‘Government Needs To Pull, Not Push’

In a Forbes article, contributor Llewellyn King, who has written about nuclear power for 50 years, says the nuclear paradigm is broken and can’t be fixed.

WASHINGTON DC, UNITED STATES, December 12, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ — In an important article in Forbes, contributor Llewellyn King declares that the nuclear power paradigm now being pursued is broken and it can’t be fixed.

King, who founded The Energy Daily, and has written about nuclear power for half a century, argues that “the government works better when it is pulling than when it is pushing,” and that its approach to needed new nuclear in a time of global warming is all push, no pull.

The result, as King sees it, is that many will try and none will succeed in attempts to bring new nuclear to market.

He says the mechanism simply isn’t there to get nuclear across the threshold: There is no way to deal with the first-of-a-kind cost that will be involved with small modular reactors (SMRs) — or even the latest large reactors.

Furthermore, he says, since the golden age of nuclear reactor construction in the 1960s and 1970s, the electric utility industry has changed and has been deregulated. The result is that no nuclear operator can afford the risks of the first reactor of a new design.

King mentions the collapse of a deal between NuScale and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, which distributes electricity to municipal utilities in seven western states. The deal was for the power marketing agency to buy power from a new reactor to be built at the Idaho National Laboratory. But as projected costs rose, the price of the power went too high for the marketer.

Nuclear and the federal government are uniquely entwined, bound together in ways that other endeavors aren’t, says King. This is because the government must provide security against proliferation, keep track of nuclear materials, ensure safely, supervise new and used fuel transportation and, ultimately, dispose of nuclear waste.

Based on this, and to get the benefits of carbon-free and dependable power, nuclear plants need to be built — possibly at government sites — and sold off to the utilities as they come online, and when the power is flowing, says King, who advised five secretaries of energy.

“The United States would never have gotten to the moon if it had used a push strategy, funding every contractor,” he says, adding, “Instead, it set a goal, funded it, and American industry rose to the occasion.”

That is the only way to jump-start the nuclear industry and bring a lot of new clean power to the market, and precious time is being wasted, King asserts in the article.

Llewellyn King
White House Media LLC
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