The truth about nuclear's comeback

**Anu** (0:00)
If you ask me what nuclear energy meant when I was a kid, I would describe it as the job that Homer Simpson did on The Simpsons. But if you ask me as an adult who's new to covering the energy space, what nuclear is, I would describe it as the thing that's taking over headlines and my social media feed in recent months.
So I thought it's safe to conclude that nuclear energy is back, right? After all, the US Department of Energy did just publish a few days ago that the golden era of American nuclear energy has arrived. Forbes said the AI boom is making nuclear power bankable again, and the Wall Street Journal said the public backs nuclear now. With every hyperscaler like Meta and Microsoft getting into investing into nuclear, it's safe to conclude that it's back. Well, according to Energy Central's Matt Chester, nuclear isn't making a comeback because to those who are in the industry or those who chime in online at Energy Central, nuclear was never gone. So if nuclear has been around for decades, why am I suddenly seeing all these headlines about nuclear energy making a comeback? By the way, if you're listening to this on YouTube, please make sure to subscribe to our channel and like this video. If nuclear power isn't back, why am I hearing about it everywhere as if it is?

**Matt Chester** (1:05)
It's a great question. And I think to really get into it, we'd have to go back over a brief history of nuclear energy. And going all the way back, tapping into the immense power atoms that are capable of nuclear energy and what we know about that today, it goes back to the Manhattan Project. And this is the entire story that's been well chronicled. Movies like Oppenheimer and other places, people might be familiar. For better or worse, we see the trope where technology is ultimately driven by military, by war, by weaponry. But after scientists unlocked the chain reactions that nuclear made possible with the bomb of it all, nuclear tech then fed into the more optimistic post-war feeling, which was peaceful means, and realizing that that same science and that same technology could create nuclear power, a new energy source. And we think of nuclear power today a lot about how it's carbon neutral and that's one of its main benefits. But back then, people weren't really worried about emissions of energy sources. But what they saw was nuclear energy as a potential source of abundant, cheap energy, and that was the real driving force. So from that time of the post-war period through really the 1980s, we saw a massive build out of nuclear power plants. The oldest operating power plant was built in 1969 So that highlights how one of the hallmarks of nuclear plants is that it takes a while to build, and especially early on when it was still new. That plant from 1969, it's still in operation today, which is pretty remarkable. But even if you look at the landscape of US nuclear power plants today, most of them were built between 1970 and 1990, and that two decades still represents 92 out of 98 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity that's on the grid today. It was a big period of nuclear boom then. That was, obviously, we weren't around during that time, but I'm sure if you tuned into the news, you'd hear it all over that place, what you're saying, people is hearing it all the time.
Again, the fervor around it was for a number of reasons. One is that nuclear power was and still is an always on, always available power source. It has a capacity factor above 90%, which means literally 90% of the time a nuclear power plant is generating power. And a lot of that is 24-7, it's not 90% of the day.
It's going constantly with that 10% being when it's shut down for maintenance or refueling or things like that. And to put that into perspective, that 90% capacity factor, the next closest power source is geothermal at 65%.
And then when we go to other sources that are considered base-load power sources like nuclear, as we look at natural gas, it hovers around 60%, coal is around 43%. So a nuclear power plant really is the closest thing we have to an always-on power source. And that's what made it really attractive and it continues to make it really attractive today. And then in terms of abundance, you know, we have enough uranium today that would last us for nearly a century at the current consumption rates. And there's been a lot of work recently about things like advanced recycling and extracting uranium from the ocean and all these new sources that, you know, the experts say, well, if we did that, all of a sudden that century of uranium turns into thousands of years of it. So, you know, there's no such thing as an endless abundant energy source, but it seems like nuclear is as close as we have to that, which also makes it extremely affordable once the power plant is up and running. So all of that is kind of the background, which is why nuclear power became such an important source of energy over the 20th century.