Nuclear project canceled in Biden clean energy agenda blow - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Nuclear project canceled in Biden clean energy agenda blow

WASHINGTON — A project to build a first-of-a-kind small modular nuclear reactor power plant was terminated this past week, another blow to the Biden administration's clean energy agenda following recent cancellations of two major offshore wind projects.
NuScale Power Chairman and CEO John L. Hopkins, seen Feb. 12, 2019, outside the White House in Washington, said the company will continue working to bring its technology to the market after dumping plans for a small modular nuclear reactor power plant.

Oregon-based NuScale Power has the only small modular nuclear reactor design certified for use in the United States. For its first project, the company was working with a group of Utah utilities to demonstrate a six-reactor plant at the Idaho National Laboratory, generating enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes.

The project was to come online starting in 2029 and was supposed to replace electricity from coal plants that are closing. When combined with wind and solar, the advanced nuclear technology was intended to help municipalities and public power utilities in several western states eliminate planet-warming greenhouse gas emission from the power sector.

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Instead, NuScale and the Utah utilities announced Wednesday they're terminating the project after a decade of working on it. The cancellation comes as two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey were canceled amid supply chain problems, high interest rates and a failure to obtain the desired tax credits.

The announcement by Danish energy giant Orsted was the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry and a blow to President Joe Biden's goal to have 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes.

A spokeswoman for the Energy Department called the cancellation “unfortunate news,” but said first-of-a-kind deployments are often difficult. Officials believe the work accomplished to date on the project will be valuable for future nuclear energy projects.
The Washington Monument is visible Thursday as a member of the Secret Service stands guard in front of Marine One with President Joe Biden abroad as it lifts off from the South Lawn of the White House for a short trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., and then on to Illinois.

“We absolutely need advanced nuclear energy technology to meet (the Biden administration’s) ambitious clean energy goals,'' spokeswoman Charisma Troiano said.

“While not every project is guaranteed to succeed, DOE remains committed to doing everything we can to deploy these technologies to combat the climate crisis and increase access to clean energy.″

Timothy Fox, vice president at ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm, called NuScale's announcement “a substantial setback” for small nuclear power, but said there is still “a lot of interest out there” in developing the technology at other sites. It was not yet clear whether other projects under development face similar obstacles, he said.

"This was the frontrunner, and the frontrunner has now faltered,'' Fox said..

The Energy Department under three presidents has provided more than $600 million since 2014 to support the design, licensing and siting of a small modular reactor power plant near Idaho Falls, Idaho at the Energy Department's Idaho National Laboratory.

In 2020, the Trump administration approved up to $1.4 billion for the project, known as the Carbon Free Power Project. The agreement serves as a funding vehicle and is subject to future appropriations by Congress.

The cancellation of the Idaho project reminded some critics of the earlier failure of Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt soon after receiving a federal loan from the Obama administration more than a decade ago, costing taxpayers more than $500 million.

NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems said it was unlikely the project will have enough subscriptions from local power providers to continue. The power system serves 50 members, mostly municipalities and public power utilities in Utah and other Western states.

Most prospective subscribers were unwilling to take on the risks associated with developing a first-of-a-kind nuclear project, the Utah group said.

Costs have increased more than 50% in the last two years to $89 per megawatt hour, the company said. Small reactors are seen as an alternative to more costly, traditional nuclear power that includes large reactors and cost billions of dollars and takes decades to complete.

NuScale President and Chief Executive Officer John Hopkins said the company will continue working with domestic and international customers to bring its technology to the market. The design that was certified by federal regulators is for a 50-megawatt, advanced light-water small modular nuclear reactor. The company is currently seeking certification for an upgraded 77-megawatt design.

NuScale said it can use power plant design plans and the regulatory progress from the cancelled project for other customers and is working to transfer materials with long lead times to other projects.

The Utah power system said it will focus on non-nuclear resources in the near term, and will need additional renewables, primarily solar and wind, as well as new natural gas.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association, called the cancellation “very disappointing,” but said it was understandable because of the difficulties inherent in developing new technologies. NuScale has a design that will deploy and bring clean and reliable energy in the future as the demand for clean energy grows globally, the institute said in a statement.

The side benefits of clean energy

The side benefits of clean energy

Scientists, environmental advocacy organizations, and concerned citizens have long made a case for transitioning from a reliance on fossil fuels to clean energy sources like wind, solar, and hydropower to mediate the impacts of climate change. The negative effects of fossil fuels on the environment have been widely documented and occur at every phase of their processing—from mining, fracking, and drilling for oil to burning refined fuels.

The environmental toll of fossil fuels has been linked to water and air pollution, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and global warming. Meanwhile, renewable energy sources offer an alternative solution to energy needs without catastrophic environmental impacts. But what about the economic, public health, and safety-related benefits of clean energy?

As clean energy infrastructure has increased over the past decades, many of its non-climate-related advantages have become more evident. Renewable energy has become less expensive, created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and has had positive health impacts on communities across the United States. For a more holistic view of the impact of renewables, Rocket Solar compiled a list of some of the side benefits of clean energy using a variety of government, nonprofit, and academic sources.

Clean energy provides almost 443,000 jobs in the US

The clean energy sector already supplies almost half a million jobs in the United States. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022 allocated funds for investing in clean energy solutions and limiting carbon emissions, giving an even bigger boost to clean energy sector jobs. Energy Innovation, a clean energy research organization, estimated that funding and tax credits from it could create 1.5 million additional jobs in the field by 2030.

The industry is one of the fastest-growing in the nation, with jobs like wind turbine service technician and solar photovoltaic installer estimated to take the lead in occupation growth. In general, jobs that specialize in installing and creating clean energy infrastructure, including wind turbines, battery storage, and solar panels, are predicted to be large areas of growth.

A federal carbon tax on all energy-related carbon emissions could raise $1.87 trillion over the next decade

Carbon taxes create a financial penalty for big generators of carbon emissions and have been implemented in 27 countries worldwide, including Argentina, Canada, Denmark, and Singapore. Despite the United States being the second-largest carbon dioxide generator globally, there is no federal carbon tax—although some states, including California, Hawaii, and Massachusetts, have their own carbon policies in place.

Rather than taxing the creation of carbon emissions, the Inflation Reduction Act instead created a system of tax credits and incentives for low and no-emission technologies. However, researchers at the Tax Foundation estimated that a federal carbon tax in the United States could generate close to $2 trillion in federal revenue over the next 10 years.

More than 25% of Americans live in states with carbon-pricing programs

Thirteen states in the U.S.—California and those in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative— have established cap-and-trade programs that set limits on the carbon emissions certain companies can lawfully emit within different industries and allow companies emitting less carbon to sell their emissions allowances to other, higher-emissions companies.

Washington is expected to begin a program in 2023. This system limits the overall emissions created by certain industries while rewarding companies financially for emitting less.

The RGGI is a cap-and-trade consortium made up of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia. These states specifically limit carbon emissions from the power sector and have successfully decreased emissions while benefiting economically.

The US already produces enough clean energy to provide power for 58 million American homes

Roughly 20% of the United States' power comes from clean energy sources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Wind power was the leading source of clean energy in 2021, accounting for more than 9% of all power in the United States, followed by hydropower, solar, biomass, and geothermal energies. There is the potential for renewable energy to comprise an even greater proportion of American power; a 2022 report on renewable energy resources found that the renewable resources available in the country could, if properly harnessed, produce a staggering 100 times more power than the entire nation's annual need.

The cost of wind and solar power fell 47% and 71% in the past decade, respectively

A 2020 report from the International Renewable Energy Agency found that renewables had replaced fossil fuels as the least expensive energy source in the world by a significant margin.

The cost of renewable energy across sources ranging from solar to wind power fell between 2018 and 2020 by as much as 16%. Renewable energy remains cheaper than coal and natural gas power, and new wind and solar ventures were around 40% less expensive than new coal and gas ventures as of June 2022.

The increasing affordability of clean energy is likely to incentivize the phasing out of coal plants, which are responsible for 3 gigatonnes of carbon emissions every year. Click here for a visualization of 1 gigatonne.

Increased clean-energy use decreases the instance of heart attacks, asthma attacks, and other cardiovascular issues

Adverse health effects have long been linked to the burning of fossil fuels.

In particular, nitrogen, sulfur, and carbon emissions negatively impact the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. A Harvard University study published in 2021 found that more than 8 million people died in 2018 from the effects of fossil fuel pollution—a number that translates to about 1 out of every 5 deaths globally.

In the United States alone, 350,000 premature deaths were attributed to fossil fuel pollution. The states with the highest numbers of deaths corresponded to states with larger than average fossil fuel exposure, including Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The country's fossil fuel-related deaths and illnesses do not impact everyone equally. A 2019 study found that Black and Hispanic Americans bear the brunt of fossil fuel pollution exposure, inhaling a disproportionate amount of pollutants compared to non-Hispanic white Americans. This exposure and increased proximity to toxic chemical plants have been linked to higher rates of premature death among Black and Hispanic Americans. The transition to renewable energy sources decreases the emission of toxic pollutants and may limit negative health outcomes.

Clean energy is more resilient and reliable than fossil fuels

Besides the issue of resource scarcity—while fossil fuels are a finite resource, renewables are, as their name suggests, renewable—clean energy has proven to be more reliable than fossil fuel power in numerous disasters over the past decade.

A cold snap in Texas in 2021 killed at least 246 people after a disastrous power grid failure left millions without heat. Although Gov. Greg Abbott claimed that clean energy unreliability was to blame, reports showed that renewable energy sources performed better than fossil fuels during the incident.

Another example of the reliability of this includes Hurricane Sandy in 2012, during which fossil fuel-powered systems largely failed across the Northeast, while renewable energy systems went mostly uninterrupted.

As technology continues to improve and strengthen the resilience of renewable energy sources, scientists are also looking for better ways to store the power generated. Storing energy so that after dark, or on windless days, we can ensure a steady and consistent availability will ensure the reliability of electric grids. Scientists around the world have already developed high-capacity battery storage options that can hold this energy and replace midsized natural gas generators, helping pave the way for even bigger, more resilient clean-energy systems.

This story originally appeared on Rocket Solar and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.