Part 4 of 4 Parts (Please read Parts 1, 2 and 3 first)
     Accomplishing all this will not be easy and it will not be cheap. But the nuclear supporters say that the West will benefit from supporting its dynamic and innovative nuclear sector. Although traditional, large-scale nuclear projects have been struggling domestically in the U.S. and Europe, a new suite of nuclear technologies might start to shift the market in their favor. The U.S. has more than sixty companies working on advanced nuclear technologies. These include NuScale Power which is marketing small modular reactors. It has reached agreements to deploy them to Poland and Romania. The British company Rolls Royce is working to develop its own small modular reactor technology. It has signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. utility Exelon and entities in the Czech Republic. Westinghouse is a U.S. nuclear company that has assisted Ukraine to dramatically reduce its reliance on Moscow. It has also recently expanded its cooperation with the Czech Republic as well as Slovenia to explore deploying its newer AP1000 nuclear power reactors. In April of this year, the U.S. State Department announced that it would help Latvia explore the feasibility of nuclear energy.
     These kinds of collaborations across allied democracies are exactly what the world needs to create energy supply chains that are secure, ethical and sustainable. They will help the West build resilience against the whims of authoritarian regimes. By changing away from fossil fuels, they will also assist nations to avoid supply shortages and price shocks. However, these collaborations show a recognition that the solution to Russia’s energy dominance and to climate change is not to support an attempt at green nationalism. Instead, it requires that allied nations work together to design energy systems and technologies that are robust because they are collaborative and interdependent.
     While nuclear energy may be a path to energy independence from Russia and China, this will only be possible if the nuclear industry can reign in the schedule and cost overruns for nuclear power plants. The time needed to license and construct nuclear power plants are losing the battle for market share to renewable sources such as wind and solar. Unfortunately, nations cannot pursue both nuclear energy and renewable sources. This makes nuclear energy a poor bet to fight climate change which must be done as quickly as possible. And the elephant in the room for nuclear energy is the huge amount of spent nuclear fuel waste which still has not permanent geological repository anywhere in the world. It is probable that one more nuclear disaster on the level of the 2011 Fukushima disaster could sour both public opinion and investor interest. It will be an uphill battle to revitalize the global nuclear industry and it may not be the best solution to future energy needs.
      A wild card in the energy sector is the huge investment in nuclear fusion research. While it has not yet been achieved, there are over a dozen companies in the U.S. alone working furiously to prototype a commercial nuclear fusion reactor within the next ten years. If any of these different approaches to nuclear fusion succeed, the global energy market will suffer massive changes.