Predictable and circular: These tired tropes against nuclear must go!

Stephanie Cooke’s latest opinion piece for the New York Time calls the nuclear revival a fantasy. But it is actually time to burst the anti-nuclear bubble.

Anti-nuclear stalwart Stephanie Cooke’s latest opinion piece for the New York Times makes the predictable and circular case against nuclear: we haven’t been building nuclear, and therefore we shouldn’t try and build nuclear in the future.

“World leaders are not unaware of the nuclear industry’s long history of failing to deliver on its promises, or of its weakening vital signs. Yet many continue to act as if a “nuclear renaissance” could be around the corner,” scoffed Cooke, later adding, “For much less money and in less time, the world can reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of renewables.”

To underline the difficulty of a nuclear revival, Cooke refers to delayed builds in the west such as Vogtle. The nuclear industry is condemned as completely hopeless and the whole technology ought to be scrapped because recent western builds have experienced heavy cost overruns. The fact that Russia, China and Korea are still building them efficiently? Doesn’t matter. The fact that we used to build them well in the past? Can’t be done again. The fact that France is the only developed country that can be said to have decarbonized in any meaningful way without relying on hydro AND THEY DID IT IN THE 70s BY ACCIDENT WITH NUCLEAR? Utterly memory-holed.

This approach is utterly absurd when applied to any other endeavor, including Cooke’s own pet technologies. Solar, EVs and wind all had to be be given massive subsidies over decades in order to reach economy of scale. In fact, they are still receiving enormous subsidies. If we followed her logic, then development in solar should have stopped with Solyndra.

It’s worth the time to unpack Cooke’s editorial, not just because it appeared in the New York Time but because these tired tropes appear over and over again as anti-nuclear activists move off the losing ground of scaremongering nuclear and instead attack it for being uneconomic.

Tired trope 1: The nuclear industry can’t do it!

Cooke:“Pledging to triple nuclear capacity by 2050 is a little like promising to win the lottery. For the United States, it would mean adding an additional 200 gigawatts of nuclear operating capacity (almost double what the country has ever built) to the 100 gigawatts or so that now exists, generated by more than 90 commercial reactors that have been running an average of 42 years. Globally it would mean tripling the existing capacity built over the past 70 years in less than half that time in addition to replacing reactors that will shut down before 2050.

This view is ahistoric. We know that nuclear builds all over the world took place in spurts, followed by decades of inactivity spurred on by anti-nuclear sentiments, stagnant load growth and cheap fossil fuels. Since we are trying to get off fossil fuels and look to experience massive load growth, we should be looking at the spurts, not the average growth rate, for guidance.

For instance, France built 56 reactors over a span of around 20 years between the late 70s and mid 1990s. To this day these reactors provide around 70% of the electricity in France with more to export besides. With the US economy roughly 9 times larger than the French economy and with 5 times the population, building 200 gigawatts of nuclear by 2050 is a challenge, but far from impossible, even before taking the possibility of technological advancement into account.

Tired trope 2: Renewables can do it all!

Cooke: “For much less money and in less time, the world can reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of renewables like solar, wind, hydropower and geothermal power, and by transmitting, storing and using electricity more efficiently. A recent analysis by the German Environment Agency examined multiple global climate scenarios in which Paris Climate Agreement targets are met, and it found that renewable energy ‘is the crucial and primary driver.’”

Actually, it’s totally unproven that a modern grid of any decent size can exist on nothing but intermittent renewables and battery storage. And on her way to cherry pick the German Environmental Agency’s analysis that renewables can do it all, Cooke had to step over the International Energy Agency, the US Department of Energy and others.

It’s easy to get models to show you this result or that, but nothing clarifies the mind like the threat of war. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe got started on nuclear projects. As Cooke correctly pointed out, they know how difficult it is to build nuclear power plants. But they also know that panels, turbines and batteries alone won’t replace Russian gas.

Tired Trope 3: nefarious deep state actors are secretly pushing nuclear

Cooke: “There’s a certain inevitability about the U.S. Energy Department’s latest push for more nuclear energy. The agency’s predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, brought us Atoms for Peace under Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s in a bid to develop the “peaceful” side of the atom, hoping it would gain public acceptance of an expanding arsenal of nuclear weapons while supplying electricity ‘too cheap to meter.’”

This is probably the most unhinged part of Cooke’s piece. She insinuates that “powerful nuclear bureaucracies” are somehow behind the drive for the nuclear revival. She doesn’t appear to offer any evidence beyond the fact that the Atomic Energy Commission used to exist. I wonder if Cooke envisages a “secrets of the temple” style society of bureaucrats passing on the atomic flame from generation to generation since the 50’s, waiting patiently…for decades at a time without action if necessary…to spring nuclear power forward and quash the renewables revolution.

If the nuclear Deep State is out there and they’re listening, I’d like to ask why they didn’t use their influence to block the nomination of the infamous Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chairman Gregory Jaczko, just the most ridiculous among a large number of anti-nuclear members of the NRC we’ve had over the years.

As we bust the tired tropes of nuclear being too expensive and slow, it’s also interesting to note that other tired tropes are missing: the ones scaremongering radiation and the dangers of nuclear waste for instance. I have two hypothesis: the elevated threat of climate change as an actual existential crisis takes the punch out of radiophobia. Or, could it be that repeated efforts to educate the public on how benign nuclear energy actually is might be bearing fruit?

The final trope I would like to dismiss is the idea that there is antagonism between nuclear and renewables. Better batteries are awesome and a worthy addition for any grid, including nuclear-dominant grids. As for renewable energy, where they are inexpensive and abundant they made a great addition to the grid: we surely need all the help we can get to support our massive future electrification.