Why Nuke Power 4.0 Has No There There

-by Harvey Wasserman

The latest Nuclear Renaissance (version 4.0) is Dead on Arrival. In terms of the public good, there is no there there. In Finland, France, England, South Carolina and Georgia, the last eight big reactor projects have ended in catastrophic financial failure. America’s operating 94 big reactors (average age 40) are decayed, can’t compete with renewables, and can’t manage their wastes. Small mythological ones are unproven, unlikely, hyper-expensive. So now the industry bets its latest “Renaissance” on Oliver Stone’s much-hyped Apocalypse Now 2.0 (AKA “Nuclear Now”). Above all, the film must hide the reality that A-power’s Product #1 is fissionable material and trained personnel to feed the military’s Bomb machine… while fueling corporate control over global energy supplies. As a source of electricity, nuclear reactors have been forever left in the financial dust by wind, solar, batteries and conservation/efficiency. “Intermittent” renewables now come with ever-cheaper advanced storage. Nuclear’s “baseload” strait-jacket has become a serious liability as demand becomes more flexible and even antithetical to 24/7 supply. Aging reactors like California’s Diablo Canyon are shut as much as 40% of the time. Their inflexible grid presence often blocks cheaper, cleaner wind and solar, driving up prices. Solar panels on 1.4 million Golden State rooftops provide far more electricity than Diablo’s nukes, at far less cost. Some 70,000 Californians work in the solar industry (not counting those in wind and efficiency). Twice in recent years privately owned decentralized battery arrays have helped avert regional blackouts. And the last eight big Euro-American nuke projects have gone so far off the financial rails that not one more those big Light Water Reactors will ever be built in the US. South Carolina’s cancelled VC Summer wasted $10 billion. Georgia’s Vogtle soared from $14 billion to $34 billion… and still counting. Projects in Finland, France and England have exploded in cost. So the industry is pivoting to “Small Modular Reactors,” now in the prototype phase. Advocates promise these SMRs will someday take over the energy world. But an early iteration long ago irradiated Santa Susana, north of Los Angeles, with terrifying financial, ecological and health fallout. Projected SMR kilo-watt hour prices are already well above renewables. Even the most fanciful timetables say there’ll be no significant small nuke capacity for years to come. And there’s still no proven solution for managing their radioactive wastes. So with the big reactors done and the littler ones far away, there is no real nuclear there there. Instead there’s the towering green reality of Germany’s energiewende. On April 15, Europe’s largest economy went post-nuclear. After a 12-year phase-out— dating from the 2011 explosions at Fukushima— Germany’s last three reactors (of 17) are finally shut. The world’s fourth-largest economy (some say it’s fifth, behind California) now gets nearly half its electricity from renewables, far more than from any single fossil source. Much of German’s wind power comes on large lines from the North Sea. Much of its solar comes from panels installed on household rooftops. Indeed, the green transition so far exceeded industry expectations that terrified corporatists prompted Prime Minister Angela Merkel to slow it down a few years ago, leaving Germany more susceptible to the gas shortages caused by the Russo-Ukraine war. Germany has also been phasing out its coal burners, many of which are for export. But neighboring France’s 56-reactor fleet has been decimated by serious structural failures. With global-warmed rivers too hot to cool their cores, more than thirty French nukes have been intermittently shut, requiring massive imports. The irony of nuke-free Germany selling power to nuke-intense France underscores the failure of yet another “Reactor Renaissance.”

The aging big nukes in France, the US and elsewhere have never been more dangerous. Diablo is embrittled, surrounded by earthquake faults, seriously under-maintained. Headed toward shut-down for six years, California Gov. Gavin Newsom now wants them to reverse course. Elder reactors like Palisades, Davis-Besse and South Texas are also crumbling. Meanwhile, six reactors at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia may be on the wartime brink of the worst nuclear disaster since Fukushima. A single errant shell could literally carpet Europe with lethal fallout.

Hanging in the balance, amidst yet another massive industry PR blitz (at least three previous “Renaissances” have failed), CA Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Biden Administration want to throw huge sums of public money at propping up dying reactors while conjuring up visions of little pie-in-the-sky newbies. But all that funny money can’t erase the reality that these old nukes are totally priced out and terrifyingly decrepit…while the super-hyped new ones don’t yet exist. If they follow the industry’s historic pattern, SMRs are virtually certain to come in years late, billions over budget, filled with fatal flaws. The industry must also hide the German elephant in the room: that renewables work. They are job-producing, profitable, reliable. They have the proven ability to cleanly, safely and efficiently power very large industrial countries while vastly reducing carbon emissions. The nuclear industry must cover up the fact that atomic radiation from reactor operations, accidents and waste do kill people. That the nuclear fuel cycle does emit carbon. That radioactive waste remains a serious unsolved problem. Perhaps most significant: the industry has no existing fleet of workable new reactors to install in the next five years or more. So it must gamble the planet and all our lives on forcing dicey old nukes to keep operating, year after year after year, hoping and praying that no more of them blow up. It must also hide that fact that nuclear power can never again compete with the escalating, unstoppable revolution in renewables. And that wind and solar have the proven ability to saturate the world’s energy production market…leaving no room at all for that mythic, public-funded, “too expensive to matter” generation of unproven small nukes. Even Oliver Stone’s Apocalypse Now 2.0 can’t make all or any of the above go away. ——————————————————————————- Harvey Wasserman wrote SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, and THE PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY.