New Fission Reactors Are Dangerous Folly

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In their July 1 commentary, “Minnesota Should End Its Nuclear Moratorium,” Darrick Moe and Jim Schultz are right about one thing: Minnesota’s energy policies are preventing us from an affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy future. They would have been even more right if they had included “efficiency,” “cleanliness,” and “equity” in their list of attributes we should expect from our electricity delivery system. Beyond that, their views are out of touch with reality.

The economic inanity of new fission reactors was acknowledged in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2018. New reactors were then far too expensive relative to other energy sources, and since then, the cost of new reactors has continued to rise, while the price of alternatives has continued to fall. Units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle Generating Station in Georgia are the most recent nuclear plants to come online in the United States, 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 capacity costs about $2 million per megawatt installed. For times when the wind is not blowing and there is no usable sunlight, a megawatt of storage capacity lasting 10 hours is available for about $3 million.

If Minnesota followed a smart energy policy, strategically sized wind, solar, and storage capacity would be installed within the footprint of every substation in the state. Strategic sizing would ensure that all the electricity generated and made available by these facilities would also be consumed within the footprint of that substation, so no new transmission infrastructure would be needed. In Minnesota, that would represent over 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 solution, if only we would do it. On the other hand, it took over a decade to bring the Vogtle units online in Georgia. If Minnesota’s nuclear moratorium were lifted, how many years do you think it would take before a new reactor was producing electricity?

Power plants, transmission lines, and substations are on the supply side of providing electric utilities. But Minnesota’s energy policy is just as biased on the demand side. Clearly, the amount of electricity needed to generate on the supply side depends on how much electricity is needed to run things on the demand side. So, from a policy perspective, why are electric utilities—including investor-owned utilities, municipal utilities, and Rural Electric Association cooperatives—financially healthier when they incentivize consumers to buy more kilowatt-hours, thereby producing more pollution? Good policy would instead reward electric utilities for delivering energy services efficiently. The kilowatt-hours saved by using the most efficient end-use devices on the market are much cheaper than wind and solar.

Speaking 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 the safety issues surrounding American reactors. But the radioactive tritium currently leaking from Monticello and flowing into the Mississippi River a few miles upstream of the city of Minneapolis’s water intake is a real thing, and city leaders would be wise to pay more attention to it, especially now that the city is negotiating its franchise agreement with Xcel Energy. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which Moe and Schultz have bragged about, knows about this leak, has lied publicly about it, has been arrested for lying, and has publicly apologized for its lies.

Moe and Schultz do not appear to be aware of the standard radioactive emissions that all commercial reactors emit. Monticello began releasing these radioactive gases in 1970. As part of the NRC’s official public filing for Monticello’s 20-year license renewal, Joseph Mangano, a master of public health and master of business administration, examined federal data from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) between 1972 and 2023. During that time period, according to the NCI data, Mangano found that Wright and Sherburne counties, where Monticello is located, experienced 4,319 excess deaths over the average death rate for Minnesota during those years.

All the world’s spent nuclear fuel could fit in a football stadium, as Moe and Schultz suggest, but only if it were packaged without containment, which brings us back to Homer Simpson. In fact, the only proposed permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste in the United States, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, is dead. On March 28, 2024, federal courts blocked a nuclear industry plan to store more than 100,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in casks atop the Ogallala Aquifer, near Hispanic communities in eastern New Mexico. And the waste continues to accumulate in casks at reactor sites across the country and will continue to do so for an indefinite period, with increasing risks of radiological destruction as the casks age and the systems deteriorate.

In short, the dream of ending Minnesota’s nuclear moratorium is irrelevant. In any case, there will be no new commercial fission reactors in Minnesota. But it would be good if Minnesota’s energy policy were a little wiser.

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