Why I’m Pro-Nuke Now: Conclusion

This concludes my three-part post. Part I, “Beginning,” began with the Three Mile Island accident and covered the decline of nuclear dread, the advent of fabulously reliable reactor operation, and nuclear power’s climate-hero status; it’s available here. Part II, “Centerpiece,” covered the failure of carbon tax advocacy, the closure of Indian Point, and the dissolution of my dream that renewable energy could do it all; it’s available here. This part takes antinuclear activism to task for turning a blind eye to the far more lethal harms from unrestrained automobility, and then turns to the need to redefine “least-cost” decision rules guiding electricity investment. — C.K.

7. A More-Brutal Bête Noire

On a different, but as I’ll show, related topic: I had known for some time that deaths from being struck by a motorist were shockingly common in the U.S., with 300 a year in New York City alone. I had made that fact a central element in defending bicycling against the moral panic over ― of all things ― New York’s industrious bicycle couriers during the pre-digital 1980s. And as a bicycle commuter I had long jousted with drivers. But the death of oncologist Dr. Jie Zhang in 1994 forced me to consider driver-caused traffic violence as an assault on both public health and the moral order.

A speeding driver hit and killed Dr. Jie outside Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on Manhattan’s East Side. She was nine months pregnant. As she lay dying, her colleagues at the hospital delivered her son, who survived. The newspaper ran a photo of the newborn in his father’s arms. My wife and our week-old son were safe at home. My good fortune was hard to bear.

What were the hazards of nuclear power, next to those of motorized traffic? There was and is no agreed-upon damage ratio between the two technologies. But in my eyes, the anti-nukers’ derogatory depictions of U.S. nuclear regulators seemed better suited to officials in charge of “auto safety.” In 2009, for example, after a spate of deaths in SUV rollovers, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required that roofs on new vehicles be able to support three times their already swollen weight. That rule led to wider windshield-obstructing structural posts , badly expanding SUV drivers’ blind spots. The result, according to a recent New York Times report, was a tidal wave of crashes that killed hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists and injured thousands more.

As a young attorney in the 1960s, Ralph Nader rocketed to fame by documenting how regulatory capture made cars excessively dangerous. His subsequent pivot to opposing nuclear power initially made sense but, over time, inadvertently left American pedestrians, cyclists, and occupants of smaller vehicles vulnerable not just to “vehicle bloat” but driver distractions and the “windshield perspective” of police, prosecutors and juries.

All the while, anti-nuclear activists keep pounding their drum, willfully ignoring U.S. reactors’ splendid post-seventies safety record (see Sections 1 & 2). With few domestic miscues to flog, they leaned instead into the faraway disasters at Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011). Those disasters were real enough, but they differed from the U.S. situation not just in location but also in root cause. Soviet and Japanese officials had downplayed reactor risks, while the U.S. nuclear enterprise had built a culture dedicated to containing them.

Even reactor radioactivity, like reactor accidents, is becoming another non-barking dog. We are half-a-century into the age of large-scale deployment of nuclear power, and not a single large-scale study has emerged that credibly pins increased morbidity and/or mortality on nuclear power plant operation. Moreover, the old Rubik’s Cube problem of nuclear waste disposal is yielding to engineered solutions. The hangup was never technical. It was political.

8. By All Means, Decarbonize

For half-a-century, nuclear power and renewable energy have circled each other like wary prizefighters.

The two weren’t simply antithetical, they were incompatible — logistically as well as culturally. One couldn’t be for both; you had to pick a side. That was the gospel of physicist Amory Lovins, whose revolutionary 1976 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken,” upended energy policy debates and galvanized the antinuclear power movement.[12]

In Lovins’ influential framing, nukes epitomized “hard” energy — lumbering and brittle. Renewables — wind and solar — were “soft” — home-grown and “right-sized.” (This was before the relentless push for engineering efficiencies turned wind turbines into colossi and blanketed entire fields with solar panels.)

Fifty years on, the climate crisis has entered the ring and demanded that the rivals partner up. The choice now is carbon-burning vs. carbon-free. Further, the perilous timeline of the crisis has toppled another dictum, also traceable to Lovins: that the transition from fossil fuels must proceed under a “least-cost-first” hierarchy that turns to costlier energy sources only after first exhausting all of the less-expensive ones.

Once, that logic was persuasive. In a leisurely, decades-long transition, why not have the lowest-cost energy lead the way? Wherever a home solar array or a Great Plains wind farm could turn a profit, the thousand busy ants of capitalism could be trusted to deploy them. The climate-warping curve would bend, steadily, painlessly, bringing a more flexible and benign energy system into the bargain.

That was the idea. The reality is falling far short, as revealed by the stubborn persistence of U.S. carbon emissions.[13] The manifold causes have been touched on here; they include everything from traditional NIMBYism to viral versions built on conspiracy-mongering, along with supersized pickups, “sport utes” and the absence of robust carbon emissions pricing. The shale revolution and two Trump presidencies did their part as well, keeping fossil fuels cheap (until No. 47 made war on Iran), which added to the stock of carbon in the atmosphere and America’s stock of carbon-consuming cities and towns, farms and roadways.

In World Cup parlance, we’ve entered stoppage time. A new rule applies: nuclear power ― or any other fossil-fuel antidote ― need not pencil out as cheaper than solar or wind to merit a part in decarbonizing U.S. grids. Instead, we should pursue any energy source or energy-saving measure that displaces fossil fuel use at lesser cost than the harm caused by burning those fuels in the first place.

Think of it like the hikers’ joke about the bear: I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you. In the same way, new nuclear plants don’t need to be cheaper per kilowatt-hour than solar or wind. Their electricity just needs to cost less than the added climate damage that would result from burning the fossil fuels that would otherwise fill the gap. And on that test, new nuclear power plants appear likely to succeed.

Let’s break that down.

What will new U.S. reactors cost to build?

This year I applied my statistical skills and power plant knowledge to the 49 most recently built U.S. reactors. Forty-seven of them limped to completion in the dozen years following Three Mile Island. At the time, their swollen costs so ravaged U.S. electric utilities that Forbes magazine termed the U.S. nuclear power program “the largest managerial disaster in business history.”

Nevertheless, my analysis of that cost data points to a path forward. I found that even if future reactor costs track past costs, a program that builds two or more reactors at each site and uses standardized designs will allow new plants to be built for an average cost of $8,200 per kilowatt of capacity, in 2025 dollars. At that price, building and running new reactors is almost certainly a lower-cost proposition than facing the ecological and human damage from burning equivalent fossil fuels.[14]

If anything, my figure is on the pessimistic side, since it bakes in the kind of shifting regulatory requirements that drove up costs so much in the post-TMI period. Even so, it comes to just half of what it cost to build the final two reactors — Georgia Power new Vogtle 3 and 4 units ― a project that nuclear power critics dredge up at every opportunity as proof that any new U.S. nuclear plant is doomed to be uneconomical.

Just as important, the odds of future extreme overruns appear low. Using a probabilistic model, I found that the likelihood that a new twin-unit plant, built to a standardized design, will end up costing as much as Vogtle is slim ― the same odds, around 1.7%, as correctly calling six coin flips in a row.[15]

Will the long time to build new reactors undo their climate benefit?

Past nuclear plants seemed to take forever to finish. The 47 reactors whose costs I analyzed averaged nearly 12 years from initiation to completion ― a 50 percent worsening from their 1970s counterparts. Much of that added time traces back to Three Mile Island, which triggered design changes, equipment upgrades, and staffing shifts across the entire U.S. nuclear sector, each adding delays. Slowing demand for power also led some utilities to stretch out construction schedules on their own.

To nuclear power’s critics, these setbacks come with the territory. But reactors aren’t the only major infrastructure projects facing long timelines. Delays in building wind farms, transmission lines, and other accoutrements of renewable energy have prompted plenty of national hand-wringing too. Even balcony solar ― the latest face of decarbonization ― will need time to scale up. Electrical codes and fire regulations must be rewritten, and then the real challenge begins: installing roughly 25 million of these devices (at 220W each) to match the climate benefit of a single 1,000-megawatt reactor.

There’s also a déjà vu tinge to the complaint that nuclear power is too slow to help with the climate crisis. That argument easily predates Vogtle 3 and 4 ― the massive Georgia project that tested residents’ patience and wallets, but is now helping decarbonize Atlanta and hundreds of other cities. The goal isn’t to repeat Vogtle’s egregiously high cost, which doesn’t yet clear the bar set by the social cost of carbon. It’s to treat the climate fight as an ongoing effort to reduce harm by whatever effective means are available.

Balcony solar and giant nukes aren’t rivals ― they’re partners. Building Vogtle didn’t stop Georgians from putting solar panels on their roofs in 2015, and if balcony solar really is the money-saving no-brainer its supporters claim, there’s no reason it shouldn’t help rate-burdened Georgia families in 2027, too. “All hands on deck” is a cliché, but it fits here. The world has no time to wait ― it needs to decarbonize by every means available. Including nuclear power.

[12] Lovins’ Foreign Affairs article is available here. I recounted its momentous impact on energy policy and public discourse for The Electricity Journal in 10 Blows That Stopped Nuclear Power (Jan/Feb 1991).

[13] U.S. CO2 emissions circa averaged only 1 to 2 percent annual reductions over the period 2010-2025, a rate many times slower than needed to meaningfully address the climate crisis.

[14] See Komanoff & Boucher, “Beyond Vogtle,” op. cit., pp. 41-44.

[15] The chance of correctly calling six coin-tosses in a row is one-half raised to the sixth power, which is 1 in 64, or 1.56%, which more or less matches the 1.7% chance that a new nuclear plant will cost as much as or more than Vogtle 3 and 4. See Komanoff & Boucher, op. cit., Fig. 9.