Did you get the Simpson’s Nuclear Power Plant play set with the Homer Simpson action figure for Christmas? No? You must not have been good this year, because it seems like nuclear power is all anyone can talk about in the energy industry lately. This is because many claim that a nuclear power “renaissance” is happening in the United States. Recently, it was reported that companies such as Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are “betting big” on nuclear power to support their growing needs for electricity for their data centers. Other appealing claims around nuclear power are that it is good for the environment because greenhouse gas emissions are negligible and unlike wind and solar assets, these plants, for the most part, run 24/7. Additionally, unlike solar and wind farms, nuclear power plants use a fraction of the land necessary to produce the same amount of electricity.
All of this sounds lovely and are strong reasons to go long on nuclear power in the United States. The only problem is that a real and robust nuclear renaissance is not going to happen anytime soon, and we should stop kidding ourselves into thinking that nuclear power is going to play a significant role in solving this country’s energy needs on a large scale in the near future. To be clear, as a nuclear engineer, I believe that there is an important role for nuclear to play in this country’s power generation mix. But there are too many practical obstacles that need to be solved for there to be any kind of nuclear "renaissance” in the United States.
The most significant obstacle is the lack of any long-term solution for the disposal and storage of spent nuclear fuel. A 1,000 MW pressurized water reactor core typically contains between 120 and 200 fuel assemblies with approximately 1,200 pounds of uranium dioxide fuel. A reactor of this size disposes about 40 spent fuel assemblies per year containing approximately 20 tons of uranium oxide. This spent fuel continues to generate heat after it is removed from the core of a reactor and remains highly radioactive. Nuclear power plants have a spent fuel pool or dry casks on-site where these fuel assemblies are stored but they were never intended to serve as a safe long-term storage solution for high-level radioactive waste.
The debate around what to do with this nation’s spent uranium fuel has been going on for decades without any firm resolution. As early as the 1980s, a disposal site in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was proposed as a deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel. Despite funding for this project, it has been opposed and contested by numerous state and regional organizations over the years. None of this is surprising. Would you want a high-level radioactive waste disposal site in your backyard? You are not alone. Very few elected officials or community groups want one either. Aside from the issue of finding a location to store high-level waste, the costs of building a new utility-scale nuclear power plant are enormous.
The last time a new nuclear power plant went into operation was at the Vogtle generating station in Georgia where Units 3 and 4 went into operation in July 2023 and April 2024 respectively. It took ten years to build these plants, and recent estimates are that these two units cost more than $28.5 billion. Very simple math puts the construction cost alone at $12.75 million per MW. According to the US Energy Information Agency, the average construction cost for a natural gas-fired power plant in 2022 varied between $722,000 and $1 million per MW. This puts the average cost of building a new nuclear power plant at approximately 10 times the amount of a conventional fossil fuel power plant. Additionally, a natural gas plant can be built in approximately two years. The bet with nuclear power is that once in operation, the high capital costs of nuclear construction are offset by lower and more stable variable costs, but the need to finance the upfront construction and the time required to build a plant presents a major challenge. This is especially true in electricity markets that are deregulated.
Today, the chances that a new utility-scale nuclear power plant will be built in a deregulated state are slim. It is simply too expensive. And even if there was some financial appetite on the part of a private investor to build a new nuclear plant, can you imagine the public opposition in the community where it might be built? We cannot even build offshore wind farms in this country without enormous resistance from various environmental and other interest groups. Smaller modular reactors (SMRs/MMRs) have been hailed as the gateway into a new nuclear energy landscape. And while they may help to lower construction costs, they will not solve the high-level waste disposal issue and they are not going to make the licensing, permitting and construction of new nuclear plants any easier. It is certainly possible that new SMR/MMRs will get built in a regulated state for a data center where the population density and public opposition are low. But it is highly unlikely that nuclear power will be a dominant player in the broader generation mix anytime soon.
To be clear, there is strong support to re-license and extend the operational life of existing nuclear power plants. States such as New York and Illinois have done this through Zero Emissions Credits (ZECs), which are subsidies paid to nuclear power plant owners and compensate them for their carbon-free electricity. These subsidies help to ensure that nuclear plants in these states remain financially viable and operational. Even Three Mile Island, whose name is almost synonymous with the “No Nukes” movement, has a new lease on life. In September 2024, Constellation Energy announced plans to reopen Unit 1 in 2028, which includes an agreement with Microsoft to purchase electricity from the plant for 20 years to support its data centers (the infamous accident occurred in Unit 2 in 1979; Unit 1 was shut down in 2019 because it was unprofitable to remain in operation). Additionally, in 2024, the Diablo Canyon plant in California received financial support to remain in operation beyond its planned closure in 2025. Clearly, there is some appetite to keep existing nuclear power plants in operation. But that is not the same thing as building and licensing new utility-scale plants. Will a few smaller nuclear plants be built by well-funded companies in remote areas to meet the energy needs of their data centers? Sure. However, this does not mean there is a real nuclear renaissance. Imagine attending public hearings for the licensing and permitting of a new utility-scale nuclear plant in a densely populated state. The chances of any public approval on such a project are probably close to zero and likely to be stopped faster than a reactor SCRAM.
Since I am a nuclear engineer by training, I hope I am wrong, and I wish that there was broader support and interest in building new nuclear power plants in the United States. But there are too many practical obstacles that are in the way of this happening on a meaningful scale. The long-term, high-level nuclear waste storage problem is a significant and decades-old issue that remains to be solved. And even if a viable solution were found, it is hard to believe that a local populace would ever embrace a new nuclear facility in their backyard. In my opinion, all the news and hype around nuclear energy detract from real and substantive innovation in the development of other electric power generation sources. I think that anyone who wants to “bet big” on nuclear energy in this country is better off buying a bunch of Simpson’s Nuclear Power Plant play sets for Christmas next year – last I checked, it was only $34.99 on eBay plus shipping and handling.
