SOCAN Testimony to members of the Oregon Senate Committee on Energy & Environment regarding a range of pronuclear Senate bills filed in 2025
In 1980, following the Three Mile Island nuclear incident, Oregon voters passed a Ballot Measure that precluded construction of nuclear power plants in Oregon until/unless a satisfactory mean of disposing of the nuclear waste was developed. Because of the tremendous pressure on the transmission grid imposed by data centers, cryptocurrency and AI centers, legislators and the nuclear industry are seeking to overturn this ban. Three Senate bills were filed before the session started. Since they have been assigned to the Senate Committee on Energy ad Environment, and no Hearing has been scheduled, this represents an effort to convince members of the committee that no Hearing should be scheduled. – Alan Journet
Alan R.P. Journet Ph.D.
Cofacilitator
Southern Oregon Climate Action Now
February 1st 2025
Co-Chair
Climate, Energy and Environment Team
Consolidated Oregon Indivisible Network
Testimony opposing Senate Bills SB215, SB216 and SB635
Chair Sollman and members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Environment
I write as cofacilitator of Southern Oregon Climate Action Now (SOCAN), an organization of some 2,000 Southern Oregonians who are concerned about the climate crisis and encourage state action to address it. As rural and coastal Southern Oregonians, we live on the frontlines of the warming, reducing snowpack, heatwaves, drought, ocean level rise, and the increasing wildfire risk that these trends conspire to produce. Because of this, we pay close attention to what is happening in the state legislature relating to climate.
I also write as co-chair and on behalf of the Climate, Energy and Environment Team of the statewide Consolidated Oregon Indivisible Network.
I comment today on the array of Senate Bills that have been introduced promoting nuclear energy. While SB215 acknowledges that the current exclusion of nuclear generation plants from Oregon is a consequence of a ballot measure passed by the people of Oregon following the 1079 Three Mile Island nuclear incident and refers a reversal of that 1980 ballot measure to Oregonians, SB216 and 635 do not. Rather, proponents of these bills assign authority for rejecting the expressed will of the people to the legislature and thus do not refer their proposals to a ballot. As Sierra (2024) pointed out: “In 1980, Oregon voters prohibited the construction of new nuclear reactors until the federal government developed a nuclear waste site. With no site in existence more than four decades later, new nuclear reactors are effectively banned within the state.” Regrettably, in the same article, Sierra furthered the nuclear industry campaign of disinformation by repeating the false claim that the “appeal of SMRs is that they could provide a great amount of energy capacity without the climate warming effects of fossil fuels.’ Nuclear generation absolutely is NOT free of carbon emissions.
Why Consider the Nuclear Option?
In exploring on behalf of Southern Oregon Climate Action Now the claims of proponents and opponents of nuclear power as a climate solution, I concluded that proponents of this option seem to rely on one or more of three arguments to support their position (Journet 2023):
1) The potential availability of renewable energy sources is inadequate to meet the global demand for energy
2) The generation of electricity from nuclear power is greenhouse gas (carbon) emissions free.
3) Nuclear generation facilities are safe.
This exploration led me to conclude that each of these arguments is false in that:
1) there exists more than enough renewable energy to meet global demand;
2) full lifecycle assessment of energy generation methods suggests that, from plant construction to decommissioning and the extraction and processing of the fuel, while better than coal, oil and gas, nuclear is no improvement over genuine renewable sources (e.g., solar and wind) in terms of greenhouse gas emissions;
3) since provision of energy globally via nuclear generation would require the construction and operation of nuclear facilities through the world, even where political systems are of questionable stability, nuclear power plants could become targets for military or terrorist action just as has occurred in Ukraine.
It is important to appreciate, also, that achieving generation via the nuclear option rather than via renewable facilities generally takes many more years to become operational and is substantially more expensive than renewable generation. This means that any greenhouse gas emissions reduced by switching rom fossil fuel to nuclear generation will be substantially more expensive than would occur if fossil fuels were replaced by solar, wind or genuine renewable resources. Note, also, that nuclear energy is not a renewable energy generation approach since raw nuclear fuel is in limited supply and thus is a non-renewable resource.
Are Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Beneficial?
As discussed in Journet (2013) Small Modular Nuclear Reactors are prefabricated units that can be shipped and plugged in to establish a nuclear facility with a capacity of up to 300 MW as compared to the standard large scale nuclear reactor with a capacity ranging up to a few thousand MW.
Despite the hype that nuclear proponents have generated around SMRs, Ed Lyman, Director of Nuclear Power Safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists recently (Lyman 2024) identified five myths that SMR proponents promote:
1) SMRs are not more economical than large reactors. Indeed, one of the main reasons for the cancellation of NuScale’s proposed SMR in Idaho was the immense and sky-rocketing cost per kilowatt hour (Bright 2023). Barber (2023) reported the demise of the proposed NuScale demonstration project in Idaho with the comment that “the utilities backing the plant were spooked … by a 50 percent increase in the projected cost for the project….” Additionally, he pointed out that NuScale’s problem was that commitments to buy power from the facility covered less that 25% of its promised output. More recently, Green (2024) reviewed SMRs and summed up the current status and future potential as: “Small modular reactors (SMRs) have been the subject of endless hype in recent years but in fact, no SMRs have ever been built, none are being built now and in all likelihood none will ever be built because of the prohibitive costs.” Comparing SMRs with renewable energy sources, Lyman uses the levelized cost of energy and reports the estimated cost for the defunct NuScale per MWH as $119 while land-based wind and utility-scale solar cost below $40 per MWH.
2) Lyman (2024) concludes that SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors. While he acknowledges that intuitively one might think that because of their smaller size and reduced fuel needs, and lower heat production SMRs pose a reduced environmental risk compared to large reactors, he argues this is not the case. While SMRs have passive safety features these “may not always work, especially during extreme events such as large earthquakes, major flooding, or wildfires that can degrade the environmental conditions under which they are designed to operate.” Clearly, Oregon is susceptible to at least two out the three extreme events identified.
Lyman (2024) also points out that “regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features.” Apparently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is “exempting new reactors, including SMRs, from many of the protective measures that it requires for operating plants, such as a physical containment structure, an offsite emergency evacuation plan, and an exclusion zone that separates the plant from densely populated areas.” He warns that the NRC could also “allow SMRs to reduce the numbers of armed security personnel to protect them from terrorist attacks and highly trained operators to run them.” This is of particular concern because SMRs could become radiological weapons if sabotaged by knowledgeable saboteurs.
3) Lyman (2024) concludes that SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste. He points out that SMRs produce just as much highly radioactive isotope as large reactors. For some SMRs, “the concentration of fission products in the spent fuel, and the heat generated by the decay products—factors that really matter to safety—will be proportionately greater.” Additionally, just like the utility that manages large reactors, any owner of an SMR, for a data center for example, will have to manage significant quantities of spent fuel for the long term. In relation to the nuclear waste production of three kinds of SMRs Krall et al. (2022) concluded that “water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of 2 to 30.”
4) Particularly relevant to the current legislative proposals, Lyman (2024) concludes that SMRs cannot be guaranteed to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production. He points out that “it is very unlikely that any reasonably foreseeable SMR design would be able to safely operate without reliable access to electricity from the grid to power coolant pumps and other vital safety systems.” The data center operator would have to provide back-up power for both the data center and the reactor. In terms of reliability, Lyman offers the caution that: “Premature deployment based on unrealistic performance expectations could prove extremely costly for any company that wants to experiment with SMRs.”
5) In terms of the claim regarding energy use efficiency, Lyman (2024) argues that “SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.” Unfortunately, the reality is that “In terms of the amount of heat generated, the amount of uranium fuel that must undergo nuclear fission is the same whether a reactor is large or small.”
Lyman (2024) concludes by suggesting that SMRs might have a role to play in the future, but only if there is a realistic assessment of their costs and risks. He suggests that the nuclear industry is guilty of painting an overly rosy picture of the benefits of SMRs and avoiding the risks.
In summary, we oppose the effort to undermine or counter the 1980 ballot measure precluding the construction of nuclear reactors in Oregon until a satisfactory method for disposal of the hazardous waste has been developed. In addition, we conclude that the proposal to incorporate Small Modular Nuclear Reactors in data centers is, at best, premature; the technology has not been developed well enough for this to be a promising or tolerable risk. The enthusiastic promotion of the nuclear option based on a campaign of misinformation by the nuclear industry and its apologists should be resisted.
Respectfully Submitted
Alan Journet Ph.D.
7113 Griffin Lane
Jacksonville
OR 97530-4182
[email protected]
541-500-2331
541-301-4107
References Cited:
Barber G. 2023 The First Small-Scale Nuclear Plant in the US Died Before It Could Live. Business, WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/first-small-scale-nuclear-plant-us-nuscale-canceled/
Bright Z. 2023 NuScale cancels first-of-a-kind nuclear project as costs surge. E & E News, Politico. https://www.eenews.net/articles/nuscale-cancels-first-of-a-kind-nuclear-project-as-costs-surge/
Greem J. 2024 Small modular nuclear reactors: a history of failure. Climate Energy, Climate and Capital Media. https://www.climateandcapitalmedia.com/small-modular-nuclear-reactors-a-history-of-failure/
Journet A 2023 The Nuclear Conundrum. Southern Oregon Climate Action Now. https://socan.eco/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/The-Nuclear-Conundrum-2023.pdf
Krall L, Macfarlane A, Ewing R. 2022 Nuclear waste from small modular reactors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (23) e211833119. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111833119
Lyman E. 2024 Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors. The Equation, Union of Concerned Scientists. https://blog.ucsusa.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bros-dont-want-you-to-know-about-small-modular-reactors/
Sierra A. 2024 Amazon wants nuclear reactors to power its Eastern Oregon data centers. Here’s why. Oregon Public Broadcasting January 30 2025. https://www.opb.org/article/2024/11/16/amazon-wants-nuclear-reactors-to-power-its-eastern-oregon-data-centers-heres-why/#:~:text=In%201980%2C%20Oregon%20voters%20prohibited,effectively%20banned%20within%20the%20state.
