RESEARCH REPORT: Five Steps Toward an American Nuclear Renaissance

RESEARCH REPORT: Five Steps Toward an American Nuclear Renaissance: Energy policy in the United States is at a crossroads. Spurred by environmental concerns, current federal efforts to replace fossil fuel electricity generation with wind and solar are making the nation’s grid dangerously unreliable. This vulnerability is due to wind and solar’s reliance on favorable weather conditions, coupled with the absence of battery technology needed to balance unpredictable electricity supply with consumer demand. At a recent congressional hearing, half of commissioners on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) warned that the United States is on the brink of an electricity reliability catastrophe (Christie, 2023; Danly, 2023). The human and economic costs of electrical grid failure are not hypothetical; the power outages associated with Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 were responsible for more than 200 deaths (FERC et al., 2021) and tens of billions of dollars of economic damage (Golding, et al., 2021). Amid changing weather patterns, a national reliance upon weather-dependent sources of electricity—the generation of which cannot be ramped up on demand—risks sleepwalking the United States into an avoidable disaster.