By George Crocker
Certain Minnesota legislators are interested in new nuclear power plants to address problems resulting from climate change.
Perhaps these politicians have recent and exciting new information about how to overcome the multitude of economic problems that cause new commercial reactors to be much too expensive. It would be good to find that out, because back in July 2018, for one example, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that nuclear fission power is just too expensive relative to the competition. A new reactor would start out costing about $13.61 million per megawatt and go up from there. New solar costs about $1 million per megawatt, with wind at about $2 million per megawatt, and wind and solar costs continue dropping.
Perhaps these politicians have also figured out how to manage high-level nuclear waste for the required 240,000 years, now that Yucca Mountain, the nation’s only proposed high-level nuclear waste repository has been shut down and abandoned for years, and U.S. federal courts recently stopped the nuclear industry from developing a dump to hold 100,000 metric tons of spent fuel on top of the Ogallala Aquifer in eastern New Mexico. These politicians probably also have a time machine to manage the fact that climate chaos is upon us as you read these words, but even in Nuclear Magic Land, if history teaches anything, new reactors will take upward of ten years to construct. There’s also the CO 2 from burning the coal to boil the uranium to refine nuclear fuel to acceptable levels of U-235.
If the Legislature were actually interested in combating climate chaos, it could pass legislation that enables the development of more than 8,000 megawatts in Minnesota of new renewable energy capacity, plus energy storage, that can be immediately installed and commissioned on the low-voltage side of virtually every load-serving substation in the state. Strategically sizing this new renewable energy capacity will allow it to come online immediately, because all the electricity will get consumed within the footprint of the substation and no new transmission would be needed.
— George Crocker is executive director of the North American Water Office. Letter originally published in Minneapolis Star Tribune on April 10, 2024.
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