President-elect Joe Biden is poised to embrace nuclear power in pursuit of aggressive reductions to carbon emissions and will look to build upon the Trump administration’s support for new smaller forms of the technology.
Biden’s support for nuclear power, as articulated in his climate plan and affirmed in the Democratic Party platform, promises to be one of the rare instances of energy policy continuity between the incoming and outgoing administrations.
“As a candidate, Joe Biden’s climate plans were explicitly pro-nuclear and pro-nuclear innovation,” said Jeff Navin, a former acting chief of staff at the Energy Department during the Obama administration. “Now that he is elected, he has an opportunity to build on the bipartisan support in Congress for advanced nuclear and help bring these decarbonization tools to market.”
Republicans have long favored nuclear power, but it is increasingly being supported by Democrats, who realize wind and solar are insufficient to decarbonize the power grid since renewables cannot deliver 24-hour electricity.
“Nuclear is one of the only places where you can get real bipartisan action through the Senate,” said Erik Olson, a climate and energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, who was assuming Republicans hold a narrow majority in the upper chamber next year.
Some progressives and environmental groups still oppose nuclear on cost and safety grounds and worry about the challenge of storing the waste generated by traditional large reactors. But even nuclear skeptic liberals like Bernie Sanders have come around to spending federal dollars on researching, developing, and deploying smaller, cheaper, and theoretically safer reactors that are being produced in the United States.
After Biden beat Sanders in the Democratic primary, the duo created a joint task force that endorsed investing in “advanced nuclear that eliminates risks associated with conventional nuclear technology.”
“Given the rapidly increasing severity of the climate crisis, you have seen a broadening of support for the technologies it will take to bring the crisis under control,” said Dan Reicher, an energy policy professor at Stanford University who helped lead a group, Clean Energy for Biden, that raised money for the candidate.
The first of these so-called small modular reactors are not expected to be on the market until late this decade. There are dozens of advanced reactors proposed by U.S.-based companies in various stages of development, according to the Energy Department. But so far, only one, NuScale Power’s light-water reactor, has received design approval from the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Commission.
Another company, Oklo, which is building an even smaller “micro” reactor, recently produced the first nuclear design that does not use water as a coolant to have its application accepted by the NRC.
Biden’s climate plan calls for creating a clean energy innovation office within the Department of Energy, dubbed ARPA-C (the “C” stands for climate), that would fund “affordable, game-changing technologies” to help the U.S. reach his goal of having carbon-free electricity by 2035 and net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050.
The new agency would seek to enable small modular nuclear reactors to reach half the construction cost of today’s reactors.
Nuclear advocates say a breakthrough in new technologies is needed because many existing large reactors are retiring due to high costs and competition from natural gas and renewables, which are cheaper.
Nuclear power still provides more than half of the U.S.’s zero-carbon electricity. But when nuclear plants close, they are often replaced by carbon-emitting natural gas.
Rich Powell, executive director of ClearPath, a conservative clean energy group, said he’d expect Biden would work to keep open reactors at risk of closing, as well as support new technologies, in order to reach 100% zero-carbon power.
“For that goal to be even remotely possible, it would require an enormous investment in nuclear power,” Powell said. “We couldn’t lose any ground with existing nuclear, and then we’d have to do a significant national deployment of all types of new clean technologies.”
Powell said Biden would have a hard time topping President Trump’s “extremely strong record” supporting nuclear power, which has been enabled by bipartisan legislation in Congress.
The Energy Department recently awarded the first $160 million for a first-of-its-kind advanced reactor demonstration program that aims for companies to build two non-light water reactors that can be operational within seven years.
Last month, it approved a $1.4 billion grant to help defray costs for a group of small utilities that are aiming to be the first in line to buy power from the reactors produced by NuScale.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation reversed an Obama-era ban that prevented it from funding civil nuclear projects overseas.
The administration has also started the process of creating a uranium reserve to ensure a domestic supply chain of the nuclear fuel.
“The key now is we have a lot of programs running,” Powell said. “We just have to make sure they are completed.”
Jessica Lovering, a nonresident fellow with Energy for Growth Hub, expects Biden to make further gains than Trump.
It was the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president, that launched the Energy Department’s small modular nuclear reactor program, which was used to support NuScale.
Trump has since bolstered that support, but it has mostly promoted strength in nuclear as a way to stay competitive with China and Russia.
Biden, however, has specifically touted nuclear as a way to combat climate change.
The difference in framing matters because Trump opposes policies favored by Biden that could spur stronger demand for clean energy sources like nuclear, such as a carbon tax, clean electricity mandate, or direct subsidies.
“What Biden brings in with the focus on climate is much more of a sense of urgency that hasn’t been there in the Trump administration,” said Lovering, who is also a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University studying small nuclear reactors. “There has been lots of private investment, but we need policies to stimulate demand to really drive deployment and costs down.”
Lovering and other supporters see nuclear getting early attention if the Biden administration pursues a economic recovery package focused on clean energy that could provide more funding for new reactors to help build them faster.
“To pass significant infrastructure and clean energy legislation through a Republican-controlled Senate, Biden is going to have to build around existing areas of low-carbon technology agreement like modular nuclear, carbon capture, and electricity storage,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate staff member now with the Progressive Policy Institute.
A coalition of bipartisan senators just this week introduced a bill to provide credits to preserve existing nuclear plants struggling economically while also further cutting regulatory barriers to approving new technologies.
“Nuclear power must be a central part of serious efforts to address climate change,” said Republican Sen. John Barrasso, a co-sponsor of the bill who is expected to become chairman of the Energy Committee. “I will continue to work with members of both parties to strengthen America’s nuclear energy sector,” Barrasso told the Washington Examiner.
