Nuclear ‘Abundance’ Is Bunk — Michael Shuman, The Main Street Journal.

Nuclear ‘Abundance’ Is Bunk Michael Shuman, The Main Street Journal (mainstreetjournal.substack.com › nuclear abundance is bunk). The United States has been on the precipice of a “nuclear renaissance” for four decades. And I can tell you right now, with confidence, that it will never happen. Why? Because nuclear power is getting more costly while solar alternatives are getting cheaper. By a lot. And the persistence—by politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul, by policymakers on both sides of the aisle, and even by smart analysts like Ezra Klein—to wish nuclear back into competitiveness suggests why we localists should always be skeptical of top-down theories of change. Basic facts: Over the last 30 years, exactly four new nuclear reactors have come online in the United States, each with a capacity of 1.1 gigawatts. The most recent two, Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia, collectively cost $36.8 billion (purplewins.io › vogtle nuclear capital risk?). The capital cost is $16,700 per installed kilowatt, which implies a production cost of 17-22 cents per kilowatt-hour. (The actual cost consumers pay, which includes utility overhead and transmission and distribution, is more than double.) The capital cost for onshore wind projects is $1,150-1,800 per kilowatt in 2026 (energy-solutions.co › onshore wind farm economics 2026), which—accounting for the intermittency of wind in most sites—implies a production cost of 2.5-5 cents per kilowatt hour. Utility-scale solar is generally cheaper than wind. So nuclear power is about 8-10 times more expensive than its truly renewable alternatives. The intermittency of wind and solar is becoming largely irrelevant because large-scale storage is becoming inexpensive as well. Earlier this year, California announced (insideclimatenews.org › california battery power) that it had deployed battery blocks to store and dispense the equivalent of 12 nuclear power plants. In other words, in one year, the state deployed three times more power capacity than the entire national nuclear industry in three decades. More importantly, as I showed in my recent paper (mainstreetjournal.substack.com › how to solarize your city with local) for the City of Irvine, it is cheaper for the city, its residents, and its businesses to solarize with batteries than to use any utility electricity whatsoever. Over the next 20 years, if Irvine does nothing, it will spend about $58 billion with the local utility, Southern California Edison. Complete solarization would cost $16 billion and thus save the city $42 billion. The bottom line: Nuclear power has become completely uneconomic. Fahgettaboutit! Nuclear supporters nevertheless insist that new generations of small modular reactors (SMRs) will be magically cheaper. In fact, a recent report (ieefa.org) by the Institute for Energy Economics and Finance Analysis concludes: “SMRs still are too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning from fossil fuels in the coming 10 to 15 years.” This is great news for those who care about sustainability. Nuclear power generates radioactive waste that still lacks a safe storage solution (my father worked on the earliest solutions in 1949). Nuclear power risks costly accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. (One estimate (irp.cdn-website.com › Press release cost study April 2016) puts the long-term costs of the Chernobyl disaster at $700 billion.) Most importantly, it spreads nuclear technology and materials that make nuclear bomb-making easier and nuclear war more probable. Consider that our entire fight with Iran right now is over that country’s use of nuclear power to develop nuclear weapons. Which brings us to Abundance, the much-discussed book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. In their very