Charlotte Whelan joins the podcast to talk all things nuclear energy, the largest source of clean energy in the U.S. Yet even with the advancements of this safe and reliable method of reducing carbon emissions, efforts continue to reduce nuclear energy’s role with a big focus on pushing renewable energy sources. Charlotte explains what this means for energy production in America and what the new energy policies and commitments from the Biden administration signal for the future of nuclear energy.
Charlotte is a policy analyst at IWF. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in French and a certificate in Global Health. At Princeton, she was involved in a variety of activities including the James Madison Program and was the President of the Princeton Chapter of the Network of Enlightened Women. Charlotte is also a member of the Emerging Leaders Council at the Steamboat Institute.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg and on today’s episode, we focus on nuclear energy, the largest source of clean energy in the United States. Yet even with the advancements of the safe and reliable method of reducing carbon emissions, efforts continue to reduce nuclear energy’s role in the United States by pushing renewable energy. So where does this leave energy production in America and what do the new energy policies and commitments from the Biden administration mean for the future of nuclear energy? Well, good thing we have Charlotte Whelan, the author of this month policy focus, joining us to answer those questions.
Charlotte works at IWF as a policy analyst. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in French and a certificate in global health. At Princeton, she was involved in a variety of activities, including the James Madison Program and was the president of the Princeton chapter of the Network of enlightened Women. Charlotte is also a member of the emerging leaders council at the Steamboat Institute.
Charlotte, a pleasure to have you back on She Thinks.
Charlotte Whelan:
Thanks for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
I thought we would just start off by getting into some of the facts of nuclear energy. Not all of us are nuclear energy specialists like you are. So can you first just give us the details of how much of the energy in the United States is derived from nuclear power?
Charlotte Whelan:
Our nuclear power makes up about 20% of total US annual electricity generation. Overall in the world, it’s about 30% of worldwide electricity generation and it really has a ton of potential for expanding and producing more energy. We’ve had the same amount of electricity coming from nuclear power for the last three decades, and we’ve had it around since the 50s and especially the 60s and 70s. So it’s really been around for awhile.
Beverly Hallberg:
And you talk about this being clean. Clean energy. What makes nuclear energy clean? Because I think a lot of people hear it on the face value and just the term nuclear energy and think that it can’t be clean. So how have they been able to make it clean over the years?
Charlotte Whelan:
Well, the way that nuclear power is generated, it’s not producing carbon emissions overall. So the idea of clean energy is to reduce carbon emissions. So natural gas is cleaner than coal and nuclear power is carbon free. This means that overall the net emissions produced is zero.
Beverly Hallberg:
You said that our use of it has not increased for quite a few decades. Why haven’t we seen an increase in production and does this also include that we haven’t built any new power plants, nuclear energy power plants?
Charlotte Whelan:
You’re right on the money. So unfortunately, a lot of climate activists don’t like nuclear power and they’ve undermined its growth. There’s only been one new reactor built since 1996 and there are two more [inaudible 00:03:16] to be built in the next two years. But in the meantime, since 2013, we’ve had 13 close prematurely and eight [inaudible 00:03:25] in the US. So usually when you hear about nuclear power these days, you’re hearing about someone pushing to close nuclear plants, which is exactly the opposite of what we need to be doing.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I think sometimes people think of these stories and these horrific examples when there has been some type of malfunction at a nuclear plant, which obviously is dangerous to the people who live there and the environment as a whole. How often do these types of disasters happen? Should we think about those when we think about a nuclear power plant or in addition to it being clean energy, are these power plants as a whole generally pretty safe?
Charlotte Whelan:
They are really safe. Everyone, I think, or most people know about some terrible nuclear reactor meltdowns. Everyone heard about the Chernobyl disaster in the 80s, but since then there’s only been a one notable nuclear accident and that was Fukushima, which was caused by an earthquake. But even though this was a huge meltdown of three reactors, there were no casualties from radiation. And following these accidents, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission established additional stringent requirements for nuclear safety. So right now there are really strict requirements set on all nuclear plants to ensure that they are safe, there aren’t accidents. For example, in the extreme winter weather in Texas recently, there was a reactor that was actually closed, just to be extra safe because of the extreme weather effects on the reactor, they decided to close it just as an extra precaution. And so what you will see is that there are incredible safety requirements on all nuclear plants and they really are quite safe. You haven’t heard of any other accidents happening and it’s been around for a long time.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I wasn’t planning on asking this question, but since you mentioned Chernobyl, so I did watch that popular series Chernobyl, I believe it was on HBO. It’s one of those premium channels, obviously horrific story, horrific what happened to the people who live there and the people who work there. When that came out, did that change people’s perception of nuclear energy in the United States? Something like that, a series, does that make a difference to how people perceive it?
Charlotte Whelan:
I don’t know if there’s polling numbers out there or something, but I would think that it really does affect how people see nuclear energy production, because they don’t hear about it in the mainstream media or in history except for in these really horrific accidents and negative events. And I think they’re really interesting stories and they shouldn’t be hidden of course, need to tell them. But I think it’s really important to actually tell the truth about the fact that over this long history of use, there’ve been such few nuclear accidents and overall there’ve been so few casualties and all energy production comes with some risk. We don’t really think about that and [inaudible 00:06:41] that’s really important and I think we need to be careful with how we talk about it to help encourage people to learn more about nuclear power. Because, for example, in France, they’ve had nuclear power as one of their main sources of energy since the 70s and they’ve had zero notable accidents whatsoever.
Beverly Hallberg:
You mentioned renewable energy sources and that’s that being the direction that there’s been a lot of support for among certain progressive groups. And last week we did celebrate Earth Day. We saw that president Biden ahead of the US hosted Climate Leaders Summit did release his climate targets. He pledged that the United States will cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 50% by 2023. Now this is really ambitious and people are questioning whether or not it’s even achievable, but what it does point to is it sounds like there’re going to be drastic changes to energy production. What do these climate targets mean for nuclear energy?
Charlotte Whelan:
Well, whether or not Biden administration wants to admit it, we need nuclear energy. The reality is that right now our renewable which is mostly just wind, solar and hydro power only produce about 16% of US electricity annually and it’s going to be really difficult to ramp these capabilities up, both expensive and we don’t have the battery technology to help overcome the intermittent nature of wind and solar. And the only real solution we have right now, the viable way to ramp up clean energy is through nuclear power. And there are various ways to do that. We have been developing new technology, or we, as I say, are American innovators and engineers have been developing [crosstalk 00:08:32].
Beverly Hallberg:
IWF is a leader in developing [crosstalk 00:08:35]. That’s where we are.
Charlotte Whelan:
[inaudible 00:08:40] myself in this. American innovators though haven’t built a new nuclear technology, especially small modular reactors, which will help to ramp up nuclear power because they’re cheaper to build because they can be built in pieces. There’s lower [investment 00:08:58] that can be built on smaller bits of land, and they can be built faster, which will help to reduce just construction costs. Because often new nuclear projects get slowed down by expensive construction costs, regulatory regimes, you name it. And so that’s going to be really, really important to lead into that. I’m not sure that the Biden administration is really trying to do so. I’ve seen some of their papers recently, just in the last week and they mostly just talk about existing nuclear. I think they need to accept that we need to build more nuclear and can’t just rely on the capabilities from the last three decades.
Beverly Hallberg:
I’m going to play a little bit devil’s advocate here. What would you say to individuals who are proponents of trying to expand renewable energies, and I think it’s a good thing to look at renewable energy. It’s not a bad thing. That could be part of innovation. But those who think that if we focus solely on cost, that that is to the detriment of our environment, that what we need to do is sink a lot of government money into solar power, into wind energy and these renewables, and that that’s the direction that it’s government intervention and that is the way to ramp up the ability of us having renewable energy being a larger percentage of the power.
Charlotte Whelan:
I would say that if you’re talking of just trying to ramp up renewable energy, we don’t have the capabilities. As much as we want to increase renewable energy and I’m all for doing that in a economically feasible and realistic way, they’re unreliable at the moment. We don’t have better technology to bridge the gap. Right now we use a lot of nuclear … not nuclear, excuse me, natural gas to help do that, which is great. And it’s difficult to integrate these renewables into the grid. So we need to completely change our grid, which will be really expensive and it will take time. And even so, renewable technology has come a really long way in the last decade. And that’s great and we should celebrate that.
But if we want to we meet these goals that President Biden has set for us, especially with the Paris Climate Agreement, it’s not feasible to do so with renewable energy. We’re not going to be able to ramp it up. And we have a very good option that has proven itself for decades in nuclear power and we can’t afford to not take advantage of such a good option. It would be [inaudible 00:11:36] and irresponsible to not add that to the mix as well.
Beverly Hallberg:
And give us the human aspect of this. If renewable energy was the focus and there were more regulations put on nuclear plants, let’s say, what does that mean to not just middle-class America, but what does that mean for those struggling to make ends meet? What does this mean for them in cost of energy, even if they can afford it at all?
Charlotte Whelan:
Oh, yeah. Simply relying on renewable energy is going to raise energy costs for Americans. You can’t really see it yet in the US, but you can look at Germany which has long been pushing renewable energies and their costs have increased by 50% for their citizens by pushing renewable energies, contrasting again, [sticking 00:12:30] with Europe, France, I mentioned earlier, have long been reliant on nuclear power and they have some of the cheapest energy in Europe, they need export their energy they have so much, but recently they’ve been trying to switch more to renewable unfortunately, which has led to higher energy costs and actually an increase in natural gas, which has led to higher emissions, which is, I think really interesting to look at. So for middle-class Americans, anyone looking at their energy bills and like me always slightly dismayed or hoping it’s lower than it will be, it’s going to go up and that’s just the reality, but it will go up without actually meaningfully reducing our emissions.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, before we continue this conversation, I would like to take a moment to highlight IWF’s Champion Women Profile Series which focuses on women across the country and world that are accomplishing amazing things. The media too often ignores their stories, but we don’t. We celebrate them and we bring their stories directly to you. Our current profile is Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. To check out her story, do go to iwf.org to see why she’s this week’s Champion Woman. And Charlotte, before I let you go and I do want to remind people that this policy focus that you did offer, it is on the website. So go to iwf.org to see the nuclear energy policy focus.
My final question to you I found really interesting and it’s based off what you wrote in the policy focus saying that focusing on nuclear energy and promoting it and utilizing it is important for national security. Why is it so important to our national security?
Charlotte Whelan:
Well, the reality is if we don’t, others will. And by others, I mostly mean China and Russia. So if the US doesn’t ramp up our nuclear power and be able to export it to developing countries, we’re going to be relying on other international actors, most likely China and Russia for clean energy as well as developing nations. And so that will help to grow China and Russia’s influence, and it’s already happening. Since we haven’t taken action, China and Russia together are supplying and financing over half of the world’s total reactors. There are 53 reactors under construction in the world. Only two are in the US which I mentioned, they’re in Georgia. China has 12. India has four … excuse me, India has seven and Russia has four.
If we don’t push and try to commercialize and expand our nuclear power, there is great risk that China and Russia will be the leaders or continue to be the leaders. They’re starting to take the leadership already. And this is bad for safety standards. They have more safety standards for human rights and really we might have nuclear technology in the hands of actors that [inaudible 00:15:30] really want to keep it away from. So I think it’s really, really important that the US steps up to take this leadership and we can, but we need to do it.
Beverly Hallberg:
We do. I know there’s an uphill battle with an administration that wants to focus more on a green new deal type of policies, but that’s why it’s important to get the message out here. Charlotte Whelan with IWF. Thank you so much for this policy focus and also for joining She Thinks today. We appreciate it.
Charlotte Whelan:
Thanks. I really had a great time.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you, and investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity and wellbeing for all Americans. Please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. And last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review on iTunes. It does help. Also, we’d love it if you shared this episode and let your friends know where they can find more She Thinks episodes. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for listening.