Little has changed to make nuclear power a safe and affordable option to produce electricity. That didn’t stop Iowa Republican members of congress, all four of them, from voting for H.R. 6544, the Atomic Advancement Act of 2023. They were not alone, the bill passed on Feb. 29, 2024 (365-36-1). It awaits action in the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. What were they thinking? They were thinking they would take care of big business first.

In a sneaky, self-serving way, the bill revised the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s mission statement to emphasize the “public benefits” of nuclear energy instead of protecting human life and health through regulation. In other words, it promotes more nuclear power over safety.

Using questionable wisdom, the U.S. House of Representatives pushed more of the cost of recovery from a nuclear disaster upon tax payers. The bill calls for renewal of the Price-Anderson Act, a 1957 law which caps the industry’s liability for nuclear disasters at only $13 billion. H.R. 6544 extends it for 40 more years. The Price-Anderson Act makes US taxpayers liable for the full costs of nuclear disasters – which could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars – and exempts the insurance industry from covering homeowners and businesses for damages from those disasters. We regular folks never have it that good from our government.

Construction costs for new nuclear power are more than ten times those of comparable solar capacity. There are similar cost issues around fuel sourcing, waste disposal, safe operations, and escape of radioactive pollution from a power plant, none of which have been resolved. There can be agreement we’d like to use a method of electricity generation that minimizes pollution. Nuclear power isn’t it.

Entrepreneur Bill Gates is working to make nuclear power more cost effective and safe. When he decided to make nuclear power generation one of the projects in his post-Microsoft life, he said he wanted to solve its problems so it could replace more polluting methods. Gates believes nuclear power is an important part of solving the climate crisis. That may be, yet not until we solve the problems of cost and safety. Read about his effort in Kemmerer, Wyoming here.

The U.S. Congress is getting ahead of itself in advancing this bill. My House Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks was out with a statement shortly after voting for it, “The Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy held a hearing to discuss nuclear energy expansion. I believe nuclear energy plays a key role in the future of American energy and am proud to support it.” I have been writing about the representative’s affection for nuclear power since this post on Dec. 11, 2010. I wrote, “As a proponent of nuclear power to control toxic emissions from coal fired power plants and concentrated animal feeding operations in the state, she is expected to kick the ball down the road for the decades it would take to bring adequate megawatts of nuclear energy on line.” One decade down, how many to go?

It is obvious the nuclear industry has made little progress toward improving safety in operations and affordability as measured in unit cost of electricity produced. They hang their hat on the likes of Bill Gates, instead, and pray he solves the problems. I didn’t know those folks spent that much time in church.