About 15 years ago, I visited a high-ranking official at the Department of Energy at his office in Washington. We chatted for 30 minutes about the obstacles facing nuclear energy deployment in the US, including Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations, supply chains, and the need for a stable fuel supply. Toward the end of our conversation, he said that one of the biggest problems with nuclear energy is that it needs bipartisan support in Congress. That hasn’t happened because “Democrats are pro-government and anti-nuclear,” he said. Meanwhile, “Republicans are pro-nuclear and anti-government.”
To be clear, Democrats have been more vocal recently in their support for nuclear energy. In June, during an appearance at the Plant Vogtle in Georgia, where two new 1-gigawatt nuclear reactors have come online, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said, “We have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country.” Also in June, the Senate passed, by a vote of 88 to 2, the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, which aims to speed up the federal process for approving and deploying new reactors. (Ed Markey, the Democrat from Massachusetts, and Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont, were the only senators to vote no on the measure.) Last month, President Biden signed that bill into law.
The passage of the ADVANCE Act (and Granholm’s rhetoric) will give a much-needed boost to the domestic nuclear sector. But don’t expect to hear the words “nuclear energy” during the final two days of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Nor will you find a single mention of nuclear energy in the just-released Democratic Party Platform. Alas, this isn’t surprising.
The omission of nuclear energy in the party’s platform shows, yet again, that while Democrats are making climate change a top talking point — the word “climate” appears 81 times in the 92-page platform — the Democratic Party is still firmly in the grip of big anti-nuclear NGOs that operate on $100 million+ annual budgets. Those groups, which include Sierra Club, NRDC, and League of Conservation Voters, are integral to the party’s fundraising and get-out-the-vote effort. Those same NGOs continue to insist that the US can run its economy on alt-energy. Thus, the party’s top leaders dare not risk alienating them.
Indeed, as I explained in May, renewable energy fetishism dominates the Left’s approach to energy. The word “solar” appears nine times in the party’s platform, wind energy gets two mentions, and “clean energy” — the catch-all marketing term that has become the rationale for hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare under the Inflation Reduction Act — appears 44 times. (The word “Trump” appears 150 times!)
The omission of nuclear energy in the 2024 Democratic Party Platform means that over the past 52 years, nuclear power has received only one positive mention in its platform. That mention occurred in 2020.
Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.
Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: Theodore Roosevelt, via Wikimedia in Public Domain.
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