Time For A Nuclear Update

The latest

Nuclear power. You don’t hear much about her these days. The technology is straightforward: first, you need a rock that is 3-5% by weight uranium-235, with the rest of it usually being made up of a different isotope, uranium-238 - by far the most common variety of uranium on the planet. In order to produce this rock, you’ll need to enrich natural uranium ore, with generally only has about 0.7% U-235 by weight. For the curious, and because it’s at least somewhat relevant for safety and for enterprising backyard enrichers of uranium, weapons grade is a whopping 90% or more uranium-235. In the most common nuclear power generation set-up, once you have your 3-5% U-235 rock, you contain it for safety, submerge that container in water, contain that, and the fission heat makes steam, either in the reactor or in a connected nearby vessel. The resulting steam turns a turbine blade that creates electricity. Like so:

Compare the above to coal power, which has a high degree of functional similarity but instead burns coal to boil water to make steam to turn a fan to create electricity:

Source

Nuclear is a lower-carbon power source, given that it does not use combustion of fossil fuels to generate heat, unlike oil, natural gas, or coal. Its primary atmospheric byproduct is water vapor, which while not irrelevant, is a much smaller contributing factor in climate change than carbon dioxide.

Spent Fuel and Reprocessing

It does produce spent nuclear fuel, which must be properly stored because it continues to produce radiation and heat, even after being used for electricity generation for years. The total volume of this spent fuel compared to the electrical volume is surprisingly modest - the Department of Energy notes that it can power 70 million homes for a year in exchange for a waste volume less than half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. All the spent nuclear fuel ever produced in the history of the United States could sit on a single football field, about 30 feet tall.

It can be even smaller with a reprocessing phase to the nuclear fuel lifecycle, but there are no US facilities for reprocessing despite its popularity in countries like France. A Carter era policy terminated federal reprocessing, citing concerns about nuclear proliferation, and despite efforts to reverse the policy decision, economic barriers have largely replaced previous regulatory ones. In 2022, the Department of Energy began to dispense grants with a longterm goal of increasing reprocessing efforts, and in 2024 $10 million in funding was announced for R&D aimed at nuclear fuel recycling, but no commercial facilities are in operation yet.

Source

Nuclear and Its Advantages

One of its major advantages over other common sources of electricity outside of fossil fuel is that it’s capable of providing what’s called base-load power - solar and wind have variable output, because no location has access to constant sun or constant wind. While a few other electricity generators are capable of base-load generation without the use of coal, natural gas, or other high-emission fuels, they’re more geographically dependent - hydroelectric power, where dams are used to generate power, and geothermal power, where geologic hot spots are the heat source for steam and power generation, both require licensing and particular locations for efficacy. In addition to the regulatory burden of both of these power types, there aren’t infinite sites that make good candidates for hydro or geothermal electric plants. Nuclear has more flexibility in location. Nuclear is one of the only forms of clean energy capable of providing power consistently.

Impediments to Implementation

Nuclear is not as rare as you might expect in the US, even if its implementation is much less common in the US than in Europe - nuclear is almost a fifth of the country’s electricity supply, and close to half of its non-fossil fuel sourced electricity.

Despite recent phase-outs, as with Germany by 2023, nuclear has long been a significant contributor to power generation in Europe. Many have demanded that nuclear expand in the US, and have protested that its lack of implementation has largely been downstream of regulatory burdens and/or public fears about the technology. Nuclear does in fact have significant regulatory limitations, particularly around licensing, which can be a prohibitive element for establishing a new plant. Recent policy efforts to improve the licensing process in order to expand nuclear power are a sign of renewed appetite to add more nuclear to the country’s renewable energy generation. As of right now, the perception of the public’s nuclear negativity is out of step with reality. The majority (a slim majority, at 59 percent, but a majority nonetheless) of the 2025 US public supports nuclear power expansion in the country, with a majority of both self-identified republicans and democrats interested in the policy. Public support for nuclear has substantially evolved over the past few decades.

Nuclear Disasters

It’s true that even today, there’s still some holdover from when nuclear was genuinely considered a risk or a bad investment by the public at large. In the 70s and 80s there was a massive increase in public distrust of nuclear power, assisted by disasters like Chernobyl¹ or Three Mile Island. Both of these were extremely avoidable and were themselves the result of poor design and poor management.

Three Mile Island resulted in no deaths or injuries with “no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public”. It is also the most serious commercial nuclear power-related accident in US history. This is why you always check the base rates, by the way. Three Mile Island was responsible for drastic changes in US nuclear policy, with some excellent additions to avoid the fundamentally avoidable, while having a noticeable and dramatic dampening effect on the construction of power plants worldwide. It’s sometimes referred to as a turning point in nuclear policy.

You know I got this from the good people of Wikipedia

It was avoidable, a failure of both design and oversight. In Three Mile Island, a pump that normally supplied water to keep the fuel rods cool shut off. In response, the safety design system automatically shut down the turbine and power generation sections of the plant. So far, so good. When you shut down a hot system without its normal cooling systems functioning, however, you tend to get pressure buildup, which happened in this case. As designed, a pressure valve for the reactor system opened to release pressure, but then failed to close again when pressure dropped to safe levels. Additionally, the valve’s signaling mechanisms malfunctioned, so operators believed it to be closed. Coolant water leaked. The system had no means to test water level of the coolant, so this too went undetected as other failure systems kicked in to mitigate these effects - other pumps to the system shut down in response to the low pressure, and the reactor core overheated.

None of this absolutely had to happen the way that it did, and in response, some good changes in standardized safety-first design went into effect - better valve open/closed detection, better design in the case of failure (such that pressure buildups and pump shut downs work together, rather than against one another, when they do happen), and better operator training. Plenty of regulation is valuable and necessary to prevent stupid negative outcomes, including freaking out the public unnecessarily because you designed your plant poorly.

And that’s just Three Mile Island. Chernobyl was an absolute step-on-a-banana-peel level of avoidable nuclear disaster, which is unfortunate because it was also significantly more costly and harmful than Three Mile Island. The reactor was poorly designed, the staff were not trained in the seriousness of the effects of their missteps, and the whole thing happened because there was an impromptu decision to delay a scheduled shut down of the reactor and run some drills to compensate for the reactor being down.

When you know a thing or two about proper management, Chernobyl sounds like a tuberculosis lab that does their experiments with the bacteria on the bench top without gloves. Neither nuclear nor tuberculosis are to be casually trifled with, because they’re quite dangerous under the wrong circumstances, but you should be cautious about assuming that a disaster is necessarily more the result of how dangerous the substance is than about how well-designed the safety and containment protocols are.

Cost

One of the largest contributing factors to the lack of US nuclear power is that it requires high upfront investment; billions of dollars to build a single plant. Relative to solar, wind, and even traditional coal, this is a much bigger investment, with nuclear reactors costing over five times the amount per kilowatt hour as wind and solar, and nearly double what traditional coal does. The build is more complex with tighter safety constraints. Although cost considerations feature heavily in official documents, say, from the Department of Energy, they’re one of the least publicly discussed factors of lack of nuclear uptake in the US. In the public imagination, even among nuclear enthusiasts, regulatory burden is real but overstated. Despite licensing constraints, nuclear is legal to build in plenty if not all localities even if there can be a bit of a NIMBY situation with it in some cases. Cost is much more relevant to the sluggishness of nuclear development in the United States than regulation is.

Technological Compensation

Nuclear will still be useful going forward, but increasingly we’ve added to our base-load renewable power generations - primarily hydro and nuclear - with better batteries and better transport for intermittent electricity generators like wind and solar. Battery tech has grown by leaps and bounds, aided by hefty federal investment. This is a success story, even if it came because we didn’t use nuclear.

Conclusion

There has been an increase in nuclear power interest in the past few years, with the newest US power plant coming online in Georgia just last year, with more reactors expected to go online at that location in the coming year. Prior to that plant, the next most recent plant built in the US added reactors in 2016 and 1996 - there has been substantial change in the nation’s openness to nuclear over the past 30 years. Nuclear is still a part of the necessary US renewables picture, despite increases in battery technology - there are new records for battery output nearly every year, but as a total percentage of electricity output, they have a lot of ground to make up. Efforts to improve regulatory and licensing burdens are well-placed to aid in the efforts for expanding nuclear, but it is investment and upfront capital that will make the biggest difference in construction. Onward!

1. Apparently a Russian drone strike cracked the major remaining containment structure built around the Chernobyl site in the last month, something I learned while writing this piece because there were a bevy of pieces about it just this week