Abstract

"Nuclear Follies? Commercial Nuclear Power in the American South"

Ben Kodres-O'Brien, Columbia University (bk2777@columbia.edu)

Commercial nuclear power has a fraught and paradoxical history, especially in the US. In the southwest, it is a story of indigenous exploitation and toxicity; in the east, of risk and accident; in the northwest and northeast, of cost overruns and financial restructuring; and in the north and on the coasts in general, of reactor shutdowns and utility bankruptcies. And yet, shockingly, nuclear power is the single largest source of carbon-free electricity generation in the US nationwide today. Most histories of nuclear power in the US focus on follies and failures. This paper, by contrast, reconsiders nuclear power’s history by balancing these with its modest successes. It does so by comparing the development of nuclear projects in the US south—like those for the Tennessee Valley Authority, Duke Energy, and Southern Company—with some of their counterparts in the northwest and northeast—as in the Washington Public Power Supply System and for utilities in New York. Southern “successes” in building—and, moreover, maintaining—large nuclear fleets are not unrelated. Much more than their northern and coastal counterparts, utilities in the South continue to operate primarily in jurisdictions with traditional cost-plus rate regulation, allowing them to recoup the substantial cost of upfront investment and maintenance. In the south, moreover, new nuclear power plants were often cost-competitive with, or even cheaper than, comparable coal plants on a per-kilowatt basis, suggesting that nuclear power was not, as Amory Lovins has famously maintained, “fundamentally uneconomic.” A fresh look at the history of nuclear power that explains not just its follies and catastrophes but combines these with its successes ought to be a jumping off point for discussion of what a realistic future for nuclear power in the US can or should look like given the unique political circumstances in the US surrounding the 21st century struggle to decarbonize its electricity mix.

[SAM note: chair/discussant Julie Cohn, U. of Houston, cohnconnor@gmail.com]