Noah Smith is too down on nuclear energy

Solar is great, but the world needs more

I’ve been feeling like I agree with Noah Smith too often, to the point where he sometimes posts articles saying roughly the same thing as an article I’m working on. So, I’ve been looking for something to fight with him about, and his article last week urging nuclear fission fans to “Let go of the nuclear retrofuture” and focus on solar + batteries was perfectly timed.

Annoyingly, Noah is smart and his article is pretty nuanced, so our actual specific disagreements are also pretty nuanced. In particular, he concedes:

• The turn away from nuclear energy in the United States and most other countries was a mistake.

• The nuclearization programs undertaken by France and South Korea were good.

• The Japanese and German post-Fukushima nuclear phase-outs were bad.

He even takes the step that I rarely see from even the most reasonable of “reasonable” nuclear critics and concedes that “nuclear still has important uses — in particular, where land and sunlight are scarce.” He concedes so much that I’m not always entirely sure what it is we’re disagreeing about.

But a big part of the difference, I think, is probably that Noah lives in California and hangs out with a lot of tech/engineering types for whom all the points about nuclear that he’s conceded are conventional wisdom, and he’s annoyed that a lot of these people have an image of solar (and especially batteries) that’s stuck in the 1980s, rather than seeing these as dynamic, forward-thinking economic sectors. I live in DC, and I hang out with lots of people who work in or adjacent to Democratic Party politics. And among the people I know, the conventional wisdom is toward much too much complacency about the current state of renewables. Many people think that because photovoltaic panels are now cheap, all the problems are solved and the big issue is that you need to say you’re pro-fracking to win Pennsylvania, and they’re looking for linguistics gurus to help them defeat fossil fuel propaganda.

I think that this is all wrong, that the world will remain much more dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future than a lot of progressives want to admit, that there are a bunch of difficult and outstanding problems that need to be solved, and that nuclear policy may provide important solutions to some of those problems. There is, of course, no way of knowing exactly what the future of any technology may hold. But I think nuclear fission remains extremely promising if — and it’s a big if — we change Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules to allow for more innovation.

Factory production, learning curves, and costs

As Noah admits, the high cost of American light water nuclear reactors seems to largely be a question of unnecessarily stringent regulations. Conversely, I concede his point that while French and Korean reactors are much cheaper than ours, they do not exhibit the falling cost-curve that is evident for PV panels and batteries.

But I think something like 90 percent of the people participating in this discourse disagree with one or the other of those propositions, and those people are wrong.

• If you participate in online climate change discourse, you’ll inevitably run into the annoying “just use nuclear” guy who doesn’t have anything to say about how we’d actually make that happen. He seems to think there’s a “just use nuclear” button on the desk of every head of government, and that Joe Biden is stubbornly refusing to push his. Even more puzzling, Donald Trump and George W. Bush also refused to push it.

• Conversely, there’s the guy who is sufficiently well-informed to know that the environmentalist scare campaign against nuclear power was misguided, but who insists “the real problem is that it’s too expensive,” without acknowledging that the scare campaign itself drove the high costs.

Both of those guys are wrong. What is true, though, is that when you make something in a factory, the tendency is to get better and better at making it over time. That’s one of the really cool things about factories. Because you’re just repeating the process, day after day after day, you have a lot of opportunity to figure out ways to improve just slightly. And then when you slightly improve the process, you can deploy the improvement over and over again. That combination of opportunities to learn and opportunities to deploy the fruits of learning is an incredible driver of productivity.

By contrast, large-scale construction projects have a very poor overall productivity track record.

The cost bloat in nuclear is unique and is driven by unnecessary regulatory frameworks. But the lack of cost progress is typical of a broad range of activities that require a bunch of people to drive to a site and build something. This is a big social and economic problem, and it’s something we should try to understand better and to improve. But precisely because it isn’t unique to the nuclear industry — it’s also true of highways and subways and houses — we should be pessimistic about the ability of nuclear-specific regulatory changes to fix it.

This is why the big hope for nuclear is to create a new class of small modular reactors (SMRs). The plans from NuScale and Oklo talk about building reactor modules in factories that can then be assembled on site.

If you could make this work, it would set you up for the same learning curve dynamic that we see with solar panels and batteries, but also computers and sweaters and everything else that’s built in factories. Now, can you make it work? That’s a tougher question, but it has an important regulatory component.

The NRC needs to change for this to work

Noah acknowledges, in passing, one particular provision of the existing nuclear regulatory framework on the United States that’s very important: radiation is held to the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) standard, which makes it essentially impossible for nuclear to be cost-competitive.

Suppose I had a design for a cost-effective nuclear reactor, and I said I should be allowed to build it, because electricity is good and air pollution is bad. The regulator is going to look at it and say, “Well, that reactor seems awfully cheap to build, why not add a bunch more features to make the radiation levels even lower?” And then I will say, “That would be hideously expensive in a way that is net bad for public health, because it leads to more burning of fossil fuels and worse air pollution.” But the regulator comes back and says, “We’re not using a cost-benefit framework, we’re using ALARA.” And I say, “That doesn’t make sense, coal ash is radioactive — you are creating more radiation by raising my costs.” And the regulator says, “I don’t regulate coal plants, I regulate you — ALARA!”

As Jason Crawford writes, “any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.”

This is a deeply dysfunctional regulatory paradigm, and it reflects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s origins in 1974 legislation that was explicitly motivated by a belief that the old Atomic Energy Commission was too friendly to the industry.

In 2019, Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which, among other things, “requires the NRC to develop new processes for licensing nuclear reactors, including staged licensing of advanced nuclear reactors.” The hope of NEIMA’s proponents was to change 45 years of the NRC fundamentally being an agency that says “no” to stuff and make them into an agency that would create a regulatory pathway under which new kinds of nuclear reactors could be licensed and built. And after several years, the NRC did get around to writing the new rules for SMRs, but they came up with an even longer and more cumbersome regulatory process.

Earlier this summer, the ADVANCE Act reiterated Congress’s determination for the NRC to change.

But the NRC staff, to the best of my knowledge, fundamentally does not believe that America’s elected officials genuinely want them to make it faster and cheaper to build nuclear reactors. And one reason they don’t believe it is that even though the Biden administration says lots of pro-nuclear stuff, has plenty of pro-nuclear appointees, signed the ADVANCE Act, and has done a lot to help with SMRs in terms of financing, they still coughed-up an NRC nominee who basically supports the status quo. You need a team of political appointees at the agency who are willing to both drive change and also personally take the heat when change makes people mad. You can’t “just use nuclear, bro.” You need to put people in place to actually drive specific policy change in a way that will let the industry grow and work.

And of course, even if you did that, it might not work.

It’s worth a try

One thing Noah and I agree about is that the wrangling over nuclear is in part symbolic — a way for people to rhetorically distance themselves from environmentalists.