Courtesy of Kentucky Lantern

FRANKFORT — State Sen. Danny Carroll peppered a panel of nuclear energy experts with questions on Tuesday during a conference at the Kentucky Historical Society. He said he could ask questions “all day long.” 

“Every day there’s something new that’s coming down the pipeline,” Carroll told the audience on Tuesday. “We’re in the middle — not the middle, maybe the beginning stages of change in this world’s history, and we get to be a part of that. And as a legislator, that’s about as cool as it gets.” 

The Paducah Republican has been at the center in recent years of passing bills into law to research and incentivize bringing nuclear power plants and a “nuclear ecosystem”, along with nuclear fuel enrichment companies, to a state that’s long relied on burning coal for electricity. 

He first helped remove a prohibition in state law on nuclear power plants being located in the state. That led to the legislature’s creation of the Kentucky Nuclear Energy Development Authority at the University of Kentucky, an agency that awarded grants earlier this year to promote and develop the state’s nuclear industry. This year, the legislature gave the authority $75 million to help cover permitting costs for developers siting nuclear power plants in the state. 

The result of those efforts, boosted by a Trump administration that’s keen on nuclear energy as well, has been a flurry of nuclear industry activity in the state. Global Laser Enrichment, a company looking to use lasers to enrich and reuse spent uranium fuel at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, plans to invest almost $1.8 billion to establish operations there. Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities, serving the largest number of ratepayers in the state, is also exploring bringing a new generation of small, modular nuclear reactors to the state. 

The former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant enriched uranium for more than 60 years, originally for nuclear weapons and then for nuclear power plant fuel, until closing in 2013. The site also has a legacy of contaminating the nearby environment with pollution, impacting the health of workers there considerably. 

A nuclear power future in the state has bipartisan backing. To kick off the two-day conference this week on nuclear energy hosted by the Kentucky Public Service Commission, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear told the crowd that he was “determined to make Kentucky a national leader when it comes to embracing responsible nuclear energy.” 

“We need to do things the right way, and every Kentucky should be a part of this conversation. That’s every Kentucky that’s going to be a part of the future that nuclear energy is helping us to build,” Beshear said. “People know they deserve the right to voice their opinions and even their concerns as we embrace this technology again.” 

And there are concerns, some of them strong. Before the two-day conference, the Public Service Commission held several public meetings across the state gathering public comments on nuclear energy.

Some Kentuckians including representatives of environmental groups, have levied concerns about the very high upfront cost of building nuclear energy, the ongoing question of what to do with radioactive nuclear waste and the speed and deregulation the federal government is moving to adopt nuclear energy. 

Ken Shapero, a board member of the Louisville Climate Action Network, told the PSC at one of its meetings that he feared utility ratepayer protections “are evaporating right before our eyes,” worried that the cost burdens of building nuclear could benefit utilities in the long run. 

“If it were not for the PSC charter to ensure fair, just and equitable rates, the average person in Kentucky would be ground into dust by the powerful political and commercial interests that are aligned today and are running amok,” Shapero said. 

Cost and safety questions

There are reasons why advocates for nuclear energy are bullish on the energy source: no emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases when generating electricity and its ability to generate electricity around the clock, considered to be a part of the foundational “base load” of electricity provided to the grid. 

One nuclear critic, Ashley Wilmes, the executive director of the environmental group Kentucky Resources Council, sat on a panel at the conference nearby Nima Ashkeboussi, a vice president at Global Laser Enrichment. 

“We shouldn’t be prioritizing these investments,” Wilmes said of nuclear energy. “I just don’t believe that nuclear is the answer to a carbon-free future and the answer to the climate crisis.” 

Environmental advocates have pointed to the high cost of nuclear energy, driven by the billions of dollars of upfront costs and long construction timelines to build a nuclear power plant in the country, as a looming concern with electricity ratepayers already facing rising bills. They also question whether nuclear energy has adequately grappled with what to do with nuclear waste, which can remain radioactive for thousands of years, from these power plants. 

Environmental advocates instead point to the relatively lower levelized cost of building renewable energy such as wind turbines and solar installations, paired with utility-scale batteries, to be charged by renewables and be more readily available around the clock.

“I struggle with the fact that we’re not making these priority investments elsewhere, and that we are continuing to put our thumb on the scale in terms of which fuel choice that we use here in Kentucky,” Wilmes said. 

Republican lawmakers have supported laws in recent years creating barriers to retiring fossil fuel-fired power plants in the state. Utility leaders and environmental advocates have clashed in past with Republican lawmakers over those laws regarding concerns that it could force aging coal-fired power plants to remain open when lower-cost energy alternatives exist. 

The Kentucky Resources Council is also challenging Global Laser Enrichment’s request for a license from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission over whether the U.S. Department of Energy, which controls the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant site, can sell or transfer spent uranium fuel to a private company, along with questioning whether the federal government is relying on a wholly inadequate environmental impact analysis in reviewing the proposed site. 

Ashkeboussi in an email said the company doesn’t have a comment on Kentucky Resources Council’s challenge. 

There’s a nuclear connection to the push to build data centers powering online services including artificial intelligence. Technology companies including Microsoft and Google have invested billions of dollars into backing nuclear power startups.

Carroll told the Lantern that the backing behind developing nuclear energy — which he believes will be primarily small, modular nuclear reactors — used to be connected to meeting the electrification of the communities, including the increasing use of electric vehicles. But the boom behind data centers has largely taken over. 

Carroll believes that as the scale of construction with small, modular nuclear reactors increases, the cost to build them will go down. He also believes power-intensive industries, including data centers, could help pay for a large share of the upfront costs of building the reactors while benefiting from the electricity as well. 

“As we move forward and transition into nuclear, the regulatory environment will have to adapt to address all these issues,” Carroll said about the concerns with nuclear energy. “The environmental folks, the folks that are representing ratepayers, they’ve got to be heard…but the benefits of where we’re heading far outweigh any other aspects of this.” 

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Linda Blackford for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.