24 Scientific American, July 2019VENTURES
THE BUSINESS OF INNOVATIONWade Roush is the host and producer of Soonish, a podcast
about technology, culture, curiosity and the future. He
is a co-founder of the podcast collective Hub & Spoke and
a freelance reporter for print, online and radio outlets,
such as MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, WBUR and WHYY.Illustration by Jay BendtI’ve Come
Around on
Nuclear Power
Climate change scares me more
than the risk of meltdowns
By Wade RoushFifty-four percent of Americans are opponents of nuclear pow
er, according to a 2016 Gallup poll. I can certainly understand
why. I used to be one of them. Back in the 1990s, I wrote an
en tire Ph.D. dissertation about the errors that led to disasters
such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and it didn’t leave me
with much faith in our ability to safely tap fission energy.
But in recent years I’ve swung around to a different point of
view. Today the specter of climate change scares me way more
than the risk of future meltdowns. It’s time to find ways to en
able the nuclear industry’s rebirth in the U.S.
The virtue of nuclear plants is that they plug into the exist
ing electrical grid and provide continuous power while emitting
zero carbon. Wind and solar are great, too, but we don’t yet have
the battery technology needed to make them useful as “base
load” power sources.
Without nuclear, it would be much harder to meet the
world’s growing power needs while limiting the average global
temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal of the 2015
Paris Agreement.
Fortunately, engineers have been rethinking every aspect of
reactor design, from the way fuel is packaged [see “Reactor Redo,”
by Rod McCullum; May 2019] to the way cores are cooled. All three
active reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant melted down in
2011 because an earthquake and the resulting tsunami destroyed
the backup diesel generators meant to power cooling pumps. Sev
eral companies, including Washington State–based TerraPower,
are working on passive designs that would use plain old convec
tion rather than electric pumps to carry away decay heat.
But TerraPower will likely build its first fullscale reactors
outside the U.S., vice chairman of the board Nathan Myhrvold
told me in a 2017 interview for Xconomy. “Frankly, if the whole
world was like the United States, we might not have ever done
this, because [the U.S. has] gotten so riskaverse that we don’t
want to try anything new,” Myhrvold said.
Today the main obstacle to new nuclear power investment in
the U.S. isn’t safety, it’s cost. Two new Westinghouse Electric Com
pany reactors under construction at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear
plant are five years behind schedule and $14 billion over budget.
Builders of traditional reactors have failed to follow basic
design, fabrication and supplychain principles proven in other
capitalintensive businesses such as pharmaceuticals and jet
engine manufacturing, a 2018 report from the M.I.T. Energy Ini
tiative found.
Then there’s the energy marketplace, which was turned up
side down by the fracking revolution of the 1990s. In the U.S.,
natural gas is so cheap and abundant that even wellrun nucle
ar plants can’t compete.
They can’t, that is, unless one accounts for the social cost of
carbon, a measure representing the economic damage that will
inevitably result from sealevel rise, wildfires and other conse
quences of carbon dioxide emissions. If electricity from fossil
fuel plants were taxed to reflect this cost, nuclear would sudden
ly become the more economical option, the M.I.T. report argues.
Because carbon taxes are a political nonstarter, the states of
New York and Illinois are going at it from the other direction,
forcing coal and gasburning utilities to purchase zeroemis
sions credits from nuclear plant owners. In both states, courts
have turned back power generators’ legal challenges to zero
emissions credits, and the new revenue has kept open five
plants that faced early closure.
We need to scale up these credits nationally to keep our exist
ing nuclear plants operating while removing obstacles to the
construction of safer new designs. If we allow ourselves to be
unnerved by the nuclear mistakes of the past, we’ll never win
the paramount race against global warming.JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]