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When future United States President Joe Biden takes office from Donald Trump next year, fighting global warming should become a top priority. It is an established promise and the hope of many climate activists that the United States under Democrat Biden will rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and take a leadership role in the fight against climate change.
Biden has promised the most ambitious climate program ever for a presidential candidate – a gigantic financial program is destined to put the US on a climate change course. He plans to walk away from the Trump-sponsored oil and gas industry. He plans to turn the US into a climate neutral state by 2050 and wants to fully convert the country’s energy supply.
New reactor technology for the US
Biden also has ideas in mind that some view with skepticism. It is mainly based on renewable energy. Because its global share of total power generation remains comparatively small (in 2020, the share of wind and solar power was just under 10 percent according to the Ember think tank), the US president-designate also wants invest in nuclear energy.
In fact, experts believe that reactor technology can make an important contribution to the energy transition. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sees nuclear power as an opportunity to reduce climate-damaging carbon dioxide, but also mentions the associated risks.
Biden wants to found an agency to promote research and development of nuclear reactors and “probe the future of nuclear energy,” as he writes in his election manifesto.
He relies on so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMR), small systems that can be built quickly and inexpensively.
The concept is not new, but it is seen as the hope of the ailing industry. They have little in common with the gigantic concrete blocks in high-security zones commonly associated with nuclear power plants. Moving forward, SMRs should provide a combination of power with wind, solar and hydroelectric electricity and then intervene when renewables calm down or clouds reduce power supply.
The Russian nuclear power plant “Akademik Lomonossow” is one of the first SMRs. The prototype supplies electricity and heat to hard-to-reach regions. Scientists and engineers are also currently working on around five dozen concepts for small mini power plants. In the United States, Nuscale Power is one of the leading developers. The Oregon company packages its reactors in a 20-meter-long steel tube. They are built at the Nuscale factory, brought to the site by heavy transport, and assembled there.
Facilitated cooling
Nuscale’s pressurized water reactors achieve minimal performance compared to conventional nuclear power plants. One of the modules is to generate 60 megawatts of power. An average nuclear power plant in Germany reaches more than 1000 megawatts. For this, the new small plants, which run on enriched uranium, should be significantly safer.
If incidents do occur in nuclear reactors, the most important thing is that the systems are cooled accordingly to avoid a meltdown of the core or the escape of radioactivity. Small systems have an advantage here: Because they take up much less space, they are easier to cool than a large power plant.
Nuscale plans to install several small reactors in a pool of water. This amount of water alone should be sufficient to cool the reactors in the event of critical accidents. The developer promises that the watershed would still cool enough if the reactor safety systems failed.
Nuscale’s first reactors could be operational in a few years. The US nuclear regulatory authority has already issued the first permits. The fact that the company’s history could turn into a success story was also due to the generous financial injections from the US Department of Energy, still under the Donald Trump administration, by the way.
Nuscale isn’t the only nuclear start-up in the US that has generous donors. The Washington state company Terrapower, which is also working on small modular reactors, also receives money from the Department of Energy. Also, Microsoft founder Bill Gates believes in the concept and probably backed the company with millions.
Terrapower is planning what are known as rotary shaft molten salt reactors. These can run on uranium from disused fuel rods and, in theory, even help reduce the mountain of nuclear waste. However, the company still has to solve some technical problems in the coming years, such as the improvement of the cooling circuit. But a first research reactor should be ready by 2025.
Oklo’s reactors are even smaller. Barely bigger than a single-family home, they should run on recycled uranium fuel rods from old nuclear power plants and produce around 1.5 megawatts of electricity for around 1,000 homes.
Nuclear power still has advocates in many countries
Although the share of nuclear power has declined in recent years, the United States and other nations continue to rely or revert to nuclear power. Climate change also has its part in this development; after all, the generation of electricity in nuclear power plants, unlike, for example, coal-fired power plants, does not generate CO₂.
In Britain, Rolls Royce is working on the return of nuclear power, also with small nuclear reactors. Rolls-Roycs nuclear power plants will be larger than those of the US competition. One of the power plants could deliver around 440 megawatts, enough to supply the more than 500,000 residents of a city like Sheffield.
However, there are parallels between the projects: the British are also planning a kind of nuclear power plant kit: small modules will be built in the factories and transported to the planned location, where they will gather the experts. Up to 16 of these systems could be built, but the first should not be online for at least ten years. The costs are just over two billion euros each.
However, some experts question the cost advantage of SMRs. Physicist MV Ramana from the University of British Columbia in Canada recently told the BBC that such projects have too often been shown to consume more money than planned. Because even the smallest systems would have to meet the same strict security standards as the large ones.
The eternal question about the repository
And Germany? Nuclear power still has an image problem here. The output of atomic energy is still done. The last nuclear power plants will be out of service in a few years. Projects like those in the United States or Great Britain would have no chance in this country, even if German scientists are working on similar ideas.
And even if the systems were much safer from a technical point of view than conventional nuclear power plants and some reactors can recycle fuel rods, the question remains what should happen to the waste. In Germany, this still has no answer. It is no different in America. An underground storage facility in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada has been under discussion for years for the waste from more than 100 US nuclear power plants. But the project has been halted time and time again and it is unclear. if it will continue. Nuclear waste is currently stored in many smaller facilities. A place for eternity has not yet been found here or there.
Does the CO₂ tax come in the United States?
Ultimately, Joe Biden’s plan with nuclear power should be seen primarily as a signal. In many cases, it remains to be seen whether the technical concepts will work in practice. Especially with types of power plants that are supposed to reuse nuclear waste. The question of profitability cannot be clearly answered yet either. It will also depend on whether Biden introduces the price of CO₂ and therefore natural gas systems become less economical.
The president-elect has so far expressed at most mild approval of a tax on CO₂ emissions, nothing more. After all, Biden’s vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, recently came out more clearly in favor of nuclear power. When asked if he was in favor of nuclear power, he said: “Yes, temporarily. As we increase investment in cleaner renewable energy. “
The Gates Foundation also funds journalistic work around the world. At SPIEGEL, he supports the “Global Society” project, which reports on social injustice in the context of globalization. Editorial content is created without any influence from the foundation.
