Zeyang Pan, Alexander Lopez de Bertodano, and Sam Corey
Principles of nuclear power
Atoms are constructed like miniature solar systems. At the center of atoms is the core with electrons circling around it. The core is made out of protons and neutrons, stuffed intensely together. The core (or, nucleus) of the atom is held by a strong nuclear force, which is identified as “the most powerful force in nature”. At the point when the nucleus is hit by neutrons, it often splits it into a smaller nucleus, with enormous energetic outcomes.
Each atom of uranium-235 (U-235) consists of 92 protons and 143 neutrons, for a sum of 235. The nucleus structure of U-235 makes it somewhat unstable and radioactive. Therefore, the U-235 atom has the possibility to break down to form a lighter but more stable atom, if it is excited by an outside source. When a U-235 atom absorbs an extra neutron under the right conditions, it may quickly break into two parts. This process is called uranium nuclear fission (as shown in Figure 1). Each time a U-235 nucleus splits, it releases two or three neutrons following energy output. Hence, it is possible to create a chain reaction that releases tremendous energy in a very short period of time.
Figure 1. Schematic view of uranium fission[1]
The brackets around “U” imply that the particle is unstable and radioactive. Under certain conditions, the fission of a couple of U-235 causes a chain reaction that can continue at an unbelievable rate if not controlled. In fact, this mechanism is the source of energy in the nuclear bomb.
The appearance of nuclear power plants
The mechanisms of nuclear power were learned in detail by physicists in the 20th century. In 1939, German researchers found that the interaction between neutrons and unstable atoms could transfer enormous energy, setting off a race with US researchers to utilize the significant force of fission to make nuclear bombs.
Through the serious work of the Manhattan Project, the first nuclear bomb was successfully built in 1945 and used to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
After WWII, some people proposed an idea of utilizing this extraordinary nuclear power as a potential new energy source. The government’s Plowshare Program believed nuclear blasts would be a work-saving approach to burrow waterways and dig for gas and oil. At the end of the 1960s, nuclear bombs were being set off to test various ideas. This, in part, explains how nuclear power plants were invented.
Mechanisms of nuclear power plants
The enriched uranium is commonly embedded into many small pieces of inch-long (2.5-centimeter-long) pellets, each roughly the same size across. Then, the inch-long pellets are organized into long rods, and the rods are gathered together into bundles. Finally, a pressure vessel filled with water is concocted to contain the bundles. The water here works as a coolant keeping the uranium from overheating and melting.
Figure 2. Schematic view of uranium fission[3]
By designing the nuclear reactor this way, the radioactive water and steam will never directly contact the turbine. Likewise, in certain nuclear reactors, the coolant liquid contacting the reactor center is gas (most likely carbon dioxide) or fluid metal (often a combination of sodium and potassium).[4] These advanced reactors allow the core of the nuclear reactor to operate at a higher temperature.
Pros and cons of nuclear energy
Nuclear energy produced from nuclear power plants has many advantages compared with traditional energy sources. Today, it supplies almost 20% of the electricity in the United States. Four main advantages are presented in this paper. While there are several disadvantages to nuclear power — including the process of ridding of nuclear waste, the cost to establishing power plants, and the accidental (or intentional) deadly catastrophes that can be spurred from the energy source — it ultimately is necessary to protect our planet from global climate change.
Above all else, nuclear energy is clean energy. The nuclear energy generated from the nuclear power plant creates carbon-free electricity, which means there are no carbon emission during the entire process. Compared with electricity generated from traditional fossil fuels, which emits a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, nuclear energy in power plants produces no carbon and no air pollution during its operation. Thus, using nuclear energy is one way of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and slowing the speed of global warming.
What’s more, nuclear energy is considered to be inexpensive energy. Despite the fact that building a nuclear power plant has a relatively high upfront costs, it’s comparatively cheap to generate electricity from it, and the cost of operation is low also. In addition, the cost of nuclear energy is relatively stable and does not fluctuate much compared with traditional energy sources like fossil fuels or coal. Due to the advancement of nuclear technologies, the cost of nuclear energy is likely to remain cheap and even become less costly over time.
Finally, nuclear energy is reliable and steadily produces electricity. The way nuclear power plants operate allows nuclear energy to be generated at any time of day, while solar or wind energy requires environmental sources that are prone to change. Using electricity produced by nuclear energy sidesteps delays in energy production compared with electricity from solar or wind energy.[5]
The jungle: nuclear power and mass information
Having laid out the basic advantages of nuclear power, it is important to understand why making these claims, or any claims about nuclear energy, is a complicated and controversial endeavor in today’s climate. One of these days, get on Quora or StackExchange and search for information about nuclear power. With climate apocalypse looming, these forums have no shortage of discussion, debate, and rhetoric about this potential antidote. Right away, you will find several questions like “Are nuclear power plants safe?” and “What are the dangers of nuclear power?”. Quora’s community, at least, is decidedly pro-nuclear: most of the top answers will present a flow of argument similar to “Nuclear seems bad, but if you look at the numbers it’s good, and we need it to find climate change”. They stand on nuclear power being carbon-free, cost-effective, and quantitatively far safer than the likely alternative. Scroll down farther, and you will find answers that disagree with the majority consensus. They highlight problems with accidents, waste, uranium mining, and even nuclear terrorism. These known cons are valid concerns, and it is easy to understand how people could look at some of these risks and arrive at different conclusions. A danger like nuclear waste, for example, which has no chance of ending human civilization in the next millennium, is easily outweighed by climate change for many people. A person with a million-year perspective, however, might see the pileup of nuclear waste as a price too high for the benefit. Look more closely, though, and you will find arguments that disagree beyond what is explainable as a matter of perspective. Nuclear, apparently, is far too expensive. Uranium mining is an unacceptable polluting factor, likely to irradiate our water supplies. The risk of nuclear is unpredictable, less understood than even climate change. Just a second ago, you were probably reading a post brushing away this risk with confidence! After encountering a good deal of confusion, one thing will become clear: the people on both sides of this argument, to a significant degree, are not using the same set of facts. Properly, they are not in discussion with each other. The confusion does not get much better in reputable sources: disagreements about cost, safety, and humanity’s ability to go carbon-free without nuclear energy remain fundamental.
There is an extremely ambiguous information environment surrounding nuclear power caused partially by real uncertainty, partially by mathematical trickery, partially by politics. This environment creates confusion and nurtures the spread of harmful, blatant misinformation, which in turn continues muddying the discussion.
Take the issue of cost, for instance: massive discrepancies exist between different quantitative cost models. Lazard, a financial firm whose annual reports weigh in on energy discussions, predicts a LCOE (Levelized Cost Of Energy) for nuclear energy at $129-$198/MWh[6]— in other words, unworkable. The IEA, however, reports costs as low as $30/MWh— just short of a panacea. The devil of this difference is in the details, so one must understand how these figures are calculated. An LCOE is supposed to give an average energy cost for an energy source over a typical plant lifetime, including both “capital” (startup) and operating costs:
Figure 3. LCOE formula, adapted from[7]
Pay special attention to the discount rate. The discount rate is a semi-theoretical parameter describing how much less a certain item is valued if it is obtained a year in the future, as opposed to now. Discount rates can exist for several reasons: in the world economy today, there are nearly risk-free assets (US treasury bonds) that yield a small percentage on investment year on year. For this reason, getting $100 a year from now is worth a few percent less than getting $100 right now, because that $100 can be invested into US treasury bonds and become $101 or $102 in a year. The discount rate on US dollars is 1-2%. In a more contextual scenario, an energy company that borrows several billion dollars to build a nuclear reactor with 5-10% annual interest will have its future revenue discounted in a very real way to pay this interest. Despite the discount rate’s connections to reality, when Lazard’s and the IEA’s models factor it into a nuclear energy LCOE, there is enough freedom in the discount rate that the results can come out any way the authors want. The culprit factor is that the capital costs of nuclear power plants significantly outweigh their operating costs[8], and they operate for decades. Because most of nuclear power’s costs come upfront, and most of their power generation comes far in the future, a small change in the year-to-year discount rate can violently swing the balance between the two.
There are other, more practical factors weighing in to cost discrepancies. Two Westinghouse AP-1000 pressurized water reactors built in Sanmen, China[9], cost a quarter of what they do in Georgia[10], partially due to China’s lower labor costs and devalued currency, but also to China’s more developed heavy industrial supply chain, active nuclear construction expertise, and lack of over-restrictive regulation. In such cases, nuclear costs are subject to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a nation commits to nuclear energy in the belief that it is a cost-effective way to fight climate change, it will probably be right. If a nation is indecisive and only builds a few plants here and there before stopping again, it will likely find that nuclear energy is unprofitable.
Similarly stark discrepancies exist on other issues related to nuclear, particularly regarding safety[11]. With confusion at the highest, most educated levels of discussion, confusion at every other level is guaranteed. One very pertinent example: the recent HBO short series Chernobyl made a spectacular effort to show many facets of the 1986 accident, analyze the problem of responsibility in depth, and educate the public on the science of reactors. It got many things right, but it also made several extremely blatant errors in key areas, spreading misinformation to millions.
In this scene, the main character and voice of science of the series, Valery Legasov, as well as a fictional scientist[12], Ulana Khomyuk, meet with Gorbachev and the top ministers of the Soviet Union about the disaster at Chernobyl. The actual Chernobyl explosion, caused by hydrogen combustion, has already occurred. They explain that an additional “2-4 megaton” explosion is about to occur at the plant as soon as the molten core contacts water in three tanks under the reactor. This “thermal explosion” will annihilate “everything within a 30-kilometer radius”, release a “massive shock wave, which will extend approximately 200 kilometers”, and put “60 million people at risk”. These doomsday exclamations constitute a major, memorable scene in the show, they drive up tension masterfully, and they are utterly bogus, a garden-variety case of confusing nuclear reactors with nuclear bombs. A 2-4 megaton explosion might have occurred if all the fissile material in the Number Four Chernobyl reactor underwent a nuclear chain reaction at once, but there was no risk of such an event; there never is except in the case a bomb, which must be carefully engineered to sustain a runaway nuclear reaction for long enough to release significant explosive power. By this time in the show, the fuel of the reactor had already been reacting uncontrolled for a few days, and it was not exploding, just slowly getting hotter. The show’s language correctly contradicted its own claims: the explosion, Khomyuk explained, was going to be “thermal”, driven by transfer of already-present heat from the core lava, not nuclear, driven by runaway fission. Back-of-the-envelope analysis[13] of the energy that could have released in such an explosion shows that the 2-4 megaton figure is at least 4 orders of magnitude too large. Historically, such a thermal explosion might have occurred, and at this energy, there would have been a risk of spreading more radioactive material into the environment, and perhaps of damaging the other reactors, but a sizable chunk of the world was not about to end
There are many other examples of shoddy science in Chernobyl[14], but this lie is the most damaging. Because it was so confidently delivered, thousands if not millions now bear the false belief that a nuclear plant can end the existence of millions, of entire nations, with one little accident. When experts fail to guide the discussion about nuclear and confusion reigns, misinformation becomes fact for millions. Why would we build nuclear plants, even if it helps cut greenhouse emissions, when the consequences are so dire? Along this line of thinking, humanity deviates farther and farther from a path of solving climate change.
Public perception and nuclear power
The public information campaign against nuclear proliferation has bled into the realm of alternative energy, altering public perception and possibly halting future production of nuclear power sites. This misinformation and misplaced fear could be drastic for the climate. The need for more — not less — nuclear power is clear: renewable energy sources like wind and solar can’t come online fast enough to replace all the clean energy currently produced by nuclear power plants. And those plants will soon need to be updated lest they be retired due to their outdated technology.[15] Already, since 2013, five nuclear plants have been cancelled in various states due to a combination of political opposition and competition from natural gas. Without these plants, and the production of future ones, an already catastrophic problem will worsen. Currently, public approval is going in the wrong direction.
For the first time in recorded history, a majority of Americans stand against the use of nuclear energy.[16] As of 2016, 54% of citizens rejected the energy usage — a 10 percentage point increase in comparison with the prior year. This change has occurred as it was merely a decade before when the majority of Americans supported nuclear power. In fact, nuclear energy is the most unpopular source of power, other than coal, according to 2020 polling.[17] When asked by the Morning Consult, one-third of adult Americans believed that current construction of nuclear plants should be halted, and no future operations should be built.
But polling is never perfect, and common responses to frequently asked questions change depending on the questions being asked. There is cause for hope.
Notably, support for the power source shifts when determining where the product’s waste would be stored. To get majority support, nuclear waste storage needs to be placed at least 75 miles from any community. According to 2019 polling, a majority of Americans would also want nuclear energy if it was coupled with lots of renewable energy projects. Survey data from a clean energy nonprofit demonstrated that support for the energy was subject to variation, with the biggest cleavage in support stemming not from political affiliation, but from gender identity. That is, 62% of men want nuclear power, while only 30% of women do.[18] The chasm, while significant, is much smaller (18-percentage points) between Republicans and Democrats. (Republicans are generally more favorable on nuclear than Democrats.) But interestingly, of all polling questions suggested by the Green Advocacy Project, the largest political coalition — men and women, Democrats and Republicans, rural and urban dwellers – supports nuclear power, but only when it is coupled with renewable energy projects.
Brief history of nuclear disasters, current coalitional politics
In the 1970s, coolant leaked at a nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, causing the dispersal of over 100,000 people from the community of the plant’s location and subsequently heightened fears of nuclear energy.[19] (Three Mile Island later reopened its plant and is still running today.) Then the disaster at Chernobyl manifested, further dampening perceptions of nuclear power. But as energy consumption demand has risen so too has the desire to avoid working with politically unstable countries to acquire energy, leading to a revival of interest in nuclear power. For a few decades up into the early 2000s, promise of nuclear power grew, leading to a coalition of political groups supporting nuclear power over that of fossil fuels. Despite the catastrophic events that occurred in Fukushima, many people retained interest in the alternative energy source.
But this subtle hope discounts some of the activists most critical to combating climate change: environmentalists.
Historically, environmentalists have fervently turned their backs on nuclear energy, often out of fear of nuclear proliferation and subsequent annihilation. (The deadly events referenced above provided fodder for such thinking.) Groups like Green America[20] are still ardently opposed to the technology — but they’re not alone. One of the most prominent climate defense groups — The Sunrise Movement, the most vocal supporters of the Green New Deal legislation and one of the largest groups organizing to defend against climate change — are against nuclear power.[21] Older, more institutionalized environmental groups, like the Natural Resource Defense Coalition (NRDC),[22] Greenpeace,[23] and the Sierra Club[24] are also firmly against the use of nuclear power plants. This possibly explains why there’s literally no mention of nuclear energy in House Resolution 109, also known as The Green New Deal.[25] Although, notably, one of the bill’s sponsors and climate change defense advocate Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she would consider nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels.
There’s marginal space for optimism on the matter as Ocasio-Cortez’s positioning may be indicative of a broader trend. In addition to some environmental groups being conflicted on nuclear power plants, and others outright supporting it, [26] organizations that disapprove of nuclear power won’t always stand their ground against the energy source if the alternative choice is fossil fuels.[27] Further research bolsters the legitimacy of this sort of watered-down support. Scholars at Syracuse University and Marist College found that people are more willing to take a risk on something they don’t like if the costs of such problem — like catastrophic climate change — are considered too severe.[28]
As such, it’s possible that a new campaign in favor of nuclear power could take hold in this country, one that combines skeptics in the environmental movement with those on the political right. But the approach would need to be of a different kind. A project that is simultaneously localized and broader in scope may make nuclear viable for today and future decades to come.
A different nuclear politics: go local — with federal assistance
Before the 1930s, through the wake of the first World War and into the Great Depression, people in the countryside were left in the dark. Literally, rural areas had not been electrified, leaving them economically behind in the country and the world. But then, things changed. One Wyoming woman living on a ranch remembers the day that electricity came to her town as “my Day of Days.”[29] Another rural resident of the American west recalls the addition of electricity like “a new creation.” These people were referring to the addition of light, all day and all night, if they so had chosen, to their homes that came from the creation of a New Deal program called the Rural Electrification Agency. Although the program was developed, initiated, and funded by the power of the federal government, it was carried out via local cooperatives that were run and governed by people from their community.
While there were critics of the program from some Republicans and conservative Democrats at the time, rural Americans organized in favor of the program because it led with their input, and became projects almost entirely of their own creation. Nuclear power could take the same shape in the 21st century as electricity did in the 20th. It could provide jobs, energy, and autonomy to local communities. But notably, electricity is not the only example that supports a new path in which to do nuclear politics. In some cases, Wi-Fi does too.
In her book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss it, Susan Crawford notes how broadband via fiber optic cables, developed by local institutions in the form of nonprofits or municipal-run operations, has been democratically and effectively introduced in some rural communities. Places like Chattanooga, Tennessee, Greensboro, North Carolina, and Wilson, Minnesota have developed independent, local cooperatives, or used their local government apparatus, to establish solid internet connection, instead of relying on large-scale corporations who were providing inferior internet connectivity at higher rates.
Although not as rural as the above-mentioned cities, Santa Monica has succeeded in establishing a municipal fiber network called Santa Monica City Net. After investing $530,000, the city began saving $700,000 a year that would otherwise be paid to private companies who would, in the traditional scenario, own the power cables that provide internet connectivity.[30] Instead, City Net is able to lower internet service costs because the city owns a fiber optic cable, thereby pooling resources together and providing extra benefits beyond high-speed connection — like free public Wi-Fi at tourist destinations and real-time data for apps — for its residents.[31]
Our group suggest that, like localized electrification and broadband projects that have taken root in various places across the rural U.S., nuclear energy too can replace coal, fracking, and other oil-drilling jobs if localities are given autonomy to run these projects with the appropriate consulting and funding from the federal government.
President Joe Biden could likely be convinced of this plan. The person who has been referred to as more FDR like than many on the left had anticipated, Biden has passed an enormous stimulus package, while developing more hefty policy in the pipeline. He also supports nuclear energy. According to his campaign platform, Biden supports nuclear power and wants to expand “advanced nuclear reactors, that are smaller, safer, and more efficient at half the construction cost of today’s reactors.”[32] If the president wants to end America’s reliance on fossil fuels by 2035, he likely won’t have another choice but to follow his original plan.
In order to implement this project, Biden could provide loan guarantees for the production of nuclear power plants, since, with stringent regulations on their production, the plants are quite costly.[33] Those loan guarantees could be specifically made available to local governments and independent cooperatives. The federal subsidies would make such projects feasible.
The need is immediate. There are about 100 nuclear plants in the U.S., and over half of them require updated technology. This, of course, says nothing of the nuclear power plants that need to be created. Public information should be part of this equation, but that too needs to occur locally. Various studies have proven the strong tie between civic engagement and local journalism.[34] One way to ensure that this project gets off the ground quickly is to stabilize local journalism, and allow localities to conversate about nuclear energy as soon as possible. Without the rollout of this project, our problems will likely continue to increase at a feverish pace.
[1] “Discovery of Nuclear Fission.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, June 1, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_nuclear_fission#/media/File:Nuclear_fission_reaction.svg.
[2] Smith, Stanley. “Fundamentals of Chemistry.” Accessed June 3, 2021. http://www.chem.uiuc.edu/rogers/Text4/Tx48/tx48.html.
[3] “Nuclear Reactor.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. Accessed June 3, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-reactor.
[4] “The Pros & Cons of Nuclear Energy: Is It Safe?” Spring Power & Gas, April 30, 2019. https://springpowerandgas.us/the-pros-cons-of-nuclear-energy-is-it-safe/.
[5] Lane, Catherine. “Nuclear Energy Pros and Cons.” Solar Reviews. Solar Reviews, May 11, 2021. https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/nuclear-energy-pros-and-cons.
[6] Lazard Ltd. (2020). (rep.). Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis — Version 14.0. Retrieved from https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-140.pdf
[7] Chun Sing Lai, Giorgio Locatelli, Andrew Pimm, Yingshan Tao, Xuecong Li, & Loi Lei Lai (2019). A financial model for lithium-ion storage in a photovoltaic and biogas energy system. Applied Energy, 251, 113179.
[8] The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists quotes a ballpark 60/40 ratio between capital and operating costs.
[9] $7.3 billion for two reactors. Source: Proctor, Darrell (20 September 2018). “AP1000 Reactor Set for Commercial Operation in China”. POWER magazine. Access Intelligence. Retrieved 27 December 2019.
[10] $25 billion for two reactors. Source: Walton, Rod (9 August 2018). “Vogtle Cost Upgrade Causes Rethinking of $25B Nuclear Plant’s Future”. Power Engineering. Retrieved 16 August 2018.
[11] See here about fraught Chernobyl death toll estimates. See here about problems in the discussion of waste from a pro-nuclear perspective, here for an anti-nuclear perspective.
[12] Bendix, A. (2019, September 20). HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ series invented a main character to depict the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/hbo-chernobyl-series-invented-nuclear-physicist-character-2019-6.
[13] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChernobylTV/comments/bo13u1/chernobyl_episode_2_please_remain_calm_discussion/enfc7pa/
[14] Conca, J. (2019, June 29). How HBO Got It Wrong On Chernobyl. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/06/27/how-hbo-got-it-wrong-on-chernobyl/?sh=651f992a9ce8.
[15] Plumer, Brad. 2017. “How Retiring Nuclear Power Plants May Undercut U.S. Climate Goals.” The New York Times, June 13, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/climate/nuclear-power-retirements-us-climate-goals.html.
[16] Riffkin, Rebecca. 2016. “For First Time, Majority in U.S. Oppose Nuclear Energy.” Gallup. March 18, 2016. https://news.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppose-nuclear-energy.aspx.
[17] Nuclear Energy among the Least Popular Sources of Power in the U.s., Polling Shows.” 2020. Morningconsult.com. September 9, 2020. https://morningconsult.com/2020/09/09/nuclear-energy-polling/.
[18] Roberts, David. 2019. “Americans Love Clean Energy. Do They Care If It Includes Nuclear?” Vox. April 23, 2019. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/23/18507297/nuclear-energy-renewables-voters-poll.
[19]Walker, J. Samuel. 2004. Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
[20] 10 Reasons to Oppose Nuclear Energy.” n.d. Greenamerica.Org. Accessed June 2, 2021. https://www.greenamerica.org/fight-dirty-energy/amazon-build-cleaner-cloud/10-reasons-oppose-nuclear-energy.
[21] Harder, Amy. 2019. “Green New Deal Activists Dismiss Nuclear Power.” Axios. May 16, 2019. https://www.axios.com/green-new-deal-activists-dismiss-nuclear-power-98c6d22e-2777-4da7-b208-0e1805aed764.html.
[22] NRDC.” 1971. Non-Destructive Testing 4 (3): 161–63.
[23] Nuclear Energy.” 2015. Greenpeace.Org. June 11, 2015. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/ending-the-climate-crisis/issues/nuclear/.
[24] N.d. Sierraclub.Org. Accessed June 2, 2021c. https://www.sierraclub.org/nuclear-free.
[25] N.d. Congress.Gov. Accessed June 2, 2021d. https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf.
[26] Climate Coalition. 2016. “Groups That Are ‘Nuclear Inclusive’ -.” Climatecoalition.Org. March 20, 2016. https://climatecoalition.org/pronuclear-groups/.
[27] Plumer, Brad, Henry Fountain, and Livia Albeck-Ripka. 2018. “Environmentalists and Nuclear Power? It’s Complicated.” The New York Times, April 18, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/climate/climate-fwd-green-nuclear.html.
[28] Pralle, Sarah, and Jessica Boscarino. 2011. “Framing Trade-Offs: The Politics of Nuclear Power and Wind Energy in the Age of Global Climate Change: Framing Trade-Offs.” The Review of Policy Research 28 (4): 323–46.
[29] Cannon, Brian Q. 2000. “Power Relations: Western Rural Electric Cooperatives and the New Deal.” The Western Historical Quarterly31 (2): 133.
[30] Crawford, Susan. 2020. Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution And Why America Might Miss It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
[31] Ibid, p. 139
[32] The Biden Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future.” 2019. Joebiden.Com. November 14, 2019. https://joebiden.com/clean-energy/.
[33] Cannon. 276.
[34] Kaufhold, Kelly, Sebastian Valenzuela, and Homero Gil de Zúñiga. 2010. “Citizen Journalism and Democracy: How User-Generated News Use Relates to Political Knowledge and Participation.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 87 (3–4): 515–29.