And again, for the 2100 time frame, the NRC has given FPL permission to construct new reactors using a projection of just one foot.

In a January 4 letter to the NRC providing commentary on FPL’s application to build two new reactors, the City of South Miami described the utility’s projections as “stark” and “disturbing.” But South Miami is far from the only voice in the region disputing the NRC’s plainly outlying sea-level estimates. NRC documents record more than 160 comments made during a series of public hearings. State senators, former mayors, adjoining municipalities, college professors, concerned citizens, and the City of Miami all raise the same general objection.

In an interview, FPL senior director Steven Scroggs defended the company’s projections. “There’s no regulatory prescription for a specific sea-level–rise forecast,” he said. “But there are qualifications and requirements that the NRC requires nuclear engineers to utilize.… The sea-level–rise application forecasts that we used met those requirements.”

The NRC also gave a formal written response to the community comments, the gist of which was: “NEPA [the National Environmental Policy Act] requires consideration of likely future scenarios not extreme future scenarios. However, the gradual increase in sea level and NRC’s safety process protects the public health and safety.” In other words, the numbers that every other planning body in South Florida is now using are extreme, and the problem is far enough away in time that it can be dealt with later.

The NRC did not consider sea-level rise during its safety analyses for the license extension. Nor did the agency include advisories on how to develop projections of sea-level rise in its 2011 technical report for estimating flood risks—in a guidance document for plants across the country.

Documents filed with the NRC show how the engineering firm retained by FPL for the design of reactors 6 and 7 developed a sea-level–rise projection. Engineers at Bechtel Corp. used a linear (straight-line) analysis of local NOAA tidal gauge data. But the rate of sea-level rise isn’t linear, as no end of climate reports are now demonstrating: Rather, seas rise in exponential fashion, accelerating over time because their levels track atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and because ice sheets tend to collapse—suddenly. This means the global standard for sea-level–rise projections is a curve, shaped like a hockey stick, rather than a line.

NRC staff, responding to emailed queries, said that FPL’s sea-level–rise estimate of one foot by 2100 was “consistent with the lower end of the range” from a 2014 report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program—the federal program that issues the National Climate Assessment. This is true: The agency’s 2014 projections offer a minimum baseline increase of one foot by the end of the twenty-first century—and a maximum of four feet. But this one-to-four-foot range comes with an important caveat: Uncertainty in the projections means high-risk endeavors (say, nuclear facilities) are advised to engineer their relevant safeguards to the higher ends of the risk curve, not the lower ones. As the report puts it: “... decision makers may wish to use a wider range of scenarios, from 8 inches to 6.6 feet by 2100. In particular, the high end of these scenarios may be useful for decision makers with a low tolerance for risk.”

So what rationale could justify the opposite approach—particularly in an industry with effectively zero room for risk? In a series of emails addressing Turkey Point’s flood risks, NRC staff explained the underlying logic: Because the agency’s calculations include “significant pessimistic assumptions” for known risks like storm surge, coastal plants already have “a significant safety margin” in the event sea-level rise exceeds the agency’s expectations.

But the deeper problem here may not be so much the empirical debate over measuring the rising ocean as it is the NRC’s close ties to the nuclear energy sector.

But the deeper problem here may not be so much the empirical debate over measuring the rising ocean as it is the NRC’s close ties to the nuclear energy sector. Unlike many federal agencies, the NRC recovers 90 percent of its budget from the industry it regulates, through licensing and inspection fees. And it takes guidance from industry groups that also lobby on Capitol Hill—notably the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a coalition of companies that operate plants, design reactors, and conduct studies on safety and performance. It was the NEI that originally floated the post-Fukushima FLEX program.

“I don’t think [the NEI] are nefarious,” said Lochbaum, the former Nuclear Safety Project director. “They present their views. NGOs and [NRC] staff and others present their views. And it’s up to the commission to determine what’s the right policy path moving forward.”

But part of being a government agency is making difficult—and costly—decisions in the face of uncertainty. The lack of action commensurate to the risk is what worries Lochbaum, Stoddard, and others.

The chemistry manager at Turkey Point, Kevin O’Hare, sporting protective goggles and a hard hat, led a small tour group through the facility’s labyrinthine inner passageways, and up a set of metal stairs onto a landing. At the center of the landing is a turbine longer than a coach bus, protected by a thick metal housing. Through a tiny window in that housing, you can see the turbine spinning.

O’Hare shouts that it’s OK to touch the turbine housing, to feel the vibration made by 802 megawatts of power. And as most visitors do, they immediately register a mix of pride and astonishment and childlike glee at this behemoth, splitting atoms, lighting up Miami so that it glows in the night.

O’Hare led the tour group back down off the platform. He walked his charges past the building housing the backup diesel generators, and down to the landing by the bay, making sure to point out the flood defenses—and to note the height and the slope of the concrete leading up from the water to the reactor’s housing.

Earlier, in a conference room, O’Hare had used the word “steward” to describe the responsibility borne by Turkey Point’s employees. And then he’d taken a phone call.

“Sorry, this is that emergency call,” he said. “I can’t keep putting it off. We’ll put it on speaker.”

It was a weekly call to test the plant’s emergency response system; yet another hallmark of how everything related to building, operating, maintaining, and safeguarding a nuclear plant follows meticulous procedures—tens of thousands of physical and virtual documents, a welter of excruciatingly detailed plans and instructions for every U.S. nuclear power plant.

For O’Hare, this fastidiousness is a mark of pride. For NextEra Energy, the Fortune 200 company that owns Florida Power & Light, those reams of procedures and regulations represent a heavy cost. And in an electricity market increasingly powered by cheap natural gas, those costs—and the costs of maintaining or repairing aging plants—are making nuclear power less competitive. Thanks to these market pressures, five nuclear plants have shut in the past five years. Another twelve may do so in the next six. There aren’t enough new nuclear power plants on the drawing board to replace those that come off line. The two reactors now under construction suffer from cost overruns. South Carolina Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper abandoned plans to build two reactors in 2017. And Florida Power & Light’s NRC-approved additional two reactors at Turkey Point may never come online.

Almost 20 percent of all electric power nationwide is generated by atomic fission. The dwindling margins of profitability for commercial nuclear power have serious implications—not just for the residents of South Florida, but also for a planet faced with the challenge of a swift transition away from fossil fuels.

Back on the pleasure boat circling near the facility, South Miami Mayor Phil Stoddard stood at the bow, watching a backhoe at work near the perimeter of Turkey Point.

“If you had to, you know, pick the whole thing up and raise it up another 20 feet, that’s not that technically difficult,” he said. “It’s just expensive.”

From this vantage, the solutions to climate change are easy to imagine: Build your coastal nuclear power plant 20 feet higher, and buy time until the world figures out a way to dial down the global thermostat. The catastrophes of flooding induced by climate change are likewise easy to conceive: A surge from a massive storm wipes out a plant’s pumps and emergency generators, causing the core to overheat and melt down, spewing radioactive particles into the ocean and the sky. It’s still an infinitesimal risk, but we’ve seen it play out in horrifying detail for the communities around Fukushima Daiichi. As the American nuclear industry sits in denial before the rising seas, industry leaders, the NRC, and the rest of us can ill afford to act as though extreme flood risks aren’t swelling with the tide.





This article was reported in partnership with Type Investigations.