From the DAILY CALLER

NICK POPE
CONTRIBUTOR

Nuclear energy is effective at scale and produces no emissions, but the technology may not be poised to play a leading role in President Joe Biden’s green agenda.

American policymakers, primarily Democrats and their appointees, are pushing hard to realize the Biden administration’s goal of having the U.S. power sector reach net-zero emissions by 2035, but wind, solar and other renewable generation sources have not yet shown the same degree of reliability that nuclear has demonstrated. Despite these facts, Biden and lawmakers have so far failed to simplify the nuclear regulatory and permitting process, according to energy sector experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Biden administration often mentions nuclear alongside solar and wind, but U.S. nuclear capacity has remained mostly stagnant since 1980, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). While new solar and wind projects are being announced and built with generally increasing frequency, only a handful of new nuclear reactors have come online in the past twenty years, a trend that may not change in the absence of significant policy and regulatory changes, according to EIA and power sector experts who spoke with the DCNF.

“Nuclear’s costs are enormous, because of the regulatory morass created by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It would be better to scrap the whole thing and go back to the Atomic Energy Commission, which actually worked to ensure safe, secure and affordable nuclear technologies,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF. “Nuclear would be the obvious answer if the Greens and Biden truly want to electrify everything and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but they also oppose natural gas that has reduced coal emissions, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. They don’t seem to want anything that solves the problems they insist exist, so I expect them to continue to reject things that actually work.”

The Biden administration has spent at least $1 trillion to advance its climate agenda, and generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 are designed to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels. Both the infrastructure package and the IRA contain provisions designed to forestall the early retirement of nuclear facilities. However, neither law sufficiently streamlined the complex regulatory environment for nuclear or significantly reduced the overhead costs of building new capacity, John Starkey, director of public policy for the American Nuclear Society, told the DCNF.

The incentives in the IRA and infrastructure bills are a “great start,” but “more assistance for cost overruns and early mover support for first-of-a-kind advanced reactors would also be helpful,” Starkey told the DCNF.

The administration has expressed a desire to build up a domestic supply chain for nuclear power, which is dominated by Russia and China. However, Biden also designated a nearly one million acres of uranium-rich land in Arizona as a national monument in August 2023, prohibiting future mining claims in the covered area. (RELATED: Enviros Cheered New York For Shutting Down Huge Nuke Plant. Then Emissions Jumped)

There are currently 54 operational nuclear power plants and a total of 93 commercial reactors in the U.S., which combine to supply about 19% of America’s electricity, according to EIA. The average nuclear reactor is 42 years old, and licensing rules restrict their lifetimes to a maximum range of 40 to 80 years, according to EIA.

The potential promise of nuclear energy is also apparent to many policymakers from around the world; more than 20 nations, including the U.S., pledged to triple nuclear energy generation to bring down emissions during COP28, the United Nations climate summit held at the end of 2023 in the United Arab Emirates. However, realizing that pledge in the U.S. may be more difficult than making it given the high costs and regulatory environment that prospective builders and operators of nuclear plants must navigate, multiple energy sector and nuclear experts told the DCNF.

“I think the fundamental issue with nuclear power is a question of risk aversion. People have a very strong association of nuclear power with nuclear accidents and radiation leaks and very severe health hazards. And there is debate,” Brian Potter, a senior infrastructure fellow with the Institute for Progress, told the DCNF. “There’s a lot of debate, which I’m not an expert on, as to how real those risks are.”

“The organizations tasked with overseeing and managing tend to be very risk averse and have a very burdensome process for approval and getting these things built,” Potter continued. “And so overall, it just makes it really, really hard to build these things or to relax regulations around making them easier to build.”

In terms of levelized capital costs, nuclear energy is the most expensive per unit of energy produced of all forms of generation other than offshore wind under the assumption that operation will start in 2028, according to EIA data aggregated by Statista.

Notably, many Democrats and environmentalists are opposed to nuclear energy largely because of perceived safety risks. Historically, major nuclear incidents — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima — have caused significant environmental damage or loss of life, and often are followed by increases in regulation designed to prevent another disaster.

But those incidents, tragic and destructive though they were, are not representative of nuclear power’s overall level of safety, according to Starkey.

“I sense a cooling even from a lot of environmentalist groups that used to sour on nuclear who are now saying ‘wait a minute,’” Starkey told the DCNF. “With regard to things that have happened in the past when it comes to nuclear accidents, the public and Congress, in a bipartisan way on both sides, I’m starting to see more of an understanding of what’s happened. And that deep fear of radiation from 10, 15, 20 years ago, it’s starting to tamper down a little bit.” (RELATED: Elon Musk Calls For More Fossil Fuels And Nuclear Power To Avert Energy Crisis)

The NRC — the federal entity that is primarily responsible for regulating nuclear power —  does not impose a regulatory burden that is too onerous, Starkey added. However, the agency is trying to become “leaner and meaner” while also “maintaining a vigorous standard of safety,” Starkey said.

“We are focused on appropriately balancing our regulatory footprint while continuing to ensure we’re carrying out our safety mission,” an NRC spokesperson told the DCNF. The spokesperson also referred the DCNF to a March speech from NRC Chair Christopher Hanson in which he said that his agency is anticipating applications for two combined licenses, one design certification, one standard design approval, one manufacturing license, three operating licenses and nine construction permits.

Congress has also identified a need for streamlining in the nuclear space, passing a package of nuclear reform bills in the House this week in strong bipartisan fashion. However, the plan of some senators to use the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill as a legislative vehicle for the nuclear package failed, according to the Washington Examiner.

Despite the missed opportunity on the FAA bill, Starkey remains confident that the nuclear package could still find its way through the Senate at some point in the coming weeks as more chances come around.

The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.

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From Robert Bryce’s Substack

The Sun is mainly made of hydrogen. But there is nothing new under the Sun, and that includes hydrogen.

That Old Testament reference — “what has been will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” — is appropriate here because the hype about hydrogen seems nearly as old as the Bible itself.

On June 10, 1975, during the 94th Congress, the House of Representatives held the first of two “investigative hearings on the subject of hydrogen — its production, utilization, and potential effects on our energy economy of the future.” The hearing was chaired by Mike McCormack, a Democrat from Washington state, who claimed hydrogen “has the potential of playing the same kind of role in our energy system as electricity does today.”

In 1996, the Chicago Sun-Times declared “The first steps toward what proponents call the hydrogen economy are being taken.” In 2003, Jeremy Rifkin, an “economic and social theorist,” published The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth. In that book,Rifkin claimed that “Globalization represents the end stage of the fossil-fuel era.” Turning “toward hydrogen is a promissory note for a safer world,” he averred.

President George W. Bush bought the hydrogen hype. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, he said, “With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles” to taking hydrogen-fueled automobiles “from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.” A few months after that speech, his administration announced a collaborative effort with the European Union for the “development of a hydrogen economy,” including the  technologies “needed for mass production of safe and affordable hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles.” The White House claimed in a 2003 press release that the effort would “improve America’s energy security by significantly reducing the need for imported oil.”

The history of the hype matters because we live in ahistorical times. Or, as author Jeff Minick explained in 2022, we are plagued by “presentism.” Presentism, Minick wrote, “is the reason so many young people can name the Kardashians but can’t tell you the importance of Abraham Lincoln or why we fought in World War II.”

Presentism helps explain why, on April 30, the New York Times published a piece headlined, “Hydrogen Offers Germany a Chance to Take a Lead in Green Energy,” which ignores the long history of hydrogen’s failure to live up to the forecasts. But blaming presentism can’t account for the vapidity of the article, which hinges on this nut graf:

The concept of hydrogen as a renewable energy source has been around for years, but only within the past decade has the idea of its potential to replace fossil fuels to power heavy industry taken off, leading to increased investment and advances in the technology. (Emphasis added.)

The idea of hydrogen may (or may not) be taking off, but hydrogen is not a “source” of energy, it’s an energy carrier. Calling hydrogen an energy “source” is like calling Stormy Daniels an “actress.”

Hydrogen is abundant in the universe. But it’s not a source of energy. Instead, like electricity and gasoline, it must be manufactured. The most common ways are by splitting water through electrolysis, or via steam-methane reforming, which uses high-pressure steam to produce hydrogen from methane.

There are other forehead-slapping statements in the Times article written by Stanley Reed and Melissa Eddy, who traveled to the German city of Duisburg to visit a factory that makes electrolyzers. “If adopted widely,” they wrote, “the devices could help clean up heavy industry such as steel-making, in Germany and elsewhere.” Well, yes, if “adopted widely.” But despite decades of frothy predictions from Rifkin and others, electrolyzers haven’t been adopted widely because making and using hydrogen on a large scale is — as my friend, Steve Brick, puts it — “a thermodynamic obscenity.”

The cover of Rifkin’s 2003 book.

Reed and Eddy ignore the energy intensity of making hydrogen, only offering that by using “electricity to split water” the electrolyzer “produces hydrogen, a carbon-free gas that could help power mills like the one in Duisburg.” That’s true. But how much electricity is needed? And where the heck is German industry, which is already being hammered by expensive gas and power, going to get the juice? At what cost? Those questions are not addressed.

To be clear, lots of other media outlets are hyping hydrogen. And the hype is surging because of fat government subsidies. Reed and Eddy explain that the German government has earmarked some $14.2 billion “for investment in about two dozen projects to develop hydrogen.” Here in the U.S., the 45V tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act provides lucrative subsidies for hydrogen production. Big business is lining up to get those subsidies. In February, energy giant Exxon Mobil warned that it might cancel a proposed hydrogen project at its Baytown, Texas refinery depending on how the Treasury Department interpreted the “clean” hydrogen rules in the IRA.

Regardless of tax credits and subsidies, making and using hydrogen is a high-entropy, high-cost process. As a friend in the oil refining business told me last year, “If you like $6-per-gallon gasoline, you’re gonna love $14-to-$20-per-gallon hydrogen.”

As for Brick’s “thermodynamic obscenity” line, the numbers — which I’ll examine in a moment — are easy to understand. Hydrogen is insanely expensive, in energy terms, to manufacture. It takes about three units of energy, in the form of electricity, to produce two units of hydrogen energy. In other words, the hydrogen economy requires scads of electricity (a high quality form of energy) to make a tiny molecule that’s hard to handle, difficult to store, and expensive to use.

Among the biggest challenges in handling and storing the gas is the problem of “hydrogen embrittlement,” which can occur when metals are exposed to hydrogen. That means we can’t use existing gas pipelines or tanks to move and store the gas. As for using the gas, yes, it can be blended with natural gas and put into turbines or reciprocating engines. However, the best way to use it is in a fuel cell. And from where will those devices come? I’m old enough to collect Social Security. I’ve been reporting about the energy sector for nearly four decades, and yet, in all that time, I’ve seen precisely three fuel cells.  

How much would the hydrogen economy cost? In 2020, Bloomberg NEF estimated that producing enough “green” hydrogen to meet 25% of global energy demand would require “more electricity than the world now generates from all sources and an investment of $11 trillion in production and storage.”

The obscene thermodynamics of hydrogen can be understood by looking at an announcement made last year by Constellation Energy. According to a March 10, 2023 article in Nuclear NewsWire, a new hydrogen production project at the company’s Nine Mile Point nuclear plant in New York, “is part of a $14.5 million cost-shared project between Constellation and the Department of Energy.” Of that sum, $5.8 million was coming from the DOE. The article explained that “Using 1.25 megawatts of zero-carbon energy per hour,” the plant’s electrolyzer will produce “560 kilograms of clean hydrogen per day.”

The math is simple. The plant uses 30 megawatt-hours of electricity to produce 560 kg of hydrogen per day. One MWh of electricity is equal to 3,600 megajoules of energy, and one kg of hydrogen contains about 130 MJ of energy. Therefore, Nine Mile Point uses 108,000 MJ of electricity to produce 72,800 MJ of hydrogen, or 1.5 MJ of electricity for 1 MJ of hydrogen.

Such a lousy EROEI (energy return on energy invested) should immediately disqualify hydrogen from serious energy policy discussions. But that, of course, hasn’t happened. It must also be noted that the EROEI is worse than what I stated above because the hydrogen, once produced, must be stored and fed back into another energy conversion device to make electricity or heat. In that process, more energy will be lost.

I’ll end with a bit more history. In 2004, the National Research Council and the National Academy of Engineering published a 267-page report called “The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs.” In the concluding section, the report said, “making hydrogen from renewable energy through the intermediate step of making electricity, a premium energy source, requires further breakthroughs in order to be competitive.” It continued:

There are major hurdles on the path to achieving the vision of the hydrogen economy; the path will not be simple or straightforward. Many of the committee’s observations generalize across the entire hydrogen economy: the hydrogen system must be cost-competitive, it must be safe and appealing to the consumer, and it would preferably offer advantages from the perspectives of energy security and CO₂ emissions. Specifically for the transportation sector, dramatic progress in the development of fuel cells, storage devices, and distribution systems is especially critical. Widespread success is not certain.

Widespread success of the hydrogen economy wasn’t certain in 2004, and it’s not certain now. Or, to put it in ecclesiastical terms, there’s nothing new under the hydrogen sun.