Dig Deeper

Nuclear power gambles with disaster; even proponents acknowledge that accidents are inevitable. Smaller reactors would mostly be clustered together to generate more power and offer no more safety than larger ones.

Nuclear power is not inherently unsafe. Accidents are rare and getting rarer as engineers and operators learn lessons from accident causes. Moreover, if the industry moves to smaller reactors, any accidents that do happen will have smaller impact.

James Mahaffey, a nuclear engineer, argues that “[a]ccidents happen when operators do not follow the correct procedures, or because ambitious plant designers overlook glaring weaknesses–not because nuclear power is inherently unsafe.”

Fukushima and Chernobyl “are the only major accidents to have occurred in over 18,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation in 36 countries.”

The evidence over six decades shows that nuclear power is a safe means of generating electricity. The risk of accidents in nuclear power plants is low and declining. The consequences of an accident or terrorist attack are minimal compared with other commonly accepted risks. Radiological effects on people of any radioactive releases can be avoided.

In the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident, approximately 1,000 onsite reactor staff and emergency workers and 200,000 emergency and recovery workers were exposed to high-level radiation. It is estimated that the accident will cause about 4,000 eventual deaths.

The Fukushima nuclear reactor accident is estimated to have caused 2,313 premature disaster-related deaths, mainly in older people who had to be evacuated from the radiation zone around the plant.

After the Chernobyl accident, a total of 784,320 hectares of agricultural land and 694,200 hectares of forest were restricted from use. A towering radioactive plume spread over northern and central Scandinavia, negatively affecting pastureland, farming, and dairies.

At Fukushima, the release of Cesium 137, which has a half-life of about 30 years, extensively contaminated the soils around both Fukushima and neighboring prefectures.

Chernobyl cleanup expenses were 22.3% of Ukraine’s national budget; total spending by Belarus between 1991 and 2003 is estimated at more than $13 Billion.

In Ukraine, Chernobyl-related expenses were 22.3 percent of the national budget in 1991, declining gradually to 6.1 percent in 2002. Total spending by Belarus on Chernobyl between 1991 and 2003 is estimated at more than US $13 billion.

At Fukushima, the release of Cesium 137, which has a half-life of about 30 years, extensively contaminated the soils around both Fukushima and neighboring prefectures.

Nuclear power is of course far less dangerous to human lives and the environment than fossil fuel power. But this comparison is irrelevant. The proper comparison of nuclear power is not to fossil fuel energy but to renewal alternatives like wind power, solar power, and geothermal power. These are far less risky, dangerous and costly than nuclear power. Hydropower is also a renewable energy technology; however, it has proven to have unforeseen environmental costs in at least some instances.

In comparison to nuclear energy production, fossil fuel energy production is responsible for many more costly and deadly accidents, deaths and disease from air pollution, and environmental destruction including but not limited to climate change.

The presence of tritrium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that is a by-product of nuclear energy production, is a concern for the Environmental Protection Agency. Exposure to very high levels of tritium could increase risk of cancer. The EPA has determined that 20,000 pCi/L is the acceptable level of tritium in drinking water.

There have been leaks and spills. However, there is no evidence that these have caused environmental or health dangers. According to the NRC, ”(a)lthough on site ground water may have excess tritium, no leaks and spills so far have led to tritium levels in excess of 20,000 pCi/L in off-site groundwater or drinking water. Tritium rapidly disperses and dissipates in the environment, and as a result, tritium from leaks and spills is typically not detected outside the facility boundary.”

High-level nuclear waste (HLNW) can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, though it is likely to remain a danger to the environment for a relatively short period of half a millennium.

The total high-level nuclear waste produced in more than 50 years of operation by nuclear power plants is in fact quite small. It would, if stacked end to end, cover a football field to a depth of approximately 12 yards. HLNW can be safely stored in cooling pools and then in rugged containers made of reinforced concrete, called “dry casks.”

“Storage of spent fuel in dry casks has a flawless record; there hasn’t been a single case of dangerous radiotoxic exposure to facility workers or local communities. Experts agree: we can safely store and transport waste in dry casks for at least a century.”

​France reprocesses nuclear waste. This is complicated and expensive, but it significantly reduces the volume of nuclear waste that must be permanently and safely stored.

​Even nuclear proponents acknowledge the dangers of nuclear waste and the difficulty of finding adequate solutions for storage. As Jameson McBride of the pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute writes: “…the challenge of nuclear waste is not “solved,” and nuclear advocates must take public concern about the fuel cycle seriously… Developing innovative solutions to the waste problem is severely needed for the past, present, and future of nuclear in the US.

Experts don’t agree that we can safely store HLNW in dry casks over the long term. For example, an article in Chemical and Engineering News points out that “salt particles…can form chloride-rich corrosive brines, leading to small cracks that breach the cylinder and release harmful material and radiation.”

Not all nuclear waste is stored in dry casks. High Level Nuclear Waste has to be cooled in nuclear waste tanks for at least 7 years before it can be removed to dry casks.

About 88,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors remain stranded at reactor sites, and this number is increasing by some 2,000 metric tons each year. These 77 sites are in 35 states and threaten to become de facto permanent disposal facilities. Much of this waste remains stored in pools.

In 2013 and again in 2021 it was discovered that nuclear waste tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State were leaking.

In 2022, Washington State Department of Ecology and the US Department of Energy reached an agreement to address Hanford’s leaking underground tanks. Community activists expressed concern that the deal could allow the tanks to leak for years.

Their concerns are well-founded. Currently, engineers are considering “vitrification,” in which waste is solidified by heating with glass-forming materials to create solid blocks that could one day be buried deep underground. Although proposed in 2002, the vitrification plant is still not operational. France vitrifies high level nuclear waste; however, the nuclear waste at Hanford, is unusually complex and presents apparently intractable problems.

Indigenous Communities Are More Likely to be Burdened by Nuclear Waste–for example, the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota agreed to temporarily store spent fuel from a nearby power plant. Although the Federal government promised to remove the waste thirty years ago, the repository has tripled in size.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Southeastern Washington is now the largest Superfund toxic waste site in North America and one of the largest nuclear cleanup projects in the world. Members of the Umatilla, Yakama, and other fishing communities along the Columbia have a disproportionately higher exposure to Hanford’s toxic by-products due to their Salmon consumption.

Radioactive waste from uranium mining has also posed dangers for Native communities.

“In the past, the waste rock produced by underground and open pit mining was piled up outside the mine. This practice has caused problems, including on Navajo lands where more than half of the small, abandoned uranium mines from the middle of the 20th century and their wastes remain. Wind can blow radioactive dust from the wastes into populated areas and the wastes can contaminate surface water used for drinking. Some sites also have considerable groundwater contamination.”

DGRs are very safe. A DGR isolates nuclear waste underground in stable geological formations. Isolation is provided by a combination of engineered and natural barriers (rock, salt, clay) and no obligation to actively maintain the facility is passed on to future generations. This is often termed a ‘multi-barrier’ concept, with the waste packaging, the engineered repository, and the geology all providing barriers to prevent the radionuclides from reaching humans and the environment. In addition, deep groundwater is generally devoid of oxygen, minimizing the possibility of chemical mobilization of waste.

Nuclear Proponents Respond: The accident at WIPP was caused by unnecessary mistakes that reflected mismanagement, bureaucratic failures, and a breakdown of the “nuclear culture.” We can learn from this incident to prevent future accidents.

DGR’s are not necessarily safe. A costly accident occurred in February 2014 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the only deep geologic repository in the United States. The long-term cost of the accident could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

Several countries are proceeding steadily through research, licensing and outreach to prepare for the construction and eventual operation of deep geological repositories Finland’s DGR is now operational.

Sweden is far along toward building its DGR in Forsmark and expects operation to begin in the 2030s.

France has selected its site and in January 2023 the French Radioactive Waste Management Agency submitted a construction permit.

Switzerland’s national radioactive waste disposal cooperative, Nagra, recently identified its site and will prepare applications to be submitted to the Federal Council in 2024.

DGR’s are costly to build and to operate– in the case of Finland’s Onkalo facility, 2.4 billion euros to store nuclear waste until 2120.

According to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) most countries with large nuclear power programs, including the United States, will not be establishing deep storage repositories in the next 20 years.

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board examined programs in 13 selected countries that account for 80 percent of worldwide nuclear power‒generating capacity. Of these three (Finland, Sweden, and France) are close to implementing a technically and politically accepted effort to develop a DGR. The other 10 countries are on a longer timeline, and in four countries, including the United States, the timeline is at this point indefinite.

The geological requirements for a deep storage facility are complex to identify and years of research is necessary before a suitable site can be found. As the NWTRB, points out, “it has become clear that performing convincing technical analysis in the face of considerable temporal and spatial uncertainties is more complex and challenging than earlier anticipated.” Moreover, in addition to the challenging technical issues that must be addressed in siting a DGR, there are institutional and political challenges, such as “establishing credible implementing and regulatory agencies, creating trusting relationships with local communities, and putting into place legitimate decision-making processes.”

In many instances, local opposition to the establishment of a storage facility has either stopped or delayed many DGR projects (in the US see the failure of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada).

Even nuclear proponents agree that achieving local community consent to site a DGR is challenging. Breakthrough Institute’s Jason McBride suggests that “a voluntary and competitive process for site selection — like reverse auctions at the airport gate for giving up a seat — could help minimize conflict with the local community.”

In the meantime, France’s state-owned facility for reprocessing and storing nuclear waste is about to run out of space by 2030 at which time all nuclear reactors would have to be shut down.

The government-owned nuclear energy company, EDF is hurrying to build an extra refrigerated pool at a cost of $1.37 billion– but that will not be ready until 2034 at the earliest.

Considering these examples, even if the US began right now to work on a Deep Geological Repository, it would not be available for storing high level nuclear waste until 2080 at best.

Meanwhile tons of dangerous nuclear waste will continue to be produced and stored above ground. Even if no new nuclear plants are built, a DGR will still be necessary just for the existing waste now sitting dangerously above ground.

If one or more deep geologic repositories are built, nuclear waste from around the US will have to be transported there from existing nuclear plants.

Used nuclear fuel has been routinely transported across the US on over 1300 occasions over the past 50 years for reasons other than consolidation and disposal… There has never been any release of radioactive material to the public from used fuel in transportation.

The safety of transport by rail is very much in question. The U.S. regulatory system has been colonized by the corporations it is supposed to regulate. Over 1,000 derailments occur every year in the United States. And over the last seven years, the costs from derailments of trains carrying hazardous materials have increased.

While it is true that there has not yet been a nuclear waste transport accident, “there is little experience with managing transport operations on the scale that would be needed to move the tens of thousands of metric tons of spent nuclear fuel that have been and are still being generated by the U.S. commercial nuclear industry.”

​Furthermore, much of the high-level nuclear waste that has been transported in the U.S. so far has been transported and regulated by the US military, particularly the Navy.

The term “advanced nuclear reactor” refers to a broad category of fission reactor designs that boast considerable improvements relative to current-generation nuclear technologies. They include smaller next-generation light-water fission reactors (such as NuScale’s Small Modular Reactor) and also non-light-water fission reactors—principally sodium-cooled fast reactors, molten-salt reactors, and high temperature gas-cooled reactors.

Advanced is Not Necessarily Better. There are concerns about the safety, sustainability, and security of these new designs, according to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Nuclear energy requires painstaking, time-consuming, and resource-intensive research and development (R&D). The current designs will need much more testing and development before they can be safely and reliably deployed.

National Security:

“New reactors must also use new fuels, which must be licensed as well as produced, managed during use, and stored and disposed of when spent. Some new reactor designs depend on the use of fuels that require higher enrichments of uranium—material that the United States currently has little capability to produce. The higher enriched fuels have set off concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation and would require international safeguards.”

Nuclear Waste:

SMR reactors will increase the volume of nuclear waste, not reduce it. A recent study of nuclear waste streams from three types of small modular reactors being developed by Toshiba, NuScale, and Terrestrial Energy. showed that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30.

Furthermore, molten salt SMRs will create high level nuclear waste that presents serious disposal problems.

“Waste from molten salt reactors will be highly radioactive due to fission products that were not vented in the off-gas and will include halides like uranium tetrafluoride. If such waste forms are buried without processing, and they interact with water, they would produce corrosive hydrofluoric acid (Krall and Allison 2018). Therefore, they would need to be processed before disposal using processes that will be costly and complex; moreover, such processing has never been carried out at scale.”

In any case: all small modular reactors will produce radioactive waste for which there is NO permanent safe repository in the U.S.

The costs of SMR’s will be lower than traditional nuclear power plants, because rather than being built on site, they will be manufactured as modular units and transported to the site.

Manufacturing off-site has proved not to be more cost-effective than traditional nuclear plant construction. Westinghouse’s experiment in off-site manufacturing of nuclear plant components—the AP100—is a case in point. The attempt to construct AP100 plants in South Carolina and Georgia was a financial disaster that led Westinghouse to declare bankruptcy in 2017.

Although construction at the Georgia plant went ahead, South Carolina cancelled construction in 2017 after sinking $9 billion into the project—a cost that will have to be paid by ratepayers.

Savings made from factory-built modules will have to compensate for the scale economies lost. A 1,600MW reactor is likely to be much cheaper than 10 reactors of 160MW. And it will be expensive to test the claim that production line techniques will compensate for lost scale economies.

The failure of NuScale’s proposed SMR power plant–a project to be built in Idaho Falls for a regional utility, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), demonstrates the difficulties facing SMR developers.

In 2020, due to increasing costs of the project, eight of the municipalities in UAMPS who signed on to a development contract with Nuscale dropped out.

Three years later, in January 2023, UAMPS announced that the estimated cost per megawatt-hour (MWH) of the NuScale SMR had risen from $58/MWH to $89/MWH. This cost would be much higher without the $4 billion in subsidies from the US government. Total cost had risen from $5.3 to $9.3 billion.

In November 2023, NuScale and UAMPS announced that they were terminating the project.

Shortly thereafter, a suit against NuScale was filed on behalf of investors, claiming that between March and November 2023.

As even nuclear proponents acknowledge, the investment climate for building new nuclear projects is extremely poor. “Almost all these kinds of MoUs and contracts, as we saw with the NuScale contract, are just not worth the paper they’re written on. There are so many off ramps and outs for both sides and no one’s willing to expose themselves to the downside risk of projects that go way over budget cost and take too long,” says Ted Nordhaus, Founder and Executive Director of The Breakthrough Institute (quoted in “Cancelled NuScale contract weighs heavy on new nuclear.”

According to the Breakthrough Institute, in order to develop and build advanced nuclear reactors, the industry will require huge subsidies and guarantees from the US government.

The costs of SMRs will fall as more experience is gained in manufacturing and construction.

According to a study by Jessica R. Lovering and Jameson R. McBride, “[w]hile SMRs and microreactors are considered appropriate for niche markets today, this analysis shows that with significant volume, there is potential for their cost to decline enough to be competitive with large nuclear power plants. With targeted policies and fast learning rates, SMRs could reach cost parity with fossil fuels before 2050.”

There is little evidence to support the claim that the costs of SMRs will fall over time.

Learning from experience, which may characterize the history of production costs in some industries, has not occurred in building of nuclear power plants. A study by MIT found in three out of four U.S. reactor designs, the first to be built was also the cheapest. Only General Electric’s BWR-4 boiling water reactor managed to get cheaper after the first plant. But 14 out of 18 of the plants studied ended up being more expensive.

An analysis of the costs of two SMR’s currently in development, showed that even assuming economies of scale, SMR’s will remain far more costly per MWH than wind or solar.

Analyst Michael Barnard looked at two SMR’s far enough along in development that their costs over time could be calculated: Nucsale and Last Energy. Based on the companies’ current projected costs for their SMR, Barnard calculated what their costs would be once production of their SMRs had expanded enough to achieve economies of scale. “Data on the current costs of small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) is starting to roll in. As a result, it’s now possible to make some projections of how long it would take for their costs to drop to the level of renewables today. The results aren’t good for SMRs…. with massive increases in numbers in both cases and with the assumption that they’ll hit current cost projections, neither gets close to the current global averages for wind or solar. Neither gets below $50 per MWh in 2023 dollars.”

Nuclear Energy Can Help Address the Climate Crisis in Time If the NRC Would Stop Its Over-regulation and Arbitrary Regulation of the Nuclear Power Industry: The NRC Is At Fault for the Long Development and Construction Timeline for New Nuclear Reactors.

Allison MacFarlane, former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, points out that “The nuclear industry is plagued by long construction delays and cost overruns..the construction time to build most reactors in the United States has surpassed 10 years… Given that climate scientists are warning that the world must end the use of fossil fuels by 2050 in order to prevent catastrophic climate change, building new nuclear reactors is a waste of time and money.”

The Vogtle plant in Georgia is the only new build of nuclear reactors in the United States since 1985. The plant’s two reactors were expected to start in 2016 and 2017 after five years of construction. Instead, Reactor 3 did not come on line until July 2023 and Reactor 4 not until April 2024. And the recent new build experience in Europe is similar: the French EPR reactor design has experienced multiple delays and large cost overruns in both France and Finland. These megaprojects face challenges in program management and quality control and regulatory issues that result in lengthy delays.

In 2022 the French government was forced to completely nationalize the French nuclear power company EDF for $10 Billion. The company suffered from unplanned outages at its nuclear fleet, delays and cost overruns in building new reactors, and power tariff caps imposed by the government to shield households from soaring electricity prices.

In December 2022, TerraPower announced that its proposed sodium SMR demonstration reactor in Kemmerer, WY would be delayed at least two years past its previously proposed 2028 completion date due to problems with supply of HALEU, no longer available due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The NRC is driven by bureaucratic self-preservation rather than reasonable concern for safety.

Rani Franovich and Matthew Wald from the Breakthrough Institute argue that “this is a problem common to many government bureaucracies and particularly those that regulate safety, where bad outcomes can mean injury or death. The first imperative isn’t to let the public enjoy the benefits of the regulated activity (in this case, clean, copious electricity) but rather to preserve the agency. And the main sign of success is not screwing up.

The cancellation of NuScale’s contract is another example of how nuclear regulations are killing innovation in the industry. Nuclear energy remains saddled with an outdated and radically conservative regulatory framework that substantially overstates the public health risks associated with nuclear technology while failing entirely to account for its public health and environmental benefits.

Over-regulation by government agencies is not at fault for cost-overruns and long delays in building new nuclear power plants.

Builders of nuclear plants regularly overpromise on costs and fail to anticipate construction problems that will arise because building a nuclear power plant is extremely complex and safety regulations are complex.
For example, an analysis of the causes of delays in construction at the V.C. Summer reactor, performed by Bechtel Corp and paid for by the South Carolina government, found that the project was plagued by flawed construction plans, faulty designs, inadequate management and low worker morale. Bechtel did not cite nuclear agency over-regulation as a cause of the delays.

For example, Finland’s Okilito nuclear power plant in Finland originally planned to deliver power to the grid by 2009, began operations 14 years later—-in April 2023. An analysis of these delays by Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority cited design problems, managerial problems, and shortage of equipment.

According to Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority the reasons for this long delay lie primarily in an overambitious original schedule for a plant that is first of its kind and larger than any NPP built earlier, inadequate completion of design and engineering work prior to start of construction, shortage of experienced designers, lack of experience managing large construction, worldwide shortage of qualified equipment manufacturers.

Safety regulations are complex because knowledge about the potential dangers of nuclear reactors has continuously increased over the time that nuclear power has been operating.

As more reactors were brought online, and more experience was gained operating them, more was learned about potential things that might go wrong. Plants experienced, among other things: loss of normal and emergency power, safety systems not properly connected, failure of control rods to operate properly, large pipe failures, fuel leakage, malfunctioning valves and cables, and structural failures. In some cases, such as the fires at San Onofre (1967), Indian point (1971) and Browns Ferry (1972), the accidents were quite serious. The AEC/NRC began to learn that their previous attempts to model reactor failure were inadequate.

Moreover, nuclear plants have to be protected from both natural events and terrorist attacks which could have incredibly horrific consequences—much greater than those posed by attacks on any other type of power plant.

For example, nuclear plants require a significant amount of concrete for the foundations, as well as the containment building. Because it performs a shielding function, nuclear plant concrete must meet stringent safety-related requirements. The concrete shield must be able to withstand a plane being flown into it, as well as earthquakes and tornados. These requirements also make on-site concrete construction more difficult and error-prone, therefore more costly.

And it could be argued that rather than being overly cautious, the NRC has not done enough to protect the public from nuclear accidents.

For example, on August 10, a powerful storm called a derecho swept through the Midwest with wind gusts of up to 130 miles per hour, cutting off the external power supply at the Duane Arnold Energy Center, whose General Electric reactor is of the same type and vintage as the doomed Fukushima Daiichi units. Operators were able to shut down safely. Nevertheless, the NRC declined to conduct a more intensive inquiry into this near miss.

And these nuclear industry regulatory failures happen in other countries too.

Japan’s nuclear authority had knowledge about the earthquake danger to Fukushima power plant but failed to enforce necessary changes that would have prevented the disaster caused by the tsunami in 2011.

According to Linus Blomqvist, “the land-use intensities of the different electricity sources differ by four orders of magnitude — that’s a factor of 10,000…Nuclear had the lowest median land-use intensity at 7.1 ha/TWh/year, and biomass the highest at 58,000 ha/TWh/year…

Using ten prominent proposed decarbonization pathways, we calculated the total land footprint of each, based on their energy mixes. All the scenarios at least double the land footprint, with Jacobson and Delucci’s having by far the largest on the order of 500-900 million hectares, by 2030. The latter figure is roughly the same as the total land area of the United States!”

There are large differences in land footprint within a single energy technology… “land use depends a lot on how the technology is deployed, and the local context…[for example], whether you mount solar panels on rooftops or on the ground. Rooftop solar obviously needs much less additional land; we’re just using space that is already occupied, on top of existing buildings….The land between wind turbines can be used for other activities.”

A 2016 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that solar installation just on rooftops could supply roughly 39% of national electric sector sales (based on 2013 data).

According to Harvard physicist Mara Prentiss, more than half of the surface area necessary for solar energy production could be provided through locating solar panels on rooftops and parking lots throughout the country (Mara Prentiss, Energy Revolution: The Physics and the Promise of Efficient Technology, Harvard University Press, 2015).

Renewable energy is generated from natural resources that are constantly replenished, such as sunlight, wind, and water. However, it is also intermittent, and its availability is subject to weather patterns and seasonal fluctuations. This means that renewable energy cannot provide a consistent and reliable supply of energy on its own…Nuclear power plants…operate continuously at a constant output level. This means that they can help to maintain grid stability even when there are sudden changes in demand or supply. In fact, nuclear power plants are often used as the backbone of the grid because of their ability to provide a stable source of energy.

“The combination of inexpensive, intermittent renewable energy and dispatchable nuclear energy, and the blending or averaging of costs, will produce abundant energy at affordable rates, and it will be reliable, clean, and carbon-free.”

Nuclear power is not necessary to ensure a reliable supply of electricity in a renewable energy system.

Geo-thermal and hydroelectric power—both renewable sources of energy—are constant.

Indeed, as renewable proponent Marc Jacobsen argues, hydroelectric and geo-thermal can complement solar and wind power. On the other hand, geo-thermal power is not available everywhere (while sun and wind are ubiquitous) and hydroelectric power can pose other environmental problems—as we have seen in California and the Pacific Northwest with the decimation of the native wild salmon population.

In many places, solar plus batteries is already cheaper than coal or nuclear and is replacing both. In fact, battery costs have declined 97% since 1991. The more storage costs decline, the more storage will be coupled with Wind, Water, and Sun (WWS) generation to keep the grid stable.

It is also necessary and possible to improve energy efficiency. “Efficiency improvements—such as switching to LEDs and insulating buildings—can reduce electricity consumption. Utilities can also give financial incentives to encourage consumers to shift the time of their energy use to periods when sunlight or wind is available.”

Proponents of SMRs claim that unlike large nuclear power plants, their reactors can more easily be powered up and down, supplying additional power to renewables when necessary. This mode of operation is called “load-following.”

France and Germany both utilize “load-following” in the operation of their nuclear power grids. These grids are powered primarily by traditional large nuclear reactors. Regulatory limitations are a check on how frequently and to what degree nuclear plants can be powered up and down. Nonetheless, experience in both countries demonstrates the feasibility of load-following. Although there is some concern that frequent shifts in power output can cause strain in components and increase maintenance costs, France’s nuclear power agency, EDF, reports that “the transition to flexible operations had little impact on maintenance costs and a low impact on unplanned capability load factors, and it stressed that its success hinged on appropriate designs and well-trained operators.”

Insofar as intermittence is a problem, the use of SMRs to “smooth out” the grid with load-following is unlikely for both a)technical and b)economic reasons.

a) Powering nuclear plants up and down poses risks, because frequent and steep temperature changes may lead to rupture of the metallic cladding around the reactor and can reduce operating life, increase maintenance costs, and the escape of fission products.

b) “Nuclear reactors, whether small or large, are not economically suitable for responding to variability because they have high fixed (capital) costs and low variable (fuel) costs. This is why nuclear power plants have been used as a baseload electricity source; it spreads out the fixed costs over the largest number of kilowatt-hours, making each one cheaper. Responding to variability will mean operation at partial load for much of the time, raising costs per unit of electricity. For instance, the cost per unit of electricity from a NuScale small modular reactor would rise by about 20 percent if the capacity factor is reduced from 95 percent to 75 percent.”

Renewable solar energy production and battery storage depend on minerals (such as lithium, copper, graphite, zinc, cobalt, copper, and nickel) and rare earth metals that are being mined in environmentally destructive ways.

Additionally, although many elements of wind turbines are recyclable, wind turbine blades are difficult to recycle. Today, many wind turbine blades end up in landfills.

None of these problems are unsurmountable. Mining practices can be regulated to be sustainable. Recycling of metals and minerals can and should be greatly expanded.

“Reducing the [mining] sector’s environmental and social footprint means adopting improved regulations and lower-impact methods of mining. This can be done, for example, by improving community consultation processes, ensuring comprehensive mine closure and remediation of abandoned mine sites, and exploring ways to reduce or reuse mining waste.”

“At present, average recycling rates for these resources are below 1% of the total supply. By contrast, the recycling rate for steel cans in the U.S. is now 71%. Increasing recycling rates for the minerals needed to produce renewable energy equipment to just 5% would go far to overcome any problems of supply shortages.”

In addition to recycling, opportunities will also emerge to economize on the level of minerals and metals necessary to produce solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, as production technologies improve along with the rapid expansion of the industry. Substitute materials can also be developed for those materials that remain in short supply”.