Could Nuclear Energy Power the Ocean State?
Improvements in technology and a push to decarbonize could make nuclear more pervasive
October 24, 2024
As Rhode Island tries to reach its climate goals, the discussions of solar panels and wind turbines are starting to include another carbon-free energy source: nuclear power.
Anti-wind power advocates have offered it as an alternative to ocean wind farms — which have come under fire after a blade at a wind farm off Nantucket failed this summer — while power brokers, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Secretary of State John Kerry, are suggesting it might be the most efficient way to get to carbon neutral.
Fears around this type of energy, which does not produce carbon emissions but has caused several deadly catastrophes, including one in Rhode Island 60 years ago, has prevented development of nuclear power plants over the past several decades.
But improvements in technology and a push to decarbonize could make nuclear more pervasive, though obstacles still remain before large-scale nuclear power could come to Rhode Island.
Rhode Island already has one nuclear reactor, but like the state itself, it’s small. It’s a research reactor on the University of Rhode Island’s Bay Campus.
Built in the 1960s, the reactor was originally constructed to test different materials’ vulnerability to radiation, according to Clinton Chichester, chair of the Rhode Island Atomic Energy Commission, which oversees the reactor.
Today, the reactor is largely used for engineering and medical research.
“The research reactor is so limited in size, it is very safe in terms of operations,” Chichester said. “The amount of radioactivity is orders of magnitude smaller than a power plant, and we don’t have water circulating from the bay through the reactor or anything like that.”
Federal officials inspect the reactor four times a year, and according to recent U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Reports, it is in compliance with safety and security regulations.
“I really have no concerns about safety about the small research reactor because it’s so small,” Chichester said.
A nuclear power plant would be a completely different situation, he said.
Although Chichester said he’s confident in the safety of URI’s reactor and supports the important research that it helps facilitate, when asked if he would be comfortable living next to a nuclear power plant, he wasn’t sure.
“I’d have to think about it,” he said. A nuclear power plant using current technology would need significant cooling resources, Chichester thought out loud, and Rhode Island is such a densely populated state. A power plant might have to be cited near the ocean.
“Who wants to disturb Narragansett Bay?” he asked. “I wouldn’t go for that, for sure.”
There have been attempts in the past to bring nuclear energy to Rhode Island. In the 1970s, residents of Charlestown fought a proposed plant that would have been constructed at what is now Ninigret Park.

Donna Walsh, a former state representative and former Charlestown Town Council member, recalled advocating against it at the time.
“I live very, very close to Ninigret Park, but I still would have been against it” even if she didn’t live where she did, she said.
Instead of becoming a power plant, the park is now a green space and wildlife refuge. “We’re very fortunate to have Ninigret Park,” Walsh said.
When the plant was proposed, the country was in the middle of a gas crisis, so there was a lot of pressure to go nuclear, Walsh said. It was before the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania underwent a partial meltdown in 1979, but Walsh said she was still greatly concerned about the danger of an accident and the damage that could be caused by nuclear waste, a byproduct of the nuclear energy process.
The waste in particular, and where it would go, was a big worry for Walsh. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, most nuclear waste today is kept at department sites and is regulated under federal laws. Scientific American reported last year that these repositories are piling up, which could be a problem in the future.
Less than a decade before Charlestown’s plant was proposed, an accident at a Rhode Island facility that dealt with nuclear waste resulted in one death.
Thinking about nuclear now, Walsh said, she isn’t sure how she feels.
“It would be a help in [reversing the] climate change process we’re in,” she said, “but I couldn’t say I support it. I’d be pretty apprehensive, unless I had my questions answered.”
Walsh also said she wouldn’t like to live near a nuclear power plant, and “if I don’t want to, I’m sure others don’t.”
“I know I can change my mind,” she added, “but I’m not ready to change it yet.”
If a nuclear power plant were built in Rhode Island, it would have to first be approved by the General Assembly.
Rep. Brian Kennedy, a Democrat representing District 38 in Hopkinton and Westerly, has tried to pass legislation to remove this step, but it hasn’t been successful.
Kennedy told ecoRI News that he was motivated to write the bill after going to a national conference and learning about new nuclear technology, and after becoming frustrated with the limitations of wind and solar farms.
“My area of the state has been overrun by solar,” he said, with forested places cut down for large solar farms taking up acres of space.
Typically, nuclear power plants in the United States use nuclear fission (the splitting of an atom) to produce heat. The heat boils water, creating steam, which powers turbines that generate electricity. The process doesn’t create any carbon emissions, though it can cause water pollution by changing the water temperature, thus degrading it.
But new technology being pioneered by companies like Bill Gates’s TerraPower are testing systems that use liquid sodium instead of water, which theoretically reduces the amount of space the reactor needs to operate and makes it safer.

Kennedy also said nuclear power plants have the added benefit of being able to run 24/7, something weather-dependent wind and solar farms can’t do.
Removing the requirement to get the General Assembly permission for every new nuclear project, Kennedy thought, might allow the state to consider the prospect of nuclear power more seriously.
“We have to open the discussion,” Kennedy said.
“Probably I would not enjoy living next to any type of electrical generating facility,” he admitted, when asked whether he would feel comfortable living near a nuclear power plant. But because new plants may not take up as much space in the future as other energy producers, “you hopefully can keep a whole bunch of trees up” to block it from view.
Kennedy said he will reintroduce the bill, which was held for further study in the last legislative session.
“It makes sense for us to take at least one obstacle away,” he said.
Reconsidering nuclear is not a unique question for Rhode Island, according to Christine Csizmadia, senior director of state governmental affairs and advocacy at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI).
NEI, a trade association that advocates for pro-nuclear policy on the state and federal level, testified in favor of Kennedy’s bill earlier this year.
Csizmadia said she’s been in the nuclear advocacy space for 18 years, and when she first started, there were probably five to 10 bills across state legislatures that mentioned the world nuclear.
“Over the last couple years, there are upwards of 200 bills every single year,” she said. The proposed legislation looks to end moratoriums, include nuclear power in green energy standards, set up task forces to look into the energy, and provide tax credits to nuclear energy producers.
There were previously 16 state moratoriums on nuclear power, and six have since been repealed, Csizmadia said, with bills introduced but not passed to end the policies in Rhode Island and Hawaii.
“We’ve never seen this type of historic momentum toward nuclear before in history, and so we’re really excited,” she said.
Part of the momentum comes from the push away from fossil fuels, Csizmadia said, while emerging technology offers the potential to make nuclear energy cheaper and safer.
Nuclear is already a part of the fight against climate change, Csizmadia added. Currently, there are some 90 reactors across the country, producing about 20% of United States energy. That energy amounts to about half of the country’s carbon-free power, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate Portal.

When asked about the safety of nuclear facilities, a major factor historically in opposition, Csizmadia insisted they are safe and that she would be comfortable living next to a nuclear power plant. “Oh, absolutely,” she said, “definitely.”
“The nuclear industry has decades of a very safe, very safe record,” she said. Deadly incidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima give people pause, she understands that, she said, and “there’s no reason to not talk about them and address them.”
The failure at Chernobyl in what is now Ukraine in 1986 is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history. The United Nations estimated it killed about 50 people directly from radiation and likely affected thousands more with long-term health impacts.
The Fukushima disaster occurred in Japan in 2011 after an earthquake followed by a tsunami shut power off to the plant’s reactors, causing a meltdown.
Michael Oumano, a member of Rhode Island’s Atomic Energy Commission, said that while those disasters, along with incidents like Three Mile Island, have scared people away from nuclear power, it is a very safe form of energy.
Oumano is a radiation safety officer and a medical physicist at Brown University and spends a lot of his time determining how much radiation exposure from things like medical procedures and X-rays is safe.
The federal government regulates how much exposure people are allowed to get from nuclear power plants, setting it at 1 millisievert (mSv) per year, Oumano said. A millisievert is a measurement of a radiation dose or exposure, and 1mSV is one third of the average exposure Americans get from natural sources, like space and rocks such as radon. Just from living in the United States, people on average get exposed to about 3mSvs annually, Oumano said.
“If things are functioning properly, which they do with, you know, a couple notable historical exceptions, most folks are going to be limited to 1mSV per year, and likely much, much less,” he said.
A disaster, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, could increase exposure, but few people die directly from radiation in the immediate aftermath of a meltdown, Oumano said, although he noted it can be difficult to parse how many people develop a life-threatening disease, such as cancer, years after an accident.
Some literature shows more people died in the extensive evacuations after the Fukushima meltdown than from the incident itself, he said.
Oumano noted that those disasters will hopefully not be repeated and wouldn’t likely impact a reactor in Rhode Island.
Chernobyl was caused by a design flaw with the reactor, and that type of plant isn’t constructed anymore, he said, and Rhode Island is also safely located away from fault lines and is largely protected from direct hits from extreme weather.
Oumano said he would live next to a reactor, if one came to Rhode Island. “If I could see one, I’d be fine,” he said. “I would enjoy the clean air.”
When I worked for URS, one of the largest engineering companies in the world, as the Head of Planning and Permitting, we bid (didn’t win) the EIS for development of a nuclear waste containment facility in the Wyoming mountains. One of the design requirements was that the facility should be operated for 400,000 years.
How arrogant are we to think such foolishness!? History shows a litany of nuclear accidents, some of which fall beyond our control (e.g. Fukashima tsunami). We live in an evil world with bad actors always looking to hurt others. Imagine a landscape littered with numerous nuclear waste sites.
In addition, we haven’t even made a dent in cleaning up Superfund sites, now nuclear!? Let’s stop the extreme arrogance.
While nuclear may be the most effective way to solve our energy demand, it is not worth the risk.
New England is run by a bunch of vandal politicians who know nothing about engineering and live in some kind of rainbow Unicorn utopia which is really paving over New England with solar panels and destroying the oceans with wind turbines in which right whale goes extinct never mind what it’s doing to our fishing industry. Vandal politicians have unplugged Yankee ROWE 185MWe, Maine Yankee 800MWe, Vermont Yankee 630 MWe, lic 2032 and Pilgrim nuclear 680MWe. lic 2032. Seabrook and our Connecticut power stations have about a capacity of 3200 megawatts. Offshore wind is an absolute disaster and is costing us in New England we’re paying over $0.30 a kWh and it’s rising to pay for this paving over our states with solar panels and wind turbines it’s insanity because it is unreliable power with a whole secondary grid of gas powered peakers which are only 30% efficient which if we went to combined cycle we’d be 60 cent percent efficient which would be the same carbon footprint as building all this useless unreliable so-called renewable energy. John Travassos is fine with our carbon footprint going to China where it is outsource manufacturing is being made with coal with higher emissions== insanity. Nuclear is safe every container that’s stored at Pilgrim nuclear is the equivalent of 2 million tons of CO2 that didn’t go into the atmosphere. The South wind project in Rhode Island is projected to sequester about 6 1,000,000 tons of carbon that’s three nuclear casks but a whole lot more expensive and a nuclear cask, in 650 years will be the same radiation as it as the uranium that came out of the ground but it’s fully contained. Really superior civilizations of Russia and China are going nuclear, are building nuclear, and basically out competing the West, which is caught up in this spiral of over dramatization of climate change and destroying our infrastructure which took hundreds of years to build by tearing down nuclear plants coal plants and gas plants and thinking that we can somehow do it with unreliable power insanity insanity insanity!!
RI is the Ocean State. It has enormous potential wind energy that can be built out much faster and less expensively that nuclear plants producing the same amount of energy. Nuclear development should only be pursued as part of a deal that would include no further investment in fossil fuel infrastructure.
Thank you ecori for covering this. The environment community should indeed be open to new nuclear technology, not to do so would be anti-science just like climate deniers and some overzealous opponents of off-shore wind.
But the market has spoken on building new conventional nuclear plants, they are too expensive. And the nuclear waste from them is a major concern. But technology is always evolving, wee really need to decarbonize, and all forms of energy generation have a downside (as we indeed know from the loss of woodlands solar sprawl) So we should keep an open mind.
I’ll add that I spent some time in France, noting not just their dependence on nuclear generated electricity, but their use of that to power most of their extensive trains (even some freights) and also how they have built electric light rail systems in almost every city there, powered mostly by nuclear. That also supports energy-efficient compact urban development. As a result they have a much lower carbon output per-person than in the US with a comparable standard of living
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“Nuclear is safe,” until it’s not, then is catastrophically devastating. How are you going to deal with that Brian?
I do not trust the government to fully regulate new nukes (too much money sloshing around) and there is no place you can safely store radioactive fuel for 10,000 years. We need to rein in the growth fantasy and if we do nuclear power is a waste of money.
After the recent offshore wind forum in Newport, I was inspired to do a little research on small nuclear reactors using thorium for fuel. The Green Oceans contingent was pushing hard on nuclear as a better alternative to wind. I recommend reading the Wikipedia page …. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power …. where I learned a couple of interesting things. One, the rigid opposition to thorium reactors did not come from the utility industry being driven by profit motive; it came from the military. They want to stick with traditional uranium reactors because one by-product is plutonium that can be used to build more bombs. Two—the claim was made that thorium reactors produce no radioactive waste, which is not true. From the above cited Wikipedia page: “The radioactivity of the resulting waste also drops down to safe levels after just one or a few hundred years, compared to tens of thousands of years needed for current nuclear waste to cool off.” Far lower, certainly, but not zero. There was a lot of complaining about not adequately considering the cost of decommissioning offshore wind farms. I would expect to hear the same level of concern about the cost of storing radioactive waste for “a few hundred years” when comparing next-gen nuclear to offshore wind. The rate-payers would be on the hook either way.
Oh my! Many of us formed the RI Chapter of Mobilization for Survival and created Women for a Non-Nuclear Future to fight the Charlestown power plant and to oppose the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons, along with great help of the RI program of the American Friends Service Committee. The “safety” of nuclear power does not account for the fact that after all these many years there is still no solution for the storage of radioactive waste produced by these plants. And let’s not forget uranium mining. From the EPA ” Regardless of how uranium is extracted from rock, the processes leave behind radioactive waste.”
Nuclear power production loses 65% of the energy produced. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles-use-half-the-energy-of-gas-powered-vehicles/ It is inefficient in addition to leaving waste that we can only contain… which with the extreme weather
Our movement away from fossil fuels does not need nuclear. Here are a few things we can do :
1. Spend the money on energy conservation and efficiencies to reduce our waste of energy.
2. Improve the electric grid (and advance the research on batteries) to effectively handle renewables
3. There is so much more solar energy that could be created without destroying forests. Highway median strips, most of the rooftops in Rhode Island, all of the parking lots.
More BS from $2.3 Billion / year Anti- Nuclear NGO DE-Industrial Complex that seems intent on destroying the environment with Unreliable so called “Renewable Energy”? Paving over our Forests and farmland with Green Profit$ Solar Panels and destroying our Oceans with Expensive Offshore Wind $CAM! while killing whales and destroying our fishing industry. Watch your bare feet Nantucket, those fiberglass shards require surgery! https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-anti-nuclear-industry-is-a-23b
The Ocean State still cannot withstand a rise in bay and estuary water temps from effluent waters over time. Let’s work harder to split the hydrogen atom economically, without incurring harmful side effects that are expensive to mitigate or offset. Tell Lester Lightbulb you’ve had enough at the polls next week! #Vote Climate