The gullibility of the human species is a sight to behold. Take these examples, from a list of superstitions.
According to Joshua Partlow, Washington Post Mexico bureau chief, putting two mirrors in front of each other opens a threshold for the devil. In Lithuania, it is forbidden to whistle indoors, because the noise is believed to summon demons. In South Korea, it is commonly believed that prolonged exposure to a running fan will cause hypothermia and asphyxiation.
Here’s one not from that list. “Even the smallest dose of radiation is not safe and will harm you.” In the United States alone, there are more than 80 organizations, many well-funded, that oppose nuclear energy, and their misguided efforts have cost this nation dearly.
The sheer stupidity of eschewing the most powerful, most efficient, and cleanest generator of electricity is truly beyond belief. But here we are. Irrational fears early on drove regulators to create absurd “safety” limits for radiation, and these in turn dramatically drove up the cost of bringing a nuclear power plant online.
Thanks to President Eisenhower’s focus on “Atoms for Peace,” the U.S. nuclear energy industry got off to a bangup start in the 1950s, and by the late 1960s, overnight construction costs for new reactors had dropped to $600 to $900 per kilowatt in today’s dollars – cheaper even than today’s natural gas power plants.
As the Vietnam War raged, supply chains and skilled labor for a growing nuclear energy industry became stressed, causing construction delays and cost hikes. At the same time, regulators began finding new reasons to add costs to nuclear energy, from earthquake contingency plans in California to industry-supported upgrades to core cooling systems.
President Nixon’s National Environmental Policy Act opened the door for citizen lawsuits to intervene in the licensing and construction process, sometimes causing further slowdowns that added costs. Two Nixon-created agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1974), have consistently stifled nuclear energy development.
By the early 1970s, nuclear construction costs had risen to $1,800 to $2,500 per kilowatt in today's dollars — about the cost of modern wind farms. Then the sensationalist coverage of the very minor incident at Three Mile Island fueled the anti-nuclear movement as if someone had poured gasoline on a fire.
In short order, construction costs jumped as high as $7,000 per kilowatt (in today’s dollars) and all 51 reactors then under construction began facing major regulatory delays, changes in safety procedures, and new back-fit requirements. The result was that not a single new nuclear reactor was built in the U.S. between 1978 and 2013.
Meanwhile, costs for nuclear power plants remained fairly stable in France, Japan, and Canada, and costs in South Korea actually went down. While in Japan and France today a nuclear reactor can be brought online in five to six years, licensing, constructing, and connecting a nuclear power plant to the energy grid in the U.S. can take up to 20 years and cost up to $30 billion.
The primary reason for higher costs and longer development times is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which appears designed to thwart any new power plant development. Way back in 1992, the Reagan-appointed NRC chairman Kenneth Rogers boasted that his agency “had been pushed in the right direction [obstructing new nuclear reactors] because of the pleas and protests of nuclear watchdog groups.”
A 2016 study by the Breakthrough Institute confirms this sobering fact. Senior author Jessica Lovering explains that, “The biggest thing we found is that there’s nothing intrinsic to nuclear that leads to cost escalations. It depends on what policies are in place, on the market dynamics. You get very different cases in different countries.”
A 2022 report from Robert Hargraves exposes the hypocrisy of President Biden’s “American Jobs Plan,” which includes funding for developing advanced nuclear reactors and more efficient use of existing reactors but does little to address the regulatory bottlenecks that tripled costs and lead time for the newly commissioned Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia.
According to Hargraves, the Vogtle plants project costs of over $9,000 per kilowatt of generating capacity – three times the cost for newly built fission power plants in the United Arab Emirates. Startups like ThorCon, Hargraves says, claim capital costs just above $1 per kilowatt using their clean liquid fuel technology and shipyard mass production.
The NRC’s public radiation exposure standards are a chief culprit, says Hargraves. Ionizing radiation is measured in Sieverts (Sv); even a brief dose of 10 Sv is deadly and a 1 Sv dose brings a risk of acute radiation sickness, while a dose above 0.1 Sv can slightly increase cancer risk. But the NRC limits annual public radiation exposure from nuclear power to 0.001 Sv, which is in many areas lower than ambient levels and well below the dosage given to cancer patients.
Among top-tier nations, only Germany appears even more backward than the United States in commitment to nuclear energy. The Swedish government just announced its own shift back toward nuclear energy, as Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson announced that wind and solar are too “unstable” to meet Sweden’s energy needs. In “substantial industrialized economies,” Svantesson said, “only a nuclear pathway is viable to remain industrialized and competitive.”
Even closer by, Canada, which just a year ago excluded nuclear from its green bond framework, has changed its tune. The new federal budget offers a 15 percent refundable Investment Tax Credit for nuclear and a 30 percent ITC for nuclear energy equipment manufacturing and for processing or recycling nuclear fuels (as part of its clean energy program).
The Canadian budget also explicitly backs nuclear power through a range of other initiatives, such as an extension of reduced tax rates, financing from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, cash for the regulatory authority, and half a billion dollars in small modular reactor project investment. Moreover, the Ontario government has begun pre-development work to site a large-scale nuclear power build at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, already the world’s largest operating nuclear facility.
Back in the U.S., the Biden Administration’s nuclear effort is highlighted by the floating of a proposal to exclude the nation’s largest deposits of uranium ore from further exploitation. Anti-nuclear groups are demanding Biden create the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument that would shut down 1.1 million acres of what one uranium company executive called “some of the most valuable uranium deposits in the United States.”
The “brilliance” of such a move would parallel the Biden Administration’s acceptance of the Paris agreements and his electric vehicle mandates, under which China (and India) can continue developing coal resources while selling high-priced lithium-ion batteries to American manufacturers who will be unable to compete with cheaper Chinese-made EVs.
The U.S. imports much of its uranium for power generation from Russia and Kazakhstan, which, like China, operate their mines with far fewer environmental restrictions. There is really nothing like making your own nation dependent upon its two greatest enemies all because your nation’s regulatory agencies, media, and official policies are based on fear and the people’s gullibility.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and a frequent writer on public policy issues.