Illinois may lift historic ban on building nuclear power plants as state continues transition from coal and gas

Already home to more nuclear power plants than any state in the nation, Illinois is on the verge of lifting a nearly four-decade-old ban on building reactors as the state transitions from coal and natural gas.

The move comes as other states have rescinded similar bans and policymakers are taking a fresh look at nuclear as another alternative to generate energy without increasing carbon output.

And while the legislation lifting the ban in Illinois moved relatively quietly through the General Assembly earlier this year, the effort has led labor unions and environmentalists — two groups that typically align with the Democrats who dominate Springfield — to be on opposite sides of the issue. Labor sees the possibility of new nuclear plants as an opportunity to preserve high-paying jobs in the energy sector, while environmentalists see it as an expensive distraction from a future with cleaner power sources.

The sensitive political dynamic is playing out as Gov. J.B. Pritzker is expected to sign the bill into law. But even if he does, players on all sides agree Pritzker’s backing alone won’t lead to an immediate atomic energy boom in the state.

“It’s extremely unlikely that will really make a difference, certainly not in the short term, because there’s no one waiting here to start building a nuclear power plant as soon as the law changes,” said Robert Rosner, a theoretical physicist and founding co-director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “In the final analysis, whether or not nuclear will ever happen again, anywhere in the United States, I think really depends on economics.”

Still, the initiative stands as a major turning point and comes at a time when the nuclear industry is in the midst of change. The federal government has incentivized developing the next generation of reactors, and even Pritzker has mentioned the possibility that new nuclear technology is something to keep a close eye on. The governor has made the energy policy overhaul he signed into law two years ago that included help for three of the state’s nuclear power plants a hallmark of his first term.

“The devil’s in the details,” Pritzker told reporters in Springfield in early April, before the final version of the measure that would lift the ban was approved with bipartisan support in the General Assembly. “We want to make sure that we’re not just opening this up to nuclear everywhere or any type of nuclear.”

The following week, he told an audience at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics that Illinois was “looking now at removing the ban on nuclear — not to build any major new plants, but there’s small nuclear reactors that are being developed now that are much safer, that could be used in places in Illinois where there’s a lack of energy production.”

Despite its long-running impact, the moratorium on nuclear plant construction garnered little news coverage and virtually no debate on the floor of the Illinois House and Senate when it was approved in spring 1987, about a year after the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.

Rather than concern about meltdowns, however, the push for a ban on nuclear construction in Illinois — which had the backing of then-Gov. Jim Thompson, a Republican — was driven by a national political stalemate over how to dispose of radioactive waste, a controversy that continues to this day.

Indeed, the measure, which took effect Sept. 11, 1987, prohibits the construction of nuclear plants “until the director of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency finds that the United States Government, through its authorized agency, has identified and approved a demonstrable technology or means for the disposal of high level nuclear waste,” or unless the General Assembly passes legislation approving a specific project.

Illinois was not the only state to have instituted a moratorium. More than a dozen states from California to Vermont had some type of restrictions on new nuclear power facilities, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

But in recent years, some of those states have ended those limits, including Wisconsin in 2016, Kentucky in 2017, Montana in 2021 and West Virginia last year, according to the NCSL.

Although the Illinois moratorium has remained in place all these years, governors and lawmakers during that time have remained mostly friendly and supportive of the nuclear industry.

Exelon, parent company of scandal-plagued utility Commonwealth Edison, repeatedly threatened to shut down some of the state’s nuclear plants because the energy officials said the plants weren’t making enough money. In response, lawmakers propped up the nuclear fleet and Exelon won ratepayer subsidies for its Clinton and Quad Cities nuclear plants in 2016 during Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s tenure and its Byron, Dresden and Braidwood plants five years later after Pritzker was elected.

In both instances, Exelon and ComEd partnered with labor unions and environmental groups to push for sweeping policy changes they argued would protect both jobs and the climate by properly accounting for the carbon-free benefits of nuclear power.

The 2016 measure, known as the Future Energy Jobs Act, is one of the major pieces of legislation at the heart of an ongoing federal corruption case in which ComEd admitted to a yearslong effort to bribe longtime House Speaker Michael Madigan, who has since left office and pleaded not guilty to bribery and racketeering charges and is set to stand trial next year.

In April, former ComEd CEO and Exelon executive Anne Pramaggiore and three other former executives and lobbyists were convicted in a related case, where a jury found they orchestrated a scheme to win Madigan’s support for the 2016 bailout and other legislative priorities by showering the speaker’s allies with jobs, contracts and college scholarships.

Under Pritzker in 2021, lawmakers approved another round of support for nuclear plants after Exelon said it would close Byron and Dresden in the absence of more assistance from the state. The measure that ultimately was approved, dubbed the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, offered that support along with setting ambitious deadlines for shutting down coal-fired power plants by 2030, gas plants by 2045 and achieving carbon-free power by midcentury.

While they ended up on the same side, disagreements between labor groups and environmentalists over the timetable for shutting down fossil fuel plants and other issues dragged negotiations on through the summer of 2021, requiring lawmakers to return to Springfield multiple times to finalize a deal. Those divisions deepened this year, with the two sides unable to find common ground.

The driving forces behind the effort to reverse the moratorium this year were labor unions and not Constellation Energy, which is the new firm that was spun off from Exelon to run the power generation business that includes 11 reactors at six plants providing about half of the state’s power.

Still, Constellation is supportive of the measure, even though it might not act on it anytime soon.

“As the nation’s largest producer of clean, carbon-free nuclear power, Constellation fully supports legislative and policy solutions that eliminate barriers to maintaining and expanding nuclear’s role in delivering reliability, affordability and energy security,” spokesman Paul Adams said in a statement. However, “currently, Constellation has no plans to build new nuclear plants in Illinois.”

For organized labor, though, removing the prohibition offers a signal the state is open to maintaining its use of a power source that offers a greater number of well-paying, steady union jobs than the renewable energy industry, said Pat Devaney, secretary-treasurer of the Illinois AFL-CIO.

“It would provide not only the construction jobs to be able to develop these facilities but also in the ongoing operations and maintenance would provide opportunities that don’t currently exist, for example, in the renewable industry,” Devaney said.

As coal and natural gas plants go offline in the coming years, reviving nuclear power plant construction also could help replace jobs that will be lost, supporters argue.

That would be particularly true if a new generation of small modular nuclear reactors under development can be commercialized and reach widespread use, they say. There’s even the possibility new reactors could be built in places where fossil fuel plants have shut down and make use of the existing turbines and transmission infrastructure.

“Maybe a coal plant went offline and we can replace that with a small modular nuclear reactor and use that transmission line that is right there on-site and, more importantly, keep good-paying jobs,” state Sen. Sue Rezin, a Morris Republican who sponsored the proposal, said during debate this spring.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded nearly $2 billion to TerraPower, a company founded by Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates, for a demonstration project in Wyoming that is seeking to retrofit a coal plant that’s scheduled to go offline in the coming years. It’s one of a small number of demonstration projects receiving federal support through President Joe Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure law.

The process, though, has not been proven, and many environmental groups argue time and money would be better spent investing in better developing renewable energy and storage technology.

“There’s a reason why anyone who owns a nuclear power plant in Illinois is not interested in building any more,” said Jack Darin, director of the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club. “They’re incredibly expensive to build and to operate. And so should we ever head down the path of building new nuclear in Illinois, it’s going to be at tremendous cost. And whether those are ratepayer dollars or public dollars … the urgency of the climate crisis demands that we invest any available resources in proven technologies that are essentially without risks, such as wind and solar power. Diverting from that path just runs the risk that we’re not going to reach our clean energy targets.”

What’s more, Darin said, there hasn’t been a solution to the problem that prompted the moratorium in the first place.

“There is no current, permanent disposal site for this waste,” he said.

When the Illinois House debated the proposal in May, state Rep. Joyce Mason, a Democrat from north suburban Gurnee, pointed out what the lack of a federal solution to the nuclear waste storage problem means for her district, which is home to the former Zion Nuclear Power Station that went offline in 1997.

The result is “a kiloton of nuclear materials sitting on the shoreline of Lake Michigan with no place for these materials to go,” Mason said.

“My community is stuck and has been decimated because of stranded nuclear materials,” she said. “This is not clean energy. This is waste that gets dumped into environmental justice communities. It’s dangerous, and we have no plan for disposal.”

Rosner, the University of Chicago expert, said finding a solution to the long-running waste storage issue is the main action the federal government could take to create a more certain future for nuclear power.

The waste in places like Zion “will sit there forever until the federal government comes to grips with the fact that they have the responsibility to take it,” Rosner said.

A potential solution would be for the federal government to charter a corporation with the sole responsibility of handling nuclear waste, separating that responsibility from the Energy Department’s role as a nuclear booster, he said. A blue-ribbon panel recommended that step more than a decade ago during the Obama administration, but it hasn’t gained traction in Washington.

If the waste storage issue can be addressed, nuclear energy offers a variety of opportunities to replace carbon-emitting sources, from generating electricity directly to generating heat for industrial uses to producing hydrogen as a clean alternative fuel source, said James Stubbins, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign whose specialties include energy policy.

The new generation of reactors could even ease the waste problem because they’ll potentially be able to go 20 years without needing to be refueled, cutting down on the need to haul away spent fuel, “which would also be a big advantage of this system,” Stubbins said.

U. of I.’s nuclear engineering department currently is in the license review process with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a demonstration microreactor on campus for a variety of research and power-generation purposes.

The university is working with Washington state-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp., which hopes to make the technology commercially available in the near future, Stubbins said.

One of the advantages of this new generation of small reactors is that they can be at least partially fabricated in factories, potentially cutting down on the astronomical cost of building a large-scale nuclear plant such as the ones in Illinois or the new reactor in Georgia that reached fully energy output in late May, seven years behind schedule and $17 million over budget, according to The Associated Press.

As it stands, all of Illinois’ existing reactors are scheduled to shut down by 2050.

Whether a new generation of smaller plants will take their place will depend largely on whether the technology in development can produce electricity at a price that’s competitive with the combined cost of wind and solar power and the battery storage technology that will be necessary to ensure the lights come on whenever a customer flips a switch, University of Chicago’s Rosner said.

“We just don’t know the answer,” Rosner said. “It’s entirely possible that nuclear will beat renewables plus storage. It’s very possible, but we don’t know that for sure.”

Source: The Chicago Tribune