Crawford on Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop

It's a few years old, but an outstanding Roots of Progress post recently showed up at my favorite tech news aggregator.

Jason Crawford's review of Jack Devanney's book is thorough and, at around 4,800 words, will take 15-20 minutes to read. Crawford offers his thoughts at the end.

The whole provides a much-needed and multi-pronged challenge to the conventional "wisdom" about nuclear power. Said wisdom consists largely of misconceptions, often encoded into law, that cause or allow legions of modern naysayers on each side of the nuclear power debate to cry but nuclear power is uneconomical and get away with it.

I particularly like Crawford's knack for putting complicated issues into plain English, while also motivating the reader to understand why we need to get to the bottom of them.

This early passage is a fine example of motivation:

One of these can power the world, and one of these can't. (Image by Boudewijn Huysmans, via Unsplash, license.)

If we account for population growth, and for the decarbonization of the entire economy (building heating, industrial processes, electric vehicles, synthetic fuels, etc.), we need more like 25 TW [for the whole world to reach the same level of per capita energy availability as seen in Europe].

This is the Gordian knot. Nuclear power is the sword that can cut it: a scalable source of dispatchable (i.e., on-demand), virtually emissions-free energy. It takes up very little land, consumes very little fuel, and produces very little waste. It's the technology the world needs to solve both energy poverty and climate change.

So why isn't it much bigger? Why hasn't it solved the problem already? Why has it been "such a tragic flop?" [bold added]

This will get almost anyone interested in human progress or the effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide interested in reading further.

And these readers will find lots to think about, like this devastating indictment of how an irrational safety policy is working to make it impossible for nuclear power to compete on price:

Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines "reasonable"? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.

This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can't even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, 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. [bold added]

This review stands alone as an outstanding introductory resource for anyone interested in promoting a rational discussion about this important, but often neglected topic.

Crawford links to Amazon for anyone interested in purchasing the book, but also provides information for obtaining a free PDF of same.

-- CAV