2022)
Currently, as examined in detail in the 2023 DOE report, several
major factors contribute to the likely high cost and associated financial risk of
new nuclear energy construction in the U.S. These include severe labor constraints,
especially in key trades including electricians and welders, supply chain
constraints, especially large forging capacity, fuel supply chain constraints, and
a time-consuming and expensive licensing regime. Overall, the U.S. has clearly lost some of the
expertise and support system capability that enabled it to build nuclear
reactors relatively efficiently in the 1970s and 1980s.
Possibility of Lower Costs
There are some reasons for hope that this decline can be
reversed. A look at how France and
Sweden managed to achieve their rapid build rates is potentially useful. Both nations sought energy independence. Both nations had robust educational systems
and were willing to invest in educating and training a skilled workforce
capable of supporting the nuclear industry. The oil crises of the 1970s were a
strong motivator for France, especially, to be energy independent. France adopted a strategy of standardizing
reactor designs, settling on essentially one pressurized light water thermal
reactor design, which reduced costs and streamlined construction.
Another reason for hope is that small modular designs,
especially if standardized, could be manufactured in dedicated facilities in
much the same manner as airplanes and ships; this approach could minimize some
of the high labor cost issues that exist for large construction projects, and
could also minimize or eliminate repeated regulatory reviews. There are precedents for rapid manufacture of
units of similar complexity. During World War II, the U.S. manufactured 2750 EC2
type cargo ships (“Liberty ships") utilizing a standardized, mass-produced
design. These ships’ 250,000 parts were prefabricated
throughout the country in 250-ton sections and welded together in about 70 days
(USMM, 2024). Currently, the world’s
fleet of some 5,400 container ships is augmented by the manufacture, in many
nations, of some 900 new container ships each year (Conley & Maloney, 2024).
The likely shorter timeline for construction and lower price should enable SMRs
to move down the learning curve faster and with less risk (DOE, 2023), especially
in markets where availability of nuclear
construction employees is highly constrained (DOE, 2024c).
Encouraging development of new nuclear energy: a policy menu
There are steps the U.S. and individual states could take to
facilitate the development of new nuclear energy. Some of these steps are
listed below. Included are actions that
are conceptual and will require additional thought and elaboration to be
implemented.
1)
Track the development and deployment prospects of the various Gen III+ and Gen
IV designs that are in play with the goal of identifying one or more designs
that appear to present the best value
According to several experts and reports, Gen III+ designs are
the most promising candidates for early deployment (Hargraves, 2024b;
Pickering, 2024, DOE, 2023). The DOE has
stated that, while Gen IV designs are promising, interviews with utilities and
supply chain players suggest that they currently feel most comfortable with Gen
III+ designs. The DOE notes however that
demand for Gen III+ reactors would nevertheless benefit the entire industry,
including Gen IV, building the momentum and industrial base required for
deploying all designs at scale. The DOE
also points out that there is a value in settling on a recommended design, as
standardization will greatly facilitate a lowering of costs (DOE, 2023). Currently, promising Gen III+ designs include
the large Westinghouse AP1000, which is the design of the recently completed
units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. Promising Gen III+ SMRs include NuScale’s
VOYGR, the GE/Hitachi BWRX, and Holtec’s SMR300. Importantly, the VOYGR and AP1000 designs have
already been approved by the NRC.
2) Identify potentially suitable sites for locations
of new plants of various sizes by evaluating current conditions at sites of
plants permitted historically but never constructed, retired fossil fuel
plants, and brownfield locations.
Large plants such as the 1.1 GW AP1000 require large sites.
Should smaller SMR units become available, more sites might
be amenable, especially if the NRC would permit a smaller emergency planning
zone (see the discussion of nuclear energy’s footprint earlier in this
document). Potentially amenable sites that
may have transmission and other infrastructure (e.g. turbines) still available
might include decommissioned coal and natural gas plants. Investigation might reveal other potentially
suitable sites including brownfields.
Micro-reactors and other still smaller designs such as the
proposed Deep Fission 15 MW units (Deep Fission, 2025) might be capable of
being installed on smaller geographic scales such as university campuses,
hospital complexes, and industrial sites.
Utah has released a report that included a discussion of
criteria for suitable sites in that state (Utah OED, 2024). These criteria included water availability,
seismic stability, proximity to infrastructure, environmental and land use considerations,
community and political support, and potential association with existing energy
projects. Water availability may not be a critical
criterion for certain SMR and smaller designs.
3) Research and
communicate funding opportunities to potential interested parties and offer
assistance in obtaining funds
As noted in its extensive report (DOE, 2024c), although the nuclear industry faces a commercial stalemate, this could change if there were a committed orderbook for the first 5 to 10 nuclear reactors. The report notes that the nuclear industry is building momentum to break this stalemate as utilities and other potential customers see the successful operation of Vogtle Units 3 and 4, anticipate sustained electrical load growth, and internalize IRA benefits. However, the industry must overcome remaining barriers to achieve liftoff. Innovative power purchasing could be a key tool for large power users, including tech and industrial companies, to catalyze the new generation. The DOE report lists some of the ways of encouraging new nuclear power. These include:
1) A consortium, of companies or utilities, committing to
constructing 5 to 10 or more reactors could be formed. The pooled demand would allow for a
cost-sharing agreement, with perhaps the expected higher costs of the first few
units shared among the consortium, with the benefits of lower costs for later
units also being shared.
2) Use of a developer to build reactors to sell or lease to
end-users. The risks would fall to the developer, who could also reap the
benefits. The DOE reports that this
model is common in the power industry outside of nuclear power.
3) Export of 5-10 reactors to foreign off-takers.
Michigan has provided an example of working with a vendor to
obtain funds, in this case federal funds.
Holtec, Inc., with the aid of a $1.5 billion federal loan, intends to
reopen a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan.
The State of Michigan was supportive of this process; more details on
their actions in helping to secure this loan could be sought.
Other states too are supportive. Both Tennessee and Virginia have budgeted
funding to help develop nuclear energy (NEI, 2024a). Utah (Utah OED, 2024) has issued a report
that stresses the importance of baseload power and states that the state, with
suitable planning for new nuclear energy, could become a “regional baseload
powerhouse.” The report identifies a number of locations of retired coal plants
that could be suitable for new nuclear plants.
4) Ensure predictable cost recovery for new facilities. Contributing to this could be tax credits,
grants, and low-interest loans for nuclear plant construction.
Several different forms of government support that might
encourage nuclear development include:
1) Cost overrun insurance: A third party, which could be the
State government, could agree to cover certain costs of reactor construction
above a certain cost threshold. It should be noted also that cost overrun is
not a monolith: costs are divisible for sharing among stakeholders who are able
to manage project risks and who stand to benefit from project completion.
Consortium arrangements and partnerships can reduce the financial exposure of
any individual participant. The investment tax credit available through the IRA
applies 30-50% to capital cost regardless of initial budget, so in effect
provides “overrun insurance” which potential customers have cited as increasing
their willingness to commit to new nuclear (DOE, 2024c).
2) Financial assistance, perhaps in the form of tiered
grants, which would be larger for the first reactor and lower for later
deployments.
3) Government ownership: There would seem to be no reason
why the State, or perhaps a federal government entity such as a military base,
could not itself directly purchase a nuclear plant, perhaps with State
assistance.
4) Government-enabled off-take
certainty: An example of an off-take
agreement that would provide certainty would be a power purchase
agreement. For example, a state could
agree to purchase a defined amount of electricity from a new nuclear plant in
another state.
5) Carve-out from de-gregulated markets: Other ways of reducing the financial risk by providing cost recovery avenues could be explored. These could include creating a carve-out from the deregulated market, such as by determining that nuclear energy is critical infrastructure for achieving GHG emissions reduction and grid reliability goals, and empowering state utility commissions to authorize and oversee cost recovery through regulated charges to ratepayers.
6) Collaboration with private entities: Many artificial
intelligence developers and data center owners/operators have large financial
resources. Collaboration arrangements
with such firms to contribute funds should be considered.
Several of the major factors that contribute to the likely
high costs and associated financial risks that face nuclear energy development
today are beyond the control of individual states. The regulatory regime is under federal
control by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Long reviews by the NRC have translated to large costs. One estimate is that achieving a preliminary
site plan approval from the NRC is likely to cost $50,000,000 and take 7 to 11
years (Oneid, 2024). The ADVANCE Act,
signed into law July 9, 2024, directs the NRC to update its mission statement
so the regulatory body does not unnecessarily limit the use of nuclear energy
or the benefits it could provide for society. In other words, the NRC is now directed to do
the same sort of risk/benefit analysis that other regulatory agencies are
required to do, not just look at potential risks as it has in the past. The
bill also gives the NRC more flexibility to hire staff to ready for a ramp-up
in license applications, reduce fees for some applicants, and require more
timely processing of applications, including for coal-to-nuclear repowers. The bill should facilitate the permitting of
new plants in all states.
5) Leverage federal support,
such as through the DOE’s Loan Program Office, Advanced Reactor Demonstration
Program, and IRA tax credits
Various sources of federal funding are available. These are described in detail in the DOE’s 2024 updated Liftoff Report (DOE, 2024c). For example, on June 17, 2024, the DOE announced plans to provide $900 million in support for the initial U.S. deployment of Generation III+ small modular reactors, including support for two “first mover” teams of utility, reactor vendor, constructor, and end users or off-takers committed to deploying a first plant (DOE, 2024).
The DOE’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) has billions of dollars
in loan authority available through Title 17 through Section 1703, Innovative
Energy and Innovative Supply Chain, and Section 1706, the Energy Infrastructure
Reinvestment Program. To qualify for 1703, energy projects must either involve
innovative technologies or be paired with investments from State Energy
Financing Institutions. To qualify for 1706, energy projects must retool,
repower, repurpose, or replace energy infrastructure; 1706 also allows for
projects that enable existing energy infrastructure to be upgraded to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions. Eligible project types include constructing new
reactors, uprates and upgrades to existing reactors, and restarts of closed
reactors. Across the supply chain, eligible project types include conversion,
enrichment, fabrication, and nuclear component manufacturing. In 2014 and 2019,
LPO provided $12B in loans for Vogtle Units 3 and 4, saving ratepayers hundreds
of millions of dollars in interest costs. In 2024, LPO provided a loan of up to
$1.52B to restart the shuttered Palisades plant in Michigan. Because interest
costs can be a substantial portion of total project costs LPO financing can be
a useful option (DOE, 2024c).
Aided by the
financial benefits of federal tax credits and other federal guarantees, several
other re-starts are in the planning stages, including Pennslyvania’s Three Mile
Island Unit1 which, pursuant to a 20-year purchase agreement, will supply power
to Microsoft Corporation’s artificial intelligence operations. A re-start of the Duane Arnold plant in Iowa may
be in process. The resumption of the
halted construction of the V.C. Summer plant in South Carolina may also be
under consideration.
6) Revise subsidy mechanisms:
A number of policies and procedures are in place that
subsidize energy sources. Most of the
fossil fuels combusted enjoy a largely hidden subsidy because the waste product
of their combustion, carbon dioxide, is dumped into the air for free. Facilities regulated under the Regional
Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) program of the Northeast states do pay a fee
for their carbon dioxide emissions, although the current fee, in the range of $26
per ton, is arguably too low to cut emissions significantly. In the face of this subsidy that fossil fuels
enjoy, it is hard to see how a state, the nation, or the world can move to a
carbon-free economy without subsidies to encourage carbon-free energy. An economy-wide, steadily increasing,
revenue-neutral price on carbon emissions might incentivize clean energy and
offset fossil fuel’s subsidy, but implementing a carbon price at the state
level could handicap the state’s economy.
Therefore, subsidies will likely remain an important tool to help reach
GHG emissions reduction goals. Relevant
questions are what should be subsidized, and by how much.
A review of the various subsidies in place in many states
indicates that the playing field is tilted in the direction of renewables. There are federal subsidies that apply to
nuclear energy and there have been subsidies that apply to existing nuclear
plants such as those in New Jersey. But few if any state subsidies exist that
would apply to new nuclear energy facilities.
However, a number of subsidies for new renewables exist. It has been
argued (Angwin, 2020) that in deregulated energy regions, out-of-market
subsidies to renewables provide an unfair advantage, allowing them to lower
auction clearing prices to where baseload plants such as nuclear, that must
rely on selling kWh, cannot compete. The
capacity market in deregulated regions also may inadvertently favor peaking
technologies (Mays, et al., 2019).
Angwin (2020) warns that the grids in deregulated markets, largely due
to out-of-market price distortions, are moving inexorably to a power source mix
dominated by renewables with single-cycle natural gas as back-up, and that grid
stability is likely to suffer because of the lowering percentage of stable
baseload power in the generation mix.
Analyzing existing subsidy landscapes and revising them to
be essentially equal for all clean energy sources and set at an appropriate
level to sufficiently incentivize clean energy development will be
challenging. A thorough cost/benefit
analysis should be done, taking into consideration benefits that include job
creation, contributions to grid stability and energy security, minimal impacts
to the landscape, etc., and costs that include need for associated
infrastructure such as new transmission lines and other grid improvements, need
for backup storage capacity, and more.
Also, as pointed out above, local, regional, and national
cuts in GHG emissions will not eliminate the worst impacts of climate
change. Therefore, another important
consideration is whether an energy technology that is incentivized has
significant potential to be widely adopted by the developing world. A corollary to this consideration is to what
degree a state’s economy could benefit from developing and marketing the
technology on a global scale.
Many subsidies have been entrenched in policies for years
and have influential constituencies, complicating and making difficult the task
of levelling the playing field.
Listed below are some of the most important subsidies that
exist in many states. The financial
value of some are relatively easy to quantify, others less so. Where possible, approximate dollar values are
given. For some, suggested modifications
are provided. The workings of some of
the subsidies are complex and evolving; associated suggestions should be
considered conceptual.
Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS)
There are 29 states plus Washington DC that have a Renewable
Portfolio Standard (RPS). New Jersey is illustrative. New Jersey’s RPS was
first adopted in 1999 and has been updated several times (DSIRE, 2024). New
Jersey’s RPS is one of the most ambitious in the country, requiring 35% of the
energy sold in the state come from qualifying energy sources by 2025 and 50% by
2030 (NJDEP, 2024a). Qualifying energy
sources were determined in 1999, with the Electric Discount & Energy
Competition Act to be Class I Renewables, which include solar energy, wind
energy, wave or tidal action, geothermal energy, landfill gas, anaerobic
digestion, fuel cells using renewable fuels, certain other forms of sustainable
biomass, and hydroelectric facilities of 3 MW or less. Also included, with stipulations that they
should make up a relatively small percent of the total, are Class II
renewables, which include electricity generated by hydropower facilities larger
than 3 megawatts (MW) and less than 30 MW*, and resource-recovery facilities
(i.e., municipal solid waste incinerators) located in New Jersey approved by
the DEP. Electricity generated by a resource-recovery facility outside New
Jersey qualifies as “Class II” renewable energy if the facility is located in a
state with retail electric competition and the facility is approved by the DEP.
Solar energy, while it remains an eligible Class I technology, occupies a
special place as the only resource eligible for the solar electric component of
the standard. Offshore wind, defined as a wind turbine located in the Atlantic
Ocean and connected to the New Jersey electric transmission system, likewise
also occupies a special place within the RPS (DSIRE, 2023).
Nuclear energy is not among the RPS’s qualifying sources,
very likely due to the perception, in 1999, that it was neither clean nor
renewable. As discussed above, there are
a number of reasons why it can be argued that new nuclear technology is as
clean or cleaner than some or all of the qualifying sources. Given that uranium can be extracted from
seawater, which has what amounts to an inexhaustible supply, nuclear energy may
also be essentially renewable. And it
should be noted that while the energy in sunshine and wind is renewable, the
apparatus to harvest this energy is not.
Both wind turbines and solar panels have lifetimes expected to be in the
25-year range, as opposed to the expected 40- to 80-year expected lifetimes of
new nuclear facilities, and wind and solar technologies have significant
materials demands, manufacturing impacts, and disposal and recycling
challenges.
It is difficult to quantify the overall cost of the RPS
requirement and its impact in deregulated energy markets. One study found that with RPS programs, carbon
emissions were 10-25% lower, and electricity prices were 11% higher seven years
after RPS passage; the per ton cost of CO2 abatement ranged from $58-$298
and was generally above $100 per ton (Greenstone & Nath, 2020). Another study (Barbose, 2025) found that RPS
standards add approximately 12% to the price of electricity in New Jersey.
Changing the RPS to a Clean Portfolio Standard (CPS), with a
revised definition of qualifying sources that includes nuclear, would be a step
towards leveling the subsidy playing field.
Both Minnesota and Michigan have included nuclear energy in their clean
energy standards (NEI, 2024a)
Societal Benefits Charges
A number of states, especially those in deregulated markets,
have a societal benefits charge. New
Jersey is an example. In that state this
is collected via a per kWh fee added to utility bills. It funds New Jersey’s Clean Energy
Program. Based on the period 2009 to
2012, approximately 20% of the funds collected were allocated for renewable
energy programs (DSIRE, 2024). The fiscal year 2024 budget, which totaled
approximately $600 million, listed a number of items that apply to renewable
energy. A cursory identification of
these items, including a pro-rated portion of planning and administration
costs, indicates that they total approximately $100 million or so, in
approximate agreement with the 2009 to 2012 value reported by DSIRE.
Solar PV subsidies; net metering
Many states allow homeowners, etc. to get credit at the
retail price for the electricity their solar panels send to the grid, although
the electricity being replaced could have been purchased by the distribution
utility at the basic generation service (BGS) price, which may currently be in
the range of $120/MWh to $130/MWh.
Assuming that the current average retail price of electricity is in the
range of $180 per MWh and assuming that the BGS price is in the range of $120
to $130/MWh, the net metering subsidy amounts to approximately $50 to $60/MWh
for electricity sent to the grid. The cost of this subsidy is borne by other
ratepayers.
However, this cost will be offset and the subsidy
essentially nullified if the utility could sell the extra energy that it
receives at a retail rate. However, if
it sold the extra energy at the wholesale rate the subsidy would not be
nullified. Further, as the capacity of
solar PV grows, there could be situations, e.g. sunny afternoons, when more
extra electricity is produced by solar PV than the market can use. If
sufficient grid-scale storage capacity that can absorb this extra electricity
is not developed, or if growth in demand (e.g. for charging of electric
vehicles) does not keep pace with growth in solar PV capacity, this extra
electricity production would have to be curtailed (i.e. wasted). In such cases
the subsidy would not be nullified.
Some recent work by MIT professor Chris Knittel and
colleagues (Knittel, 2026) found that net metering programs applied to rooftop
solar were correlated with increasing electricity prices, whereas no
significant correlation was found between increased electricity prices and
renewable portfolio standards.
Solar PV subsidies: renewable energy credits
Approximately 10 states offer solar renewable energy
credits. These provide payments to
owner/operators of solar PV based on the amount of power they produce. The value of these payments is transferred to
ratepayers. In New Jersey, for example, incentive
costs for energy year 2023 totaled $986,776,139 (NJBPU, 2023). Adding this to the estimated subsidy from net
metering indicates that approximately $1.5 billion was paid as solar incentives
in 2023. This amounts to a total solar
incentive in the range of over $200/MWh.
Other subsidies are available in some states to solar PV as
well; a comprehensive listing of these is available through the DSIRE website
(DSIRE, 2024).
Offshore Wind Subsidies
Significant subsidies have been planned for offshore
wind. In New Jersey, for example, it was
proposed that offshore wind producers would receive a subsidy for the power
they produce, offshore renewable energy credits (ORECs). They would have to return a portion of this
subsidy - the market revenue received from PJM for energy, capacity, and
Renewable Energy Credit payments – to the ratepayers. In a hearing in 2024, the
NJBPU stated that the "estimated levelized net OREC" to be paid to
the two most recently approved offshore wind producers, Leading Light Wind and
Attentive Energy Two, would be $70.05/MWh and $96.75/MWh respectively.
Other incentives could apply to offshore wind as well. These include funds to be provided for the
necessary new transmission infrastructure to bring the power ashore (see “Additional
transmission capacity, grid updates and modernization” section below).
Storage and other redundancy cost provisions
Solar and wind produce power only about 1/6 to 1/3 of the
time, so they require relatively large amounts of dispatchable power as
backup. One study (summarized by
Nesvisky, 2016), in which the researchers analyzed data on the installed
capacity of renewable energy, including solar, wind, geothermal,
ocean/tide/wave, and biomass, in 26 Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) countries between 1990 and 2013, found that an 0.88
percentage point increase in the long-run share of renewable energy was
associated with a one percentage point increase in the share of fast-reacting
fossil generation capacity. (In other words, a 1% increase in renewables led to
a 1.14% increase in fast-reacting fossil backup.) The authors noted that as the push for clean
energy continues, it will be important to recognize the need for - and the
costs of - complementary fast-reacting fossil backup technologies.
The cost of developing adequate storage capacity to
accommodate increased use of intermittent power sources also falls into this
subsidy category. Viable grid-scale
storage capacity could obviate the need for as much backup, but for storage to
be effective as a back-up, it needs to be kept charged. When electricity is used
to charge batteries or other storage technology it is not available to meet
existing demand.
Current costs of storage are significant. Tesla's 4.9 MW, 4-hour
duration megapack, which is reported to supply 19.6 MWh, sells for about $5
million installed. (Tesla, 2025). This represents
a cost of approximately $250/kWh
This estimated cost is consistent with estimates in a recent
U.S. Department of Energy Report (DOE, 2024d), although that report focused on
duration longer than 4 hours. The report
estimated that that 225 to 480 GW of long-duration storage will be necessary to
meet the needs of a U.S. decarbonized power system by 2050, and that this will
represent $330 billion in cumulative capital.
It is important to note that battery costs have come down recently
and could decline further. A 2023 NREL
report (Cole & Karmakar, 2023) indicated that battery storage costs were in
the range of $500/kWh, approximately twice the current cost of a Tesla unit as noted
above.
Another important consideration is the storage duration. The
case of New Jersey is again illustrative. Assuming a yearly New Jersey
electricity use of approximately 75 TWh, the State’s average instantaneous use
is approximately 8 GW. Peak loads are approximately twice this (PJM, 2024a).
The state’s 2019 Energy Master Plan called for 22 GW of storage capacity to be
developed by 2050. The expected duration of the projected 22 GW of storage was not
clear from the Energy Master Plan but is likely to be 4-hours. A 4-hour
duration storage is not likely to be adequate to ensure secure electricity
supplies through days-long periods of cloudy, low-wind conditions. Analysis of
35 years of German weather data indicates a 24-day storage requirement
(Hargraves, 2024). Jenkins, et al. (2018) looked at the cost of 7-day storage,
and found that, assuming costs fall to less than a third of the (then current)
costs, it would cost over $7 trillion to build out enough lithium-ion batteries
to store a week’s worth of electricity in the U.S. New Jersey’s current electricity use is
approximately 1.7% of U.S. use, which suggests a cost for one-week duration
storage of approximately $100 billion. If NJ electricity use should
approximately double by 2050, as projected by the 2019 Energy Master Plan, a
cost for one-week of electricity storage capacity could be in the range of $200
billion.
Much work is underway to lower the cost of grid-scale
storage. However, developing
cost-effective long-duration storage technology or other adaptive measures such
as advanced power distribution coupled with distributed storage approaches are
challenges that may be at least as difficult as lowering the cost of new
nuclear energy.
Additional transmission capacity, grid updates and
modernization
In order to accommodate a larger percentage of intermittent
sources, grid updates and modernization efforts are needed. These could include such technologies as
fast-acting batteries, synchronous condensers, capacitors, reactors, static VAR
compensators, and other advanced – and likely expensive - technologies. Without rigorous oversight, there is a
potential for distribution utilities to take advantage of these needs in ways that
are not cost-effective. Distribution
utilities get paid for these upgrades the same way vertically integrated
utilities got paid for rate base expansions before deregulation.
New transmission infrastructure must also be constructed to
bring the electricity produced by offshore wind ashore. According to one study, the costs for this
added infrastructure in New Jersey could amount to about $40/MWh by 2047
(O’Donnell, 2023)
Premature displacement of baseload capacity
There is evidence that baseload plants cannot compete
effectively with subsidized electricity providers (Angwin, 2020). If this is
largely true, baseload plants will be displaced, at a potential cost to grid
stability and power quality. Such
displacements could have long term costs not only in terms of power supply costs
but also in emergency preparedness and energy self-sufficiency.
Other incidental subsidies
Solar panels and wind turbines are reported to have an
estimated lifetime in the range of 25 years, perhaps up to 35 years. Costs of disposing or recycling worn-out solar
panels and wind turbines are unclear at this time.
7) Develop
educational and outreach programs to share information on nuclear energy’s
safety and environmental and economic benefits, and to train workers relevant
to nuclear energy construction, infrastructure and plant management
Efforts to encourage new nuclear energy will doubtless lead to resistance from some quarters. Several environmental groups and other organizations still strongly oppose nuclear energy. However, there is evidence that a majority of the public supports nuclear energy (MI PSC, 2024). As discussed above, much or most of the resistance seems to be based on out-of-date notions and lack of information. States could counter this by launching an educational campaign that would point out the safety of the new, passively cooled designs, the jobs and other economic benefits (e.g. tax base), the small footprint, energy security, increasing chances of meeting GHG goals, and potential benefits to industry. To support a build of new nuclear energy facilities, more skilled workers such as plumbers, welders, electricians, pipefitters, and other trades relevant to nuclear energy infrastructure and management will be necessary.
A related educational outreach effort would be to help fund
colleges and other schools to develop the skills and expertise that will be
needed to support a nuclear industry with a strong presence.
8) Establish
a Nuclear Power Advisory Commission charged with studying and
reporting in a timely manner how nuclear energy could be incentivized to play a
larger role
Michigan and New Hampshire have established commissions to
study the prospects for new nuclear energy and to make recommendations
accordingly. Reports from each
commission are available (NH Commission, 2023, MI PSC, 2024). Michigan has gone beyond the recommendation
stage, and with help from a $1.5 billion federal loan, has committed to
supporting the reopening of the shuttered Palisades nuclear plant and
potentially adding SMR units at the site (Budryk, 2024).
Florida passed a sweeping energy bill, House Bill 1645,
signed into law May 15, 2024. Ironically, this bill deletes more than 50 lines
of previous state statutes dealing with climate change (Perry, 2024). To its credit, and perhaps typifying a
“strange bedfellows” aspect of bipartisan support for nuclear power, the bill
directs the Florida Public Service Commission to issue a report to the governor
and legislative leaders by April 1, 2025, with findings and recommendations to
support new nuclear in the state—specifically including military bases. The bill reads, “Recognizing the evolution
and advances that have occurred and continue to occur in nuclear power
technologies, the Public Service Commission shall study and evaluate the
technical and economic feasibility of using advanced nuclear power
technologies, including small modular reactors, to meet the electrical power
needs of the state.” (NuclearNewswire,
2024).
New Jersey’s Governor Mikie Sherrill, who took office
January 20, 2026, issued an executive order on that day establishing a Nuclear
Power Task Force, charged with formulating and implementing a strategy for the
development of new nuclear energy facilities in the state, including
coordination with the federal government and other states.
Fusion Nuclear Energy
This post focuses exclusively on fission reactors. Plants of this design are in operation
throughout the world. Next generation fission
designs build on what is now a proven record of safety and reliable
operation.
Tremendous energy is potentially available through nuclear
fusion, which powers the sun and the stars.
Harnessing fusion at a scale useful to power society has been a goal of
research for many decades. The fusion process produces no long-lived
radioactive waste. It is also extremely efficient; 1 kg of fusion fuel could
produce the energy of 10 million kg of fossil fuel. The necessary fuel, derived
from water and lithium, is abundant. Recent
developments are encouraging (Theresa, 2024). As it tracks the development and
potential benefits of nuclear energy in achieving GHG goals and benefitting its
economy, states should include up-to-date assessments of progress in fusion. States should also recognize that
encouragement of greater capabilities in fission technology could have
significant spin-off benefits for fusion technology.
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