Can We Talk About "Nuclear Now"?

Has the time come again for one of the world's most unfairly maligned industries?

Me and spent nuclear fuel at San Onofre, February 2020. Photo by John Dobken.

I got a chance to screen Oliver Stone’s new documentary, Nuclear Now earlier this week. I spent almost 15 years working in the nuclear business at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade association. It never ceases to amaze me how public opinion has shifted since I first started working there in the early 2000s, but seeing a “Baby Boomer” like Stone flip on the issue has to be the most amazing turn of all.

The proximate cause of his conversion, like a lot of others concerned with the environment, is climate change driven by rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere generated by the use of fossil fuels.¹ Nuclear fission, which splits atoms of uranium that release tremendous amount of energy without producing any particulate emissions, promises to help the world get out of that trap.

If you’re at all acquainted with the history of the atom, Nuclear Now, based on the book, A Bright Future by Josh Goldstein and Staffan Qvist, covers a lot of familiar ground. There’s the early work of Marie Curie, the Manhattan Project, Admiral Hyman Rickover’s creation of the U.S. Navy’s reactor program, President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative and the construction of America’s commercial nuclear reactors.

But Stone doesn’t shy away from the atom’s worst moments: Hirsohima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. He also provides valuable context about the three civilian nuclear accidents. And he certainly doesn’t limit his examination of nuclear energy to the USA, traveling to France and Russia, two nations that play outsized roles in the world’s atomic ecosystem.

America might have birthed the nuclear power industry, but it hasn’t been an all-American game for a while now, in part thanks to President Eisenhower. That’s introduced new strengths, while exposing other weaknesses. For one, if you’re an industry with a truly global supply chain, it behooves the nations of the world to find a way to get along. When it doesn’t, lots of things can go awry, such as when tensions with China and Russia impact the trajectory of some promising nuclear projects.²

But where things get a little different is when Stone sits down with Rod Adams, a retired U.S. Navy submariner who entered the commercial nuclear industry after he retired from the service. Full disclosure: I’ve known Adams for almost 20 years and consider him a friend. It was Adams who provided me with the opportunity to screen the film. Having survived an interview with Admiral Rickover to be accepted into the Naval Reactors program, he knows what it’s like to endure the crucible and come out the other side.

While Adams is an industry veteran, he is probably best known for his blog, Atomic Insights. It was there that he published his research concerning the connection between the American anti-nuclear movement and the fossil fuel industry. Few remember it now, but the environmental group Friends of the Earth got its start thanks to a donation from an oil industry executive.

Even the Sierra Club was once pro-nuclear before it fell under the same sort of influence. Later, Stone connects the dots about how the oil and gas industry has positioned natural gas as the logical partner for wind and solar as carbon-free nuclear power plants all over the world are forced offline for economic or political reasons.

As a former industry executive I can’t be entirely objective about this film. And in an era when trust in institutions is at an all-time low, I can’t blame viewers for being skeptical about the nuclear case even when the imperative to keep current plants open and build new reactors has never been clearer.

This year, grid operators in the East have warned that the rapid retirement of baseload generation provided by coal — the 24/7 electricity we rely on to keep the grid electrified and delivering power — is threatening the reliability of the grid itself as demand hits Summer peaks.³

Three Mile Island by Ted Van Pelt is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I’ll leave you with this story. It’s 1979 and I’m at home watching an NBC Nightly News report on the accident at Three Mile Island. My father, concerned that the report might terrify his 11-year old son, turned down the volume on the television to deliver a short lecture.

Unbeknownst to me, a few years before, my father had taken a tour of a nuclear fuel fabrication facility operated by Babcock and Wilcox, the company that designed and built Three Mile Island. He patiently explained to me that I shouldn’t be worried about what was happening at the plant. After all, he had met some of the people who worked in the nuclear industry and he found that they were the best people we had.

But he had one final point. He asked me to remember that there would be others who in the aftermath of the accident would try to shut the industry down. He told me that would be a shame, because there might come a time when we really needed it.

Time and tide have proven my father to be wiser than he knew. It’s good to see that Oliver Stone has caught up with him after all these years.

1. Public acceptance of nuclear energy generally rises when energy prices that consumers pay — the price of gasoline and the monthly electric bill — are on the rise.

2. Bill Gates originally intended to build his TerraPower reactor in China. A number of new reactors being designed in the USA need access to high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel known as HALEU. Russia is currently its only source.

3. We’re referring to PJM, the independent system operator (ISO) that operates the grid in 13 states and the District of Columbia. Click here to read the PJM report.