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Is Nuclear Energy the ‘Real Green New Deal’?
The Trump administration may back nuclear, but it still faces an uphill battle in the U.S.
The Trump administration—the same people who pulled out of the Paris Agreement, rolled back the Clean Power Plan, and reduced fuel-economy regulations—has become an unlikely champion of at least one source for climate change mitigation: nuclear power.
Late last year, Trump signed into law two bipartisan bills to encourage research and innovation in nuclear energy. In late March of this year, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced that the Trump administration would be guaranteeing $3.7 billion in loans to finish building two new reactors at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. That same week, Edward McGinnis, the DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for nuclear energy, told CNBC that the State Department would be expanding talks for cooperation and memorandums of understanding with countries interested in nuclear power. The idea would be to cultivate clients for the “next generation of nuclear power,” which McGinnis hopes will come from the U.S.—and to ensure American influence on nuclear material proliferation.
Unlike coal or natural gas, nuclear doesn’t generate any carbon emissions. And unlike carbon-free renewables like wind or solar, it can produce electricity 24/7. But nuclear power also has a real image problem among environmentalists, who worry about the risk of meltdowns and nuclear waste, and an economic one as well, on account of the sky-high costs of building new plants. The Trump administration has been consistently pro-nuclear, at least on paper. When Perry announced the new Vogtle loans, he declared triumphantly, “This is the real Green New Deal,” and said the project would help further his agency’s mission of “making American nuclear cool again.”
With U.S. emissions growing by 3.4% in 2018, and with the planet routinely experiencing warmer surface temperatures, nuclear power can make a significant difference on climate action. But can the Trump administration do anything more for nuclear than its usual brand of gesture politics?
“The short answer is no,” says Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who studies nuclear policy. The long…
