A nuclear power vision for the new pro-labor GOP

Jul 18, 2024

Change is underway. Last week, at the National Conservatism Conference, I spent the evening gobsmacked as I listened to Sen. Josh Hawley give a barn-burning pro-labor speech that extolled the virtue of private sector unions and industrial policy. Then, Trump nominated a man of similar sympathies—JD Vance—as his running mate. And to top it all off, the President of the Teamsters Union, Sean O’Brien, gave a speech at the RNC convention. What this realignment means and whether or not it succeeds will be revealed only with the passage of time. And with effort.

And effort is sorely needed when it comes to our ailing grid. Readers of Nuclear Barbarians know that we’re losing reliable power plants faster than we can replace them; and instead of trying to replace them with baseload, we’re doubling down on weather-dependent power sources like wind and solar. America is staring down the barrel of pernicious power shortages that could threaten our industrial base. Last week, at the request of the Edmund Burke Foundation, I gave a talk at the NatCon on why a pro-nuclear industrial policy is vital to solving these problems.

What follows are the highlights of what I had to say.

We finally have a bi-partisan consensus about the value of nuclear energy. Some on the right believe that nuclear will fend for itself in brutalizing pseudo-markets and flourish with competing reactor designs. I disagree. Here’s my four point plan to pursue engineering excellence and national greatness with a nuclear power buildout.

1. Back the winner. We already have a great, regulator-approved, existing reactor: Westinghouse’s AP 1000. To lose its established supply chain and workforce to “competition” with nonexistent reactors or bald fumbling would be a catastrophe. We’ve already seen that there’s bi-partisan appetite for federal spending on nuclear power, so let’s just cut to the chase and line up a suite of deals between American utilities, Westinghouse, and the federal government. Utilities worry nuclear will send them into bankruptcy and provoke a prolonged series of migraines not unlike those Southern and the Georgia Public Service Commission had to weather when they built Vogtle. No one, neither utilities nor state regulators, watched that experience and thought, “Sign me up!” So, a little risk-sharing would go a long way to unleash an -nth of a kind build out of the AP 1000. Westinghouse, meanwhile, seems more interested in building reactors abroad than at home, a business model that makes zero sense. “Wanna buy this reactor we don’t want to sell at home?” American taxpayers subsidized the creation of the AP 1000; that’s a two-way street—federal money comes with federal obligations. We didn’t go to all that trouble just to watch Westinghouse struggle to sell it to foreign countries alone. Pulling this off would require a more active Loan Programs Office in the DOE and/or some other third party to step in.
   


2. Fill ‘Em Up! Most nuclear plants in America were designed to house four reactors, and many of them only have one or two. This means we can work with utilities and Westinghouse to drive federal money into adding reactors to already existing plants, outflanking the environmental NGOs’ typical lawfare over project siting. Sure, we’d still have to war it out in whatever legal venues are available to them, but building more reactors at already operating plants limits exposure to the billionaire-funded Ivy Leaguers who think crushing union jobs will keep the icecaps from melting.
   


3. Coal to Nuclear. In my talk, I called this the “Narcan or Nuclear” choice. Everyone knows that when a plant dies, the loss decimates the community. No jobs, no tax revenue, no future. Opioids and a parade of human tragedy arrive in tow. Currently, America is looking at a loss of a third of its coal fleet to retirements by 2035. That will take a human toll we can absolutely avoid. According to the DOE, putting comparably-sized nuclear reactors in place of coal units will create more jobs, increase a host community’s total revenue, and “increase revenue for host communities, power plant operators, and local suppliers.” Many of these coal plants sit in “flyover country” and in districts that vote red. Plus, such a build-out would firm up the grid because coal retirements play a huge roll in our looming reliability crisis. And wherever the AP 1000 is too big, perhaps TerraPower (or whoever makes it first past the post in an SMR build) can step in. We know this is achievable, by the way, because Ontario already did it.
   


4. A Nuclear TVA. I had to make a game-time decision and cut this portion from the talk due to time constraints. But it’s important. America’s largest public power entity already gets 42 percent of its power from fission. It operates four coal plants that won’t last forever. In fact, the TVA is already pushing to retire its Kingston plant. Why not commit it to a long-term coal-to-nuclear plan? Perhaps replacing the Kingston plant could be the first step to enact the entirety of this four-point plan; a “here, we’ll go first” gesture to the private utilities to help assuage doubt and uncertainty.

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But there are reasons to build nuclear power plants beyond our practical needs. Our reliability crisis is a crisis of our industrial commons. And a commons needs to be governed not just because we need it today but because it is our patrimony—we have received it from our forebears who brought it forth onto this earth through the calluses on their hands and the sweat in their faces. Our duty is to steward it so that we can pass it on to future generations, thus assuring their prosperity, and, importantly, their social trust. For when a commons fails, the tragedy is not only that the material consequences prove fatal—it’s that such a failure bankrupts the public trust, hastening decline by demoralizing the best of us while enabling our most mendacious leaders and our most corrosive social parasites. This trust—not climate, not the environment—should be our sacred concern.

Nuclear power secures our ability live up to this duty. Nuclear power plants produce clean, reliable, and cheap electricity and can last for at least a century. To their host communities they offer solid union jobs that allow families to thrive on a single income. That’s the only thing the Simpsons got right about nuclear: Homer could afford to buy a home for his family while Marge stayed at home to take care of their kids because he worked at the plant. Plus, nuclear power plants create a robust network of local trade unions around them—steamfitters, welders, and so on—all dignified work. Every job around the plant can be passed from father to son, mother to daughter, for successive generations; perhaps, with diligent maintenance, in perpetuity. These are Industrial Cathedrals, atomic Notre Dames, vital to building an industrial commons that can endure.

Our future rides on America’s industrial commons, our power grid: the mother network that links together our entire society and powers our lives. For this, we need a new policy vision, one that anchors us in the past, guides us through our present, and opens into our future. The Industrial Cathedral is the lodestar of this vision. True, we build nuclear power plants because of the abundance they bring. But we also build them because to commit ourselves to projects so grand and demanding testifies to our ancient faith in the endurance of the American project; our hope for an America that will have had nuclear power for longer than it has not; our belief that we can pass onto succeeding generations a Republic of Industrial Cathedrals of the people, by the people, and for the people—forever.