Since last November, proposals in the US for a Green New Deal (GND) have been causing much debate. The GND aims to address both climate change and economic inequality, but support for it is dividing along traditional partisan lines. It is championed by many Democratic 2020 presidential candidates vying for their progressive wing votes, and criticised by many Republicans.
One of the contentious issues is the role in the GND of civilian nuclear power, or lack thereof. The issue is muddied by confusion between the information in the and an accompanying fact sheet that was briefly published on the website of the resolution’s sponsor, the charismatic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
So first, the facts. The resolution language doesn’t contain the word “nuclear” anywhere in its text. It does state that, within 10 years, the US will be “meeting 100 per cent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” – but some would argue that nuclear power meets those criteria. Ocasio-Cortez’s fact sheet, however, reportedly stated that the GND “”.
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Merits of nuclear
Here are some more facts about today’s US energy system. , in 2017, nuclear power provided 22 per cent of US electricity, and 58 per cent of the country’s “non-carbon based” electricity.
Furthermore, nuclear power plants often operate at 90 per cent of their rated capacity. Wind and solar, by comparison, have capacity factors ranging from 20 to 30 per cent. And their intermittency depends on the vagaries of nature.
The GND leads with the severe risks of unabated climate change and the short period of time we have remaining to undertake meaningful decarbonisation. Why, then, would we voluntarily give up a source of non-carbon-based power that generates far more energy today than wind and solar combined? The Herculean task of changing over to zero emissions power in just 10 or 20 years becomes virtually impossible if we walk away from this proven source of energy.
Ideally, wind and solar would be rapidly scalable and battery storage of the energy they generate (so that it can be fed as needed onto power grids) would be nearly free.
But in the real world – the one where climate is changing rapidly and threatening our health, our economy and our security – we need to use what we have. Leaders are often faced with choosing between imperfect options, and one of those, for the foreseeable future, should be current and next-generation nuclear technologies.
