Without nuke power, climate change threat grows: Column

The announcement last month that California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric company, plans to close the state’s last nuclear power station sent shock waves through America’s electric utility industry and should send a chilling message to anyone worried about the warming of the planet due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the last several years, utilities around the nation have announced the closure of a number of small, aging nuclear reactors. Many where plagued by high operating costs and required significant safety upgrades. Low natural gas prices and competition from heavily subsidized wind and solar generators have made them increasingly unprofitable to operate.

Diablo is different. It is a large plant with a stellar safety record and low operating costs. PG&E CEO Tony Earley acknowledged after the announcement that continuing to operate the reactor would be the cheapest way to meet the state’s clean energy and climate goals. But the plant in the end succumbed to decades of regulatory harassment by environmental groups, hostility from the state’s hegemonic Democratic political establishment, and a raft of mandates, regulations, and subsidies designed by those parties to tilt California’s electricity market toward renewable energy and away from nuclear power.

While the announcement was cheered by the anti-nuclear environmental movement and the state’s renewable energy enthusiasts, the closure couldn’t come at a worse time for the global efforts to address climate change. In Paris last December, the Obama administration committed the United States to cut emissions 26-28% by 2025. Doing so allowed the administration to secure similar commitments from major emitters like China and India.

The new US climate targets could survive the closure of a few small nuclear power plants in difficult markets. But if the Diablo closure becomes a model for the closure of large, economically viable nuclear plants around the country, as Rhea Suh, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council has suggested, then the U.S. will almost certainly fail to hold up its end of the bargain. And that will be bad news for the fragile progress that the world, after two decades of mis-starts, made in Paris.

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If there is a silver lining, it is that the Diablo closure has finally made obvious how critical nuclear energy is to the US climate mitigation effort and how unserious green proposals to address the issue without nuclear energy are. The Natural Resources Defense Council, which brokered the deal with PG&E, claims that all of the electricity provided by Diablo will be replaced with clean energy. But a an analysis of the plan reveals that until 2031, the utility has committed to replacing less than a third of the energy currently provided by the plant with wind, solar, or other sources of zero carbon electricity.

That’s consistent with past closures of nuclear power stations. When nuclear plants close, one can reliably count on them being substantially replaced by fossil fuels. This was the case when California closed the San Onofre nuclear power station in 2012, when Japan shuttered its nuclear fleet after Fukushima, and in Germany, which despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade to replace its nuclear power fleet with renewable energy, announced last month that it was reneging on its commitment to phase out its large fleet of coal-fired power stations because it can’t keep the lights on without them.

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The Diablo closure presents a stark challenge to both the nuclear industry and policy-makers who are trying to clean up America’s electricity grid. Even large, state-of-the-art nuclear power plants won’t survive if they are forced to compete with heavily subsidized wind and solar generation and operate well below full capacity on power grids that give priority to intermittent renewable energy. America will not meet its still modest 2025 climate commitments if the current nuclear fleet is significantly downsized. And without new nuclear plants, we won’t get anywhere close to the much deeper emissions cuts necessary to make a significant dent in climate change.

The latter challenge will require a very different kind of nuclear industry. Getting rid of the many ways that existing state and federal policies penalize nuclear energy would likely keep the existing fleet operating, but it won’t be sufficient in most places to spur a new wave of nuclear construction. Few utility executives today are looking to make a series of 60-year $10 billion bets on future electricity demand, which is what building present day reactors requires. Progress on climate mitigation and a future for nuclear will require a new generation of reactors that are cheaper to build, easier to operate, and can be purchased and added to the grid in smaller increments.

Today, there is a growing new nuclear industry, populated by entrepreneurial start-ups boasting innovative advanced reactor designs. Many are small enough to be manufactured off-site and require much less operational oversight and redundant safety systems because they can’t melt down, features that promise better and cheaper reactors.

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Getting those new reactors to market will require big changes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy and new policies to help the best companies get to market. Congress has recently begun to take up that challenge. Long-standing champions of nuclear energy in the Republican Party have recognized that the nuclear industry will whither unless a new generation of nuclear innovators has a real pathway to commercialization. Meanwhile, influential climate hawks in the Democratic Party have finally recognized that deep emissions reductions won’t be possible without nuclear energy. If there is reason for optimism in the wake of the Diablo Canyon announcement, it is that it will help to powerfully focus both parties on the task at hand. Recent plant closures in California, Japan, and Germany have made the energy math very clear. Without nuclear energy there is little prospect of meaningfully addressing climate change.

Ted Nordhaus is the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute. Ray Rothrock, CEO of Red Seal  and a former president of the National Venture Capital Association, has been an investor in a number of next generation nuclear technologies​. 

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