America aims for nuclear-power renaissance

AFTER THE second world war, America’s newly created Atomic Energy Commission was on the hunt for a remote site where engineers could work out how to turn the raw, world-altering power contained in a nuclear bomb into electricity. They settled on the desert shrubland of south-eastern Idaho. Towns in the area fell over themselves to compete for the headquarters of the reactor test site, viewing it as a catalyst for growth. Idaho Falls, then a city of 19,000, launched what it called “the party plan”. Locals wooed officials at lunches, cocktail parties and tours of the city. The guest lists always included women who were “as winsome as possible” to make the town seem attractive to the (male) engineer in charge of choosing.

The party plan worked. Nearly 75 years later, Idaho Falls (with a population of 67,000) remains home to the test site’s successor and the centre of nuclear-power research in the United States: the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

Today, America’s nuclear-power industry is partying again. Nuclear is a carbon-free alternative to other sources of steady baseload power, such as coal and natural gas. Nuclear reactors are much smaller than wind or solar farms, which sprawl across landscapes and attract legal challenges from groups with different visions of how the land should be used. The need to decarbonise electric grids to limit greenhouse-gas emissions has spurred liberals, historically wary of nuclear power’s toxic-waste problem, to rethink their stance. In America, 46% of Democrats favour using nuclear energy for electricity, the highest proportion in a decade. Republicans have long approved of the technology.

But the biggest reason the nuclear sector is popping champagne is the billions of dollars the Biden administration is pumping into nuclear development via the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which made nuclear power eligible for the same tax credits as renewables like wind and solar; and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, which created a $6bn fund to help keep existing plants running. The Biden administration is even offering developers a bonus tax break if they build reactors in fossil-fuel areas, such as a coal-mining town, to funnel workers into green jobs, a core tenet of Joe Biden’s industrial policy.

Nuclear’s green makeover, and all of the federal cash on offer, have its boosters predicting an atomic renaissance after decades in the dark ages. Nuclear power currently provides about 19% of America’s electricity generation, but at least 13 reactors have been shut down since 2013 alone. California had planned to shutter its last remaining nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, which provides 9% of the state’s power. It is now using a $1.1bn grant from the infrastructure law to try to extend the plant’s life. West Virginia repealed a ban on new reactors. Bill Gates, who founded TerraPower, a nuclear startup, has expressed interest in building a plant there. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a lobby group, counts 12 states that passed laws in 2022 to help keep existing plants running, and attract new ones.

The Department of Energy (DoE) is praying that the party turns into a fully fledged rager. A recent report from the DoE suggests that America could triple its nuclear-power generation, to 300 gigawatts, by 2050, the year by which the Biden administration has pledged to reach net-zero emissions. This push would be driven by the development of new advanced reactors that the DoE is helping to fund.

But three massive difficulties could dampen the mood. The first is cost. Because their designs are so technical and take years to get approved, nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build. The DoE reckons that nuclear reactors need to cost about $3,600 per kilowatt to be built quickly around the country. But first-of-their-kind reactors are costing anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 per kilowatt. NuScale, a startup building a small modular reactor on INL’s campus, recently said the cost of its project would surge by 75%, to $9.3bn, due to inflation and higher interest rates.

The second question bedevilling some nuclear startups is where they are going to get fuel. Before the uranium from mines can be plugged into a reactor, it needs to be processed. Russia dominates uranium processing, and is the world’s only commercial supplier of high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, American lawmakers and executives have felt queasy about continuing to buy Russian uranium. Republicans in Congress have introduced several bills to reduce imports. But TerraPower needs HALEU for the reactor it is planning to build in a coal town in Wyoming. In December the firm said the plant would be delayed by at least two years for…