ONE THING IS CLEAR
The United States and 21 other countries pledged on Saturday at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, saying the revival of nuclear power was critical for cutting carbon emissions to near zero in the coming decades. Proponents of nuclear energy, which supplies 18 percent of electricity in the United States, say it is a clean, safe and reliable complement to wind and solar energy.
The first thing to mention about this is that all of it was in the works two decades ago. Today there are at least 61 nuclear power reactors under construction, with over 112 in the planning stages and another 318 proposals on the books. So, just like so many other commitments, such as reducing or eliminating new fossil fuel vehicle production by 2030, this pledge requires very little, if any, new investment or any effort of any kind to hit its mark. And that's true even if doing so made any sense, which it most certainly does not. Aside from being extraordinarily expensive and terribly slow to get up and running (with many new reactors taking a decade or more to build, and typically arriving far overdue on top of that, along with coming in many billions over their already ludicrous budgets) we also know nuclear to be both unreliable and unsafe. And that is true if we just compare nuclear to what else exists, not imagining what we all would like and expect to exist in the 2020s. If you need proof of all that, you're in luck! We have new examples to look at arriving all the time.
For example, in April of this year, Unit 1 of the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant (the largest nuclear plant in the US), just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, automatically shutdown due to “a loss of power to critical reactor coolant pumps, loss of hydraulic pressure in the main turbine, the main generator output breakers failing to automatically open, and the fast bus transfer not actuating.” Yikes. And this is a reactor that was previously listed as one of the most heavily monitored in the country due to continued significant safety concerns, violations, and critical failures, including the discovery of a non-functioning emergency core-cooling system and an inoperative diesel generator (which is essential to maintaining power and preventing a meltdown during an emergency. Think Fukushima. So is all of that a sign of reliability? Safety? Sure, why would you want three solar panels, a wind turbine, and a couple of batteries on your property when you could have a catastrophe in the waiting up-river of your town?
Do you need more? There are plenty.
In June, a Texas nuclear power plant, Vistra Energy’s Comanche Peak, saw its Unit 1 reactor go into emergency shutdown. An issue with a feed water pump resulted in the plant halting energy production and with it 1,235 megawatts (power for 250,000 homes) go offline for two days. As you would expect, the industry, energy company, and advocates insists such outages are rare; but, of course, Comanche Peak was the power plant that went offline for two weeks after a fire in the main transformer back in June of 2021, contributing to the tremendous stress on the Texas grid during that summer’s heatwave which saw officials calling on residents to limit their energy consumption, reduce air conditioning use and “avoid the use of large electronics like ovens and washing machines.” How do these facts pair with the propaganda you hear regarding the insufficiency and unreliability of solar and wind? Does the above make nuclear reactors really look like the only robust energy option, or even a good one, for the 21st century?
Or how about in August, when Unit 2 of DTE Energy’s Fermi 2 Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan, responsible for 30% of the state’s nuclear power, was shut down for a week. Not a few hours. Not over the weekend. A week. The plant halted energy production after a reactor coolant leak was discovered during routine inspection. But that's not unusual. Similar shutdowns occurred in 2018 with a transformer malfunction and valve issue, and in 2015 with a leak from a heat exchanger. And it should be noted this reactor is the successor to Fermi 1, which went into meltdown on November 29th, 1955 and then again on October 5th, 1966, inspiring the Bridges’ song We Almost Lost Detroit. Nuclear power is safe? You might ask yourself why a week after Hiroshima and Nagasaki folks were returning to the area, cleaning up, and rebuilding but Chernobyl and Fukushima are and will remain, according to those responsible for remediation, no-go zones for centuries.
More? It was a fault in the cabelling between the turbine and the electrical grid causing emergency systems to come online at the Prairie Island nuclear power plant in Welch, Michigan. The resulting loss of power generation affected both plant reactor units back in October and the outage is anticipated to continue until January of 2024. Three months! Troublingly, this event came just weeks after the same power company, Xcel Energy, saw its Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant in Minnesota shut down due to an issue with a pressure control valve in its turbine. And, amazingly, that fault arrived only months after they reported a recurring leak of tritium-laden water at the same plant — which itself was an unresolved problem arising from a much larger 400,000 gallon leak just months earlier. Reliable? Safe? By what standard? According to who?
And then in November, Entergy’s River Bend nuclear plant, 30km up the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge, Louisiana saw an emergency SCRAM. Control rods were plunged into the reactor core when a fault occurred in the plant’s water heating system. This, comically, was a fault and shutdown that took place when the plant was merely attempting to raise power generation to just 30% after its previous shutdown. And, to add to the absurdity, this most recent SCRAM occurred just six days after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sent a notice of violation to the energy company for failing to obtain an amendment to the reactor’s operating license before changing its internal rules for how to supply emergency cooling water to the plant in the event of a serious accident. During the same regulatory inspection, which the plant requires due to a history of problems (including falsifying tests, failing to complete safety checks, and a senior reactor operator giving an unauthorized person keys to a room containing sensitive equipment), the plant was found to have half a dozen near-violations in addition to its problem with emergency water supply rules. Learning of this, Edwin Lyman, director of Nuclear Power Safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told reporters “I would say that this report paints the picture of a plant with serious management problems that could endanger worker and public health and safety.” Oh, so safe! Oh, so reliable!
Oh, and Finland’s next-generation Olkiluoto 3 reactor, Europe’s largest, also suffered an outage in November. Finland’s newest reactor, plagued with problems in planning, construction, and operation, was taken offline on November 19th due to malfunction in the generator’s cooling system. The reactor was meant to be fully operational by November 21st but didn’t get up and running until the 24th. And then another unexpected “rapid shutdown” was caused during further testing on November 29th. And we don't need to get into how the plant was forced to throttle power generation last summer when, relative to alternatives, nuclear became far too expensive for anyone to buy — this, the best and latest nuclear energy example proponents have. Yikes!
And then there was Sweden’s Ringhals 4. The reactor had been out of commission from August 2022 until April 2023 due to a significant problem with a pressure vessel. Eight months?! Maintenance then saw the reactor shut down again in June, with restart postponed and postponed once more for an additional three weeks to July 19th. Oh, but then a valve failure on November 29th caused the reactor to, just once more, become nonoperational for another week — proving once again how ultra-reliable nuclear is.
I don't know, folks. One thing seems pretty clear: nuclear sucks so bad and in so many ways that other technologies just cannot compete. And to this day I can't find anyone to explain what the real benefits of nuclear are, if those even exist.
