Amazon has said it wants to build small-scale nuclear reactors along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest to power AI data centers. Yesterday we heard from Oregon’s NuScale Power, which has achieved regulatory approval for their small-scale nuclear reactor design.
Today we hear from Kelly Campbell, policy director for Columbia Riverkeeper, about her organization’s concerns about using this kind of energy in the Pacific Northwest.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. From the Gert Boyle Studio, I’m Dave Miller. Yesterday we talked to José Reyes, the chief technology officer and one of the founders of NuScale Power – that is the Oregon-based company that’s leading the charge nationally for what are known as small modular nuclear reactors. NuScale has now received federal approval for two different SMR designs, and says it’s gotten interest from utilities and tech companies with power hungry AI-driven data centers. Amazon has already said it wants to build small-scale reactors along the Columbia River in Washington and there was an effort in Oregon in the legislature this session to change state law to allow a small reactor in Umatilla County.
My next guest has concerns about all of this. Kelly Campbell is the policy director for Columbia Riverkeeper. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Kelly Campbell: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Given the existential threat that climate change presents, why stand in the way of any new non-carbon emitting energy production?
Campbell: Well, the problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t do well under climate change. In fact, just this week, there were nuclear reactors in France and Switzerland that had to shut down because of the warming climate and the warming water that they were dealing with. So it’s really not a very practical solution. Also, small modular nuclear reactors really haven’t been built at all in this country. There’s one in Russia and two in China, and they’re both underperforming. So there’s nothing that really says this is going to be a helpful tool to address climate change.
Meanwhile, we have proven options such as solar, wind, battery storage, energy efficiency, conservation, that we know work, that are cheaper to do, that come online within months, not decades the way we’re looking at nuclear. So it’s really a little bit of a nuclear fantasy. I think once you start digging in and seeing what the cost looks like, the timeline to build these things looks like, it really isn’t a good solution for climate change. And it’s really diverting funds and diverting energy that could be going to real solutions that we can implement now, rather than these pie in the sky nuclear fantasies.
Miller: Do you have different concerns about the small modular reactors than you do traditional larger ones?
Campbell: Well, they both use generally the same technology. There’s a bunch of different varieties of these new small modular nuclear reactors. I like to make sure to get the word nuclear in there. It’s interesting to me that the industry likes to hide that word and just say “small modular reactor.”
The problems are the same in terms of waste – and that’s a huge problem. Nuclear reactors create radioactive waste that has to be isolated from people and the environment for literally hundreds of thousands of years. Just let that sink in, hundreds of thousands of years. Can you even imagine what might be going on along the Columbia River in hundreds of thousands of years? I can’t. So that waste problem has not been solved. We are not any closer to solving it than we were in 1980 when voters in Oregon passed a measure that says we’re not going to build nuclear in Oregon until there’s a federal waste repository. We still don’t have one. So any community that’s going to host a small modular nuclear reactor in its community is signing up to host radioactive waste for, it could be thousands of years, we don’t know, just for the foreseeable future. And that’s really an environmental justice concern.
Miller: You heard, I think, the conversation I had with José Reyes yesterday. I asked him about nuclear waste, and he mentioned two things. One, the viability of reusing this waste, to sort of recycle it through a reactor to get more energy out of it. And then he said that there are best practice local containment efforts that are being used around the world right now. Basically, it seemed like he was saying that concerns about waste containment are overblown. I’m curious to get your specific thoughts about what he said.
Campbell: Yeah, I disagree with that. I think the industry likes to bring up the idea of recycling or reprocessing. And it’s really not what you and I think when we think about recycling aluminum cans or something. This reprocessing actually complicates the waste streams and makes it more difficult for them to then be stored safely. So it’s not really a true recycling, it’s a reuse that creates more complicated problems in the end.
So, sounds nice. But again, like a lot of these things, nuclear, once you start digging into it a little bit, it’s more complicated and it’s more problematic than it seems. Small modular nuclear reactors, you’d think because they’re small, that they create less waste. But in fact, there was a study that Stanford did a few years ago looking at these small modular react nuclear reactor designs and they found that these designs can produce two to 30 times the waste of the old reactors, depending on the design.
Miller: You mean compared to the amount of electricity they’re producing?
Campbell: Compared to the old reactors.
Miller: You’re saying overall, even though they’re making a 50th of the electricity?
Campbell: Yeah. Again, once you start looking into the details, you find that things aren’t quite what they seem and that there are reasons that some of the way that these small modular reactors differ actually could produce more of a waste stream. So that’s a concern for us, to have these hosted in communities along the Columbia River.
Miller: What exactly are your fears about the Columbia River itself or the communities along the river?
Campbell: So first of all, the waste that we already talked about, these communities become kind of sacrifice zones. No one’s talking about building a small modular nuclear reactor in Lake Oswego, right? They’re talking about doing it out in Umatilla County, out in rural places. And those communities are already hit hard dealing with a lot of environmental justice concerns. This is just another one to pile on top of that.
Secondly, one of the places that is furthest along in consideration for building small modular nuclear reactors is out near Hanford, on the Washington side of the Columbia River. Building these there, where there’s already nuclear issues going on, if there’s an accident in one facility at Hanford, it’s going to affect the others. So it’s a particularly unsafe place to ever think about building more reactors. In fact, they want to build it next to the Columbia Generating Station, which is a nuclear reactor. That reactor, there’s a tritium plume underneath the parking lot where the employees park, so they’re not able to get in and clean up that tritium plume as part of the Hanford cleanup until after the decommissioning of that plant, which might not be until 2043.
Miller: This is an issue that we’ve talked about, not the tritium itself, but the Amazon push. They wouldn’t be partnering with NuScale, it’d be a different company but also a small modular nuclear reactor, and in this case to power AI-driven data centers. How do you think about these data centers in the context of the push for much more electricity?
Campbell: So a lot of these big tech giants have climate pledges, right? So now they need all this energy, or they want all this energy, but they want it to be “clean.” So I think it’s a little bit of a magician’s trick. They all kind of came out last October within a week of each other – Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Facebook – saying, “Hey, guess what, we’re going nuclear. Either we’re going to try to reopen things like Three Mile Island or we’re going to go for these small modular nuclear reactors.” The building of those is at least 15 years out at best. Meanwhile, they want this power now. So they’re just using more fracked gas, they’re just using more conventional fuels and pointing to nuclear, like, “See, we’re going to be clean. We’re gonna be doing something to solve climate change.” So I think it’s a little bit of a ruse and I hope we don’t fall for it.
Miller: Is your point that these companies are just pretending to try to do nuclear as a kind of fig leaf so they can build data centers now and then keep using whatever electricity that they can get now? Or, that if we put emphasis into nuclear reactor projects, that wind or solar projects would be less likely to be pursued?
Campbell: I think both. I mean, essentially, they’re saying, “We’re going to do nuclear because it’s clean.” Well, we know it’s not clean, it creates this waste. It starts with uranium mining on Indigenous land, which is not a clean practice, all the way through to the nuclear waste.
The other thing about these tech companies, the motto in Silicon Valley is, “Move fast and break things.” Well, that’s not a great way to approach nuclear technologies. We want to be extra careful and extra safe if these things do get built, because we don’t want a Fukushima here on the Columbia River.
Miller: At the same time that you’re saying very clearly you don’t want more nuclear generation in this country or in the Columbia Basin, Columbia Riverkeeper has long supported the effort to remove the Lower Snake River dams. So, opposing a version of new carbon-free power generation, but also getting rid of some existing carbon-free power. What is your vision for, given the contemporary politics, how we could achieve the kinds of low or no carbon electricity that you actually would support?
Campbell: That’s a great question. I’ll start with the removal of the four Lower Snake River dams. The idea that nuclear could replace that is a huge gamble. And the fish can’t wait. The fish can’t wait for these things to be built that may not ever be built or may be decades away. So it’s really kind of a false problem to set up like, “Do you want nuclear, or do you want the Lower Snake River dams?” In general, our vision is a vision of a just transition to renewable and clean energy. It involves a lot more energy efficiency and conservation measures. And it involves really digging into things like solar, wind and battery storage that’s all getting cheaper and easier and faster to do.
It’s not going to be easy, right? There’s no easy solution to climate change. I think that’s why some people in a climate panic seem to think, “Oh, nuclear can solve it all for us.” But again, once you start looking into the details, nuclear is not a solution. It doesn’t play well with renewables, it doesn’t work well when the planet is warming. And there’s easier, faster, cheaper and safer ways that we can address the climate crisis.
Miller: Do you see an obvious path forward to the future you’re describing, given the current administration’s policies that are in almost every way going in the opposite direction?
Campbell: They are absolutely going in the opposite direction. In fact, right now the National Regulatory Commission as we speak is meeting to talk about lowering health and safety standards around radiation so that they can rubber stamp some of these projects and get them through. That is frightening. That’s something I feel like we need to rely on our states here in Oregon and Washington to help slow these things down and make sure that they’re vetted correctly, if these projects do end up moving forward. Because we, at this time, can’t trust the federal government to actually be trying to protect health and safety from potential problems with nuclear. And that is new.
Miller: I want to go back to the state questions then. You mentioned briefly a state law that voters passed in 1980. What exactly did that say?
Campbell: So in 1980, voters passed a ballot measure that said there can be no nuclear power reactors built in Oregon until there’s a nationally licensed federal waste repository and another vote of all the people of the state of Oregon to overturn the moratorium. So, it’s 45 years later [and] we are literally no closer to getting a national waste repository than we were in 1980. And certainly, the voters haven’t voted on it again. There were 13 bills this session in Oregon’s legislature that attempted to promote nuclear or overturn or find some loophole through the moratorium. That was unheard of, we haven’t seen that many bills in the past. We haven’t seen bills with Democratic co-sponsors in the past. That all happened this session ...
Miller: In other words, you saw a political shift in Salem. Maybe not seismic, but bipartisan movement towards a rethinking of nuclear energy in Oregon?
Campbell: Yes. We’ve usually seen maybe one or two of these bills that are an attempt to overturn the moratorium that don’t get out of committee. This time we had two bills that got out of committee and were sitting in Ways and Means and basically didn’t get funded because of the broader funding issues in Oregon.
The nuclear folks have been in there doing their lobbying. This is certainly being backed up by the tech companies, and it’s something that I think we need to really have a conversation here in Oregon about. Because we have been protected and now, we’re looking at potentially, if one of these bills passes in a future session, you’re not being protected from building new nuclear in Oregon. And that is really concerning.
Miller: What would the Umatilla bill have done?
Campbell: So there was a bill that would have basically exempted Umatilla County somehow from the statewide moratorium and allowed the building of small modular nuclear reactors within the county, after a vote of the people of the county. A strange bill, kind of a bizarre bill. I don’t know how you get one county to exempt itself from statewide law, seems like that kind of sets a bad precedent for other types of issues in the future.
The bill was vehemently opposed by the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation. And the bill’s sponsor Bobby Levy actually misspoke during the hearing before her colleagues voted to pass the bill out of committee, saying that the tribes supported the bill, when they in fact were opposed to the bill and had to put out a press release to correct the record. So there’s some concerning things going on in terms of how this is being presented in ways that are not necessarily true.
Miller: Kelly Campbell, thanks very much.
Campbell: Thank you.
Miller: Kelly Campbell is the policy director for Columbia Riverkeeper. As I mentioned, we talked to José Reyes, the chief technology officer and one of the founders of NuScale Power yesterday. You can find that conversation at our website.
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