This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s proposal to bury much of the nation’s nuclear waste in tunnels bored into the basement of the Granite State — specifically beneath Hillsborough and surrounding towns.
The search for a site for the nation’s first permanent repository was spurred by a law Congress enacted in 1982 that ordered the creation of a home for the nation’s growing accumulation of spent power plant fuel and other radioactive waste.
Neither the New Hampshire site nor any of the 11 others under consideration passed geological, geographic or political muster. To this day, no national repository exists. Instead, the United States has an estimated 90,000 tons of radioactive waste “temporarily” stored first in cooling pools, then in steel and concrete casks at more than 100 sites in 39 states. Seabrook has one. There’s another just over the river from Hinsdale in Vernon, Vermont. The waste remains dangerous for about 10,000 years.
The anniversary was marked, though probably not intentionally, by Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s March executive order directing the state’s Department of Energy to develop a roadmap that will lead to the increased production of nuclear energy in New Hampshire.
The order has led to some talk of building Seabrook Station’s ill-fated second reactor, but most of the focus has been on the construction of a new generation of “small modular reactors,” standardized units that in theory could be built quickly and produce about one-quarter of Seabrook’s 1,200 megawatts. The current estimated cost of SMRs, none of which exist in the U.S., is just under $10 billion.
Ayotte’s call has been seconded by former U.S. senator and current senate candidate John E. Sununu whose father John H. Sununu, as governor, was a fierce proponent of nuclear energy.
In these times of roasting days, wilder weather, less snow and rising seas it makes sense to explore every alternative to the burning of more fossil fuels. That includes small modular nuclear reactors, but don’t hold your breath and, as the state’s consumer advocate Don Kreis advises, watch your wallet.
“The last thing I’ll mention is nuclear power,” candidate Sununu said to an interviewer on the Granite Conversations podcast earlier this year. “We are fortunate in New Hampshire to have Seabrook, which has been safe, very efficient, consistent in producing electricity … for decades. It would be great if we could find the right opportunity to expand that facility, whether it’s building the second unit that was originally planned or using the new small modular reactor technology to sort of expand the production footprint there.”
Well, maybe not so great. Three things have remained true about nuclear power plants, at least those built in the United States. More than a decade of construction delays and cost overruns led to the bankruptcy of Seabrook’s builder, Public Service Co. of New Hampshire. Nuclear power plants still take far longer to build and cost far more than planned and there’s still no permanent home for the radioactive waste they produce.
Per unit of energy produced it costs roughly three times more in the United States to generate electricity from nuclear energy than from wind or solar power, according to an analysis published in July in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. That cost differential will continue to increase as nuclear power becomes ever more expensive while power from the sun and wind continues to become cheaper, the authors concluded.
Worse yet, New Hampshire is already a net exporter of electricity. Power from any new nuclear plant would not be purchased here but sold out of state. “There is no reason to suppose that new nukes in New Hampshire — big or small, utility-owned or otherwise — will bring down electricity rates,” consumer advocate Kreis said last summer in a column published in the Monitor.
That means New Hampshire would get the additional risk of hosting more nuke plants plus more nuclear waste and waste sites while consumers in other states would get nearly all the benefits.
Instead of wasting taxpayer-funded time and money chasing the grinning Cheshire cat of cheap nuclear power, the state’s lawmakers should expend their energy changing these sorry statistics. New Hampshire ranks last in New England in offering renewable energy incentives, last in electric vehicle charging stations per miles traveled and last by a lot in the percentage of electricity the state gets from solar power.
Learning to split atoms to boil water, make steam and spin turbines to produce electricity was a remarkable human accomplishment. But fusing atoms together produces far more energy that can also be used to make electricity, and the sun does it for free.
Ralph Jimenez of Concord served on the Monitor editorial board.