Will Trump’s Regulatory Reforms Do Enough To Unleash Nuclear Energy?
Will Trump’s Regulatory Reforms Do Enough To Unleash Nuclear Energy?
https://reason.com/2025/05/27/will-trumps-regulatory-reforms-do-enough-to-unleash-nuclear-energy/
Tag: electricity
Spain’s Grid Collapsed in 5 Seconds. The U.S. Could Be Next.
“Stable power is retiring faster than its replacements can show up—stuck in queues, lawsuits, or supply chain hell. We’ve spent a decade subsidizing volatility, penalizing reliability, and crossing our fingers that storage will arrive on time. Meanwhile, the slow, steady, heavy machines that actually hold the grid together are being dismantled.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/13/spains-grid-collapsed-in-5-seconds-the-u-s-could-be-next/
The New Stadium Scam Is a Server Farm
“La Porte, Indiana, is a small city between South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. The recent announcement that Microsoft is investing over a billion dollars into a vast new data center campus in La Porte is expected to be transformational for the town of 22,000 people.
Microsoft was given a 40-year tax abatement on equipment, a renewable state sales tax exemption through 2068, and just $2.5 million of payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) over four years—roughly 30 percent of what it would normally owe. After that? Nothing. Local utilities would cover the infrastructure.”
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“there’s infrastructure. Data centers demand massive utility upgrades: power lines, substations, water lines, fiber, and roads. These are usually paid for by local utilities, state infrastructure grants, or ratepayers. In Kansas City, Evergy announced it would build two new power plants largely to meet data center demand—costs to be passed on to customers. In Northern Virginia, Dominion Energy’s data center grid upgrades are now a line item in statewide electric rate hikes.”
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“these deals are struck behind closed doors, insulated from scrutiny, and built on the assumption that any growth is good—even if it’s paid for by reaching into your neighbor’s wallet.”
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“Analysts project that data center capacity will more than triple by 2030 and estimate the U.S. will need to reach 35 gigawatts of capacity by then—double today’s total. The surge is largely driven by artificial intelligence (AI), which alone could account for 70 percent of all data center demand by 2030. These facilities already draw more electricity than some nations, and Goldman Sachs projects they’ll consume up to 9 percent of U.S. power by decade’s end. New builds are booming—yet much of that construction is being underwritten, piece by piece, by state and local governments chasing the illusion of growth.
Data centers are not a menace. Left to the market, they’re a genuine asset—critical infrastructure in a country trying to stay competitive in the age of AI. We don’t need to bribe the richest companies on earth to build them.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/06/the-new-stadium-scam-is-a-server-farm/
Small Modular Reactors Are Overhyped
Markets Don’t Want More Coal. Trump Is Propping Up the Industry Anyway.
“Coal’s decline was not caused by a federal plot to transition away from coal, like Trump thinks, but rather by markets and innovation. Advancements in renewable energy technologies—which were, and continue to be, supported by subsidies—made the energy source more attractive to investors. Breakthroughs in horizontal drilling in the early 2000s brought a flood of cheap and abundant natural gas to the market. These technologies priced coal out, which lowered energy bills for consumers and significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
The energy source is also not as cost-effective as the executive order claims. Coal plants are expensive to build and operate, and transportation costs can exceed the price of coal at the mine. These economic factors have informed investors and utilities not to build coal-fired power plants—the most recent large plant was built in 2013—which has made the current fleet of these power plants less efficient than other energy sources.
To be sure, some regulatory barriers, including federal air quality standards and state-level bans, have made coal less competitive. However, “it is the market that explains coal’s decline better than regulations,” Philip Rossetti, an energy policy analyst at the R Street Institute, tells Reason.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/10/markets-dont-want-more-coal-trump-is-propping-up-the-industry-anyway/
Texas Lawmakers Want To Use ‘Police Power’ of the State To Halt Renewable Energy Projects
“Texas generates the most renewable energy in the nation. Three Republican bills being advanced by the state legislature could halt Texas’ green energy progress and give fossil fuels a leg up in the state’s energy market.
Senate Bill 388, which has passed the state Senate, would require at least 50 percent of power generation installed after January 1, 2026, to come from “dispatchable” energy sources, which include natural gas, nuclear power, and coal. This bill effectively subsidizes fossil fuel projects by requiring utility providers to purchase power generation credits from dispatchable energy sources.”
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“A report from Aurora Energy Research estimates that this bill would add $5.2 billion to Texas power prices over the next decade; residents could pay an extra $200 per year in energy costs.”
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“Using the “police power” of the state ignores what regulators and the market are saying: Texas needs every energy source to meet future demand. That includes renewables.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/02/texas-lawmakers-want-to-use-police-power-of-the-state-to-halt-renewable-energy-projects/
Nuclear Energy Prevents Air Pollution and Saves Lives
“While estimates vary, studies agree that air pollution has caused great harm to human health. Max Roser at Our World in Data reviewed information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) on global air pollution mortality estimates. WHO and IHME report that between 4.2 million and 4.5 million people die prematurely from exposure to outdoor air pollution annually. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) calculated that 3.6 million people prematurely die as a result of air pollution from burning fossil fuels. The PNAS study estimated that the 194,000 annual premature deaths in the U.S. resulting from fossil fuel air pollution amounted to the annual loss of 5.7 million life years.
Contrast these estimates with the number of deaths associated with generating nuclear power. The 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown caused no injuries or deaths, and Fukushima’s 2011 tsunami-caused disaster may have led to just one radiation-related death years later.
Chernobyl’s reactor blast killed two workers, and 47 emergency workers who doused the core fires later died of radiation exposure. The good news is that a 2018 report by the United Nations’ Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation noted that most people downwind “were exposed to radiation levels comparable to or a few times higher than annual levels of natural background.” Consequently, the report concluded that the “vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences due to the radiation from the Chornobyl accident.”
Using air pollution data derived from satellite observations, the NBER economists generally find that bringing a reactor online significantly reduces ambient fine particulate air pollution around the nearest cities. Using estimates provided by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index, they calculate how much life expectancies would have increased owing to reduced air pollution had the extrapolated trend in constructing new nuclear power plants not stalled.
The economists reckon that the construction of each additional nuclear power plant, by reducing air pollution, could save more than 800,000 life years. “According to our baseline estimates, over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of [nuclear power plants] worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies,” they report. “Our calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in [nuclear power plant] growth in these countries after Chernobyl.” They estimate the U.S. lost 141 million life years due to the slowdown in nuclear power deployment.
Cautioning that their estimates are only intended to illustrate a hypothetical timeline in which nuclear power plants continued to grow at the same rate as before the Chernobyl disaster, the researchers nonetheless conclude that “air pollution would have likely been much lower, which in turn, would have had significant health benefits.””
https://reason.com/2024/11/29/nuclear-power-saves-lives/
Regulations Are Making It Harder To Meet the Nation’s Power Demands
“absent a comprehensive permitting reform bill that shrinks the role of the federal government, developers in the U.S. will be unable to rapidly build out power generation to meet future demand.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/11/regulations-are-making-it-harder-to-meet-the-nations-power-demands/
Many Native Americans Struggle With Poverty. Easing Energy Regulations Could Help.
“According to the study, reservations today are 46 percent less likely to host wind farms and 110 percent less likely to host solar projects compared to neighboring non-reservation lands. Although the lands provided to Native Americans have historically been less agriculturally productive, those lands are now seen as perfectly conditioned for solar and wind energy, according to research from the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Federal policy, however, continues to pigeonhole Native Americans into farming because of how difficult it can be to use the land for anything else. Since the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up communal land into parcels among Natives in an attempt to assimilate them into American society, and its subsequent reversal through the Wheeler-Howard Act, Native land policy has been overwhelmingly bureaucratized.
Despite its reversal, the Dawes Act has had long-lasting consequences. Inheritance rules imposed by the law spurred a phenomenon called fractionation, in which parcels of land had to be divided up between all heirs after the owners passed away. As a result, some parcels have hundreds of owners, increasing the cost of development exponentially as the number of owners who needed to be contacted for approval ballooned.
A green light from the Bureau of Indian Affairs is also required for most energy projects on Native lands. “Typically, you have to work with different agencies, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” said Sarah Johnston, one of the study’s co-authors, “which, anecdotally, can be quite slow in terms of getting the necessary approvals.” Additionally, ownership records from the Bureau are often incomplete, making cases involving fractionated land even more fraught.
Were reservation lands to host more energy facilities, this would help lower the rate of unelectrified tribal communities. In just Navajo Nation homes, the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States, 21 percent lack electricity.
Altogether, removing regulatory barriers would give Native American tribes the ability to move past the raw deals they’ve gotten throughout history, allowing them to generate electricity, wealth, and prosperity for their communities.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/03/many-native-americans-struggle-with-poverty-easing-energy-regulations-could-help/
Noah Smith is too down on nuclear energy
“Noah acknowledges, in passing, one particular provision of the existing nuclear regulatory framework on the United States that’s very important: radiation is held to the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) standard, which makes it essentially impossible for nuclear to be cost-competitive.
Suppose I had a design for a cost-effective nuclear reactor, and I said I should be allowed to build it, because electricity is good and air pollution is bad. The regulator is going to look at it and say, “Well, that reactor seems awfully cheap to build, why not add a bunch more features to make the radiation levels even lower?” And then I will say, “That would be hideously expensive in a way that is net bad for public health, because it leads to more burning of fossil fuels and worse air pollution.” But the regulator comes back and says, “We’re not using a cost-benefit framework, we’re using ALARA.” And I say, “That doesn’t make sense, coal ash is radioactive — you are creating more radiation by raising my costs.” And the regulator says, “I don’t regulate coal plants, I regulate you — ALARA!”
As Jason Crawford writes, “any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.”
This is a deeply dysfunctional regulatory paradigm, and it reflects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s origins in 1974 legislation that was explicitly motivated by a belief that the old Atomic Energy Commission was too friendly to the industry.
In 2019, Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which, among other things, “requires the NRC to develop new processes for licensing nuclear reactors, including staged licensing of advanced nuclear reactors.” The hope of NEIMA’s proponents was to change 45 years of the NRC fundamentally being an agency that says “no” to stuff and make them into an agency that would create a regulatory pathway under which new kinds of nuclear reactors could be licensed and built. And after several years, the NRC did get around to writing the new rules for SMRs, but they came up with an even longer and more cumbersome regulatory process.
Earlier this summer, the ADVANCE Act reiterated Congress’s determination for the NRC to change.
But the NRC staff, to the best of my knowledge, fundamentally does not believe that America’s elected officials genuinely want them to make it faster and cheaper to build nuclear reactors. And one reason they don’t believe it is that even though the Biden administration says lots of pro-nuclear stuff, has plenty of pro-nuclear appointees, signed the ADVANCE Act, and has done a lot to help with SMRs in terms of financing, they still coughed-up an NRC nominee who basically supports the status quo. You need a team of political appointees at the agency who are willing to both drive change and also personally take the heat when change makes people mad. You can’t “just use nuclear, bro.” You need to put people in place to actually drive specific policy change in a way that will let the industry grow and work.
And of course, even if you did that, it might not work.”
https://www.slowboring.com/p/noah-smith-is-too-down-on-nuclear