Counterpoint: New fission reactors are a dangerous folly

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In their July 1 commentary, “Minnesota should nuke its nuclear moratorium,” Darrick Moe and Jim Schultz get one thing right: Minnesota’s energy policies are holding us back from an affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy future. They would have been even more correct had they included “efficient,” “clean” and “equitable” in their list of attributes we should expect our electric utility system to exhibit. Beyond that, their opinions are disconnected from reality.

The economic folly of new fission reactors was recognized in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2018. New reactors were way too expensive relative to other energy sources then, and between then and now, the cost of new reactors has continued to escalate, while the price of alternatives continues dropping. Units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle Plant in Georgia are the most recent nuclear plants to come online in the U.S., Unit 3 last year and Unit 4 this past March. They cost more than $13 million per megawatt of installed capacity. For comparison, new solar capacity costs about $1 million per megawatt, and new wind generation capacity costs about $2 million per installed megawatt. For those times when the wind isn’t blowing and there is no harvestable sunlight, a megawatt of storage capacity lasting 10 hours is available for around $3 million.

If Minnesota were following intelligent energy policy, strategically sized wind, solar and storage capacity would be installed within the footprint of each load-serving substation in the state. Strategic sizing would ensure that all the power produced and made available by these facilities would also get consumed within the footprint of that substation, so no new transmission infrastructure would be needed. In Minnesota, this would amount to more than 8,000 megawatts of new generating capacity with major potential for local ownership and progress toward energy equity. If Moe and Schultz are concerned about grid reliability next summer, strategic deployment of renewable generation and storage capacity offers a real-world solution, if only we were to get on with it. On the other hand, the Vogtle Units in Georgia took way over a decade to bring online. If Minnesota’s nuclear moratorium were lifted, how many years do you think it would take before a new reactor would be producing electricity?

Power plants, transmission lines and substations are on the supply side of delivering electric utility services. But Minnesota energy policy is equally askew on the demand side. Obviously, how much electricity needs to be generated on the supply side depends on how much electricity is required to get things done on the demand side. So, from a policy perspective, why are power companies, including investor-owned utilities, municipal power companies and Rural Electric Association co-ops, healthier financially as they get consumers to buy more kilowatt-hours, thereby producing more pollution? Good policy would instead reward power companies for providing energy services efficiently. Kilowatt hours that are saved by using the most efficient commercially available end-use devices are much cheaper than even wind and solar power.

By their discussion of nuclear safety issues, Moe and Schultz must think Star Tribune readers are idiots. Soviet-era graphite core reactors and Homer Simpson have nothing to do with safety issues attached to American reactors. But the radioactive tritium currently leaking out of Monticello and into the Mississippi River a few miles upstream from the water intake for the city of Minneapolis is actual reality, and city leaders would be wise to pay it more attention, particularly now as the city negotiates its franchise agreement with Xcel Energy. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), bragged up by Moe and Schultz, knows about this leakage, lied about it publicly, got busted for lying and publicly apologized for its lies.

Moe and Schultz don’t seem to know about the routine radioactive emissions that all commercial reactors emit. Monticello began releasing these radioactive gases in 1970. As part of the NRC’s formal public record regarding relicensing Monticello for another 20 years, Joseph Mangano, master of public health and master of business administration, examined federal National Cancer Institute (NCI) data between 1972 and 2023. During that time, according to the NCI data, Mangano found that Wright and Sherburne Counties, where Monticello is located, experienced 4,319 excess deaths compared with the average death rate for Minnesota during those years.

All the world’s spent nuclear fuel might fit into a football stadium, as Moe and Schultz suggest, but only if it were to be all packed together without containment, which gets us back to Homer Simpson. In fact, the nation’s only proposed permanent high-level nuclear waste repository, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, is dead. On March 28, 2024, the federal courts blocked a nuclear industry plan to store more than 100,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste in casks atop the Ogallala Aquifer next to Hispanic communities in eastern New Mexico. And waste continues piling up in casks at reactor sites around the country and will continue to do so for an unknown period of time, with escalating risks of radiological destruction as casks age and systems deteriorate.

So the long and short of it is that the dream of nuking Minnesota’s nuclear moratorium is irrelevant. Either way, there will be no new commercial fission reactors in Minnesota. But it would be nice if Minnesota energy policy wised up a bit.

George Crocker is executive director of the Lake Elmo-based North American Water Office.