Nuclear power in unlikely to play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., says a new analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper first looks at large, advanced light water reactors, concluding. “It appears most unlikely that any new large plants will be built over the next several decades.”
That leaves last, best hope for U.S. nuclear to smaller, modular reactors. The PNAS analysis is also skeptical of this. The authors write that SMR advocates “in the absence of a dramatic change in the policy environment, have been unable to make a convincing case.” The pessimistic report finds that, despite nuclear power’s technical promise for reducing carbon air emissions from electric generation, “the United States appears set to virtually lose nuclear power, and thus a wedge of reliable and low-carbon energy, over the next few decades.”
The lead author of the article – “US nuclear power: The vanishing low-carbon wedge” – is Carnegie Mellon’s Granger Morgan, long an insightful supporter of atomic power. The other authors are Ahmed Abdulla of the University of California, San Diego; Michael Ford of Harvard University; and Michael Rath, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon.
The research team says, “For several years, we have been evaluating the potential role that new nuclear power technologies might play” in decarbonizing the U.S. generating fleet. That role is not likely to be filled. Nor is the rest of the world, other than China, likely to deploy nuclear as a greenhouse gas reduction strategy.
Some nuclear advocates tout advanced reactor designs, particularly non-LWR designs, as the key to a nuclear revival. The PNAS paper says they will arrive too late. That’s been the strategy of the U.S. Department of Energy, with a goal of two new designs ready for commercial application by “the early 2030s.” The Morgan team looked at detailed budget documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews “with 30 senior nuclear energy experts” and found that the DOE’s plans are a pipedream.
The agency’s nuclear energy office, they report, “has spent $2 billion on this effort since the late 1990s, with little to show for it. This is unsurprising: Even by its own assessment, this amount is less than half what is necessary to demonstrate even one non-light water technology.” The Doe program is victim of the nature of federal funding, which fluctuates wildly year-to-year, with “erratic priorities,” and major spending on “existing infrastructure (some of which is obsolete or ill-suited to support testing of new designs),” which eats up half of the already inadequate DOE appropriations.
Some nuclear proponents argue that private enterprise can fill the research and development gap in the federal government, with “more than $1.3 billion” allocated by four dozen private sector companies.” But that’s misleading, says the analysis, as more than a dozen of those “are not working not on advanced fission reactors but on fusion reactors or nuclear fuels. Another dozen companies (e.g., Westinghouse) belong to bankrupt companies or are proceeding at a very low level of activity (e.g., the DOE’s Next Generation Nuclear Plant and various university ventures that are very much in the conceptual design phase).”
What’s left on the nuclear plate? SMRs, which “are quite attractive in theory,” such as NuScale Power. But SMRs fail an economic test, according to the PNAS analysis. Their evaluation concludes that “while one light water SMR module would indeed cost much less than a large LWR, it is highly likely that the cost per unit of power will be higher. In other words, light water SMRs do make nuclear power more affordable but not necessarily more economically competitive for electric power generation. That vision of the dramatic cost reduction that SMR proponents describe is unlikely to materialize with this first generation of light water SMRs, even at nth-of-a-kind deployment.”
The market so far has validated that assessment, as Westinghouse dumped its SMR program in 2014 after to failing to win DOE funds and Babcock and Wilcox abandoned its DOE-funded mPOWER SMR program in 2017. When Westinghouse killed its program, the CEO at the time said, “The problem I have with SMRs is not the technology, it’s not the deployment – it’s that there’s no customers.”
The PNAS paper concludes that “without immediate and profound changes, we appear to be set to lose one of the most promising candidates for providing a wedge of reliable, low-carbon energy over the next few decades and perhaps even the rest of the century.”
— Kennedy Maize