Nuclear Energy Is Cheaper and Better Than Green Energy and Doesn't Cover the Land with Glass and Towers

Guest Post by Duggan Flanakin of CFact.

“Bad Boys” Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, both formerly of the Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment, just posted an article contending that, in the long run, nuclear energy is cheaper (and better) than wind or solar (though not as cheap as coal or natural gas) despite high up-front capital costs.

One obvious reason is that wind turbines and solar arrays have much shorter lifespans than nuclear facilities, which are initially commissioned for 40 years and can apply for 20-year extensions thereafter; many today anticipate an 80-year lifespan. They also require one-thirtieth of the land needed for solar; wind farms would require 200 times more land.

Orr and Rolling compare building a nuclear plant to obtaining a mortgage on a house; as the upfront cost is paid off (or recuperated), the operational costs dwindle. New York’s Nine Mile Point Unit 1 has been in operation since 1969, round the clock, while wind and solar facilities are weather-dependent.

Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station (1969), producing electricity for 55 years

Orr and Rolling two years ago found that meeting Minnesota’s total electricity demand would require over 100,000 megawatts of installed wind and solar capacity but just 16,379 megawatts of new and existing nuclear plants plus some battery storage and the retrofitting of a North Dakota coal plant with carbon capture and storage technology.

Further proof that nuclear is cheaper than wind or solar, they say, comes from Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Form 1 data. Existing nuclear plants were generating electricity at a nationwide average of $26.19 — $20.15 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in Virginia, $21.71 in North Carolina, and a whopping $37.00 in Minnesota. Yet FERC data showed that existing wind and solar facilities cost $52/MWh and $73/MWh, respectively.

Rogé Karma, who covers economics and economic policy at The Atlantic, argues that building new nuclear plants affordably is essential if the U.S. is to meet its climate goals. While wind and solar, he notes, can technically be bolstered to power the entire electricity grid, political realities weigh heavily against that ever happening.

The chief reason? Wind and solar require massive amounts of land.

Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study found that reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would require solar panels on land equivalent to the entire state of Virginia and wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. Building new transmission lines to transport that energy from the wind and solar facilities to energy markets provides even bigger challenges.

Karma also notes that nuclear reactors can be built to easily tie into existing transmission lines and that, on average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project and pay those workers 50 percent more. Best of all, they now have overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington.

There’s just one problem, says Karma. America has forgotten how to build nuclear capacity cost-efficiently. But that may soon be changing, especially if new micro-reactor designs can win over regulators and energy users. The cost-efficiency of yesterday’s nuclear plants can be traced to the fact that the 94 operating plants today are based on more than 50 different designs, meaning there are no economies of scale or lessons learned from earlier similar models.

A second reason, Karma notes, is that after the U.S. stopped building nuclear plants in the 1980s there soon was no trained workforce with any experience in nuclear plant construction. That is a major reason the Vogtle Unit 3 plant ended up costing $35 billion, while its sister Unit 4 cost 30 percent less to build. One simple incorrect rebar installation caused a 30-week regulatory delay.

By contrast, the U.S. Navy has been commissioning nuclear submarines since 1955 and nuclear aircraft carriers since 1961. America’s nuclear submarines are commissioned with enough uranium fuel to last more than 30 years, operating at high speed for longer periods than diesel-electric submarines. Because they do not require air, they can also stay submerged at deep depths for months at a time.

The pioneer nuclear aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise, cruised more than 200,000 miles over 3 years before needing refueling. The tiny space occupied by the reactors freed up space for aviation fuel, ordnance, and stores, while its top speed of over 30 knots made it the fastest warship afloat. Today, the U.S. has 10 Nimitz-class carriers and one Ford-class in service; France’s Charles de Gaulle is the only other nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Nuclear submarines are similar to other nuclear reactors but work as heat engines rather than to produce electricity. The uranium fission releases energy used to heat water to produce steam that drives the turbines that power the propellers. These reactors are comparable in size to the micro-reactors that soon may power large industrial facilities, data centers, mining operations, and other high-energy users – or even residential communities in remote locations.

President Biden in May signed legislation to help jumpstart a revival of the U.S. nuclear power industry, and Bill Gates’ TerraPower just broke ground on a “next-generation” nuclear reactor in Wyoming. But the main obstacle to a rejuvenated nuclear industry in the U.S. remains the regulatory mindset at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA, according to Robert Hargraves, co-founder of ThorCon International, which seeks to build thorium reactors.

Hargraves charges that U.S. regulators do not analyze data about human health effects of radiation from nuclear power but still rely on “groupthink consensus evolved in nongovernmental organizations originally misled by grant-seeking geneticists.” Hargraves argues that nuclear power plants should be treated just as other power plants, with individual owners and operators assigned liability for any radiation harm (which has been nearly nonexistent).

Eliminating the costs and delays caused by anti-nuclear regulators at the NRC and the EPA would go a long way toward the nuclear future, which was all the rage back before the first Earth Day began poisoning the nuclear well. But so would providing incentives for financing new nuclear plants.

The U.S. has done it for the Navy – nuclear carriers and submarines are very expensive upfront but pay for themselves over time. Nuclear is the only “clean” pathway (and far easier on living beings than wind or solar) to a clean energy future that can power an AI-friendly society. And it leaves Joshua trees, eagles, whales, bats, and ordinary farm, forest, and prairie animals and plants alone – people, too.

Duggan Flanakin (duggan@duggansdugout.com) is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

#Nuclear #Solar #Electricity #Wind #Renewables #GreenEnergy #EnergyCosts