In a decade or so, we will know.
We will know if Spencer Cox’s oft-expressed enthusiasm for the coming of new generations of nuclear power plants will turn out to be prescient or gullible.
The governor of Utah has been out on the hustings promoting deals with up-and-coming nuclear energy operators. He has ponied up $1.8 million of your money for a PR campaign to convince us that it’s a good idea.
Cox sees our state as a leader in creating and manufacturing new kinds of nuclear power plants. Small ones, cheaper and safer — supposedly — than the frightening atomic behemoths nobody wants to build, pay for or live next to any more.
In May, Cox was breathlessly announcing a deal with a start-up called Valar Atomics to start churning out small nuclear plants at the state-owned San Rafael Energy Research Center in Emery County. Said machines to be deployed all over the state to keep up with the skyrocketing need for juice to supply artificial intelligence data centers.
Big talk for a company with no real experience in building anything at all. But everyone has to start somewhere.
More recently, Cox showed up in Brigham City, joining local and corporate leaders in celebrating another plan for a plant to build small nuclear reactors for use wherever they may be needed. This time, with companies known as Holtec International and Hi Tech Solutions.
The history of a Utah political class fascinated with shiny new baubles that turn out to be busts — Syn-crete, TestUtah, dredging Utah Lake — does not inspire confidence.
But the governor is correct when he says that we will need a lot more electricity in the near future, and when he allows as how that power needs to be, as much and as quickly as possible, carbon-free.
So as we watch, with equal measures of hope and suspicion, Cox’s love affair with nuclear power bloom, here’s what Utah needs to see and hear.
Total transparency
None of this proprietary business secrets stuff. If the taxpayer is participating in the creation of new nuclear technologies in Utah, through contracts, grants, tax breaks or help with permitting and legal obstacles, we need to have some questions answered.
Who is paying for these new technologies and who stands to benefit? How much is the taxpayer on the hook for, and what will we get out of it? Will the new sources of electricity benefit all ratepayers, or just a few well-placed energy hogs?
How much water will these new reactors consume? And what will be done with the radioactive waste?
We need to go fully trust-but-verify on these nuclear energy dreams. Independent reviews, not from far-away consultants but by experts at our own research universities, must be part of the package, advising us not only on costs and profits but on the technical ins and outs of how such machines might work. Or fail.
Utah is, after all, the home of a great many people — the Downwinders — who are still suffering the sickening and deadly results of a series of nuclear tests that our government wasn’t honest about.
A genuine all-of-the-above approach
Cox and other leaders should be showing as much passion for other carbon-free, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and, especially in Utah, geothermal.
Solar and wind technologies are better-established, cheaper, quick to build, rely on free, limitless sunshine and air, produce no carbon or radioactive waste and are extraordinarily well suited for Utah’s topography and climate. They are increasingly successful in markets as varied as Europe, China and Texas.
Shortcomings include questions about what to do with junked solar cells and windmills once they have exceeded their useful life and the need for power storage to make up for times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Those are problems to be solved, not reasons to give up.
Maybe Cox thinks that solar and wind have enough cheerleaders so that his focus should be on what he sees as the underappreciated potential of nuclear. Maybe.
But he should also be aware that his friend Donald Trump is pulling every string he can reach to undermine these sources of renewable energy going forward, and they could use the help of more reasonable Republicans such as our governor.
The planet’s simultaneous needs for more power and less carbon mean that the problems attached to nuclear energy should be faced and, if possible, solved.
If Spencer Cox helps get us there, he will have every reason to be pleased with himself. If not, well, he tried.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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