Ted Nordhaus, Alex Trembath, and Jessica Lovering :
(From previous issue)
Even in the power sector, the United States and most other developed countries have mostly stopped building nuclear power plants. Demand for nuclear power is growing slowly, public fears of nuclear accidents and radiation are vastly out of step with the actual risk, and liberalized electricity markets have undermined the kind of long-term planning that a cost-effective build-out of large conventional nuclear power plants requires. In contrast, wind and solar have been growing at a rapid rate from a tiny base over the last decade. But wind and solar installation around the world has reliably stalled as their share has approached about 20 percent of electrical grids. At that point, sometimes intermittent wind and solar will generate nearly all the grids electricity needs and sometimes none at all, so the costs of dealing with high penetrations of variable renewable energy sources start to become prohibitive.
In the face of such challenges, climate advocates have engaged in one version or another of magical thinking. There is hope that some combination of better climate science and mounting climate catastrophes will motivate public support for a World War II-style mobilization of wind and solar energy. There is faith that pumping subsidies into existing solar and wind technologies will result in incremental improvements that over time will accrue to the sorts of radical breakthroughs that would be necessary to scale those technologies to levels beyond what is today technically and economically feasible. There is also the belief, not much supported empirically, that a price on carbon or other regulatory mandates will spur private entrepreneurs to come up with the breakthroughs we will need to move human societies wholesale off of fossil fuels once and for all.
Given the scale of what would be necessary to have much impact on the global climate, some level of magical thinking may be unavoidable. One way or another, the world will need to develop and deploy technologies that don’t yet exist on a massive and unprecedented scale. But there is one other possibility that hasn’t much been on the table until relatively recently. In recent years, a new generation of nuclear engineers has launched a slew of advanced nuclear energy start-ups. The technologies aren’t anything like the nuclear reactors operating around the world today, nor are the companies anything like the midcentury goliaths that commercialized the current generation of nuclear reactors. The new designs are small, hyperefficient, and radically safe. They can’t melt down, are often a tenth or less the size of conventional light-water reactors, can be manufactured in factories just like wind turbines and solar panels, and can operate at sufficiently high temperatures to provide heat and power for steel, cement, hydrogen, and fertilizer production. Like wind and solar, these reactors produce energy with zero carbon dioxide. Unlike wind and solar, they produce it 24/7.
The United States is unlikely to embark upon the kind of state-led, top-down nuclear build-out that allowed France and Sweden to virtually entirely decarbonize their power sectors with nuclear power, but it might be able to embark on an entrepreneur- and venture-led effort to radically disrupt the nuclear sector. Doing so might allow the United States to once again lead the world in developing nuclear power on a planet that will soon enough have nine billion energy-hungry consumers. Reforming the Department of Energy, the national laboratories, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission so that this sort of radical innovation would be possible might be just the sort of thing that congressional Republicans and the new administration would be able to get behind. And a climate mitigation effort that featured an innovative, entrepreneurial nuclear sector competing for growing global energy markets might persuade many U.S. conservatives to take the climate challenge a lot more seriously.
In the meantime, the prospects for a coherent climate policy in a Trump administration are exceedingly dim. But one thing the Trump era ought to do is challenge climate advocates to grapple seriously with why their politics and policies have failed so consistently for the last several decades. More than anything that is likely to happen in the next Congress, such a reckoning might offer a more hopeful and optimistic path for climate advocacy in the years to come.
(Ted Nordhaus is Executive Director at the Breakthrough Institute. Alex Trembath is Communications Director at the Breakthrough Institute. Jessica Lovering is Energy Director at the Breakthrough Institute).
