Daily Herald opinion: Bill lifting moratorium puts nuclear power in the conversation and prioritizes safety

Anyone nervous about the legislature's overwhelming nod toward nuclear power in the fall veto session can take heart in at least one reality.

No new nuclear plants of any size are likely to be operating in Illinois for many years to come.

The legislation the General Assembly is sending Gov. Pritzker lifts the state's moratorium on nuclear plant construction only for a new breed of small nuclear reactors that could be less costly and easier to build than typical operations, but even so, the bill has hardly swung open the doors to nuclear proliferation in Illinois.

A recent New York Times report noted that the design process alone for the only small nuclear plant certified so far by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission took more than 10 years and cost $500 million. This month, the company planning to build that operation in Utah by 2029, NuScale, gave up because of rising costs.

So, even if companies do begin to consider testing the small-reactor nuclear waters in Illinois, they face a long, uphill climb. And the refined legislation headed to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, modified in hopes of addressing issues that led him to veto the original bill, adds an additional regulatory step and requires a study on the risks of new nuclear technology.

But ending the nuclear power moratorium does at least allow the technology to be considered in Illinois, and that's an important consideration for a state that already gets more than half its electricity from nuclear energy and envisions a zero-carbon future by the middle of the century.

With memories of Chernobyl, Fukushima and even Three Mile Island still strong, reservations about the risks of nuclear power are understandable, and it must be acknowledged that the reason for Illinois' moratorium in the first place were concerns about handling waste that remain unresolved.

But the impacts of climate change are growing ever more evident and profound. Much as we may want to supplant dirty coal operations with fresh new wind and solar technologies, those alternatives are not likely to meet the state's or the nation's needs for decades and certainly have their own shortcomings.

Nuclear power needs to be a part of the clean-energy conversation. The new legislation offers that option.

It doesn't by any means indicate a relaxed attitude toward safety. Indeed, it places safety as a top priority in the approval and development of whatever proposals for nuclear power may emerge in the state.

Importantly, both the legislation and the state of the industry allow time to ensure that that priority is met.