Don’t Wait Until You Get to the Checkout Counter-- Nuclear Is Expensive

by Susan Gore

Nuclear energy is three times more costly than combined cycle energy (natural gas plus steam). Roughly, if a monthly household electric bill were $85 for natural gas energy, the bill would be about $255 for nuclear reactor energy. Coal power is less expensive than nuclear power and considerably more expensive than the market winner, natural gas.

Fracking of natural gas is great for Wyoming and the coal slow-down is painful. But failing to understand that natural gas is much cheaper and nuclear much more expensive is like failing to understand inflation until check-out at the grocery store.

Nuclear energy markets are fading away. The average age of United States conventional light water reactors (LWRs) is 40 years. By 2021 twenty-three of the original fleet were shut down and nineteen were in various stages of expensive decommissioning clean-up. Absent replacements, nuclear energy's 19% share of America's electric power shrinks. Since 1996 the only traditional LWR to come online was Tennessee's 2016 Watts Bar reactor. Construction began on Georgia's unfinished Vogtle reactors in 2012. Ten years later, Georgia ratepayers have paid $3.5 billion in rider fees on electric bills and Vogtle spending tops $34 billion. The states of New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Illinois propose state taxes to subsidize failing reactors.

In June of 2021 Natrium's demonstration project rode into Wyoming with a 'new' idea and promises of jobs, subsidies, promises of subsidies and talk of economic prosperity. The horse has a pretty color, but can it run? What's the price?

The Natrium project is part of an international 'advanced reactor' initiative. Key experts who worked "on the front line . . . at the highest governmental nuclear regulatory and radiation levels in the US, Germany, France, and UK" issued a joint statement January 25, 2022, from which we briefly quote:

The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction. The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn't cheap, but extremely costly.

They add, ". . . nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design."

Among the ten points listed by these leaders are these three, edited for brevity:

Subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems associated with newer unproven concepts, including 'Advanced' and Small Modular Reactors.

Unsustainable due to the unresolved problem of very long-lived nuclear waste.

Inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents from human error, internal faults and external impacts . . . the majority of those very significant costs being borne by the public.

The 2022 Wyoming Legislature welcomed Natrium by passing the Nuclear Power Generation and Storage bill, "An ACT relating to environmental quality", that agrees to site nuclear reactors and store high-level radioactive waste in Wyoming. Bill sponsors did not know that these are federal, not state-level decisions, although states have options.

The pretty horse is worse than a long shot. Best to check out facts and think them through before we're bought.

https://www.powermag.com/blog/former-nuclear-leaders-say-no-to-new-reactors/

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904943/nuclear-power-climate-change-solution-gregory-jaczko https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020

https://ieefa.org/articles/vogtle-nuclear-plant-price-tag-increases-again-topping-34-billion

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/rogers2/

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-industry.php