JD Vance touted the benefits of nuclear energy on Joe Rogan’s podcast and suggested expenditures as much as it costs to build an aircraft carrier to provide the United States electrical grid with enough equipment to quickly restore service after a major power outage.
During a three hour conversation Published Thursday morning, the Republican vice presidential candidate repeatedly criticized environmental groups for what he saw as the hypocrisy of opposing the most efficient and abundant form of carbon-free electricity, while also describing global warming emissions as an existential threat.
“If you think carbon is the most important thing — (that) the sole focus of American civilization should be on reducing the world’s carbon footprint — then you would invest big time in nuclear power,” Vance said.
“When you say that, the environmentalists say, ‘Well, you have to deal with all these toxins afterwards,’” he added, referring to radioactive waste left behind when a reactor is refueled with freshly enriched uranium. “Well, the toxin problem is less of a problem than the carbon problem, if you think we’re all going to be extinct in a hundred years. So let’s tackle the most pressing problem.”
Nuclear power plants produce relatively minuscule amounts of physical waste per unit of electricity generated, compared to the mountains of toxic ash emitted by coal-fired power stations or the non-recyclable wind turbine blades and solar panels now piling up in landfills.
Unlike other forms of waste, every piece of spent fuel is highly regulated and monitored by national and international authorities. The vast majority of spent fuel remains on site at power plants, waiting for the federal government to draw up a plan for what to do with it in the long term. It will take millennia to decompose.
Republican vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance (R-Ohio) speaks during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The US built a facility at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain where it could store nuclear waste indefinitely. Finland has just completed the the world’s first permanent waste repositorywhere sealed containers containing spent fuel rods can be buried deep underground. But France, Russia and the United Kingdom recycle their spent fuel, which still contains roughly 95% of the energy after it leaves a reactor, by turning it into new fuel or extracting valuable radioactive isotopes for medical treatments.
The US canceled its first nuclear waste recycling facility in the 1970s, but several new companies also emerged are busy commercializing spent fuel reprocessing technologies with financing of the federal government.
Vance’s comments are in stark contrast to those of his running mate, former President Donald Trump, who said during an appearance on Rogan’s show warned last week that nuclear reactors entail too many costs and ‘dangers’. (That’s a change from recently in August, when Trump told conservative podcaster Shawn Ryan that “nuclear has now become very good and very safe.”)
During his term in the White House, Trump signed two major bills in support of nuclear energy and took several executive actions to support the sector. But the momentum for an industry revival reached critical mass under President Joe Bidenwhose groundbreaking infrastructure bill has pumped billions into preserving existing reactors and testing and building new reactors. The law also provided long-term tax credits for any form of carbon-free electricity, including nuclear power.
If elected, Trump and Vance have promised to revoke many of those subsidies.
Vance also called Russia the “largest funder of the green energy movement in Europe.” Although this claim is almost certainly exaggerated, a Report 2022 from the Foundation for Political Innovation, a liberal think tank headquartered in Paris, found that Russia’s state gas company Gazprom funded certain environmental nonprofits that promoted the permanent phase-out of nuclear power in countries like Belgium. Before Green Party member Tinne Van der Straeten took office as Energy Minister in 2020 and set in motion plans to close the country’s nuclear power plants, 50% ownership from a law firm where Gazprom was a top client.
The four nuclear reactors and cooling towers are on display at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, Friday, May 31, 2024, in Waynesboro, Georgia. The two newer units at the plant are the only two new reactors built from scratch in the United States. USA in decades.
“Why do the Russians finance? It’s not because they’re worried about climate change. It’s because they want the Germans and everyone else to buy Russian natural gas,” Vance said. “They realize that if the Germans and French close all their coal and nuclear power plants, Russia will have them by the balls.”
Still, Vance — whose campaign has pledged to boost already historically high levels of U.S. oil and gas production — is casting doubt on the urgency of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
He derided climate advocates as “carbon obsessives,” he said of continued public hesitation some activists to support nuclear energy showed that “they clearly don’t believe their own nonsense, and that’s why I’m skeptical of what they say.”
The Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate then turned to another shaky energy policy issue: the nation’s supply of electrical transformers.
As extreme weather events become more common – something scientists say is causing temperatures to rise – massive storms have destroyed electrical transformers at an increasing rate. Transformers are the backbone of the electrical grid, acting as penstock systems in a channel to increase and decrease electricity levels as electrons move from generators through wires to electrical outlets.
As severe storms and heat waves take their toll on existing transformers, overdue upgrades to the aging power grid are driving demand for replacements.
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Still, manufacturers are struggling to keep up. In the face of one national shortagethe Biden administration in April rolled back a regulatory reform Factory owners’ complaints prevented them from increasing production of the transformers that are in high demand today.
Vance made no mention of the effects climate change has had on the country’s supply of transformers. Instead, he described a previously fictional scenario in which the U.S. could be hit by an electromagnetic pulse that would blow up the power grid — something federal experts have done. participation would be possible if an adversary were to detonate a nuclear bomb at a high altitude over the US. Americans have only experienced this one such eventwhen a pulse from an atomic bomb test in the Pacific Ocean traveled 800 miles to the east, briefly disrupting street lights and telephone service in parts of Hawaii.
To ensure a quick recovery after such an attack, Vance says, the federal government should stock enough spare transformers to replace defective ones.
“It’s actually a scandal, I think, that the federal government hasn’t — at some point, with all the money we’re spending on defense and everything else — just said, we’re going to spend $15 billion to buy enough power transformers to have a backup for every transformer in the country,” he said.