Case for Nuclear Strengthens as First New Reactor in Decades Goes Online

S omething big has happened in the realm of nuclear power, strengthening the case for the energy source. Vogtle Unit 3 began supplying its first electricity to the grid on April 1. It’s the first truly new reactor in the U.S. since 1996, 27 years ago.

Unit 3 is scheduled to enter commercial operations by the middle of this year, with the nearby Unit 4 projected to be complete later this year. Together, the new units will provide electricity to half a million homes and businesses in Georgia.

“It’s great that the Vogtle 3 nuclear power plant is finally coming on line,” Robert Zubrin, engineer and author of the new book The Case for Nukes, told National Review. “But it’s the first nuke to start up in the United States in 3 decades, and it took 14 years to build. America’s first nuclear power plant, at Shippingport, was built in three. That was in 1957.”

Zubrin’s book skillfully outlines the political and technical history of nuclear power in the U.S. while explaining how a recent spate of entrepreneurial developments in the field, such as mass-producible reactors that cannot melt down, are poised to revive the flagging industry — if the government can get out of the way.

Prior to Vogtle, Watts Bar, the newest U.S. nuclear reactor, finished its troubled construction process in 2016 — 43 years after it began. Construction was put on hold in 1985 because of a scandal involving contractors paying off corrupt TVA officials. Watts Bar Unit 1 was completed in 1996, but construction of Unit 2, when 80 percent complete, was suspended by another scandal and only restarted in 2007. The projected cost of this old reactor was initially $2.2 billion, but new compliance standards, inflation related to the old design, and overruns drove the costs up to $4.7 billion.

America currently operates 92 nuclear reactors across 54 commercially operating nuclear-power plants, providing 18.2 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That’s down from 99 reactors in 2016. The average nuclear plant employs between 400 and 700 highly skilled workers, has a payroll of about $40 million, and contributes $470 million to the local economy, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute trade group.

“With more experience, the time to build a nuke should have gone down. Instead, as a result of hostile hyperregulation it has quintupled, and the cost has gone up as the construction time squared. This is crazy,” Zubrin continued. “If the FAA were run like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC] we would have no airplanes. If we are going to have a vibrant nuclear industry, this problem needs to be corrected. Drastic regulatory reform is in order.”

Perhaps the best example of NRC meddling increasing the costs of the Vogtle reactors was the agency’s forcing the company behind the project to spend $30 million and a month of time fixing a simple pipe brace, the kind of problem that should cost merely thousands of dollars and take a day or even just an hour to fix. However, the NRC ensured that the minor pipe problem required a full license amendment, thus creating more bureaucratic work for overpaid NRC bureaucrats.

The NRC receives 90 percent of its budget from direct fees on the nuclear industry, giving it even more of an incentive to artificially inflate costs than most government bureaucracies. The agency charged $290 an hour for staff time in 2022, a cost mostly borne by the nuclear industry.

Zubrin’s book explains how the NRC’s decisions are extremely erratic, with the agency regularly letting politics influence its decisions to allow reactors to operate. The agency regularly flip-flops at the behest of environmental activists and Democratic-appointed bureaucrats, seemingly so that the wind and solar-energy projects those groups favor don’t have to deal with competition.

In 2018, Congress tried to simplify the NRC’s awful licensing procedures, but the agency ignored Congress and tacked on an additional 1,200 pages of regulation.

Heavy government regulations combined with policies directly favoring wind and solar energy now make it essentially impossible to open a new profitable nuclear-power plant, according to an R Street Institute study. Each existing U.S. nuclear plant spends an estimated $4.2 million annually just meeting government-paperwork requirements and another $4.4 million to pay government-mandated security staff while paying $14 million in government fees, according to a 2017 American Action Forum report. The average nuclear-power plant employs an estimated 86 full-time employees solely to do NRC-mandated paperwork, meaning about 17 percent of the employees just handle red tape.

The NRC clearly wrecked America’s once world-leading nuclear-power industry, reducing it from building nine new reactors when it was founded in 1975 and 1976, to a grand total of three in all the years since. In January, the NRC’s bureaucracy proposed a series of ridiculous new rules for approving reactors that are mathematically impossible to meet and so strict that their only purpose seems to be to block any new reactors. (The proposed rules assume that every new nuclear plant would suffer an unprecedented catastrophic failure every single year.)

The NRC’s mission is to enable the use of nuclear power to contribute to America’s environment and national security via regulation, not to flat-out ban the use of nuclear energy. Yet it is not an exaggeration to say that Biden’s NRC is drowning America’s nuclear-energy industry in a tide of expensive red tape. Congress should ask the agency and the Biden administration to explain why it appears to be intentionally handicapping nuclear power.

America and the world are experiencing heightened energy insecurity, and as Zubrin’s book explains, zero-emission nuclear power provides a reliable and clean source of energy. All the government needs to do to inaugurate a new era of energy is to get out of the way.