Let’s Face The Nuclear Elephant in the Room – Watts Up With That?

Guest essay by Ronald Stein, Oliver Hemmers, and Steve Curtis

There is lots of talk about nuclear power around the world today. However, except for China and, maybe, Russia, there is no action. 

Talk means nothing, but action means everything. Perhaps the reason for inaction is the massive waste of government funding for nuclear power promises. Private capital produces many times more production than government funding does. Maybe if the money was left in the hands of the people, some sense of urgency could be realized. Moreover, to secure monopolies for those who own them, massive government roadblocks are placed in the way of any competition that could disrupt the profits from these monopolies. 

Such is the case for government subsidized wind and solar projects over the last two decades. Because of mismanagement and outright corporate theft, the sizzle has come off the idea of just electricity from “renewables”. Once the private industry lost their government subsidies, wind and solar projects started shutting down. Some, of course, are still around, but no utility company will take even a single penny of risk on solar and wind production. 

So, when the gravy train of government subsidies stops flowing, the profit centers move on. No gravy, no profits, no production. Then the citizens are left to clean up the mess. What a deal. Citizens pay to make the mess and now citizens pay to clean it up. All while enjoying the benefits of higher electricity costs. Maybe they will get tired of this scam and start to realize that they really need nuclear power.

The answer to safe, continuous, uninterruptible, emissions-free electricity is laying right in front of us. Locked in the nucleus of each uranium atom is a source of energy that is 50,000,000 times that released by burning an atom of coal. 

So, all other things being the same, we should use this natural uranium resource instead of just throwing it away. The commercial nuclear industry, so far, has leveraged only 3% of the energy available in nuclear fuel rods. We would not get very far buying an apple and just eating the peel. Yet, that is what we do with our uranium. 

It makes a lot of sense to make use of all the uranium since we went to the trouble of mining it and refining it. Your cheap costs for electricity (worldwide) in past years have come at the price of taxes. In the USA, the renewable subsidies over the years stand at $5 trillion (or so). This means that every person has paid $15,000 above their power bill for the luxury of having so-called “renewable” electricity. So, do you really wonder what will happen to your power bill when that subsidies are gone? 

Now, we add the further economic pressure of a sharply rising demand (data centers) with a stable or slightly reduced supply of electricity. It appears that we have to cover the cost of wind and solar renewables and the cost of competition for a vanishing resource at the same time. 

Since data centers are profitable at $3.00 per kWh, how far do you think they will bid before residential customers give up bidding? Ironically, recycling slightly used nuclear fuel (SUNF) can result in retail prices around a penny per kWh, $0.01 because they do not require special equipment and engineering to work. So, we are either headed for penny per kWh power (recycling in fast reactors) or dollar per kWh power (wind and solar renewables and high data center demand).

Fast reactor recycling, basically, involves dumping chemically altered SUNF (already existing) into a vat of hot molten salt (or sodium). The magic of breeding allows uranium that is unusable in conventional reactors to produce 50,000,000 times more power than coal. This releases at least 90% of the uranium power instead of the current 3%. 

Remember, countries are proposing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to “bury” or throw this uranium material away. Even then, they cannot find a way to do so because the public does not want it in their “backyard”. We are proposing that we turn this hundreds of billions of dollars of liability into hundreds of trillions of dollars of electricity revenue. Sound impossible? Well, a reactor called Experimental Breeder Reactor-II demonstrated this capability with technology called pyroprocessing (extracting elements using voltage and chemistry) and fast reactor recycling. Modern technology allows this to be done with “liquid fuel” mixed right in with the molten salt (best process). Of course, there are many different ideas of how this can be done. The best way to find out which works best is to try it. Only privately capitalized industry tries things more than they talk. So, do you want talk or action?

All we have to do is crank up the free enterprise innovation engine. No other method works nearly as good. To do this, the government has to get out of the electricity business. Government subsidies only cloud the effectiveness of free enterprise and force the warp speed of private innovation to die in the face of the molasses of free government money. If no results are required, people get lazy. But business must have results, or they lose their investments. The only money government loses is your tax money. So, we must find a way to encourage the innovation of free enterprise while eliminating the molasses of government free money, camouflaged as subsidies. What we need is a proposal submitted to government to explain the logic of this, even in the face of enraging monopolistic interests. Don’t the people deserve the benefit of their investments?

Let’s find those who are advocates of the people. Once investors see $100 trillion in assets, they can be very persuasive. So, what we need is a state governor willing to advocate for the people. So far, none has emerged. However, as prices go up, supply goes down, billionaires become trillionaires from government-funded monopolies, and citizens’ quality of life degrades, hopefully someone will remember the great promise of recycling slightly used nuclear fuel (SUNF). Oh, yeah, the USA government has a fund of $50 billion collected from ratepayers plus interest to do only this. In the right hands, innovation can be realized. Believe it or not, the voices of citizens like you could make the difference.