For those of us who are tuned in to the continuing failure to find solutions to the problem of nuclear waste, with used nuclear fuel piling up in casks around nuclear plants throughout the United States, the news about reactors has not been encouraging. (Keep in mind that “used” fuel is extremely radioactive and that efforts to recycle it at West Valley were monumentally unsuccessful.)

One trend is the decision to keep old nuclear reactors in operation long past their intended life span. This is disturbing not only because of the possibility of their failure, but because reactor components may become more and more challenging to dispose of when the reactor is finally closed.

Where is this happening? In the U.S., for example, California announced in 2016 that it would close its last nuclear power plant, the aging and earthquake-vulnerable Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant because of excessive cost.

However, in November 2023 they applied to extend its license for another 20 years.

In European countries, nuclear plants are extending their years in operation. Hungary derives nearly half of its electricity from Russian-supplied nuclear reactors built in the 1980s with a design life of 30 years. In 2005 their life was extended by 20 years; now they plan to extend their operating license for yet another 20 years. Switzerland is considering the same action. And in Germany, which closed the last of its nuclear reactors in April, political opposition is calling for re-opening them.

A second recent trend has been for the U.S. Department of Energy and private investors with deep pockets, notably Bill Gates, to promote small or modular reactors (SMRs). The hope was that the SMRs would avoid the enormous cost overruns and delays in the construction of large reactors. Criticism of the SMRs centers on the environmental and security risks of scattering them widely, and particularly of the prospect of selling them overseas into areas where warfare and access to the plutonium that the SMRs breed are risks.

NuScale Power Corp., leading among several firms developing SMRs, pulled the plug on the project in November as a financial failure, despite having received hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the Department of Energy.

Even some environmental activists have begun to promote nuclear power as an answer to fossil-fuel-induced global climate overheating. Will the NuScale failure lead to constructive rethinking of the attractions of nuclear energy, or not?

Pat Townsend