Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Still, nuclear power is expensive, mainly because it must clear crippling regulatory hurdles while its competitors have been given easy passage. Also, in the United States, nuclear power plants are now being built, after a lengthy hiatus, by private companies using idiosyncratic designs, so they have not climbed the engineer’s learning curve and settled on the best practices in design, fabrication, and construction. Sweden, France, and South Korea, in contrast, have built standardized reactors by the dozen and now enjoy cheap electricity with substantially lower carbon emissions. As Ivan Selin, former commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, put it, “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.”⁸⁹

For nuclear power to play a transformative role in decarbonization it will eventually have to leap past the second-generation technology of light-water reactors. (The “first generation” consisted of prototypes from the 1950s and early 1960s.) Soon to come on line are a few Generation III reactors, which evolved from the current designs with improvements in safety and efficiency but so far have been plagued by financial and construction snafus. Generation IV reactors comprise a half-dozen new designs which promise to make nuclear plants a mass-produced commodity rather than finicky limited editions.⁹⁰ One type might be cranked out on an assembly line like jet engines, fitted into shipping containers, transported by rail, and installed on barges anchored offshore cities. This would allow them to clear the NIMBY hurdle, ride out storms or tsunamis, and be towed away at the end of their useful lives for decommissioning. Depending on the design, they could be buried and operated underground, cooled by inert gas or molten salt that needn’t be pressurized, refueled continuously with a stream of pebbles rather than shut down for the replacement of fuel rods, equipped to co-generate hydrogen (the cleanest of fuels), and designed to shut themselves off without power or human intervention if they overheat. Some would be fueled by relatively abundant thorium, and others by uranium extracted from seawater, from dismantled nuclear weapons (the ultimate beating of swords into plowshares), from the waste of existing reactors, or even from their own waste—the closest we will ever get to a perpetual-motion machine, capable of powering the world for thousands of years. Even nuclear fusion, long derided as the energy source that is “thirty years away and always will be,” really may be thirty years away (or less) this time.⁹¹

The benefits of advanced nuclear energy are incalculable. Most climate change efforts call for policy reforms (such as carbon pricing) which remain contentious and will be hard to implement worldwide even in the rosiest scenarios. An energy source that is cheaper, denser, and cleaner than fossil fuels would sell itself, requiring no herculean political will or international cooperation.⁹² It would not just mitigate climate change but furnish manifold other gifts. People in the developing world could skip the middle rungs in the energy ladder, bringing their standard of living up to that of the West without choking on coal smoke. Affordable desalination of seawater, an energy-ravenous process, could irrigate farms, supply drinking water, and, by reducing the need for both surface water and hydro power, allow dams to be dismantled, restoring the flow of rivers to lakes and seas and revivifying entire ecosystems. The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history’s saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.

Breakthroughs in energy may come from startups founded by idealistic inventors, from the skunk works of energy companies, or from the vanity projects of tech billionaires, especially if they have a diversified portfolio of safe bets and crazy moonshots.⁹³ But research and development will also need a boost from governments, because these global public goods are too great a risk with too little reward for private companies. Governments must play a role because, as Brand points out, “infrastructure is one of the things we hire governments to handle, especially energy infrastructure, which requires no end of legislation, bonds, rights of way, regulations, subsidies, research, and public-private contracts with detailed oversight.”⁹⁴ This includes a regulatory environment that is suited to 21st-century challenges rather than to 1970s-era technophobia and nuclear dread. Some fourth-generation nuclear technologies are shovel-ready, but are trussed in regulatory green tape and may never see the light of day, at least not in the United States.⁹⁵ China, Russia, India, and Indonesia, which are hungry for energy, sick of smog, and free from American squeamishness and political gridlock, may take the lead.