New Fission Reactors Are Dangerous Madness

Opinion Editor’s Note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local opinions comments online and in print every day. To contribute, click here.

•••

In their July 1 op-ed, “Minnesota Should Drop an A-Bomb on Its Nuclear Moratorium,” Darrick Moe and Jim Schultz are right about one thing: Minnesota’s energy policies are holding us back from an affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy future. They would be even more right if they included “efficiency,” “cleanliness,” and “fairness” in the list of attributes we should expect from our electricity system. Beyond that, their opinions are divorced from reality.

The economic folly of new fission reactors was recognized in July 2018 by the National Academy of Sciences. New reactors were then far too expensive compared to other sources of energy, and since then the cost of new reactors has steadily risen while the cost of alternatives has steadily fallen. Units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle plant in Georgia are the newest nuclear plants to come online in the U.S., Unit 3 last year and Unit 4 this March. They cost more than $13 million per megawatt of installed capacity. By comparison, new solar capacity costs about $1 million per megawatt, and new wind capacity costs about $2 million per megawatt installed. During periods when there is no wind and no sunlight to collect, a megawatt of storage capacity, enough for 10 hours, is available for about $3 million.

If Minnesota followed smart energy policies, strategically sized wind, solar, and storage would be installed within every substation serving a load in the state. Strategic sizing would ensure that all the power produced and shared by these facilities would also be consumed within that substation, so no new transmission infrastructure would be needed. In Minnesota, that would mean more than 8,000 megawatts of new generating capacity with significant potential for local ownership and progress toward energy equity. If Moe and Schultz are concerned about grid reliability next summer, strategically deploying renewables and storage offers a real-world solution, if we just get down to it. On the other hand, it took more than a decade to get the Vogtle units up and running in Georgia. If Minnesota’s nuclear moratorium were lifted, how many years do you think it would take before a new reactor began producing electricity?

Power plants, transmission lines, and substations are on the supply side of utilities. But Minnesota’s energy policy is just as askew on the demand side. It’s clear that the amount of electricity that needs to be generated on the supply side depends on the amount of electricity needed to do the job on the demand side. So from a policy perspective, why are utilities, including investor-owned utilities, municipal power companies, and Rural Electric Association cooperatives, financially healthier because they encourage consumers to buy more kilowatt-hours, thereby creating more pollution? Good policy would instead reward utilities for providing efficient energy services. The kilowatt-hours that are saved by using the most efficient commercially available endpoints are much cheaper than even wind and solar.

Moe and Schultz must think the Star Tribune readers are idiots when they discuss nuclear safety. Soviet-era graphite reactors and Homer Simpson have nothing to do with the safety issues associated with American reactors. But the radioactive tritium now leaking from Monticello into the Mississippi River several miles upstream from the city of Minneapolis’ water intake is real, and city officials should be paying more attention to it, especially now that the city is negotiating a franchise agreement with Xcel Energy. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), praised by Moe and Schultz, knows about the leak, lied publicly about it, was caught in a lie, and has publicly apologized for its lies.

Moe and Schultz are clearly unaware of the routine radioactive emissions that all commercial reactors emit. Monticello began emitting these radioactive gases in 1970. As part of the NRC’s formal public record of reissuing Monticello’s license for another 20 years, Joseph Mangano, a master’s in public health and a master’s in business administration, examined federal National Cancer Institute (NCI) data from 1972 to 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 to the average Minnesota mortality rate during those years.

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

In short, the dream of destroying Minnesota’s nuclear moratorium is irrelevant. In any case, there will be no new commercial fission reactors in Minnesota. But it would be nice if Minnesota’s energy policy smartened up a bit.

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