Pritzker’s veto of bill to look at nuclear power reeks of petty, extremist politics – Wirepoints

“Illinois is the most progressive state in the nation and damn proud of it.”

Gov. JB Pritzker, August 8, 2023

By: Mark Glennon*

With large, bipartisan majorities, both the Illinois House and Senate this year passed a bill to lift Illinois’ ban on construction of new nuclear power projects. That ban, passed 36 years ago, imposes a blanket, permanent moratorium against development of any new nuclear production of electricity. Lifting that ban was a bipartisan no-brainer, as we put it earlier.

But Gov. JB Pritzker recently vetoed the bill. Moreover, though the bill had enough initial votes to override the veto, House Speaker Chris Welch may block any override effort, which he has the power to do in the fall veto session, even though Welch himself voted for the bill. While denying reports that he already decided to block an override, he says he’s undecided and didn’t commit to letting it go to a vote.

Understand what it means if Pritzker has his way: Illinois will continue to refuse even to hear any nuclear proposal, regardless of how safe, cost effective and reliable a new project might prove to be.

It means Illinois will continue, instead, to pursue its futile, costly goal of 100% renewable energy by 2050 without new nuclear capacity, relying instead on wind and solar almost exclusively.

Pritzker’s reasons for the veto are specious.

First, he said he said the bill provided no regulatory protections for the health and safety of residents. Of course that’s not covered by the bill. Nuclear power plants are regulated more tightly than anything on the planet — at the federal level, mainly by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And any new plant is certain to face a gauntlet of legal challenges from environmentalists and others that will take years.

Yes, more rules at the state level would still be needed for things like siting, local permitting and other matters that federal law leaves to the states. But that would be true no matter what the bill said and there would be more than enough time to put those rules and laws in place before any project would even be considered. The Chicago Tribune explained that in July:

It’s extremely unlikely that [passing the bill] 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.”

The bill would only have started the process by lifting the blanket ban. There would be plenty of time for Pritzker’s administration, through rule making, and for the General Assembly, in which his party holds a supermajority, to put the additional state law in place.

Second, Pritzker said the bill would “open the door to proliferation of large-scale nuclear reactors that are so costly to build that they will cause exorbitant ratepayer-funded bailouts.” The bill should have been limited, he said, to smaller “advanced reactors” that should be defined more narrowly than the bill would allow.

But any particular project of any size should be rejected if those risks are really present. Assessing those risks should be part of individual project assessments, not a blanket assumption that all large projects require exorbitant ratepayer-funded bailouts.

On that matter, Pritzker appears to be living in the past. Today, the utilities used by Illinois rate-payers – Commonwealth Edison and Ameren — do not own any power plants, nuclear or otherwise. They are just distributors. Last year ComEd’s parent, Exelon, spun off the last of its nukes to Constellation Energy, which is independent.

Accordingly, today, risks of high costs and delays likely would be borne by an independent company like Constellation, not a utility or ratepayers. And the state could easily mandate that assumption of risk if it wanted — make the developer responsible for overrun risk. It’s different in some other states, but in Illinois, companies would have to build any new nukes and sell the power on the competitive market, as explained here.

Most importantly, there is not a snowball’s chance in the core of a nuclear power plant that Illinois will succeed in making other renewables – wind and solar – the sole sources of Illinois energy by 2050.

That’s the hopeless path to which Illinois is committed thanks to Pritzker’s veto, the coming shut down of Illinois’ old nuclear plants and CEJA, Illinois’ Climate & Equitable Jobs Act passed in 2021. But Pritzker’s veto message says nothing about that gaping hole in where we will get our energy.

New nuclear capacity is essential to Illinois’ energy future in part because its existing nukes are nearing the end of their lives, yet the state relies on them for 53% of its energy. Licensing for each of Illinois’ existing nukes is set to expire before 2050. Conceivably, that licensing could be extended but at unknown cost and with unknown safety issues since Illinois plants will have reached or be approaching 80-years old.

Pursuing the goal of 100% renewable without new nuclear plants, however, will be extraordinarily costly and make electric power less reliable. Those results are already unfolding. Electricity costs have recently spiked 50% to 200% in much of Southern and Central Illinois. The grid operators there and in Northern Illinois have already warned of high risk for brownouts.

Aggravating that problem, the Biden Administration has now set 2035 as the goal for 100% clean energy – 15 years earlier than Illinois’ goal.

Why did Pritzker veto the bill given all that?

Conjecture is necessary, but it’s damn good conjecture. Even Pritzker’s most loyal sycophant in the media, Shia Kapos at Politico’s Illinois Playbook, had to call it out:

Still, there’s buzz that the vetoes help Pritzker politically by aligning him with the Democratic Party’s left wing. He’s not running in 2024 but may have ambitions to run again — either for a third term as governor in 2026 or as a presidential candidate. Pritzker’s political team has always been good at looking ahead at where the electorate might be. At a time when the left is making inroads in the Democratic Party, Pritzker might want to continue to beef up his liberal bonafides. Vetoing a plan to lift the moratorium on nukes fits the bill.

The surprise veto “turned heads” among fellow Democrats, angering some, as Kapos and others reported. Democratic state Rep. Lance Yednock, who carried the bipartisan nuclear legislation, says he didn’t learn of the veto until 30 minutes before it happened. “I was very surprised. It angered me. No doubt about it,” he told Kapos.

As for why Speaker Welch won’t commit to allowing a vote on an override, he, presumably does not want to cross his party’s sugar daddy, Pritzker.

Protecting Pritzker’s own claim to have made Illinois “the most progressive state” apparently demanded that Pritzker listen to extremist pressure to veto the bill. That pressure, according to the Chicago Tribune, came from radically anti-growth House Majority Leader Robyn Gabel (D-Evanston) and environmental groups including the Sierra Club and the Illinois Environmental Council.

Those environmental groups offered the same, specious objections to the bill as Pritzker. For example, the executive director of the Environmental Council said, “Rather than abandon all safeguards, Gov. Pritzker recognized that such substantial risks merit the highest protective guardrails our state can offer.” A blanket ban is apparently her idea of appropriate protective safeguards.

Republican lawmakers were more harsh and offered related reasons for Pritzker’s veto. Sue Rezin, for example, the original Senate sponsor of the bill, told me this by email:

The Governor’s veto shows he cares more about making environmental special interest groups happy than helping Illinois create a realistic carbon-free energy future. I’ve also heard from a few people that the Governor doesn’t want this historic piece of legislation to be sponsored by a Republican. If that is true, it is just one more example of the Governor putting his own political ambitions over what is best for the people of Illinois.

Rezin also says everyone was “at the table” drafting the bill, including Pritzker. “We met with the governor. He indicated that he liked the technology. He requested an amendment to more narrowly define advanced nuclear technology, which we added in the House,” Rezin says.

Meanwhile many nations and other states are looking again at nuclear power or already turning to it. Georgia Power fired up a new nuclear plant in March. America’s largest utility that serves seven states, the Tennessee Valley Authority, last year launched a program to develop and fund new small modular nuclear reactors with up to $200 million to be spent for the first phase. And Duke Energy announced last week that it will be replace two of its East Coast coal fired plants with small nuclear reactors.

In decades past, Illinois had a market-based, competitive system for energy that kept prices low for consumers and helped make Illinois a manufacturing powerhouse. That competitive advantage is rapidly disappearing.

Oh well. If you end up cold, baked or broke because of unreliable, expensive energy energy, you can take comfort knowing that Illinois secured its claim to being the most progressive state.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.