Can the US triple its nuclear energy capacity?

Ask Studies
Two cooling towers at a nuclear power plant.
Vogtle, a nuclear power plant located in Burke County, near Waynesboro, Georgia. | Photo: Getty Images

The US has a new roadmap for massively ramping up how much electricity it gets from nuclear reactors.

The Biden administration released the document on Tuesday, but with President-elect Donald Trump heading back into the White House, there’s no telling whether the plan will ever become a reality. That said, the nuclear industry has gained a fair amount of bipartisan support — not to mention buy-in from big tech.

For now, nuclear energy makes up nearly 20 percent of the US’s electricity mix. That’s roughly the same amount of electricity the US gets from renewables like wind and solar. The rest — 60 percent of electricity in the US — comes from fossil fuels. Another way to think of it is that nuclear reactors generate nearly half of the...

Continue reading…



from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/O9kXMdx
via IFTTT