A huge new bill just passed in the US Senate that has the American nuclear industry deliriously excited, and it has me (and others) in two minds.
The ADVANCE bill (Accelerating Deployment of Versatile Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy - an awkward moniker, to say the least) passed in the Senate by 88-2, with 10 abstentions and just Bernie sanders and Ed Markey voting against. It is designed to reverse the American nuclear industry's decades-long decline, by slashing development fees, speeding up the licensing process, and hiring new staff for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Spokespeople for the industry are calling it "monumental", "game-changing" and "much-needed".
The main impetus for the bill is climate change and carbon reduction, but it will affect more than that. The USA has been leery of new nuclear projects since the Vogtle plant on Georgia went so far over-budget and over-time, and solar and wind power generation became so comparatively cheap. Now, the US government - no doubt at the behest of the still-powerful nuclear lobby - is looking to tilt the playing field in its favour again.
But it will almost certainly have the effect of drawing money and investment away from true renewable energy and battery technology, which is ultimately where we need to be going. Nuclear power is a low carbon option, admittedly, but it is also expensive, slow, inflexible, and comes with a whole catalogue of other unsavoury side-effects, not least the need to safely store spent fuel for centuries. It's also not even necessary. And don't get me started on small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear plants, which people have been calling the saviour of the energy industry for decades, but which still doesn't even exist, and show no signs of ever becoming practical. Even notoriously pro-nuclear France has just scrapped its SMR plans due to soaring costs.
Joe Biden will almost certainly rubber stamp the bill when it is presented to him. But it is probably not the right direction to go. Focussing on nuclear is an unwelcome distraction from the job in hand.
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