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As governor of Washington state, Jay Inslee had been best known for his focus on climate issues. He said that climate change represents a “clear and present danger” on the same order as a terrorist threat, and he proposed an Apollo-like project to focus on renewable energy. He wrote a book about it: “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.” When Inslee sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, he based his entire campaign around his call for the country to ditch fossil fuels and have a 100% zero-emission power grid by 2035.
Inslee’s presidential campaign didn’t go far, but his reputation for being concerned about the climate has remained intact. He recently signed the final state budget of his administration, one that emphasized his push for a carbon-free grid.
Why should we care about a governor on the other side of the country who is retiring at the end of his current term?
Here’s why: Because one of the items in that newly signed Washington state budget is $25 million for the development of small modular nuclear reactors.
Here in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin has called for “a moonshot” to make the state the first to develop this new breed of nuclear reactors, which as their name suggests, are smaller and so portable that they can be built in a factory and then transported to their ultimate destination.
Ultimately, though, it’s not the governor who makes these decisions, it’s the state’s utilities; and while both Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power have expressed interest in SMRs, neither has made any kind of formal commitment toward them. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy).
In Washington state, though, the Energy Northwest utility has announced a plan to build up to 12 small modular reactors, and the state government has now just put up $25 million to support the utility’s nuclear goals.
The significance here is not just that Washington state is ahead of Virginia, it’s that a state legislature with strong Democratic majorities (58-40 in the House, 29-20 in the state Senate) approved this nuclear project and a Democratic governor known for his climate policy signed off on it.
For a long time, there was an ideological split on nuclear energy, with conservatives in favor and liberals against. The gap still remains, but liberal support for nuclear is growing. In 2016, a Pew Research Center Poll found that 51% of Republicans supported nuclear, but only 38% of Democrats did. A follow-up Pew poll last year found that 67% of Republicans now back nuclear while 50% of Democrats do, almost the same percentage as Republicans seven years before.
What changed their minds? For many Democrats, it’s climate change — and concern that we can’t build wind and solar fast enough to retire fossil fuels, so nuclear can help. There’s a passionate debate about whether nuclear qualifies as “clean energy” — there is the nasty little problem of nuclear waste — but it definitely emits no carbon emissions.
That’s where even a green energy crusader such as Inslee comes around to nuclear. In an interview in 2019, he told New York magazine: “So I think, given the urgency and the scale of the challenge, we have to keep all low- and zero-carbon technologies on the table. I support research projects to find out whether we can develop a [nuclear] system that will meet the needs: One, be more cost-effective; two, be safer to deal with, with passive safety systems; three, deal with the waste issue — either eliminate it or find some disposal system that’s meaningful; and four, win public acceptance. So I support research to find out if those can be achieved.”
In the 2020 presidential campaign, The Washington Post asked the Democratic candidates (at the time there were 26) about how they felt about building new nuclear plants. The answers were all over the board, with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in favor of phasing out nuclear, and Cory Booker and six others in favor of expanding nuclear. Biden at the time was in the “unclear” category, although his administration has since made it clear that it supports expanding nuclear. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently announced that the federal government would provide $1.5 billion to restart a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan.
Inslee at the time was in the “no new plants at this time” category, although that’s now changed with his administration’s financial support for SMRs. That’s not to say that Democrats in Virginia should necessarily embrace SMRs, but this does show the political complexity of the issue. Youngkin and Inslee might not agree on much else, but here’s an issue when their Venn diagrams overlap.
In Washington’s case, it was that state’s version of our Clean Economy Act that helped drive the interest in SMRs. In 2019, Washington passed its Clean Energy Transformation Act, committing the state to a carbon-free grid by 2045. “Energy Northwest has dedicated nearly a decade to studying SMR technology and believes it to be a strong potential for our region,” utility spokesperson Kelly Rae told me by email. “In 2019, when the Clean Energy Transformation Act was signed, Energy Northwest ramped up planning for a potential advanced nuclear energy SMR in the Northwest.”
Last year, it signed a deal with X-Energy, a Maryland firm, for up to 12 small nuclear units. So far, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved just one design for an SMR — and it’s not that one, which is still awaiting approval. The prospect of more nuclear power in Washington state has generated some opposition but obviously not enough to derail the project. It probably helps that Energy Northwest has already identified a site — and it’s one of the utility’s existing nuclear complexes.
When Youngkin initially said that Southwest Virginia would make an ideal spot for Virginia’s first SMR, that not surprisingly generated local opposition. More recently, he’s said the first one won’t be in Southwest Virginia. As I pointed out in a recent column, none of that’s his decision — governors don’t pick energy sites, utilities do. Dominion has already said that one of the places it’s looking at as a potential SMR site is its existing nuclear plants — the North Anna site in Louisa County is licensed for a third conventional reactor that’s never been built. I have no inside information, but that would seem a logical place. Dominion already has the infrastructure in place — security, transmission lines, the workforce and so forth. Why go stir up trouble by trying to plop a nuclear plant down someplace where you’d have to build all that from scratch, and stir up the inevitable local opposition?
I notice that our neighbors to the north have apparently come to the same conclusion. The only SMR currently under construction in North America is in Canada, where Ontario Power Generation plans four SMRs. The first of those is under construction, with a projected completion date of 2028. Interestingly, that utility is putting those units at an existing nuclear plant, just as Energy Northwest intends to do.
We don’t often think of Canada this way; but its largest province, Ontario, a little larger population-wise than Pennsylvania, is a nuclear giant. About 60% of the province’s power comes from nuclear; only one U.S. state — Illinois — produces more nuclear power. Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the leader of that country’s Liberal Party, has called for even more nuclear energy. He said last year that his government was “very serious” about promoting nuclear power as a way to combat climate change. “We’re going to have to be doing much more nuclear,” he said.
None of this will be reassuring to those who don’t think we should be splitting atoms in the first place, or those who worry about a nuclear plant being plopped down next to them. The point is, though, that we can no longer frame the debate over nuclear energy in easy left vs. right terms — not when we have left-of-center politicians such as Inslee, Biden and Trudeau each embracing nuclear in their own ways.