“There are other technologies that are candidates to play that role, but if you look at what is available today across the widest scale, that’s nuclear energy.” “Ultimately, you get to a point where you need something that’s not weather dependent, something like nuclear to make the grid reliable,” said John Kotek, who ran the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Obama administration and is now vice president for policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association. In California’s Inland Empire, the anger has turned to widespread action. Warehouse Moratorium : As warehouse construction balloons nationwide, residents in communities both rural and urban have pushed back.
A Piece of Black History Destroyed: Lincoln Heights - a historically Black community in a predominantly white, rural county in Northern California - endured for decades.Bullet Train to Nowhere : Construction of the California high-speed rail system, America’s most ambitious infrastructure project, has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare.The bill, whose backers include Senators Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, and Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, would provide financial assistance like tax credits, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax policy organization. In addition to the $6 billion fund, the administration is providing $2.5 billion for two projects meant to demonstrate new nuclear technology, in Washington State and Wyoming.Ī separate bipartisan measure introduced last year is aimed at preserving and expanding nuclear energy in the United States. “They’re incredibly aggressive goals, and nuclear is a part of that solution, a very big part potentially.” “The Biden administration has been very clear that we will get to the net zero goals,” Kathryn Huff, assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy, said at a recent conference of the American Nuclear Society. The application deadline is Tuesday, though it might be extended and the requirements amended to broaden eligibility. But the supply chain issues that have hurt wind and solar power development have presented the latest hurdle to reaching that goal.Īs a stopgap, the Biden administration has established a $6 billion fund to help troubled nuclear plant operators keep their reactors running and make them more economically competitive against cheaper resources like solar and wind power. President Biden wants to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the power industry by 2035, and he said a Supreme Court ruling last week limiting federal regulatory authority would not halt such efforts.
“The industry knows it does not have a good story to tell,” said Edwin Lyman, a physicist and the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The search for clean energy has given nuclear power a spark that has drawn bipartisan support that added billions in funding for existing and new projects.īut critics of the nuclear industry argue that a veneer of clean energy has not changed the concerns about the technology, including aging facilities in need of potentially costly improvements, the challenge of nuclear waste disposal and steep cost overruns for new projects that are years late - if they reach completion. Driven by the difficulty of meeting clean energy goals and by surging electricity demands, a growing number of political leaders are taking a fresh look at nuclear power - both extending the life of existing reactors and building new ones.Įven past skeptics, largely Democrats, have come around to the idea - notably in California, where the state’s sole remaining nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, is scheduled to close in 2025.
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