Countries Cautiously Weigh A Return to Nuclear Power

California's last nuclear power plant up and running. Or to Japan now, where the Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has pledged to restart more nuclear power plants to provide energy as Japan struggles with its hottest summer on record. But eleven years on from the Fukushima disaster, high oil and gas prices have governments looking for cheaper, more plentiful alternatives of power.

One possibility that's been around for decades about not so loved nuclear Fears about radioactive meltdowns still linger in a lot of people's minds, many years after disasters in Chernobyl in nineteen eighty six and at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant in twenty eleven. Now several countries, including the US, are taken another look. They're considering extending the life of aging

plants and possibly building new ones. Bloomberg reporter Shokooda covers the energy industry, and she joins me now from Tokyo to explain the government's thinking and how people in Japan feel about turning the reactors back on. Shoko, has been many years since the Fukushima disaster, and I think the world's memory has faded somewhat. Can you remind us just how deva is stating this disaster was and really still

is for many people in Japan. Sure? Really, the Fukushima nuclear disaster was an inflection point for Japan's energy strategy. Everything really changed after this disaster, which was the worsest

Chernobyl in nineteen eighties. Oh March eleven, twenty eleven, a magnitude nine earthquake struck the northeastern coast of Japan, and what happened was massive tsunamis overwhelmed the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power plant, which led to power for cooling systems at the site to be shut off and then nuclear meltdown at the reactors so immediately after this accident, Japan took all of its reactors offline. At that point, we had

fifty four nuclear reactors in the country. There was really big public backlash against the use of nuclear for the longest time, you know, nuclear was a very sensitive topic among the public. And now Japan currently for electricity relies heavily on a mix of natural gas and coal and also sub renewable like solar. And in the aftermath of that disaster, many people were displaced and had to stay

away for a lot of years. Thousands of people still have not really put their lives back together to the way they were before. Yeah, so twelve years after the disaster, the effects are still here. We visited a town in Fukushima Prefecture up in the northeastern coast. But you know, even though some of the restrictions have been lifted and people are allowed to go back, many have decided to

not return because they've already rebuilt their lives elsewhere. It's taken twelve years to get where we are today in Japan, But at the same time, it's hard to kind of gauge how long we've come, especially when you come visit these towns and see that people are still having mixed thoughts about returning and now here we have a global energy crisis which is hitting Japan like it's hitting so

many other places. Really something that you couldn't imagine happening just a few years ago, it is happening, which is people are starting to to think maybe it's time to turn nuclear back on. Yeah, I think like everywhere else, our bills and gas bills and Japan have been rising, and twenty twenty two really was almost like a year. It was a reminder for Japan how little resources we

have and how exposed we are to global turboil. Japan imports almost all of its energy needs, so the country was really hit hard by natural gas and coal prices surging, and that's cut into the profits of utility companies, which in the end have also led to power bill has

been rising for households and small businesses. So there's been pulling conducted by Japanese newspapers that do indicate that people are warming up to the use of nuclear again in the belief that by turning these reactors back on, the utilities don't have to procure expensive fuel from broad and

thus lower power bills. So in August last year, Prime Minister Keshita commented that he wants Japan to consider developing next generation nuclear reactors, and that was a big shift because for the longest time, since twenty eleven, the government towed around the wording of what Japal will do with replacing nuclear reactors, out of being decommissioned or building a completely brand new ones, there was a lot of unclarity about where Japan will be with the future of nuclear.

But Prime Minister Keishiita said that we need nuclear for energy security, but also decarbonization as carbon free power source, and he's kind of launched this platform to try to have a plan to build new next generation reactors. Not only that, but now the government has a plan to extend the lifespan of existing reactors. So the current rules are that utilities can operate nuclear reactors for forty years and then get one time lifespan extension and operated for

sixty years. Now the government is saying that it should be operated beyond sixty if the reactors are safe. So that's a pretty big shift from where we were, you know, twelve years ago. And then with this global energy crisis, the government really kind of gearing up You mentioned that public polling shows that people are starting to warm up to this idea, but I imagine there's quite a lot of division and mixed feelings and strong emotions. Are people

talking about this a lot. It's definitely popping up on local media, local newspapers, also social media spheres. It's really lingering in the minds of people, whether you're anti nuclear or pro nuclear, or maybe even conflicted, which I think a lot of people are conflicted. You have this surgeon, power bills and gas bills. At the same time you have memories of what happened twelve years ago. It was really traumatic event for Japan. You know, what do you do?

Is nuclear really the answer? You spoke to you one man whose family has run a hotel near Fukushima. He left along with everyone else, but has since come back. Can you tell us about his experience? Sure? So, we spoke with Tutomu Hirayama. He's from one of the towns

affected by the Fukushiba Daichi nuclear power disaster. When we spoke to him, he sounded very conflicted and very mixed about the use of nuclear and he's basically seen both the economic benefits of having nuclear power stations in his neighborhood and his community, but also having been affected by the actual disaster, he's seemed like the worst of what

could happen. In terms of benefits, He's talked about how the nuclear power plant provided employment for local community so people could work there, and because the government gives funding to municipalities that do host these nuclear reactors, that money could be used to build public infrastructure and building, so

there are some benefits. At the same time, he's told me about having been evacuated from the hometown after the nuclear disaster and not being able to return for a few years, and being concerned about whether he's able to ever come back to his hometown. You know, it's really a horrible experience. Hidayama has been one of the first to be able to go back to the town, specifically because they needed the construction workers to be able to

stay in hotel, but the duration of their stay. We actually, when we visited his hometown and spent a night their reporting, we stayed at his hotel. Not only at the hotel, but in the restaurants and other areas throughout the town. You could really see that it's really dominated by a lot of construction workers, and it speaks to I think, even twelve years after, the reconstruction process is still really ongoing.

And you know, when I asked he Diama about this black or white debate around using nuclear power in Japan, he got really pensive and then told me that he could understand both sides and how they both feel. Are you nice? Look too much more? Walk on? But at the end of the day, he says he's against nuclear because of what to do with the spent nuclear fuels, which is another question that the Japanese government has to still kind of figure out where the nuclear fuels will

go at the lifespan. But at the same time, he knows that by turning nuclear on, if power bills can be lowered, it could really help lower income people at lower income households and people who are affected by this inflationary pressure. Well, that raises another point, which is we're in the middle of an energy crisis now where prices

are high and people are looking for alternatives. But how likely is it that even if they were to very quickly approve putting nuclear power plants back online and building new ones, that people would actually get that power. So in terms of building brand new reactors, I think there's question of whether Japanese power companies today have the risk appetite to want to invest in a completely new reactor or let alone replace a decommissioning one with a next

generation reactor. I think that's a question to be asked whether the operators even want to do this today, especially you know, earthquakes are still very much a risk in Japan. It's a very earthquake pro own country. So you can't say that something like twenty eleven will happen again, or an earthquake that size will happen again. So I think there are some questions whether, you know, despite the government push to use nuclear again, how speedily can that be

available or how readily that will be back online. Chokoda, thanks for speaking with me today. Thanks for having me when we come back. Japan isn't alone in taking a new look to nuclear power. Japan is just one country that's weighing new investment in nuclear power. Will Wade is Bloomberg's Power and Renewable Energy editor in New York, and

he's here to tell us more. What are you looking for as someone who covers this industry, Well, I've been covering nuclear for several years now, and I would say in the past eighteen months twenty four months, there's been a really visible and obvious shift. I say there's a renaissance in nuclear energy these days, and it's because people are realizing they really need nuclear power to help achieve climate goals. There's just no other way you can reach

our goals of cutting emissions without using nuclear. Wind and solar are great. You could build lots of it, but they don't run all the time. Only nuclear does that, and that's why we're seeing so much more support for nuclear from so many corners of the world. How is that playing out? So the thing about nuclear power is that it is clean energy. There's no carbon that comes

out of nuclear reactors, and that's really good. But for the past many decades, environmentalists have been really opposed to nuclear power because of the waste that's created from reactors. And it's true, nuclear waste from the spent fuel rods is really really bad stuff. It'll stayed deadly for thousands of years, but there's not that much of it and

the track record is pretty good for the industry. And now that climate change is becoming a very real, very tangible threat, people are starting to say that that real threat is more of an issue than the potential threat of a nuclear accident. So we're seeing a lot more interest in nuclear energy as a key part of the climate solution. And I guess people when they think about nuclear a lot of them focused on the big disasters three Mile Island in nineteen seventy nine, or Chernobyl in

eighty six, or of course Fukushim in twenty eleven. But there are a lot of nuclear power plants around the world. What is the kind of balance between safety and advantage. So the thing about nuclear accidents is you just listed them. They've basically been about three in the history of the industry since we started using nuclear power back in the nineteen fifties. So the potential damage is significant, but there

have not been a significant number of accidents. So if we look at say Europe, where if we were to take France, which has a fairly well developed nuclear program, how has that worked out? How are other countries looking at the examples of nations that use nuclear power as a model like what they want to do and what they don't want to do. Well, France is a good example. France is the most nuclear country in the world. They get about seventy percent of their electricity from nuclear power plants,

and they're very committed to it. They've said that they want to advance their program even more. They announced last year a big program to expand their nuclear fleet. Other countries are sort of looking at at the same way. The UK gets about fifteen percent of its energy right now from nuclear power plants. They want to make that twenty five percent by twenty fifty. And again it's really

comes down to climate goals. People are looking at nuclear as the only clean energy source that runs around the clock. The thing about France is last year they discovered that there were some significant problems. I think sixteen of their fifty six reactors were down for a significant amount of time last year. They're not all back up. It was

a really big problem. France exports electricity throughout Europe, and at a time when all of Europe is saying we don't want natural gas from Russia, we don't want to get coal from Russia. We need electricity. Can we get some from France? And France was saying no, we don't have enough to go around right now. It's a big problem. I think nuclear generation in France was down about a third in twenty twenty two, and that, of course was happening at the same time that Europe was squeezed by

dwindling gas supplies from Russia. Yeah, and not only that, Europe said we're going to stop importing coal from Russia. So there's no coal from Russia. They're trying to not use gas from Russia. They weren't getting nuclear power from France. That's why that Europe was worried about electricity Ville last year. Right next door in Germany, that country shut down it's nuclear reactors after the Fukushima disaster. What's happening there now?

So Germany shut down most of their nuclear reactors after Fukushima, and they had a plan to phase them all out. The last three were supposed to shut down just in December, a couple months ago, but a few months before that they sort of realized, oh wait, we need that electricity. They've extended that until April, so a few more months. It's not huge. There's a lot of people that are looking that decision and saying, what are you nuts? You

need the electricity? Why shut these down right now? I mean, if you want to shut them down eventually, you can, but right now probably isn't the best time. Building nuclear reactors new ones is one thing, and it takes a really long time, it costs a whole lot of money, and so a lot of the conversation is around extending the life of existing reactors. Can you get into the

complications of that. When the nuclear power plants are built, they picked the life span of forty years, and they just said, all right, these things, we should run them for about forty years. We'll license them for forty years. Most of them have then been extended to sixty years. You can ask for a sixty year extension. A few

of them have now got their second extension. I think about six of them in the US, so now they're approved for eighty years, and there's another couple dozen that we know that they're probably going to seek that second extension. So a lot of the US fleet now or soon will be approved to run towards eighty years. And I've even heard researchers are starting to study the question, could we extend them to one hundred years? Could we have

a century year old nuclear power plant? So I'm a nuclear expert, but I don't know if anything that runs for a hundred years, is it the best idea to run a nuclear reactor for that long. That's a fair question. The thing to keep in mind is that the maintenance programs are really, really strict, so they shut down every eighteen months to refuel them, to put in new nuclear fuel rods, and at the same time they do a lot of maintenance. Most of the parts are not the

original parts. Is it the same plant, yes? Or is it all the same parts? Mostly not so much. There's a couple of things that can't be replaced, like the concrete floor, the big pad underneath it, the giant containment vessel. Those things can't be replaced. So if you have a problem with that, it's not going to keep going. But

they can keep going for a long time. And another thing to keep in mind is so it is now twenty twenty three, and the average age of nuclear plants in the US is about four decades forty years old. So coming upon that original forty year mark, right, so if we're talking about sixty years old, eighty years old, that'll take us into the twenty fifties and beyond. Who knows what's going to be available at that time. We

may not even need them. Then you mentioned the waste problem, and that's always a problem because nobody wants that stuff near them. I remember a few years back there was this huge argument in the US about burying it in a mountain in Nevada, and there is no political appetite for them. We got shut down, and I don't know that they've ever really found a place for it. And

so how does that issue get solved? How do you safely store the waste, which if we increase the use of nuclear energy, there's gonna be a lot more of it. And you're exactly right. There was a plan to store it and under a mountain and Nevada out in the middle of nowhere called Yuca Mountain, and the people in Nevada's kind of resisted that. So what happens now is basically every nuclear power plant out behind it in the back forty has a big concrete pad where they have

these giant casks. They're about I don't know, about ten feet across and thirty feet tall, and that's where all the nuclear waste is and they just store them there, every single one of them. And even power plants that have been decommissioned and dismantled and there's nothing they're left except a nice field and the old storage casts because

there's no place to put them. And that's a political question because the US government has sort of passed a law that says, yes, the government is responsible for the nuclear waste. They'll make it their problem, and now they don't have a place to put it, so they just leave it there. There are a couple of proposals now to build sort of centralized sites, one in West Texas and one in East New Mexico. They're actually pretty close

to each other. They're probably going to get approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission soon, I think this year, so we may soon have a repository for all that nuclear waste. So if you look down the road five years, ten years from now, do you think we're going to have a significant increase in the amount of energy that comes from nuclear five to ten years. No. The thing about covering nuclear energy is that everything a nuclear moves really

really slowly. In ten years, we might have the first small modular reactors in operation, but there's going to be a lot of activity pushing towards that. Fifteen years from now, I think there'll be a lot more nuclear energy. So people who are hoping that nuclear could be the solution for today's energy crunch. Are out of luck, but maybe by the time then next time we have a world energy shock, we'll have a solution at hand. We'll probably be working towards it. Yes, well, wait, thanks so much

for talking with me. Happy to be here. Nuclear has its upsides, and it definitely has its downsides, as we've heard, So how do you weigh them? That's after the break. We've heard a lot today about the risks of nuclear power, so we thought it would be interesting to ask an unabashed nuclear booster to come on the show and make her case for the upside. Doctor Jessica Lovering is co

founder and executive director of Good Energy Collective. That's a think tank that promotes pro nuclear policies with a climate change perspective. Our producer Michael Falro, talked to her about weighing the benefits and risks. So let's talk about where our energy mix is right now. How much US energy is renewable as like solar, wind, hydro, how much is nuclear right now and where could those numbers be going

in the next decade or so. So in the US last year nuclear was about twenty percent of our electricity, and a lot of people don't know that nuclear makes up such a large share of our grid in the US, but it's been at twenty percent for a couple decades now. It's been pretty stable and is probably in the next ten years is going to stay at twenty percent. Fossil fuels are still producing about sixty percent of the electricity in the US, and renewables were at about twenty two

percent last year. So most of the growth is coming from wind and solar, and really from wind. Wind was about ten percent of our electricity last year and that's only growing. And if you project kind of those current trends out, we might see renewables hit forty percent of US electricity generation by twenty thirty. But there are some serious obstacles and reasons why it might slow down. We might have some kind of friction in getting to higher

penetrations of renewables. What are those obstacles with with renewables that maybe something like nuclear isn't going to phase so

big wind is transmission. Renewables are geographically dispersed. You know, a lot of our wind comes from the Midwest, solar tends to be in the Southwest, and we need to move it to where it's needed, and there are limits to how much you can move on the current grid infrastructure, the current transmission system, and it's really hard to build new transmission lines, especially the high voltage transmission lines that you need to move power for our distances. So that's

one constraint. Another one that people don't think about but is actually a growing issue is local opposition. So renewables for the most part, when I'm talking, I'm talking about wind and solar, they take up a lot of land for the amount of electricity they produce. And you might think, okay, well, we have a lot of land in the US. Other countries like Japan don't, and they're much more constrained on where they can build renewables. But in the US, yeah, we have a lot of land. Is there really a

big issue? But the reason that it is becoming more of a concern is that if a project takes up a lot of land, it also impacts a lot of communities, a lot of people, and there's much more chance that you're going to have local opposition. Nuclear has its own challenges, but having a diversity of options, particularly ones that are more land efficient like nuclear, which as a really small footprint and our lower materials requirement can be really helpful

for balancing a clean energy system. So I live in California, and last summer we had a lot of concerns around power shortfall, particularly in the summer on really hot days when everyone's running their ac and that was a big motivator for why the governor of California, Governor Newsom, announced that he wanted to keep our last remaining nuclear power

plant open a few more years. Are supposed to start closing down next year, so extending it another five years because we don't have enough power on those hot sunny days. Even though California has seen huge growth and renewables, we have grid scale storage coming online, it's just not enough. So talk more about this quote that you gave our reporter Will Wade. You said, the calculus is changing on keeping these plants open, talking about nuclear plants around the world.

The economics haven't shifted, but the climate economics have shifted. What did you mean by that? So I want to make a point really quick that I think is counterintuitive to most people, which is nuclear is actually really cheap. And so I know that's a surprise to a lot of people, but that aside. When we talk about the economics of nuclear there's kind of two issues that get

muddled together, so there's cost and value. In the last ten years, we've seen a lot of nuclear plants closing quote unquote for economic reasons, and that's really because natural gas is so cheap in the US. It's got a little more expensive in last year, but still pretty cheap compared to the rest of the world, and that's what replaces this last generation when nuclear closes, which is really bad from a carbon perspective, but for consumers it's not

a big deal. So what's causing a rethink now is that governments and utilities are waking up to the fact that nuclear plants provide a lot of value because they are general electricity twenty four seven, they're very reliable, and they also just happen to be zero emissions. You know, when most of these plants were built, climate change wasn't

a big concern. They were built for the fact that they just provide a lot of electricity pretty cheaply, and so you're starting to see that reflected in how governments and how utilities are valuing existing nuclear and you're seeing that with credits being provided in federal legislation in the US, but also a reinvestment or new investments in new nuclear.

As we're looking towards planning for deep decarbonization or clean energy transition, we really need to start valuing the clean energy attributes of nuclear and not just treating them like fossil fuels, which is how they are done in a lot of countries. So I think it's safe to say you're a pro nuclear expert. You think about this all the time every day. When you tell people in your life what you do and why you're for nuclear power,

what do you tell them. That's a good question, because I do talk about nuclear with people a lot, talking about what I do. I think the main way that I talk about nuclear is the truth, which is I got interested in nuclear because of climate change, and I

think that's something people don't think about a lot. But you know, nuclear is the largest source of carbon free electricity in the US, it's the largest source in most countries unless they have really large stores of hydro and so if we're serious about taking action on climate change and getting to zero carbon in the shortest time possible, nuclear is just a critical tool to do that. It's

not that I don't think nuclear has problems. I think nuclear has a lot of problems, but I want to work on policies that address those problems rather than say, Okay, we can't have nuclear because it has some issues. Because really all energy sources have pros and cons, and so we want to work to minimize the cons of every energy source and focus on the benefits, which are reliable, clean electricity. Doctor Levering, thanks for joining us on The

Big Take. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producers are Michael

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