Chris Wright on nuclear power, Nov 6, 2020

Yesterday, Chris Wright was confirmed as the next U.S. Secretary of Energy. After that important step in his energy career, it’s worth taking a few moments to learn what he thinks about nuclear power outside of any political context. In my experience, people like Wright form and hold opinions that do not shift much over time. They certainly don’t shift with the political winds.

Slightly more than 4 years ago, Chris Wright was a guest on Atomic Show #286. We talked for several minutes about nuclear power; not surprising considering the natural of the Atomic Show podcast.

The below is a direct transcription of our exchange.

Aside: Remember that this was originally an audio recording of an unscripted conversation between two people. As is common in similar situations, the words and sentence structure is not refined or proofread. End Aside.

Adams: During your discussion with Robert [Bryce] you mentioned that you loved nuclear and thought it was a very important energy source for now and for the future. Can you tell us a little more about your feelings about fission. Let’s go away from your science geeky foray into fusion because I personally think it’s way off in the future. But let’s talk about fission.

Wright: Yeah, fission’s the real deal. It’s here today. It’s been around 20% of total US electricity, even though we haven’t built a nuclear power plant for decades. But I’m a huge fan of fission, of nuclear power. Heck, if I was smarter, I probably should have gone…We didn’t really need fusion, but of course in this sort of depletionist, we’re running out of stuff, I believed the concerns were larger than they were.

So, if you look at human society, we’ve generally trended from less dense energy sources into less dense energy sources. In low income countries, a third of humanity still cooks with wood, dung, agricultural waste. Women spend over an hour a day gathering this, walking miles to bring it home to burn it in a smoky fire inside a hut or a house. A lot of material a lot of impact.

Coal was a dramatic improvement. It burns massively cleaner than wood. It’s in larger quantities available. You can move it on trains. Coal was a massively cleaner, energy dense resource. People say Chris, but don’t you hate coal? No, I don’t hate coal. It’s massively better than traditional fuels. It’s a big step forward. And then oil and natural gas. We’ve gone to these denser, smaller footprint, both in land use and in emissions or impact on the environment or air pollution/air emissions. And then that trend goes on. 

And the next step after natural gas is nuclear. A very small amount of fuel required. Incredible energy density in these nuclear power plants. They look like big ol’ buildings, but oh my god, you’d have to pave a state with windmills to make the same amount of energy as from a large nuclear complex and if you pave the state with windmills and the wind goes down, you’ve got an electricity problem.

Nuclear is very reliable, very high energy density. We have an enormous resource of uranium and of course we could use thorium as well. So, yeah, I am a huge fan of nuclear power. I think it should be a meaningful grower in the US and global electricity stack. And I actually believe that it will be.

It’s got a massive political problem right now which I think is very unfortunate. Selling fear – it’s actually sort of the same problem that oil and gas has – it’s easy to sell fear. But the actual track record of nuclear power for safety – it’s just simply by far and away the safest and least impactful way to produce electricity of anything. Including hydro because hydro has a larger footprint. I’m a fan of hydro power as well, but nuclear power for producing electricity is simply fantastic.

It’s been made expensive because of regulatory, insurance costs and unrealistic fears. It has been stopped for politics. I believe in the developing world, China, India… 

I think we will see a Nuclear Renaissance. It may start there first and success or growth there, I hope, will feed back into… These fears are overblown. And believe me, if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear is awesome. There’s two things that can really move global greenhouse gas emissions. One is natural gas displacing coal, which is what’s happening, which is why US CO2 emissions on a per capita basis last year were lower than any year since you or I were born, Rod. Natural gas has been the needle mover in total greenhouse gas emissions in the US and globally. It’s by far number 1. 

But what could also be a huge needle mover is nuclear. It hasn’t been so much yet because we haven’t built or grown it. But if you just take how much greenhouse gas is displaced by the existence of nuclear capacity today, it’s gigantic. Far larger than all of the solar and wind in the world combined – by a big measure.

So sorry for the long rambling thing. But I love the technology. I believe in its future. Yeah, I’m an unabashed nuclear fan.