Federal funding, corporate investments, interruption of Russian uranium exports — not to mention the national demand for on-demand, low carbon power — are fuelling a resurgence in an industry that has long been in decline. That’s raising questions about who will bear the costs of its expansion.
On Tuesday, the Department of Energy announced contracts with six companies to supply uranium fuel to what officials of both parties hope will be a new fleet of nuclear power plants — facilities that companies like Amazon and Google have pledged will help power the next generation of data centers.
That means a potential domestic boom to supply those facilities, which in the U.S. have traditionally been supplied by uranium repurposed from decommissioned Russian warheads, according to The Texas Tribune.
The potential domestic boom in nuclear mining is splitting South Texas, one of the nation’s main potential sources of the radioactive element. “We can make Texas the nuclear capital of the world,” Reed Clay of the Texas Nuclear Alliance told the Tribune. State officials, who back nuclear, have overruled objections from local groundwater officials, who have evidence that mining could pollute groundwater.
“It’s not like I’m against industry or anything, but I don’t think this is a very safe spot,” one local landowner told the Tribune.
There are also concerns at the other end of the supply chain: what to do with nuclear waste. As CNN noted, no state has volunteered to store future waste, and some have offered vocal opposition — part of the long-tail legacy of the U.S.’s creation of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal in the 1980s against the wishes of state officials and residents.
That legacy still smarts across the Southwest. “Just because we have the right geology, a low population, large land mass, does not mean that we agree to be a further sacrifice zone for the nation’s defense industry or even the power industry,” said James Kenney, secretary for New Mexico’s Environment Department.
Nuclear stocks also have crashed in the past month, with NuScale, a manufacturer of small modular reactors (SMRs) losing 30 percent of its value, and similar losses at competitors Oklo, Cameco and Energy Fuels, according to Oil Price International.
In part, that’s a metric of just how high the sector was flying until November; in part, it’s a reflection of a key liability. As Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson reported, it’s a reflection of a key sector’s high costs and considerable reliance on public money.
That’s a big problem in Texas, where its GOP backers like Gov. Greg Abbott are publicly skeptical of both taxes and climate change — a crisis which offers the best argument for a low-carbon fuel source, but one on which state officials have pushed back hard on federal climate regulations.
Nuclear isn’t the only option for round-the-clock low-carbon power generation — long duration batteries and geothermal energy are potent competitors. But the financial, climate and governmental forces backing nuclear make it likely that mining, power generation and waste disposal will all be big fights during the second Trump administration.
“There’s an urgent desire to find zero-carbon energy sources that aren’t intermittent like renewables,” Colin Leyden, Texas state director for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Texas Tribune. There aren’t a lot of options, and nuclear is one.”
