Nuclear Power: A Now-Embraceable 3rd Rail of Bipartisan Accord in Energy Debate

Indian Point Nuclear Power plant, which sits on the east bank of the Hudson River about 36 miles north of Manhattan, had provided up to a quarter of the New Yori City’s electrical needs before it ceased operations in 2021, one of many aging plants among the 55 that remain operational in the United States. Photo by Stephen Chernin/Getty Images

Behind long-dredged but deepening trenches, Democrats lobby for renewables—wind, solar, biomass—and Republicans rally for fossil fuels—oil, gas, coal—with both sides claiming their polar policies plot the best ways forward to a national future secured by reliable, affordable domestic energy.

Between both lines, but not drawing partisan fire, shimmers nuclear energy, the one power neither party wants to pull the plug on.

In fact, congressional Republicans and Democrats agree the United States must dramatically boost domestic uranium excavation and processing because right now, 95 percent of the ore that fuels the nation’s 55 nuclear power plants is imported, including nearly a quarter from Russia.

A February-filed Senate bill seeks to create a national “nuclear fuel program” designed to anchor a “mine-to-market” domestic uranium supply chain, and a House bill introduced in January would ban the import of Russian uranium.

Her bill “that aims to eliminate our reliance on Russian nuclear fuels” is a necessary first step “to restore America’s leadership in clean, nuclear energy,” said House Energy & Commerce Committee Chair Cathy Rodgers (R-Wash.), a co-sponsor of the proposed Russian uranium ban, during Feb. 7 hearings in Washington.

“Expanding our leadership in developing and expanding nuclear energy is going to be one of our top priorities this Congress and addressing our reliance on Russian fuel is just the beginning,” Rodgers said.

Dragline and coal haul truck at North Antelope Rochelle Mine, Wyoming. Peabody Energy/Wikimedia, CC BY

Wyoming Has Your Ore

The proposed Nuclear Fuel Security Act (NFSA), co-filed on Feb. 15 by Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee Chair Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), anticipates Congress banning Russian uranium imports and accelerating the recreation of a lapsed supply chain for an ore the United States has ample supplies to provide and process.

The NFSA calls for the creation of a national effort to extract, stockpile, and process domestic uranium to secure a “mine-to-market” supply chain within the United States and establish a national reserve of uranium.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine has drastically disrupted energy supply chains around the world, and now is the time to take a hard look at how we source the raw materials necessary to power our nation and develop advanced energy technologies,” Manchin said in a statement, noting his proposed bill seeks to “establish a program that will expand both our uranium conversion and enrichment capacity to meet our domestic fuel needs.”

“It’s time for America to ramp up uranium production so we can eliminate our dependence on Russia,” Barrasso said in the statement. “We are stronger and safer as a nation when our nuclear fuel supply chain starts at home.”

That’s literally true for Barrasso because his home state of Wyoming would be among possible beneficiaries of a Russian uranium import ban and the proposed NFSA.

Wyoming’s Powder River Basin has one shuttered mine alone that could produce up to 1.3 million pounds of uranium annually, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates, with more mineable ore likely within the state, which itself could likely fill NFSA’s proposed 2-million pound national uranium reserve stockpile.

Wyoming is also where TerraPower Natrium, funded by a $2 billion Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program grant and private investors such as Bill Gates, is building a sodium-cooled nuclear reactor within a retired coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyo. as a “coal-to-nuclear transition” project.

Disruption in Russian uranium supply prompted TerraPower to announce in late 2022 that it would not have enough fuel to “reach commercial capacity” as planned in 2028.

“Our bipartisan legislation will strengthen American energy security,” Barrasso said. “It will ensure our existing reactors and advanced reactors—like TerraPower’s Natrium reactor—have access to American uranium.”

Test engineer Jacob Wilcox pulls his arm out of a glove box used for processing sodium at TerraPower, a company developing and building small nuclear reactors in this January 2022 photo at its plant in Everett, Wash. AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File

Grease For The Juice

About 61 percent of electricity transmitted by “utility-scale” power plants in the United States is generated from fossil fuels, coal, natural gas, petroleum, and other gases, according to the DOE.

About 20 percent of the nation’s electricity comes from renewable energy sources, the DOE documented in 2021, while nearly 19 percent stems from nuclear energy plants.

According to the EIA, the number of nuclear power plants in the United States declined from 104 in 2012 to 55 in December 2022. Despite this loss of nearly half the number of operating plants in a decade, nuclear power has contributed a steady 20 percent share of the nation’s collective electrical output since 1990.

The 55 nuclear power plants across 28 states include 93 operating commercial reactors and are, on average, 40 years old, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The new last nuclear plant to come online was in 2016, the first new one since 1996.

Nuclear power constitutes half of the carbon-free electricity generation in the United States, according to the DOE.

As such, it is a popular energy source among those who regard “green energy” development as a key priority and is provided significant grant potential in Biden energy laws and rules, including the Bilateral Infrastructure Law and the Infrastructure Reduction Act.

Taillights trace the path of a motor vehicle at the Naughton Power Plant, in Kemmerer, Wyo., a coal plant that will close in 2025 and be replaced by a "nontraditional, sodium-cooled nuclear reactor" to be built by TerraPower, which includes Bill Gates among its investors. AP Photo/Natalie Behring, File

Replace Plants, Double Output

In December 2020, Congress made $75 million available to establish a Uranium Reserve Program and purchase uranium from domestic producers. The 2022 Bilateral Infrastructure Law funds a Civil Nuclear Credit Program that gives priority to reactors that use uranium “produced, converted, enriched, and fabricated into fuel assemblies in the United States.”

The Manchin-Barrasso NSFA directs the DOE to accelerate “on-shoring nuclear fuel production to ensure a disruption in Russian uranium supply [that] would not impact the development of advanced reactors or the operation of the United States’ light-water reactor fleet.”

The NFSA would authorize $3.5 billion over 10 years for nuclear fuel security and calls upon the DOE to “expeditiously increase domestic production” of both low-enriched uranium and high-assay low-enriched uranium to “ensure the availability of domestically produced, converted, enriched, deconverted, and reduced uranium.”

DOE Assistant Secretary Kathryn Huff, who manages the Office of Nuclear Energy, said the department’s emphasis in coming years will be promoting the development of small modular reactors and trying to convince the public to invest in a new generation of nuclear power plants to replace the nation’s aging plants.

Huff, in position papers on the DOE’s website and in media interviews, said her immediate goal is to sustain nuclear energy’s 20-percent share of electric grid production through 2050.

Doing that, the DOE says, will require building new plants, which is an expensive and lengthy process. But, by just replacing older plants with newer, more advanced iterations, the DOE maintains nuclear energy could power half the nation’s electrical grid by 2050.