CAMDEN, N.J. ― On a bright, humid afternoon last September, Allen Hickman made the rounds on the floor of a factory that embodies the past, present, and future of the nation’s atomic energy industry perhaps more than any other site in the United States. Founded the same year as the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl catastrophe ― the only major nuclear energy accident in history with an established death toll ― Hickman’s employer, Holtec International, built a business helping utilities from New York to Ukraine to Japan manage nuclear waste.
Inside the cavernous, warehouse-like facility on the eastern bank of the Delaware River, sparks flew as welders turned sheets of steel into cylindrical containers designed to seal and store spent fuel from nuclear reactors until the radioactive material can be recycled or buried. In fact, Holtec recently became a customer for its own storage casks as the company bought up four shuttered nuclear power plants, taking over the decommissioning process.
The market for managing and disassembling defunct nuclear plants is growing; the U.S. has closed 13 reactors in just the past decade.
Allen Hickman, vice president of manufacturing at Holtec International, describes the company’s systems for the dry storage of used nuclear fuel at the Holtec facility in Camden, New Jersey, on Sept. 13, 2022.
Rachel Wisniewski for HuffPost
But so, too, is demand for the zero-carbon electricity that nuclear reactors generate. Outside the factory that hot day nine months ago, the ground was squirming. Everywhere you looked were spotted lanternflies, an invasive species whose arrival last year exacted such a devastating toll on vital crops and native trees that scientists compared the Southeast Asian insect to a plague.
The bugs swarmed the parking lot, giving the appearance from one story up that the asphalt was moving. Their colonization of the newly subtropical Northeastern U.S. was just one palpable sign of climate change, along with the sweltering weather persisting well into September.
Rising temperatures were a big part of the reason a portion of the factory was undergoing renovations last fall, with workers raising the ceiling and rerouting part of the tracks that connect to a national rail line. Hickman was preparing for his plant to expand into a new product line: Holtec’s very own brand of nuclear reactor.
It is what some have called the “grave to cradle” model. The company plans to level the decommissioned nuclear plants it owns, including New York’s Indian Point and Massachusetts’ Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, and revive energy production at those sites with its own machines.
Holtec’s bid to produce the “phoenix of nuclear reactors” is unique. But it’s hardly the only party competing for a piece of what many in the industry predict is a dawning “nuclear renaissance.”
Nearly a dozen companies are rolling out versions of what the industry calls small modular reactors, or SMRs ― shrunken-down, less powerful machines that, through assembly-line repetition and bulk orders, investors believe will prove cheaper and faster to build than the large light-water reactors that make up the entire U.S. fleet of 92 reactors today. Should it hit the market in the next few years as many analysts expect, the technology would be, as the Biden administration’s nuclear energy chief Kathryn Huff put it, “game-changing.”
While solar and wind energy, both cheap and easily deployed, are expected to remain the fastest-growing sources of electricity in the coming years, those weather-dependent renewables require backup generation that has overwhelmingly come from natural gas ― a fossil fuel whose main component, methane, is a super-potent greenhouse gas that threatens to accelerate global warming.
With electric vehicles eating into the limited supply of batteries to store solar and wind power for when the sky is dark and the air is still, few experts believe decarbonization is possible without more of nuclear energy’s 24/7 output of carbon-free electricity.
Systems for the dry storage of used nuclear fuel are created in the manufacturing facility at Holtec International headquarters in Camden.
Rachel Wisniewski for HuffPost
Unlike natural gas plants, which on average spend only half their working lives producing electricity, or solar panels that produce electrons less than 25% of the time, nuclear reactors pump out huge volumes of electricity over 90% of the time they’re in operation.
Contrary to popular misconceptions about the risks associated with spent fuel, nuclear plants generate relatively small amounts of radioactive waste, which can be safely stored and even recycled. Reactors can go years without refueling, and they require only minimal amounts of land and mined metals, particularly compared to solar and wind.
Rich democracies may have soured on nuclear power in the wake of accidents like Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. But the United Arab Emirates is set to complete construction on the fourth reactor of its debut Barakah Nuclear Power Plant this year, capable of supplying a quarter of domestic electricity needs in the country with the fourth-highest rate of energy consumption per capita. China is building dozens of reactors of all sizes. And in addition to building its own reactors at home, Russia ― the world’s no. 1 exporter of nuclear technology ― is constructing atomic stations in Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, India, and more. Virtually all of them are large light-water reactors.
Workers are seen at the Holtec headquarters in Camden.
Rachel Wisniewski for HuffPost
For Western countries looking to get back into the nuclear game, the trick for SMRs will be to prove that the reactors can be built closer to the original deadline ― or the original budget ― than traditional large reactors. Not everyone is convinced the concept is anything more than an exercise in new branding for the same fission energy.
“SMRs are a technical solution to a nontechnical problem,” said James Krellenstein, a physicist and director of GHS Climate, a think tank that advocates for nuclear energy.
“For most of the SMR designs that are being seriously contemplated, the same factors that contributed to cost and schedule overruns at Vogtle and elsewhere could also pose immense challenges to SMR builds,” he added. “Given the fact that we likely need to build gigawatts of new nuclear in the United States alone, the case favoring SMRs over large light-water reactors is less clear.”
How The U.S. Jump-Started The Nuclear Age – And Then Stalled Out
On Aug. 1, 1946 ― just five days shy of a year since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan ― President Harry Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, transferring control over the peacetime development of nuclear energy from the military to a new civilian-run Atomic Energy Commission. In 1949, the year the Soviet Union became the second country to develop a nuclear bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who’d led the Manhattan Project, appeared on the cover of Life magazine to tout the potential benefits of generating electricity from the awesome power released when uranium atoms split.
In 1953, the newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower, an Army general during World War II, delivered his famous “Atoms for Peace” speech before the nascent United Nations, vowing to unite the world with abundant nuclear energy. Soon after, the U.S. Navy launched its first nuclear-powered submarine. Having successfully designed the new warship’s reactor, the Westinghouse Electric Company won the federal contract to build the world’s first full-scale nuclear plant on the Pennsylvania shores of the Ohio River in 1958. The U.S. would soon begin constructing dozens of reactors.
By 1970, Westinghouse was taking out full-spread advertisements pitching itself as the face of American modernity: a gleeful woman loading a Westinghouse-made dishwasher on one page, and “reliable, low-cost electricity” from “the odorless, neat, clean and safe” Westinghouse reactors powering a cheerful beachside nuclear plant on the other. Before long, the United States would make plans for 1,000 reactors. At the time, the U.S. electricity market was far less complex. Utilities owned the generating plants and power lines and sold electricity directly to households at rates set by public commissioners who were elected by voters.
If construction delays on a new reactor drove up costs, it wasn’t a big deal. Demand for electricity was going nowhere but up, and these vertically integrated utilities could float losses in one division with the profits of others. Moreover, utilities could pass the construction cost off to ratepayers, then charge a profit based on a percentage on top of the total price, giving companies an incentive to build ever larger projects.
An aerial view of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1978.
Bettmann via Getty Images
As with any new technology ― particularly one built…