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It's time to pick the winners in nuclear energy BY ZABRINA JOHAL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 08/07/19 In May 1958, President Eisenhower inaugurated Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant. It was a capstone to the process he began five years earlier with his “Atoms for Peace” initiative, but it launched something much larger. In just 30 years, nuclear would grow from providing 0 percent of U.S. electricity to over 20 percent. That wasn’t an accident. Eisenhower provided the inspiration, but the work of making it happen was the legacy of one man, Hyman Rickover, the legendary admiral often called “The Father of the Nuclear Navy.” Shippingport was as much Rickover’s achievement as the Nautilus, the Navy’s first nuclear submarine. He oversaw construction of the plant through his bilateral role with the Atomic Energy Commission and Department of Defense, a job he completed in under five years — a period that seems incredible now. How did Rickover do it? It was an approach that has fallen out of favor: He picked a winning technology and threw the weight of the government behind it. Rickover knew the U.S. did not have the luxury of exploring every possible design. Instead, he chose two, holding one as a backup. The winner was Westinghouse’s pressurized-water reactor; the backup was General Electric’s sodium-cooled technology. It worked: That choice is largely the reason pressurized-water reactors now dominate the industry. Things have changed since the 1950s. Over the last 20 years, the U.S. has added just one reactor. At best, two more will come online in the 2020s. Meanwhile, seven have shut down since 2013, and another 12 may shut down by 2025. That’s a lot of clean, reliable generation lost from a grid that’s increasingly dependent on intermittent renewables. This reality continues despite technologies that far exceed Shippingport in safety, flexibility and economics. Approximately 75 such advanced reactors are in the works, yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not certified a new design since 2014. Overseas, the picture is different. The U.S. was once the leader in the nuclear industry — not anymore more. The U.S. has long since ceded that position to Russia, which has as 1