While Maine once hosted a nuclear power plant in Wiscasset, the group of lawmakers is seeking information on a smaller and more nimble option.
PORTLAND, Maine — Decades after Maine’s Yankee Nuclear Power Plant shuttered in Wiscasset, a group of Republican legislators wants to harness a new type of reactor to bring nuclear power back to the state.
Small modular reactors, or SMRs, are essentially miniature versions of the Yankee facility, generating a fraction of the electricity while using less land.
According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade organization, an average SMR powers 150,000 homes, compared to 500,000 from a conventional-sized facility.
A bill sponsored by Republican State Rep. Reagan Paul calls on the Public Utilities Commission to gather informational bids on projects that would bring a small modular reactor to Maine.
Paul presented nuclear power, in its small-scale variety, as more effective than other renewable energy sources in powering the state’s grid.
“Maine’s goals cannot happen with unreliable, intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. SMRs could provide a steady, carbon-free power source with a very small land footprint and a scalable nature that makes them well-suited for Maine’s energy needs,” Paul said in a statement Thursday.
This follows an executive order by President Trump earlier this month, encouraging small modular reactors.
Work remains to accomplish this task, however. Only two SMRs are currently in operation worldwide—one in China and another in Russia, along the coast of the East Siberian Sea.
“We’re not far behind,” Marc Nichol of the Nuclear Energy Institute said. “The United States has over 30 designs that are being developed at various stages of maturity.”
Though Nichol emphasized the “excitement” in the nuclear power community around SMRs, other lawmakers in Maine questioned their practicality.
While Democratic State Rep. Sophie Warren is a co-sponsor of another one of Paul’s bills to include nuclear in the state’s definition of a renewable resource, she sees the construction of a nuclear facility in Maine as impractical.
“I have no present interest in bringing a small nuclear reactor to the state of Maine. It just doesn’t make sense,” Warren said.
“I’m a bit agnostic when it comes to the technology itself,” she added, citing cost concerns.
Additionally, any nuclear project in Maine would have to clear a major legal hurdle—state law requires a referendum before any new nuclear reactor can be built.
Resistance to studying small-scale nuclear projects is also coming from local anti-nuclear activists, such as Cathy Wolff, who, along with fellow members of the group Clamshell Alliance, protested the construction of the nuclear plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, in the 1970s.
“We haven’t resolved any of the issues that go along with producing electricity through nuclear power,” Wolff said. “There’s no permanent disposal.”
Paul dismissed this point, “Some models of SMRs are even using their own waste as fuel. I’d say anti-nuclear activists are uninformed and hyperbolic. You cannot be for carbon reduction and against nuclear.”
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