The war in Ukraine reminds us of the ever-present threat to life on Earth posed by nuclear weapons. Particularly troubling is the possibility of a catastrophic release of radioactive material at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Ukraine, which is running low on water to cool its reactors and spent fuel rods after the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River was destroyed on June 6.
The United States and Russia possess 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, with about 900 of them maintained in each country on “hair-trigger alert,” aimed at the hearts of the other country’s cities.
The United States signed and ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970. Article VI of the treaty states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
Today, instead of getting rid of nuclear weapons, the United States is currently rebuilding our nuclear weapons complex in order to modify and redesign old weapons into more usable ones with different capabilities.
Today, however, instead of getting rid of nuclear weapons, the United States is currently rebuilding our nuclear weapons complex in order to modify and redesign old weapons into more usable ones with different capabilities. These programs are driving a new international nuclear arms race.
Nuclear deterrence is a so-called national security strategy in which one country threatens to obliterate another country with nuclear weapons as a way of getting the other country to bend to its will. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger famously plotted how they could appear crazy enough so that other world leaders would believe they would actually use nuclear weapons. Is this really a path to a sound and sane national security strategy?
Marketing has a long history with the nuclear enterprise, dating back to 1944, when General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, formed a public relations committee composed of leading media professionals. Knowing that the use of atomic bombs would draw worldwide attention and curiosity to a top-secret program, the committee was created to package information in a way that was favorable to the U.S. government. The goal was to satisfy legitimate public curiosity, while simultaneously keeping key technical and scientific knowledge secret.
The importance of the quest for public support and acceptance of the nuclear enterprise is demonstrated by the fact that on August 12, 1945—three days after the bombing of Nagasaki—the U.S. War Department released the Smyth Report, which the Department of Energy describes as a “public report summarizing the technical achievements of the wartime project.” This report was intended to convince the public that this massive and costly effort was well worth it.
In January 1954, an article in National Geographic titled “Man’s New Servant, the Friendly Atom,” noted that “to date American taxpayers have spent nearly $12 billion on the atomic energy program for both defensive and peaceful uses. In terms of invested capital it is now one of the largest industries in the United States.” Public awareness of nuclear activities was infused with the belief that splitting the atom had won the war against Japan and heralded a bountiful new era of unlimited energy and prosperity, including atomic cars, boats, and airplanes.
Today, nuclear subsidies have strong bipartisan support in Congress. The nuclear enterprise does business in almost every state, so many Republicans and Democrats join together to promote nuclear activities.
On April 3, five Republicans and five Democrats introduced the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act of 2023.
“America can and should be a leader when it comes to deploying nuclear energy technologies, and this bipartisan legislation puts us on a path to achieve that goal,” Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, said at the time. Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, added that “Russia and China are using nuclear energy as a weapon to advance their national interests and threaten the world. The free world is desperate for an alternative. The United States must re-establish its historic global leadership in nuclear energy.”
The nuclear enterprise continues its cancerous growth and development, playing a central role in our nation’s economy and military strategies.
A major focus of the global nuclear enterprise these days is the development of small modular reactors (SMRs). The sales pitch is that small, mass-produced units can be shipped to wherever they are needed to be connected to an electrical grid, turned on, and operated for years. If more power is needed, simply add another module. Theoretically, being small and mass-produced should make these reactors cheaper. The units are marketed as a perfect way to swap out dirty, old, coal-burning facilities with supposedly clean nuclear reactors.
While the sales pitch for SMRs sounds good, the reality is quite different. There are five SMR projects currently underway in the United States, using different types of nuclear fuel and cooling systems, but there are no SMRs currently available for purchase or use.
In a recent report, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine strongly supported the development of SMRs while noting that they will not be available until the 2030s, at the earliest. Given the nuclear industry’s consistent pattern of poor performance, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a functioning SMR any time soon. The criminally failed plan to build new reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in Jenkinsville, South Carolina, for example, cost the state’s ratepayers more than $9 billion before the project was canceled without ever producing a kilowatt of electricity. In Georgia, plans for two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Burke County are now seven years behind schedule and $17 billion over budget.
A report last January about an SMR project in Utah by the nuclear power company NuScale noted that the estimated construction cost of the project has increased by 75 percent, from $5.3 billion to $9.3 billion. Meanwhile, the target price of the energy expected to be produced by the project has jumped from $58 per megawatt-hour in 2021 to $89 per megawatt-hour in 2023. This higher price includes a $30 per megawatt-hour subsidy provided by the federal Inflation Reduction Act, meaning that the actual 2023 price is $119 per megawatt-hour.
Around the world, former President George W. Bush’s Global Nuclear Energy Project from the early 2000s has morphed into the International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation , which is working to promote SMRs. IFNEC has thirty-three participant countries along with thirty-one observer countries and five international observer organizations, including the International Atomic Energy Agency. To date, seventy-two SMR designs are in eighteen countries, so we are far from any standardized design.
While there is strong bipartisan support for SMRs in the United States, there have been two different explanations of why SMRs are important and deserving of taxpayer funding.
Less than a week after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, then President Donald Trump signed an executive order to promote SMRs for “national defense and space exploration.”
This document is remarkably enlightening, as it bluntly describes the purpose of SMRs, with no mention of “carbon-free” energy to solve climate change. Rather, it notes, “The ability to use small modular reactors will help maintain and advance United States dominance and strategic leadership across the space and terrestrial domains.” That sounds like an all-inclusive recipe for military domination.
President Joe Biden has also shown broad enthusiasm for funding SMRs and other nuclear programs. Although he has a different sales pitch—helping to solve climate change—the programmatic developments of the nuclear enterprise remain devoted to nuclear weapons and the nuclear Navy.
Under Biden, in 2021, the U.S. Department of State committed $5.3 million to launch the Foundational Infrastructure for Responsible Use of Small Modular Reactor Technology (FIRST) program to “provide capacity-building support” for countries to develop their nuclear programs “to confront the climate crisis.”
Last year, the State Department also committed $14 million for an SMR engineering and design study for Romania. Ultimately, this is expected to become a multi-billion dollar effort, in which case, one might characterize this $14 million as a highly profitable investment in future business.
Public Domain
Open casing on “Little Boy,” the type of atomic bomb that was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing more than 70,000 people, mostly civilians.
Speaking of billions, in 2022, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included $1.5 billion for the U.S. national laboratories, which are important to the nation’s nuclear power industry. There are also numerous other funding streams for various aspects of the nuclear enterprise, including creating a complete domestic uranium fuel chain and a program to fabricate high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, which raises significant concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons with highly enriched uranium.
Following the September 2021 AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-United States) nuclear submarine deal, on June 8, 2023, the United States and the United Kingdom announced “The Atlantic Declaration: A Framework for a Twenty-First Century U.S.-U.K. Economic Partnership” that includes plans for “launching a civil nuclear partnership.” This plan reaffirms earlier U.S.-U.K. nuclear cooperation dating back to the Quebec Conference of 1943.
So whether you track more with Trump that SMRs are for defense and space exploration or more with Biden and his promises of SMRs helping to address climate change, the nuclear enterprise continues its cancerous growth and development, playing a central role in our nation’s economy and military strategies.
Countering this strong momentum are efforts like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, the Back from the Brink campaign in the United States, and Don’t Bank on the Bomb. The majority of the world’s countries support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; the United States should join them.