Nuclear Energy Could Be A Godsend For Biden’s Green Agenda. Here’s What’s Holding It Back

Nuclear energy is effective at scale and produces no emissions, but the technology may not…

dailycaller.com

Nuclear energy is effective at scale and produces no emissions, but the technology may not be poised to play a leading role in President Joe Biden’s green agenda.

American policymakers, primarily Democrats and their appointees, are pushing hard to realize the Biden administration’s goal of having the U.S. power sector reach net-zero emissions by 2035, but wind, solar and other renewable generation sources have not yet shown the same degree of reliability that nuclear has demonstrated. Despite these facts, Biden and lawmakers have so far failed to simplify the nuclear regulatory and permitting process, according to energy sector experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Biden administration often mentions nuclear alongside solar and wind, but U.S. nuclear capacity has remained mostly stagnant since 1980, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). While new solar and wind projects are being announced and built with generally increasing frequency, only a handful of new nuclear reactors have come online in the past twenty years, a trend that may not change in the absence of significant policy and regulatory changes, according to EIA and power sector experts who spoke with the DCNF.

“Nuclear’s costs are enormous, because of the regulatory morass created by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It would be better to scrap the whole thing and go back to the Atomic Energy Commission, which actually worked to ensure safe, secure and affordable nuclear technologies,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF. “Nuclear would be the obvious answer if the Greens and Biden truly want to electrify everything and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but they also oppose natural gas that has reduced coal emissions, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. They don’t seem to want anything that solves the problems they insist exist, so I expect them to continue to reject things that actually work.”

The Biden administration has spent at least $1 trillion to advance its climate agenda, and generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 are designed to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels. Both the infrastructure package and the IRA contain provisions designed to forestall the early retirement of nuclear facilities. However, neither law sufficiently streamlined the complex regulatory environment for nuclear or significantly reduced the overhead costs of building new capacity, John Starkey, director of public policy for the American Nuclear Society, told the DCNF.

The incentives in the IRA and infrastructure bills are a “great start,” but “more assistance for cost overruns and early mover support for first-of-a-kind advanced reactors would also be helpful,” Starkey told the DCNF.

The administration has expressed a desire to build up a domestic supply chain for nuclear power, which is dominated by Russia and China. However, Biden also designated a nearly one million acres of uranium-rich land in Arizona as a national monument in August 2023, prohibiting future mining claims in the covered area…