Can nuclear power make a comeback?

(CN) — Just before midnight on July 17, 1955, something extraordinary happened in the small desert town of Arco in far eastern Idaho.

At the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s nearby National Reactor Testing Station, the BORAX-III reactor briefly generated enough energy to power Arco’s entire grid. 

The surplus only lasted for around 90 minutes, and most of Arco’s 1000 residents were likely fast asleep for the event. Regardless, Arco became the first community anywhere on Earth to be powered entirely by nuclear energy, earning it a nickname (the Atomic City) and a tagline (the “first city in the world lighted by atomic power”).

Fast forward to today, and the Cold War-era struggle for nuclear dominance that spawned the Arco experiment is long over. But if Americans once feared nuclear war, they now face a new existential crisis in the form of climate change.

As the world pivots away from fossil fuels, many have instead turned to wind and solar energy sources, which have become increasingly cheap and accessible. Proponents for nuclear energy say it deserves a spot in the energy mix too. Despite its connection to dramatic meltdowns and potentially world-ending bombs, they say that when done right, nuclear can provide lots of clean energy with little environmental impact.

At the former National Reactor Testing Station — now the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory — its around 6,000 scientists and engineers still very much believe in the promise of nuclear power. They say new projects at the lab could make nuclear energy significantly more obtainable, increasing its availability for regular civilian use.

For the first time in half a century, the laboratory is working on a new reactor, dubbed MARVEL by its creators. The first-of-its-kind microreactor can fit into just one or two shipping containers, making it easier to scale and deploy to areas too remote for a full-sized one. 

MARVEL is expected to be ready in the next two years — and INL researchers already have plans beyond it. Once MARVEL is up and running, the lab also has plans to build a new mobile microreactor for the Department of Defense.

Projects like these could forge a new path for nuclear energy, Jess Gehin, INL’s associate laboratory director for Nuclear Science and Technology, said in a phone interview. 

“They are fully factory-fabricated,” Gehin said of the microreactors. “You can transport [a microreactor] on a truck or train, [it] can be installed instead of being constructed, and when you’re done with it, it can be taken away.” Compared to the massive nuclear reactors of yore, these changes would make them “a lot more similar to other types of generators.”

Some INL scientists view the microreactors as a breakthrough rivaling Arco — one only made possible, Gehin said, by decades of steady work at the lab.

“Look at the fuels and materials being used for microreactors, and they were developed here at INL,” he said. “Not just over our history — that is research being done today.”

As governments around the world pivot towards renewables, nuclear boosters like Gehin note the technology still packs one of the biggest punches when it comes to energy output.

Nuclear power offers very high energy density, Gehin said: “about a million times more energy dense than any other form of energy.”

Still, if nuclear power is to ever play a major role in global energy production, it will first have to overcome a number of hurdles.

Among them: public fears over nuclear catastrophe. The world was first introduced to nuclear technology in World War II, when its terrifying power was seen in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 — followed by a much worse one at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 — further fueled public fears, leading to a relative lack of interest in nuclear power throughout the latter part of the 20th century.

Fears about nuclear energy are not as common today. The most notable recent nuclear disaster, at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, caused few if any radiation-related deaths and never resulted in a disaster on the scale of Chernobyl. 

If anything, critics say evacuations after the disaster (along with stress over possible radiation exposure) ultimately caused more problems than the meltdown itself. Meanwhile, research has shown that outside of catastrophic meltdowns, people are exposed to more radiation living next to a coal-powered plant than a nuclear one.

More than public mistrust, cost is now the main factor holding back nuclear energy, said Adrian Gallo, climate program manager at the Idaho Conservation League.

“Purely from a dollars and cents perspective, it is just expensive right now to bring on nuclear and maintain it,” Gallo said. “The relative role that nuclear can play almost entirely hinges on how much it costs” — and when it comes to the price tag, “wind and solar [are] just eating nuclear’s lunch.”

Nuclear-power generation currently costs around four times as much as wind and solar — and wind and solar are only getting cheaper.

Those cost realities can be seen at Idaho Power. One of the biggest utility providers in the state, it aims to use 100% clean energy by 2045.

While the company does include nuclear in its long-term plans, the relative unaffordability of nuclear power means that “Idaho Power does not currently have any nuclear in our resource mix,” the company said in a statement to Courthouse News.

“The projected cost of the most likely nuclear resource … prevented it from being included in our preferred resource portfolio,” the statement added. “We will continue to evaluate nuclear as the technology develops and as costs come down.”

In an effort to lower costs, INL in recent months has started research on experimental fuel rods. The lab says the rods, built by the Westinghouse Electric Company, could help drive down energy costs once perfected. 

Expensive or not, few question how vital nuclear power can be. In spite of historic concerns around nuclear energy, the tech currently provides around 20% of U.S. power needs. Its low emissions make it relatively environmentally friendly, and it can provide baseline power output during times of little sun or wind.

While nuclear energy can be spendy, humanity would nonetheless be much worse off without it, Gallo said.

“Is it valuable? Yes. Is it expensive? Also yes,” he said. “Could we do without it? I don’t think so. Those three things are all true at the same time.”

Can nuclear power overcome the obstacles and claim a bigger role in the global energy mix? Only time will tell. Breakthroughs like MARVEL could lower costs and increase access, giving the tech new life. Alternatively, nuclear could continue to struggle to keep pace with alternatives like solar and wind.

Whatever the case, nuclear power has left a mark on the history of humanity. At one point, the technology provided not just doomsday gloom but optimistic futurism. A small Idaho town in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains is a testament to that fact. As its welcome sign reminds visitors, it was the first city in the world lighted by atomic power.

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