If coal has to go, followed by natural gas, and solar and wind power are faulted for presumed inability to respond to demand for electricity at the slip of a switch, that would seem to favor future reliance on nuclear power. But Americans have been reluctant to embrace that option primarily due to recurring radiation contamination disasters involving the nuclear fuel cycle: Kyshtym, Russia (1957), Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania (1979), Chernobyl, Ukraine (1986) and Fukushima, Japan (2011).
Initially, as U.S. officials argued for rapid de-carbonization of energy production in this country, there was scarcely any mention of nuclear power as a replacement. During the 2015 negotiations leading to the Paris Accord on climate change, U.S. officials generally steered clear of advancing that option, and that avoidance continued until recently.
Perhaps that was because the watchword was “renewables,†primarily referring to electrical generation using the sun and wind, and the use of finite uranium as a fuel source did not conform to the terminology.
At any rate, the Biden administration’s proposal to combat climate change under consideration in Congress included subsidies for nuclear power in a $300 billion spending package.
Currently, the United States has 55 commercial nuclear power plants, mostly east of the Mississippi River. But the largest is the Palo Verde plant in Arizona which has helped generate electricity for New Mexico as well.
The newest began selling power in October 2016; two more nuclear plant reactors are under construction in Georgia.
So far, commercial nuclear plants generate about 20 percent of U.S. electricity consumption, and about 55 percent of its carbon-free production.
In total, the United States is the world’s biggest producer of nuclear power, accounting for more than 30 percent. But few new plants have been added during the past 30 years.
The World Nuclear Association explains why construction of new nuclear power plants in this country had virtually stopped. “Almost all the U.S. nuclear generating capacity comes from reactors built between 1967 and 1990. Until 2013, there had been no new construction starts since 1977, largely because for a number of years, gas generation was considered more economically attractive and because construction schedules during the 1970s and 1980s had frequently been extended by opposition and compounded by heightened safety fears following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.â€
Ongoing opposition to nuclear power in this country, as elsewhere, comes partly from uncertainty over how to dispose of the plants’ extremely long-lived waste —tens of thousands of years if not hundreds of thousands.
New Mexico is front and center for that controversy. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant  (WIPP) opened in 1999 near Carlsbad, but only for radioactive materials discarded after weapons production. No disposal site has been designated for spent fuel rods from power plants.
For that reason, a new controversy has arisen over plans to open a site in southeastern New Mexico for interim storage of power plant waste. That proposal continues under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
But that need to keep waste fuel rods out of the accessible environment for at least 10,000 years—some experts say the period of isolation should be tens of millions of years— has not deterred officials in other countries increasingly dependent on nuclear power.
France relies on nuclear power for 76 percent of its electricity, and still has no final disposal site.
Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a plan to expand his nation’s commitment to nuclear power. He would spend the equivalent of $34.6 billion on that over the next five years. Even so, his government has made commitments to substantially reduce the country’s reliance on nuclear power. That is supposed to drop to 50 percent by 2035. Under the plan presented in 2018, 14 of France’s nuclear power reactors would shut down by 2035, with as many as six closing in 2030.
About 17 percent of that nation’s power is generated using recycled (re-processed) nuclear fuel, according to the World Nuclear Association.
In France, there seems to be little if any resistance to nuclear power.