America is finally getting serious about nuclear energy? It's been a long time coming.
Georgia Power Vogtle Plant Unit 4 recently went online, after years of delay. Vogtle is the first nuclear power plant to go online in the last 30 years. At its peak, the facility will power one million homes for upwards of 60-80 years. At the Unit 4 unveiling, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declared we need 98 more nuclear reactors similar to Units 3 and 4.
Granholm and I are in - gasp! - a rare agreement here. Where we differ, however, is on net-zero aims. Nuclear should be catalyzed and supplement fossil fuels, with the hopes that it could, one day, replace oil, gas, and coal–should that ever materialize. (Much to the dismay of alarmists, fossil fuels are here for the foreseeable future. Tough luck!) Granholm, like the rest of the Biden administration, wants to use nuclear - a far superior alternative to so-called clean energy sources like solar and wind - to achieve net zero by 2050: an untenable, expensive goal that will cost trillions of dollars and only reduce global temperatures by 0.2 degrees.
Last week, Congress did the unthinkable: passing a good bipartisan bill to supercharge nuclear energy with overwhelming bipartisan support. The bill now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk.
What will the ADVANCE Act do? It’ll expedite the permitting process for nuclear reactors and facilitate nuclear fusion technology.
“We sent the ADVANCE Act to the president’s desk because Congress worked together to recognize the importance of nuclear energy to America’s future and got the job done,” Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV), a sponsor of the bill, said. “This bipartisan piece of legislation will encourage more innovation and investment in nuclear technologies right here on our shores. It also directs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to more efficiently carry out its important regulatory mission and helps redevelop conventional energy sites for future nuclear energy projects. I’m proud the work we put into this legislation over many years is coming to fruition, and excited to mark a significant achievement for clean, reliable nuclear power.”
Decades long fear-mongering about nuclear power - whose reputation was tainted by the Soviet Chernobyl disaster - didn’t help. With our current government wholly consumed by net-zero delusions a la utility-scale (yet unreliable) solar and wind, China and Russia have been eating our lunch here. This is happening despite our pioneering nuclear energy development in the first place. How sad that we yielded this advantage to our adversaries?
As these rogue nations built more facilities, our country put 41 nuclear power plants to pasture or on the path to full decommissioning. Only 94 reactors are fully operational in the U.S. today-- this is embarrassing.
Adding more insult to injury, a new report says the U.S. is fifteen years behind China— the world’s worst polluter and despoiler of the environment– in harnessing nuclear energy.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report explained: "China’s rapid deployment of ever-more modern nuclear power plants over time produces significant scale economies and learning-by-doing effects, and this suggests that Chinese enterprises will gain an advantage at incremental innovation in this sector going forward.”
What is the Biden administration’s energy strategy for meeting this challenge? Unsurprisingly, their policies include pushing equity for EVs, climate hysteria, and woke permitting reform.
In lieu of misinformation pushed by radical environmentalists, nuclear energy is the cleanest energy source out there. Its 24/7 baseload power capabilities put other sources – especially highly-subsidized solar and wind – to shame. While nuclear only comprises 18.6% of current U.S. electricity generation, there’s untapped potential to expand this undervalued energy source.
Per the Department of Energy (DOE), nuclear has a 93% capacity factor - meaning it’s reliable for 93% of the year. Wind and solar boast the lowest capacity factors of any energy sources–rounding out the bottom two at 35.4% and 24.9%, respectively.
Concerned about job security? A single nuclear power plant station can employ up to 800 people permanently spanning engineering and non-engineering careers. The NEI reports, “Nuclear worker salaries are 50 percent higher on average than other electricity generation sources.”
Even the lefty Council on Foreign Relations conceded nuclear is environmentally friendly, writing, “Researchers have found that nuclear power is by far the most land efficient for electricity generation compared to other energy sources: to generate the same amount of electricity, it needs twenty-seven times less land than coal, eighteen times less than hydropower plants, and thirty-four times less than solar.”
Why bulldoze millions of public and private land acres for unreliable solar and wind–while imperiling water supplies and wildlife – when you can construct nuclear power plants using a fraction of land? This might cause radical environmentalist heads’ to spin.
It might be strange for a daughter of Soviet Union escapees to champion nuclear energy, except it’s not
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 was a result of collectivism and central planning. American nuclear energy development, once fully catalyzed, will be rewarded by private markets and not be wholly dependent on the government to exist and proliferate.
