US President-elect Donald Trump is no fan of renewable energy. He said solar was too expensive to work at scale, threatened to impose hefty taxes on solar panels arriving from abroad, and made seemingly unfounded claims that many rabbits “get caught in” solar installations and die. When it comes to wind energy, Trump is even more sensational: he has made sweeping claims that wind turbines kill whales and “thousands” of bald eagles, that they break down into salt water and that they “destroy the atmosphere.” So it’s no surprise that Trump’s Republican Party is expected to roll back many of President Biden’s landmark measures to promote renewable energy.
It sets the Biden administration’s delegation at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, in an awkward position. At COP29, as this year’s conference is known, governments are expected to propose major new policies to fight climate change. But anything the outgoing administration announces now could be dead on arrival when Trump is inaugurated in January.
Nevertheless, the Biden team appears to be hoping that a push for one of the world’s most controversial forms of zero-emissions power will be more palatable to the president’s successor. On the conference’s third day on Wednesday, the administration announced it would set a goal of tripling US nuclear power capacity by 2050. This would involve adding about 200 gigawatts of new nuclear power generation by supporting both the types of large reactors familiar to many Americans as well as new ones”small modular” facilities that are easier to build and permit. The administration has pledged to work with nuclear developers and power utilities to find the cheapest and easiest places to build large plants — and to squeeze out nearly $1 billion in support for small modular reactors.
“Over the past four years, the United States has really established the industrial capacity and the muscle memory across the economy to execute this plan,” Ali Zaidi, the White House’s national climate adviser, said in an interview with Bloomberg at COP29.
Biden officials are well aware that Trump and the Republican Party have frequently embraced nuclear energy as a reliable and clean solution to the nation’s growing electricity needs. The party’s platform this year stated that “Republicans will unleash energy production from all sources, including nuclear power.” Earlier this year, a Pew Research poll found that about two-thirds of Republican voters support the expansion of nuclear power, a higher rate than for Democrats. As John Podesta, Biden’s senior climate adviser, said during a press conference at COP29: “The desire to build out the next generation of nuclear power is still there.”
However, the Republican Party – and even the president-elect himself – is hardly unanimous when it comes to nuclear power. During his three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump said that nuclear power is “very clean” but also noted that the reactors are “getting too big and too complex and too expensive,” citing significant cost overruns and delays at Georgia’s Plant Vogtlewhere new nuclear reactors were opened this year.
Still, Malwina Qvist, the director of the nuclear energy program at the research and advocacy nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, said nuclear power has the potential to be a rare area of consensus between Biden and Trump when it comes to climate change and energy, especially given recent push to revive nuclear power in locations across the country. California lawmakers passed a bill earlier this year that would allow the state’s Diablo Canyon power plant to stay open until 2030, fueled by a $1.1 billion investment from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced in September that it would buy power from a reopened nuclear power plant at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the site of an infamous reactor meltdown in 1979.
“Over the years, we’ve seen bipartisan support for nuclear energy and a growing appetite for developing new and preserving existing nuclear energy from governors in red and blue states,” she said. Qvist added that her organization aims to “preserve the gains made during this administration, and to advance them during the next.”
But fears that reactor meltdowns would lead to catastrophic releases of radiation, as well as the fact that nuclear waste remains radioactive for millennia and must be stored in safe places, nuclear energy can be hard to sell. A number of environmental organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, oppose a nuclear revival for these reasons. Even so, there were in the course of its history far fewer deaths attributed to nuclear power per unit of energy created than to the fossil fuel-powered plants it could replace.
Either way, the Biden administration’s last-minute nuclear agenda likely won’t be enough to triple power generation on its own. Much recent investment in the U.S. nuclear space has gone toward keeping alive or reopening the plants that already exist around the country, but building a fleet of large new reactors will require billions of dollars more in new capital — more even than the massive Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in clean energy in US history, provided by its tax subsidy provisions.
“Meeting this demand will require a step change in financing,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a global nuclear advocacy organization, said on the eve of COP29. “The financing of nuclear power plants, especially the upfront costs, requires government participation.”
The Biden administration could lay the groundwork for nuclear growth, but it will be up to Trump and his new Republican Congress to decide whether to provide that participation.
