Coalition wants to end Minnesota's nuclear moratorium
Project Optimist spoke with Generation Atomic about why they feel now is the time to lift Minnesota's nuclear moratorium.
Minnesota activists want lawmakers to lift the state’s nuclear moratorium this session.
Gov. Tim Walz (DFL) signed a bill into law in 2023 that requires Minnesota to have carbon-free energy by 2040. But it's been illegal to build new nuclear facilities in the state since 1994.
Generation Atomic is part of a coalition that wants the moratorium to end. Read the letter the coalition sent to Walz and Minnesota lawmakers here.
Project Optimist spoke with Generation Atomic Executive Director Eric Meyer and volunteer Joe Spartz about the effort. Responses have been edited for length, grammar, and style.
Project Optimist: Tell me about the coalition that has been assembled.
Joe Spartz: "We've been working for a while now to bring folks together. The whole topic of the moratorium has been out there for years and years, and as I talk to legislators, I find out it's been going on 20 years about repealing the moratorium. And so we're kind of hitting a nexus of a critical time, an important time, where a number of people are optimistic that things can move forward.
"And so with some of the individual groups that have been working on this, Generation Atomic – Eric specifically – took the lead in saying, ‘Hey, let's reach out to some of these organizations and see if we can kind of work together.’ And so that's what we started doing … We have been active talking to legislators over the last year, and now with the new session in place, it's full steam ahead in terms of getting bills introduced, committees starting to do hearings on it and testifying and all that kind of stuff."
Eric Meyer: "Yeah, so a little more on the coalition: It's a dozen unions, obviously our skilled tradespeople would benefit from any new construction of nuclear. Already the nuclear industry is the most unionized of any in the energy sector, has the highest wages, and also those jobs stick around the longest.
"Where you have a new wind or solar project, you get most of your jobs in the construction phase, and then there's very few jobs over the long term, so that's one of the things we look at is how is this going to be good for Minnesotans?
"And we find there's been a couple studies that show that it's like over 70%, almost 80% of the jobs in a coal plant transfer very easily over to a nuclear plant. They're kind of similar; one doesn't produce any emissions or pollution, but in terms of a lot of the other aspects, are similar.
"So thinking, ‘Hey, we’ve got four coal plants – three big plants and one small plant – that are due to retire by 2035. It would be great for our environment, great for our local economies if we're able to transition those to nuclear plants and be able to use a lot of the infrastructure in the process.’ So I think that's what the trade unions are thinking when they're signing onto our coalition.
"We also have some trade associations, like the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, the Minnesota Rural Electric Association, and then some nonprofits that are concerned for the environment, like ours, like the Citizens Climate Lobby Minnesota chapter, Conservative Energy Forum, Mothers for Nuclear.
"Folks like this have signed onto our coalition as well, seeing the value. Maybe we're not going to start building nuclear tomorrow in Minnesota, but we need to lift the moratorium to allow developers to take a serious look at it."
PO: I read that Republican members of the House Energy Finance and Policy Committee passed HF9 in January. How do you feel about that?
Meyer: "It's great that House Republicans share our position on the moratorium, but I think the best policy is one that can be bipartisan as it's more durable in the long term.
"And clearly the DFL wasn't a part of this one. I think their insight would be helpful in discussions along this, especially with their experience passing the 2040 legislation.
"So, yeah, we didn't put testimony in on that one. Honestly, we prefer just a clean 'Lift the moratorium' bill. It's striking a couple lines of text, so it's a little bit of a mixed bag from our perspective."
Jen Zettel-Vandenhouten
PO: Why form this coalition in Minnesota?
Meyer: "We've been trying to do this in our state for a long time. The last time it was real close was in 2011 … but died before it hit the governor's desk, and we're just thinking there are so many stakeholders that stand to benefit from this, but nobody's really organized them to speak with one voice.
"And as a result, I think the political efforts have run out of steam a few times in the past, and it just hasn't been high enough on the priority list. So it was our goal to show that there is a broad base of support for this on both sides of the aisle."
Spartz: "There's kind of a confluence of several things going on. … One is that there's been this renaissance in nuclear technology over the last decade that's really driving new development projects globally. But of course, in Minnesota we can't even think about any of those that are taking place that could potentially be beneficial to us.
"There's the 2040 legislation that was passed recently that is going to eliminate, basically, fossil fuel electricity production for the state of Minnesota, which we support, but then it puts us in a position of, ‘Where does the electricity come from when the wind isn't blowing, and the sun isn't shining?’ and so thus that really only leaves nuclear as your option, where you can flip the switch and you get electricity – what's called base load energy. And so that's another reason why it's so important right now … And the third is energy demand, electricity demand … which is just going to continue to grow substantially because of the data centers, because of electrification that's occurring within the country."
PO: What is the coalition’s goal?
Meyer: "Whether or not we can lift the moratorium. We think the conditions are right to just get a full lift of it this year."
Spartz: "And there's been efforts in the recent past to just start with a study. So we would have to hire someone to come in and study what is the current status of nuclear energy development and what have you. And again, we feel that the information is out there. You can spend $200,000-$500,000 on the study. We don't feel that would benefit anybody. It's kind of a delay, is what it is. Let's get to the inevitable point of repealing this. And so that's what our coalition is all about, is full repeal."
Noah Beardslee
PO: What are some of the common concerns you hear from people about nuclear power and how do you address those?
Meyer: "It's the classic ones – nuclear waste. ‘What are you going to do with the waste?’ For Minnesota, that's maybe even more of a hot button issue, because we have a situation at Prairie Island where we have spent fuel stored on historically tribal land, really, and I think in a lot of folks’ minds, this is a concerning thing from a public health standpoint.
"So we like to point out a couple things here. One, we're really quite good scientists, engineers, and over the years we've developed methods to store this waste incredibly safely …
"From a political agency and a justice standpoint, the Prairie Island Indian Community did not consent to store waste there. And it's just another chapter in a long history of tribal communities being marginalized. And so we think that long-term, the federal government needs to do what they are legally required to do, which is take the waste and put it in some kind of long-term storage or recycle it."
Spartz: "There's this misconception out there that there's this ooze they could come leaking out of (storage casks). And it can't…it's a dry cask. There's dry material inside, and so they can’t (leak)."
Meyer: "If you consider the bulk of the packaging, you're looking at 23 football fields worth of space, so not a huge burden, really. Politically it's just been so difficult over the years because there's a ton of misinformation about it …
"There's also this misconception that it needs to stay safe for hundreds of thousands of years. And that's another misconception, because after 600 years, the high power gamma rays that you'd have to worry about, they have all decayed away. So after 600 years, you literally have to pulverize this stuff up and eat it for it to hurt you.
"We're talking about ceramic pellets inside of metal tubes inside of 2 feet of concrete and a couple inches of steel. So the level of hypothetical layers which you'd have to imagine somebody being hurt by this stuff is hard to comprehend, versus the guaranteed threat of air pollution that's already happening, and climate change if we don't build more nuclear soon."
Where should Minnesota look as a model for nuclear and why?
Meyer: "If we're gonna stay in the U.S., I would say Chicago, which is the birthplace of controlled reactions, the birthplace of nuclear energy with Enrico Fermi back in the 1940s. Illinois has 11 nuclear reactors that provide 53% of their state’s electricity at ultra, ultra low carbon. Even according to the estimates on carbon intensity from the International Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, nuclear is a quarter of the carbon intensity of solar.
"If we are going a little bit further, I'd say Ontario, our neighbors to the north, are a great example. They were able to execute the fastest greenhouse gas reduction in North American history by closing their coal plants and investing in nuclear plants throughout the 2000s, and expanding the capacity, and they've just doubled down. They've refurbished a bunch of units they were thinking about decommissioning and replacing with a combination of gas and wind. They've committed to building advanced nuclear plants up there and more, both large and small new reactors up in Ontario, which borders our state."
Spartz: "Eric, where does France fit into the global conversation? Nationally, they get a large percentage, like half their electricity comes from nuclear, or maybe beyond."
Meyer: "It's almost 70%. They're such a good example in Europe, because they’ve got Germany right next door: (Germany) had 17 nuclear reactors back in 2010, and they closed their last three in April of 2023, and it's a shame, because they've had to bring coal plants out of moth balls. They were energy exporters. Now they're energy importers.
"So they're using France's nuclear instead to help keep their lights on. Their big plan was to get natural gas from Russia, but then the pipeline blew up, and so now they're closing down factories because they can't afford the energy costs … so it's made them a lot more expensive. It's hurt their economy, and hurt their national security. And they could still restart some of these plants too. There's been studies on this … but yeah, France is good in there. They also committed to building at least six new reactors by 2035, but they're looking at more."
You just mentioned Germany and mistakes they’ve made with nuclear. What other places do you think have handled nuclear poorly and why?
Meyer: "I think New York is a decent example, because they had this plant called Indian Point, a couple really great pressurized water reactors there that were among the best in the nation in terms of operations. Those plants were providing over 90% of the low carbon electricity for the city of New York.
"And Gov. Cuomo closed them down at least 20 years before the end of their life, arguably more, and they had to build three natural gas plants — build two brand new ones, and then there was a third one that had kind of been idling, sort of only used here and there, when demand is really high. And that one, by the way, is right upwind of housing projects in Queens and that one had to come out of mostly idling and is burning 24/7… And none of that had to happen if they would have just kept that (nuclear) plant running.
"… But now they just released a blueprint for new nuclear in New York … they announced their plans to build more in upstate New York. So all of this has just reversed, but this plant that they shut down has already been mostly disassembled, so they likely can't turn it back on.
Jen Zettel-Vandenhouten
"I don't want any more countries or states having to learn that lesson the hard way … As a climate advocate, a lot of time you don't get to see so clearly the results of your work. But if those plants stay online, I mean each nuclear plant that you stay online, that's 10 million tons of CO2 per year that you're preventing from entering the atmosphere … So that's a big impact that most of the time, climate advocates can't see with their kind of day-to-day stuff."
Is there anything else you want to add that we didn’t touch on?
Spartz: "It's important that the repeal be passed now, rather than waiting another year or two years, because as Eric has mentioned, these plants just don't pop up in 24 hours. It takes a while, and so we need to allow utilities the option of being able to look at all the possibilities that are out there.
"And so if it takes us this year to be able to open up the playing field for them, then they need to reorient their policy and their thinking and then consider what's out there. And every year you delay that, it pushes it further off in the future."
This Q&A was edited and fact-checked by Nora Hertel.