Across the country and across the political spectrum, politicians and activists are warming back up to nuclear power. Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York are among the blue states offering incentives to struggling nuclear facilities, as E&E News' Benjamin Storrow reports . New York, New England and Pennsylvania have all seen rising power-sector emissions after they closed nuclear plants and let natural gas fill the gaps. Activists and academics are pushing California to keep its one remaining nuclear plant open. There’s also a resurgence in places where it's pronounced “nucular.” Missouri lawmakers are considering a bill to let nuclear plant owners recover construction costs, and West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed a bill last week eliminating a quarter-century-old ban on nuclear plant construction, as E&E News' Jeff Tomich and Kristi E. Swartz report. The attractions are manifold. For red states, nuclear can provide baseload power to replace coal-fired plants that are shutting down due to age or economics, while also generating jobs, tax revenue and other benefits for host communities. The employment and grid reliability arguments sell just as well in blue states, on top of a generational shift among environmentalists as baby boomer activists retire and climate change becomes the overriding concern for the movement. “Today, the impacts of climate are so tangible you can taste it in your mouth,” said Michael Wara, a Stanford University energy policy researcher. “It isn’t polar bears or something in 2050 about sea-level rise. It’s now. It’s affecting where you want to live and how safe your kids are. So maybe you’re willing to take a risk on an old nuclear power plant on a fault line?” The Biden administration is supporting it both ways. An Energy Department official testified last month in support of an Indiana bill to incentivize siting next-generation nuclear plants at existing coal-plant sites. The bipartisan infrastructure package passed last year included $1.2 billion in assistance for nuclear facilities, while the stalled “Build Back Better Act” would have gone further still, with a production tax credit for nuclear facilities worth $23 billion. It might all be for naught, though. Even though former Energy Secretary Steven Chu and other prominent academics are calling for California's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant to be kept open past its 2025 retirement date, no one with any authority is talking about it. And the small modular reactors that red states are supporting won’t be commercially deployed for years, and their economics are unproven, as Jeff writes. Meanwhile, the only new plant under construction in the U.S., the 2,200-megawatt Plant Vogtle in Georgia, continues to set a discouraging example for potential investors. Southern Co. on Thursday announced yet another delay and cost hikes, pushing the total to almost $30 billion and the start date to early 2023, as Kristi reports. “We’re a little frustrated with the latest developments,” Southern CEO Tom Fanning said in an interview.
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