Reframing Nuclear Narratives with the Breakthrough Institute
Adam Stein is the Director of Nuclear Energy Innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, where he focuses on the technology, policy, risk and economics of nuclear energy. The Breakthrough Institute is a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges. Among its many projects, the Breakthrough Institute recently launched Build Nuclear Now, a national campaign to mobilize Americans in targeted states to call for regulatory and legislative change to accelerate the licensing and deployment of new, advanced nuclear reactors in the United States.
Adam brings a pro-nuclear perspective to this conversation; and given that, Cody and Adam focus the majority of the discussion on the history of nuclear power in the US and potential paths forward, rather than debating the merits of nuclear (which could of course be a full episode by itself). Adam has a particular interest in advanced nuclear reactors, which represent a broad class of new technologies currently under development and review. This conversation covers these advanced reactors and so much more.
Episode recorded on Apr 15, 2024 (Published on May 13, 2024)
In this episode, we cover:
[02:39]: Launch of 'Build Nuclear Now' to boost public support for nuclear energy
[03:45]: Shift in public opinion on nuclear energy post-Three Mile Island incident
[05:03]: Contrast between post-WWII and current energy policies focusing on efficiency
[09:30]: Decline of nuclear energy due to increased natural gas from fracking
[10:48]: Challenges in revitalizing the stagnant US nuclear industry
[13:02]: Future projections for nuclear load growth by 2050
[15:14]: Why renewables and storage alone cannot meet future energy demands
[19:39]: Additional benefits of nuclear energy
[21:33]: The role of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the need for reform
[25:00]: Challenges with traditional nuclear reactor approval processes
[29:23]: Vogtle reactors and challenges for deploying nuclear plants in the US
[32:27]: The potential of advanced nuclear reactors and their smaller, adaptable designs
[39:32]: Strategic focus on Appalachia for repurposing coal plants for nuclear projects
[42:38]: Recent legislative efforts to modernize nuclear energy regulation and innovation
[52:12]: The process and challenges of nuclear fuel management, from enrichment to waste
[01:01:12]: National focus on nuclear innovation, highlighting Idaho's MARVEL reactor development
[01:05:31]: Role of the Breakthrough Institute in addressing and implementing solutions for nuclear energy barriers
-
Cody Simms (00:00:00):
Today on My Climate Journey, our guest is Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, where he focuses on the technology, policy, risk and economics of nuclear energy. The Breakthrough Institute is a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges. Among its many projects, the Breakthrough Institute recently launched Build Nuclear Now, a national campaign to mobilize Americans in targeted states to call for regulatory and legislative change to accelerate the licensing and deployment of new, advanced nuclear reactors in the United States.
(00:00:43):
For the last few months, I've been trying to get a lot more knowledgeable about nuclear, its potential role in our energy mix, the history of nuclear energy in the US and what paths forward could look like. Adam clearly brings a pro-nuclear perspective to this conversation. And given that, I tried to focus most of our discussion on the history of nuclear in the US and potential paths forward, rather than debating the merits of nuclear, which could of course be a full episode by itself. Adam has particular interest in advanced nuclear reactors, which represent a broad class of new technologies currently under development and review. We touch on that and so much more in our conversation. But before we start, I'm Cody Sims.
Yin Lu (00:01:32):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (00:01:33):
And I'm Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (00:01:39):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:01:44):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Stein (00:01:59):
Thanks for having me.
Cody Simms (00:02:00):
Boy, this topic is one I am really excited to dive into. I've been personally trying to get much smarter on nuclear, though call it six months or a year of getting smarter is a lot different than spending my entire adult life getting smarter. Which, from looking at your background, is where you fit in. Can't wait to learn from you on this topic. Maybe let's start, Adam, with just an overview of a campaign that you've recently kicked off at the Breakthrough Institute called Build Nuclear Now. We'll start with that as the headline and use that as a way to dive into this topic more fulsomely.
Adam Stein (00:02:39):
Build Nuclear Now is a campaign to get public involvement in major regulatory and federal proceedings to show support and also push the ball in the correct direction to actually achieve deployment of new nuclear energy.
Cody Simms (00:02:59):
That's a big initiative and if you look at the US over the last 25, 30 years, maybe longer than that, there has not been a lot of advancement of nuclear energy. I think back to the 1960s and 70s and you think of nuclear as this new frontier of innovation in the atomic age and all of that. Then at least in the US, it feels like things stalled out and they didn't stall out in some other countries around the world. I'd love to hear from you maybe a bit on the history here of what happened and why nuclear, to some extent, lost favor either politically or culturally or all of the above and what's changing now.
Adam Stein (00:03:45):
There was a large shift in public perception of nuclear energy right after Three Mile Island, which is understandable.
Cody Simms (00:03:54):
That was 1979, is that right?
Adam Stein (00:03:56):
1979, there was the first major incident for a nuclear power plant and people were unsure what that really meant and what it would take to move forward from there. But there were also changes in energy consumption and energy economics as well. So shortly after Three Mile Island projects were put on hold or rethought. At the same time interest federal interest rates grew dramatically, which put large increases on costs of all projects, which included nuclear power plants. Costs started to go up almost exponentially due to federal interest rates. At the same time, projects were intentionally being slowed down to determine whether things had to change for safety. And regulations were changing dramatically at that time as well to try to ensure that an incident like Three Mile Island didn't happen again. In that mix, nuclear fell out of favor for those reasons.
Cody Simms (00:05:03):
It feels like, if you look back to that post World War II era in the United States, there wasn't a whole lot of emphasis on energy efficiency and reducing energy use. I don't know if this is true, this is my perception. It was sort of a go-go-go time. Build as much as you can, consume as much as you can, produce as much as you can, generate as much as you can, and the US is in mega growth mode. Then we hit the 70s and 80s to some extent and certainly today everything is about, how do you use less? How do you create more efficiency in what you have?
(00:05:40):
It's not about creating abundance, creating more. And we've been in a relatively flat demand curve in the US for a little while now. But if you listen to the Google's and Microsoft's and Facebook's and Apple's of the world and Amazon's of the world, it sounds like that time is about to end when you look at the forecasted energy demand as we electrify everything and create large capacity compute. It feels like we're in a different world now as well than we maybe were for the last few decades. I don't know if any of that's correct or not, that may be a totally crazy theory.
Adam Stein (00:06:13):
In a sense, yes, that is observationally correct. That's what you see on the surface. What happened in post-World War II was a huge boom in innovation and deployment of technology. Households had access to new technology that didn't exist before the war, and they all wanted to take part in that. There was no focus on efficiency. It was, how can we produce enough of these at a cost point that could be purchased by the consumer? Not, how can we produce these at an efficiency that made sense? So we had huge load growth on the grid and we had to build very rapidly, which included nuclear power. Nuclear scaled up substantially between the 60s and late 70s. The growth was several power plants per year that came online. Then load started to flatten out because there was, to some extent, saturation of the market of many of these technologies that people wanted.
(00:07:15):
Home dishwashers, washers and dryers for laundry. Electric stoves became more common, they didn't really exist much before that. And you didn't have to worry about ventilation and other things like you did with gas stoves, because at that time gas stoves were not that efficient. But then in the mid-80s and 90s, efficiency started to become more important because manufacturers could get more out of less. So industry started to drive efficiency internally and that trickled down to consumer products. Then we had federal policy that mandated efficiency for specific technologies, but also to meet requirements of, say, the Clean Air Act. And that drove more technology innovation to things like LEDs instead of incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lights in the middle as a stepping stone technology. So we still ended up with GDP growth and more deployment of technology to households, but a flat demand profile. Which meant that we didn't have to build a lot of large, new power plants on the grid.
Cody Simms (00:08:30):
At that point, it was more about how do you replace coal with renewable power and it was about swapping sources of demand as opposed to anticipating incredible increases in demand. It's how I would think about maybe the last 10, 15, 20 years.
Adam Stein (00:08:47):
For the most part, on a national level, that's absolutely correct. We had changes in population growth in certain areas, so some areas of the grid had to build a lot of new generation to keep up with local demand. But overall, demand has been flat and we've been replacing power plants instead of adding additional capacity generation.
Cody Simms (00:09:08):
I guess I should probably, to be more accurate, say renewables and obviously natural gas, which was actually the bulk of power plant replacement for most of that time period when it came to coal retirement.
Adam Stein (00:09:18):
And the bulk of generation on the grid today.
Cody Simms (00:09:21):
Where we are now is, we look forward and are now anticipating significant increase in demand for the first time in a while.
Adam Stein (00:09:30):
Well, I'd like to go back to one stage, which was the build out of natural gas capacity due to fracking. There was an expectation in the early 2000s that we would have what some called a nuclear renaissance. We would build a lot of new nuclear plants to replace old coal plants. And instead with the fracking boom, most of those power plants were canceled, the nuclear power plants were canceled because natural gas became very cheap, very quickly and undercut the cost of new nuclear generation. So that essentially stalled the industry. Part of the reason that we had stagnation for several decades, even after there was new desire to build new nuclear. There were other reasons for that stagnation including regulations and just the lack of already existing infrastructure to build these power plants, because we hadn't built many since the 80s after Three Mile Island. So just as the nuclear industry was about to ramp back up, it got pushed back down again. Which makes it really hard to maintain a workforce and a knowledge base over that many decades to actually build something new.
Cody Simms (00:10:48):
What I'm hearing you say is, the US was good at building nuclear. Three Mile Island happened in 1979, nuclear fell out of favor, both politically and culturally. As a result of that, people were concerned about safety. People even might've still supported nuclear in theory, but certainly didn't want to see cooling towers going up in their neighborhood. Then the US got to a point where maybe that was starting to feel a little bit in the past. The US needed to start retiring coal plants, but natural gas, all this technology happened around fracking right around that time. Natural gas actually was cheaper than nuclear, so nuclear yet again fell behind. And this is maybe where the US, I'm going to say, is different than China or France or Korea in that we have this abundant natural gas resource. So we were allowed to make that technology shift into gas, where some of these other nations that we know have continued to pursue nuclear, maybe were a bit less able to do so. Is that a correct leap for me to make?
Adam Stein (00:12:00):
That's a very correct leap to make, yes. In fact, there were almost a dozen new reactors in the licensing process when the fracking boom started. Only two of them were actually built.
Cody Simms (00:12:14):
Those are Vogtle plants in Georgia?
Adam Stein (00:12:17):
Exactly right.
Cody Simms (00:12:18):
Which both came online within the last two years?
Adam Stein (00:12:21):
Year and a half, about a year. Summer last year for unit three and unit four is in final testing right now.
Cody Simms (00:12:29):
We'll come back to that in a minute. I do want to spend some time on big, traditional reactor progress in the US, with Vogtle being the primary example there in recent years. I do want to come back to my question of, okay, so that's where we sit today. We've got this large gas power plant deployment that is providing the bulk of baseload power in the US. We've been increasingly building out renewable capacity, though it's still a small percentage of the total energy mix. What do we foresee for the next five to 10 years ahead of us?
Adam Stein (00:13:02):
The modeling is all over the place and the utility projections are generally underestimating what the demand will be. There's a reason for that that I'll get into in a minute. But our best modeling at the Breakthrough Institute shows that we're going to see between 100% and 300% load growth by 2050. And that's intentionally a bounding analysis. What's the reasonable peak and what's the reasonable lowest level so we know that or we have good confidence that the actual reality is going to be somewhere in the middle of there.
Cody Simms (00:13:45):
What do you anticipate being the primary drivers of that load growth?
Adam Stein (00:13:49):
Mostly switching from existing fossil fuel use to electricity use for alternatives. Heat pumps instead of natural gas for home heating, EVs instead of combustion engines, things like that. But also direct use of electricity for industrial processes, which is less efficient in many cases. But those processes are moving in a direction of decarbonization anyway because they see those policies coming, even though they're not enacted yet, such as electricity use for hydrogen production. So you can use hydrogen as a fuel source instead of coal or coke in industrial processes for high temperature heat. Also demand growth for new industries such as data center and computing, which is a load on the grid right now. But with new developments such as AI, the growth is expected to dramatically increase in the coming years. Because, as we spoke about a little earlier, when new technologies are introduced, it's generally how rapidly can you deploy them, not how efficient can you make them. In the future, they'll become more efficient. But initial load growth is expected to outstrip the efficiency curve.
Cody Simms (00:15:14):
Can this 100 to 300% increase be met by the increased deployment of renewable power plus storage?
Adam Stein (00:15:26):
No. The current supply chain growth rate, even with optimistic assumptions, just cannot grow that fast. We end up coming up to constraints on mining for certain minerals that renewables use. And mining takes, on average, 16 years to start a new mine from identifying where you want the mine to be. So building supply chains for some of these critical minerals that are more heavily used in renewables becomes a time constraint to get to decarbonization with renewables by then. There's enough of those minerals in the world, but the timeline starts to slow down the increase of those renewables. Nuclear energy uses very few of those hard-to-locate critical minerals, is by kilogram per megawatt-hour mostly reliant on concrete and steel.
(00:16:30):
Very easy to find building supplies, not rare earth minerals. The total system cost is also a question as well. It's not a matter of whether you could theoretically build a grid off of just renewables and storage, particularly if you have a small grid like, say, Denmark. You could feasibly do that. But if you have a larger grid and you need some firm power that's dispatchable when you need it, not when the resource is available, either the sun or the wind or hydro. Having firm resources that you can dispatch reduces the overall system costs. By having somewhere between 15 and 45% of firm resources, you have a lower overall system cost.
Cody Simms (00:17:21):
Can the US not continue to scale natural gas if we can get good at carbon capture around it? That's also considered a firm source of baseload power, I believe.
Adam Stein (00:17:33):
That is, yes.
Cody Simms (00:17:34):
As long as there's adequate amount of emissions capture.
Adam Stein (00:17:37):
The CCUS emissions capture is somewhere around 90% in optimistic scenarios, which still isn't sufficient to ever get you to net-zero. A natural gas alum cycle plant gets you closer to net-zero. However, it's less efficient overall. So there are trade-offs. Could natural gas supply that? Not indefinitely, because there's only so much natural gas, although for the near term that would be a pathway. The challenge becomes building out the carbon capture pipeline system, which would be rather extensive and... Well, I probably don't want to go into the permitting requirements of separating CO2 pipelines from natural gas pipelines so you can't have them in the same right of way. But that's another constraint. You need completely separate pathways for these new pipelines and pipelines do go through people's backyards literally, and that becomes challenging.
Cody Simms (00:18:36):
There's a whole host of obviously different scenarios and models to look at in terms of future energy demand. As you said, estimates are all over the place and I'm sure reasonable listeners to the show are going to come down with points of view across a wide range of spectrums here. Rather than debate one way or the other of do we need nuclear, which if you want to present more evidence to that, have at it. But what I'd love to do is to understand what has been blocking nuclear. We talked a little bit about the history of it. Right now we're in a world where, as I understand it, and I think you said this, we don't even have a whole lot of skilled labor anymore that has experience building nuclear in this country. From the beginning, right now we're almost starting from a standing start when it comes to trying to scale up. So there's that. Then on top of that, there is the regulatory piece, which we haven't talked about the NRC yet, though we need to. So maybe introduce us to the NRC.
Adam Stein (00:19:39):
That's three topics all in one little paragraph.
Cody Simms (00:19:43):
Yes, I have a tendency to do that. Choose your own adventure.
Adam Stein (00:19:48):
I might as well just talk about some of the other potential advantages to nuclear while we're on the deployment topic, before we move away from it. These are data-driven facts, so I'm just going to put them out there for your listeners. Nuclear, on average, has the lowest CO2 emissions per megawatt-hour, even if you assume that the power plants do not operate as often as they normally do. And they have only a 60-year lifetime, which most people at this point expect 80-year lifetimes. They were originally licensed for 40 years, but that was never expected to be their lifetime. They have the smallest land footprint of any energy source, whether you consider the mining portion or not. They have the lowest risk to the public of any energy source, which isn't what the public usually expects to hear. But according to the data, that's absolutely true. And nuclear energy also can be placed, in general, where you need it more than most other energy sources. You usually need a cooling source, which for many new designs can be air cooling, so you don't even need a water source.
(00:21:05):
But for larger designs, you need a water source. Then you need a connection to the grid. You're not reliant on where the best wind resources or solar resources are or where you can get the coal to the plants via barge or train, et cetera. Which allows it to uniquely be fit into some pockets of the grid that are difficult to get energy into with some other resources. The NRC, we can move into that. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission started in 1974. It was spun out of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was divided into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and what later became the Department of Energy. The Nuclear regulatory Commission's tasked with all the regulation and licensing of civil nuclear atomic uses, not just nuclear energy, but also medical and other uses. NRC had a lot to think about very quickly after Three Mile Island. Many of the regulations were not designed to handle that type of accident in a planned, coordinated way. New regulations were introduced that didn't make sense in some cases, such as emergency preparedness, which actually improved emergency preparedness for all emergencies across the nation.
(00:22:30):
Information and lessons learned from that then dramatically improved emergency preparedness for hurricanes and wildfires and other disasters. After that, the nuclear industry and the regulator both saw that they wanted a more clear-cut direct list of things that had to occur for licensing. Give me a checklist and let me check it off. So the NRC developed what are known as deterministic regulations. They predetermined, by meeting these criteria, you will result in reasonable assurance of adequate protection to public health and safety and the environment, which is what they're actually tasked with. That deterministic approach, while it worked for utilities at the time, is very rigid for innovation. Many of these deterministic regulations don't apply to many of the new technologies that are being developed. Then those technologies need to seek exemptions to those regulations, justify why they should get an exemption. And the NRC could still say, "No, we're not going to provide you an exemption." And then that regulation could become just a de facto barrier to innovation.
Cody Simms (00:23:52):
This is probably a terrible analogy, but I think of it like this. Let's say I buy an electric vehicle in California and California hadn't yet passed anything saying that EVs weren't required to have smog checks to continue to get your registration renewed. So I get a notice in the mail that says, "Your registration is renewed, you have to go get a smog check." I go down to the smog check place, they load my car up, they say, "This car doesn't have a catalytic converter, we can't approve your smog check, even though it's an EV." I don't know if that's a good analogy, but that's, to some extent, where my mind goes.
Adam Stein (00:24:25):
That is a reasonable way for most people to think about it. You would be stuck there with your EV not able to get the test that you're required to have, because there's no way to do it. So then you would have to try to, somehow, become exempt to that and the process is challenging for not only you, but everybody else that has an EV individually. That is the case for new, innovative advanced reactors right now that have different technology than what just neatly fit into the existing regulations.
Cody Simms (00:25:00):
There's the regulatory side with NRC, but even outside of that, very few traditional reactors. And I'm going to define a traditional reactor as the equivalent of the AP1000. Maybe you can describe what that is. But these are the types of reactors that now have been recently deployed in Georgia through the Vogtle project there, which is really the only projects, I think, in the US that have gone to production in recent timetable, like within the last decade. Those have NRC approval, but even those took a long time to get through the approval process, including incredible delays and incredible budget overshooting. I don't know if this is a separate topic, but maybe explain why that was for these plants that the US actually has a decent amount of history now deploying.
Adam Stein (00:25:52):
First, I'll cover what these traditional reactors are. They are generally around 1000 megawatts, give or take.
Cody Simms (00:26:01):
Hence, AP1000 as the name. Yes?
Adam Stein (00:26:03):
Exactly. 1000 megawatts is a very large plant. It's larger than basically every other individual power plant in the country. We have some large hydro dams that are larger than that with many different turbines in them, but regardless, it's a very large reactor. They have a chain reaction of uranium in the core, which heats water. That water is boiled or under a very high pressure so it doesn't boil, and the heat then turns a turbine, which turns a generator and you make electricity.
Cody Simms (00:26:40):
These would be pressurized water reactors or boiled water reactors, basically, would be the terminology that's used for these?
Adam Stein (00:26:47):
That's exactly right. We also generally refer to both of those put together as just large light-water reactors. The reactors that were just finished in Georgia are the first two AP1000 built in the United States.
Cody Simms (00:27:00):
Helpful correction. I didn't fully even appreciate that, so thank you.
Adam Stein (00:27:04):
The first two AP1000s were actually built in China and there were several other AP1000s that were either planned in the United States and had licenses to build and never started. And there were two at VC Summer power station that were started and then canceled part way through. The plants at Georgia, Vogtle plants, were very delayed and the costs were way over budget for a multitude of reasons. Some folks tried to point to one thing and in my analysis, there's no way to causally point to any one thing. It was really a mix of things that interacted and cost all of these delays and overruns. Most of the overruns are caused by the delays, more time for labor on the work site, more time that interest was accrued before the power plant went into operation to make revenue. Delays themselves caused most of the cost overrun. Project management was a factor. Regulation was a factor. The pandemic was a factor, because it significantly delayed a lot of the progress at one point. As I said, there's no way to point to any one thing, but they were way behind and way over budget.
Cody Simms (00:28:27):
My understanding is, every time the project scope changes, you reroute the project back through NRC for another round of approvals as well, which creates further delay, generally speaking. Is that accurate?
Adam Stein (00:28:40):
Depending on what part of the project changed, but yes. If it is a way to make a certain component that's tangentially part of a safety system, yes, you need to generally seek a license amendment. Which on the best terms generally takes 30 days. 30 days is significant on a job site for a delay. The NRC often tried to expedite those. There were more than 100 license amendments that had to be made to each one of those licenses. So if you add that up, that's significant delay overall because of the process that's used.
Cody Simms (00:29:23):
I didn't fully appreciate that Vogtle were the first two AP1000s deployed in the United States. So essentially these are first-of-a-kind and second-of-a-kind projects rolling out. The US has, what is it, something like 80-something live large reactors across the country today, I believe?
Adam Stein (00:29:42):
94.
Cody Simms (00:29:43):
94, thank you. Are the bulk of these all first, second, third round deployments? Or do we have a pattern of being able to now deploy something for the Nth time? I'm going to guess no, because we haven't deployed very much in the last decade plus.
Adam Stein (00:29:58):
It depends on how you define first-of-a-kind versus Nth-of-a-kind. There are almost no two reactors that are the same in the US, so in a sense, there are all first-of-a-kind plants. Except for Vogtle 4, which is almost identical to Vogtle 3. The challenge was, at the time, they were built to different specs for each single site. The reactor itself might be the same among some of them, but the generator or the turbine or the feed water intake for cooling or some major component was different between every other site, every other plant. Which meant we couldn't actually achieve cost reduction through learning by doing.
Cody Simms (00:30:46):
We've done two of these Vogtle plants now, why wouldn't we just keep doing more like that so that we can get smarter and improve and continue to drive costs down and drive deployment timelines down?
Adam Stein (00:31:02):
Some folks want to do exactly that. The challenge is that utilities don't want to do that. Georgia Power and Southern Power, which is the larger entity that owns Georgia Power-
Cody Simms (00:31:14):
Southern Company, yeah?
Adam Stein (00:31:15):
Southern Company. They had huge cost overruns that are now, for the most part, passed on to great payers. Utilities don't want to risk that cost and public utility commissions don't want to approve the risk of that cost. Because they see these as first-of-a-kind plants and they assume that the next in the line would also be at the same cost point, that there wouldn't be cost reductions. There actually was cost reduction between Vogtle 3 and Vogtle 4 because of learning. So you would expect cost reductions down the line as well, but it's still a financial risk that many utilities don't want to cover. And a lot of utilities that are expecting large demand growth at this point, because of deregulation and splitting up of many monopoly utilities, don't have a balance sheet that can comfortably fit a cost of two gigawatt reactors at this point.
Cody Simms (00:32:27):
That leads you to the work that you're largely doing, which is around advanced nuclear reactors. Maybe explain a bit about what those look like. My understanding is, these are 300 megawatt or smaller plants. So three times plus smaller than these AP1000s that went up in Georgia, for example.
Adam Stein (00:32:47):
Almost four times actually, because the AP1000s are almost 1200 megawatts.
Cody Simms (00:32:53):
Explain a bit more about how they're different. What do these look like? Why are they unique? And what makes them easier for utilities, I guess, to want to push for?
Adam Stein (00:33:03):
There's a lot of disagreement of what makes an advanced reactor. There are several laws that define it differently. Some folks in the industry define it differently than other folks in the industry, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has its own definition. This is with the overarching umbrella caveat that this is a very wide-ranging technology space. Most people consider small, modular reactors to be 300 megawatts or below, although advanced reactors can be larger than that. Advanced reactors generally use different coolants than light-water reactors. Meaning coolants like liquid sodium, liquid salt, molten lead, helium, things other than water. And they do this for several different reasons and they each have advantages and disadvantages and fit different markets because of their different operating characteristics and price points.
(00:34:04):
There are also light-water small modular reactors that are essentially pressurized or boiling water reactors that are just smaller, 300 megawatts or less. Most people don't consider them advanced reactors, but some people do. Like I said, it's very interesting how people define these. So let's just assume that they're all advanced reactors for this discussion. Advanced reactors fit different needs of the market, just like different vehicles do. If a large light-water reactor that we have in operation today is a tractor trailer, then advanced reactors are your SUVs and cars and motorcycles. And somebody that needs a motorcycle isn't going to buy an SUV, and vice versa. So they each have their own roles to play. It's not that they're all competing against each other. In fact, most of them are competing against natural gas. Some of them are very high temperature, like high-temperature gas reactors that are usually cooled with helium. They can get over 600 degrees centigrade.
(00:35:08):
Very, very, very hot to the point where they could even produce hydrogen just off of their heat instead of using electrolysis at all. Makes them a good candidate to use the heat output, instead of electricity output, for industrial processes that can't be decarbonized with almost any other technology. Then you have SMR light-water reactors, which are existing technology that's scaled down. They generally have passive safety systems. They don't have as many pumps or sometimes don't have any pumps at all. It's just natural convection that circulates the coolant. So they're passively safe. You just put the control rods in and they shut themselves down and they can cool themselves off of residual heat. And there's a range of technologies in between. The advantage of some of these, other than their specific application, is also their size. 300 megawatts roughly equals an old coal burner in terms of electricity capacity.
(00:36:15):
They fit well onto a grid connection that used to be for a coal plant or a small natural gas plant. So as we are replacing existing plants, they fit the needs or the existing characteristics of some of those sites and grid connections and water rights for cooling. And utilities can think about actually swapping technologies instead of doing an entirely new mega project for a gigawatt scale large light-water reactor or something else, using more of the infrastructure they already have. And also placing them potentially in communities that are comfortable with generating electricity, say, a coal community that wants to adopt new technology to keep their community together. Because otherwise when their coal plant shuts down, then they lose a large employer and it's difficult for them to carry on as a city or a community.
Yin Lu (00:37:10):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective. Here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community.
(00:37:40):
A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming. Like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to MCJCollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (00:38:12):
Given that definition and that footprint, is the priority from your seat, from the work you are doing to target existing coal plants that are on the roadmap for retirement and to try to move the needle in getting swap out replacements with advanced nuclear reactors?
Adam Stein (00:38:36):
Yes. We actually issued a report at the end of last year that proposes using what's known as early site permits through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to pre-approve many of those sites for building a new reactor on. Because the licensing process is so long, if you wait until that coal plant shuts down to then think about how to reuse that infrastructure, you'll have several years of gap between the coal plant shutting down and building anything new. Anything new. So you need to pre-plan. And one way to pre-plan is to get ahead of the licensing process and have that site already approved for building a new power plant on. Then you can start building a new plant before the coal plant shuts down instead of after and keep the community together. That's one example of how we are trying to enable that transition for those communities with new reactors.
Cody Simms (00:39:32):
Are there specific geographies in which you're focused?
Adam Stein (00:39:36):
The main area of opportunity is Appalachia. The Ohio River Valley, essentially, or what a lot of people know is the Rust Belt. Most of the older coal plants are in that region, although there are opportunities throughout the United States.
Cody Simms (00:39:55):
So this would be Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee. Roughly that area of the country, yeah?
Adam Stein (00:40:04):
Roughly, that's absolutely correct. Although in Tennessee Valley Authority area, which is larger and incorporates more the south, there's opportunities as well. And there are some older small fossil plants out in the west that are owned by individual utilities, individual municipal-owned utilities that own just one plant and it's for just their community. And they are trying to figure out what technology can actually provide 24/7 power for their community to replace their coal plants. They're not as connected to a larger grid as the eastern US is.
Cody Simms (00:40:44):
What needs to happen? Are there local laws that need to change? There's clearly change that needs to happen within the NRC, as you described earlier. Talk a bit about the overall work that would need to go into this vision that you all are pursuing.
Adam Stein (00:41:04):
The NRC needs to change dramatically. Thankfully, they have started that. They put together a strategic vision about a decade ago, had a very slow start to that. But in the last two years or so, progress has been made in finalizing some of the things that they started long ago. That's the good news. The bad news is, there's still a lot to do. And because these initiatives were taken on a piece at a time, we now have a patchwork of regulatory change that happens every year. Meaning anybody that is looking to license a plant now has to know what might be issued before they actually submit an application or what they want to try to submit a methodology to get approved separately.
(00:42:00):
That would look like something that's coming down the road but not finished yet. Every application for the next five to 10 years is going to be a one-off application. Which is very challenging for the NRC and the applicant to figure out not only what is the current state of regulation because it's changing a lot right now. But also at what point do they want to jump into that timeline to either get a new plant approved, how many changes to the regulation do they need to wait to occur before it's optimal for them to even try to get a license for their new technology.
Cody Simms (00:42:38):
It sounds like Congress has intervened fairly recently as well. There was a Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act that passed Congress in 2019. Does that have any teeth? Did it do anything?
Adam Stein (00:42:52):
That is one of many bills over the last five years that have actually passed or been introduced to modernize the NRC. There are two being considered right now in Congress that have both, separately, passed the House and the Senate that are very similar and that will lead to additional regulatory changes. But the Nuclear Energy Innovation Modernization Act or as it's normally known NIMA, require the NRC to make an entirely new licensing framework for advanced reactors. The NRC has since decided to make it available to any reactors, not just limited to advanced reactors, but it is dramatically different from the existing licensing frameworks. It's performance-based, technology-inclusive and risk-informed. I can unpack that a little bit. Risk-informed means that the regulation should focus on the things that are most critical to risk.
(00:43:49):
So focus on the regulatory attention to those areas first, instead of treating everything, including things that are very minimally important to risk, as equal. Technology-inclusive is important because it gets us away from the existing frameworks that were designed exclusively for large light-water reactors. The new regulations have to be applicable to any technology. And they do that or should do that by being performance-based. Performance-based means instead of saying you must do X, Y, Z to result in safety, very specific things, you focus on the objectives. What are the performance objectives? I usually explain the difference between performance-based and prescriptive as an analogy with a car. Prescriptive requirements would be, you must have turn signals on every corner. You must have four wheels.
(00:44:49):
You must have a steering wheel of a certain diameter. You have to have a certain clamping force on your brakes. The bumper must be a certain number of inches off the ground. Performance-based would be something like, you need to be able to signal to opposing traffic that you're going to change lanes. You need to be able to guide the car down the road and control its movement. You need to be able to stop within a certain distance. So setting the requirements as the objectives, what you want to happen and then innovation can happen underneath that. How are you going to meet those requirements? Instead of saying you must meet the requirement in a specific way. That will allow advanced reactors to be licensed while enabling their innovation, instead of asking for exemptions for things that don't meet what they're already doing.
Cody Simms (00:45:43):
I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I have to assume that people running the NRC today are following the path that they are meant to follow, which is ensuring safety and ensuring that nuclear power, if used in the United States, is used appropriately and isn't going to cause significant disasters. I have to assume, as individuals, they don't want the US to cede nuclear leadership to China or France or Korea or Russia. That they care about the country they live in and want to see innovation thrive.
(00:46:16):
But maybe the public hasn't been asking for this amount of change in innovation and thus this agency is in more of a world of protecting what we have, as opposed to pushing for change. I don't know. That would be where I would think humans could reasonably land in terms of a place or a point of view. If the United States is to follow the pathway that you envision, what needs to happen to help push for that change, to make that change a priority and to do so in a way that still enables safety and enables all of the things that we trust our government is delivering today?
Adam Stein (00:46:57):
I do believe that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does want to provide safe nuclear power to the US. They are not interested in ceding nuclear technological superiority to other countries or not. They consider that to be part of the promotional aspect of nuclear energy and they consider that to be the Department of Energy's job. So their focus is on safety and protecting the environment and in that focus, they have become very risk averse. The safest reactor is one that never has a problem, which is true. And they've also become litigation averse. They will do things as strictly as possible to avoid litigation, their regulations being questioned in court. The difference between what you alluded to of what the public wants for energy and what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can actually regulate is that the public doesn't actually get to make decisions on what's going to be licensed.
(00:48:09):
Utilities have to apply for an application. So the public has limited push in that sense to change the nuclear regulatory's decisions on anything. The industry also directly pays 90% of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's costs through fees. The taxpayer, in general, doesn't pay for the oversight of the regulator. Really, every safety regulator has a little bit different fee structure, but it can become a little challenging. In terms of risk and safety, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't actually have oversight over how safe is safe enough for radiation. In the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, Congress actually defined how safe is safe enough by endorsing EPA standard and gave the EPA overarching oversight over radiation protection to the public. They determined that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's regulations are sufficient because they're two orders of magnitude lower than EPA's. So that means the NRC has a lot of headroom to be innovative and still be lower than what Congress says is safe enough.
(00:49:30):
In terms of doing what's best for the public, while the NRC cannot be promotional to nuclear energy, they absolutely can do things that would ease regulation and enable new nuclear energy. The foundational legislation for the NRC specifically says, "Atomic energy should be used to the maximum extent possible to improve the general welfare." Nuclear energy should be used to the maximum extent possible to improve benefits to the public. The NRC doesn't actually consider that. They just consider, can this be safe to the public and the environment? Not, what does our decision actually do to the welfare of the public? If they did that, then they wouldn't be promotional, but they would be doing the other half of what a regulator should do, and that's working in the public interest directly.
Cody Simms (00:50:27):
If I'm a concerned citizen and I've been listening to you and I'm now convinced I need to go do something and make an impact, who do I talk to? Do I push my member of Congress? Do I push my senator? Do I go raise a sign and picket on the front yard of the NRC office? Where should I go?
Adam Stein (00:50:45):
A concerned citizen really could do all of those things, depending on how much they want to be part of advocacy. But I would suggest that they could sign up for our Build Nuclear Now project and participate in other grassroots public support for nuclear energy. Through that project it's a little bit more easily than contacting their own Congress member on their own. But another helpful and underutilized way that the public can participate in enabling new nuclear energy is participate in regulatory proceedings. Write a very short comment on any regulatory proceeding that's posted on the website for public comment. Say that you support this action or you don't and why. If you need more information, we provide that at Build Nuclear Now as well. But just actually being part of the process with just a few sentences and a few minutes of your time really can make a difference.
Cody Simms (00:51:50):
This would be the NRC's own regulatory proceedings or this would be at your local utility, for example?
Adam Stein (00:51:56):
Generally at the NRC right now. As projects get announced, hopefully, for building new projects in new communities, providing support in your own community for that project is also very helpful.
Cody Simms (00:52:12):
We haven't hit on, I think, two significant topics, maybe you can at least hit on quickly. Fuel and waste.
Adam Stein (00:52:19):
They are the same just at different ends of the supply chain. Fuel is uranium that has been mined and enriched to a certain percentage of a specific isotope. An isotope is the exact same element with a different number of neutrons. Generally conventional or traditional, as we've been saying in this conversation, large light-water reactors use 5% enriched U235, which is a specific isotope. Some advanced reactors will use up to 20% enriched U235. That supply chain is going to grow in the near future.
Cody Simms (00:52:59):
What's the difference between 5% enriched and 20% enriched? What does that mean?
Adam Stein (00:53:05):
The water coolant in large light-water reactors acts as what's known as a moderator. You have uranium that splits naturally through fission. It releases a neutron. The water slows that down, so it's more likely to hit another uranium atom and split it. And that's how you end up with a chain reaction. A nuclear chain reaction is actually good. That means that you're splitting as many atoms as you need to have just as many atoms as are leaving the reactor. The water helps slow them down to encourage that process. When you have some of these advanced reactors with different coolants, they don't slow the neutrons down intentionally. So they are higher energy when they hit another uranium atom. But they also don't reflect them back as well, so you lose more neutrons.
(00:53:58):
So you need a higher enrichment. Conventional water-based reactors are generally around 5%, other coolants that use higher energy spectrums are higher enrichment. But you generally also get higher burn-up, that means you use more of the fuel that you put into the reactor. When the fuel comes out of the reactor as spent fuel, there's different timelines for different reactors. Existing reactors are between 18 and 24 months, then they take a third of the fuel out of the reactor and put it in a pool to cool off for a couple years. And they put in a third new fresh fuel. So each bundle of fuel stays in the reactor between five and six years. That's with 5% enrichment.
Cody Simms (00:54:45):
This pool would be essentially the waste product that we talk about when we talk about nuclear waste. Is that correct?
Adam Stein (00:54:52):
Absolutely, yes. The fuel in the fuel assemblies that are taken out after 18 months still have about 90% of the energy left in them. It is considered spent fuel because there are other products that are created in the fuel that slow down the neutrons, but there's still 90% of the energy left if that fuel was to be recycled later into fresh fuel. That's why it's usually referred to, amongst nuclear experts, as spent fuel, not as waste, because there's still a lot of useful energy there. Advanced reactors generally use out more of the fuel before it's taken out of the reactor, so you don't have 90% left. Depending on the fuel cycle, you could use almost all of the fuel. In certain advanced reactors that aren't actually under development right now but have been in the past, they breed new fuel. They make more fuel than they use. So in the end, you're left with 105% of the fuel that you started.
Cody Simms (00:55:59):
My quick internal processing on everything you just said is, correct me where I'm wrong, the conventional reactors are using fuel that is less enriched. Which essentially means it's less, I don't know, volatile is the right word. But less hot, less fierce, maybe is the word I'm looking for. And yet, it can be used over a longer period of time and to a greater degree of overall degradation in most advanced reactor designs.
Adam Stein (00:56:32):
Not quite. Conventional reactors use less of the energy in the fuel. They also start with a lower enrichment. It's not a correct analogy. For most people this will make more sense. You can think of fuel for conventional reactors as being 87 octane, and for advanced reactors as being 93 octane. You think of it as that being higher power. It's not a direct analogy, but it helps people process that conceptually. When you take the fuel out of a conventional reactor, because the fuel cycle is so short, 18 to 24 months, you still have 90% of the energy left in the fuel. When you do that with an advanced reactor, some advanced reactors can go five years or even 20 years before refueling and you end up burning up the majority of the energy in the fuel before you ever take it out of the reactor. So there's less high energy left in the fuel or the waste when it comes out of the reactor.
Cody Simms (00:57:35):
Super-helpful. Then maybe the last question I have on fuel is, if all of the reactors deployed in the US today are these conventional reactors, does the US have access to the fuel source that these advanced reactors need?
Adam Stein (00:57:48):
Yes, but just barely. Right now, there are only two countries in the world that can make the more enriched uranium, which is usually called high assay, low enriched uranium or ALU. The US just became one of those two by starting a pilot plant in Ohio that can make a little bit less than one ton of it a year. That plant can scale up substantially and Congress just approved funding to do so. But right now, we're just starting the supply chain for advanced reactor fuel.
Cody Simms (00:58:21):
The other country would be Russia?
Adam Stein (00:58:22):
The other country would be Russia.
Cody Simms (00:58:24):
Do they have deployed advanced reactors?
Adam Stein (00:58:26):
They have test reactors that use advanced reactor grade fuel, so does China. The US actually has some test and research reactors that are even more highly enriched as well, but they use very little fuel and it lasts for a very long time. Deploying things at commercial scale requires a large buildup of the supply chain.
Cody Simms (00:58:51):
Going on the other side of the fuels' conversation, these pools or spent fuel, not waste, as we shall call it, where do these end up? Do they live right next door to the reactors typically?
Adam Stein (00:59:05):
Right now, they all live right next to the reactors, in either pools where they cool for several years or in dry storage casks, which are essentially concrete bunkers. The federal government has a mandate to take the spent fuel and permanently store it somewhere, but has not acted on that contract. And because of that default has actually had to pay utilities for the cost of storing spent fuel on site for now. There is a renewed effort to also look at reprocessing, which would take the spent fuel and recycle it into fresh fuel. Other countries already do this at a large scale, including France. But that costs a little bit more than just buying fresh fuel. Uranium is actually fairly cheap for the energy you get out of it, so recycling would be an additional cost. The US doesn't have a permanent repository right now. By law that's Yucca Mountain, but that project has stalled and been ultimately shelved by the last several federal administrations.
Cody Simms (01:00:16):
Clearly, nobody wants spent fuel near their town, which is an understandable concern.
Adam Stein (01:00:23):
That's actually not the concern. There are several towns that have said, "We would be willing to host spent fuel." There is a waste storage pilot plant called WIP in New Mexico, that is a federal facility. The town nearby is a welcome partner with that. When they did the site characterization near Yucca Mountain, the NRC even found that the local community supported that project. It's generally the state level that opposes having the spent fuel. So not the people that would be living next to it, but the state as a whole.
Cody Simms (01:01:08):
Why is that?
Adam Stein (01:01:09):
That's a political question that is difficult to answer.
Cody Simms (01:01:12):
One last question. I do want to make sure we hit on your work at Breakthrough Institute and what the institute does, but last question on the nuclear side of things. Which is, you're focused on advanced reactors and the development and deployments and eventual readiness of our energy systems to get them deployed. Where is innovation happening today? I hear of Idaho National Labs a lot in terms of new projects that are going. I know there was a bunch of news late last year about the MARVEL reactor that got some DOE approvals, I believe. Where should we all be focused in terms of watching new progress in this area?
Adam Stein (01:01:52):
The progress is really nationwide at this point. The Idaho National Lab is the nation's lead nuclear lab, as mandated by the Department of Energy, so they are leading a lot of the innovation. They're developing the MARVEL reactor, which is a very small micro-reactor that is intended to be a testbed essentially for several technologies. They also have two initiatives to reuse containment structures from old, demo reactors for testing new reactors. Essentially put your technology in their containment to test it out for a while, instead of building a whole new containment just for your demo project. That's enabling innovation and lowering costs for new entrants, particularly for micro-reactors. They are also planning to be the host to many of the first deployment of even commercial-scale reactors, Oklo and New Scale both plan to have their first deployments at Idaho National Laboratory. Although it is not necessarily the easiest location to build a nuclear reactor.
(01:03:05):
Because it's very dry, water resources are scarce and it's very high altitude, making thermal generation challenging for any thermal generation type plants. There are several companies that have worked with other labs. For instance, Argonne is working on a lot of fuel recycling or enrichment technologies for the fuel cycle and Oak Ridge National Lab works on a lot of the supercomputing for these innovations to both prove designs and thermodynamics and all kinds of other very useful analysis. Some companies are taking a different approach altogether. Westinghouse, for instance, is working on an AP300, which is a scaled down version of their AP1000. They already have some experience building the AP1000, so they thought about how can we reuse the exact same technology, same learning, and scale it down for different markets.
(01:04:06):
Kairos is taking a very different approach. They're building multiple non-nuclear and then nuclear demonstration-scale reactors to actually operate them. And get experience not only operating their technology at a smaller scale, but also through the licensing process with demo reactors to use that to reduce risk as they build their first-of-a-kind large plant. So they can try to avoid some of the first-of-a-kind cost and timescale overruns that are normally experienced. There are 25 developers that are currently in some sort of pre-application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They will not all succeed, but that's to be expected in any technology, that you'll have new entrants that just don't pan out. But that is a more diverse set of private investment looking at new technologies than the nuclear industry has had in 50 years.
Cody Simms (01:05:11):
All right. Thank you for that incredibly broad and deep dive into the state of nuclear in the US and in particular what's going on with advanced reactors. Maybe just give a minute or two on what the Breakthrough Institute is, which is the organization where you work, and how your role fits into the broader mandate there.
Adam Stein (01:05:31):
The Breakthrough Institute is a research institute that focuses on technological and innovative solutions to societies and environmental problems. So we try to think of new ways to solve problems that already exist that are insufficiently being addressed by the status quo. My nuclear innovation team focuses on enabling new nuclear energy deployment and does that by identifying actual barriers and actual solutions to these problems. Then tries to get them implemented, instead of doing broad overarching research only. That is interesting, but doesn't actually solve the problem. We want to find the problems and actually fix them. Which is part of the reason we do a lot of work in the regulatory space, addressing areas that haven't been looked at in decades.
Cody Simms (01:06:30):
Adam, thank you for joining us today. Is there anything else I should have asked you?
Adam Stein (01:06:35):
Well, I'd like to note, briefly, that we don't oppose large light-water reactors in any way. We just see advanced reactors as the opportunity to address a lot of challenges that cannot be addressed by large light-water reactors or other clean energy technologies. And the barriers that we see in front of them that need to be solved, we're trying to do so. I also like to note that we didn't discuss fusion at all. Fusion is very different than fission and has its own challenges. But currently, while fusion has made significant progress in the last five years, there are no commercially viable fusion designs right now. We do work on fusion licensing and regulation to make sure that's ready for them when the technology exists, but fusion has breakthroughs to go through and you cannot schedule a breakthrough. You can plan for it and have a pathway to innovation and iteration that you think will get you to that point, but breakthroughs are sporadic and unplannable.
Cody Simms (01:07:49):
I was going to ask if you thought we had a timetable for commercially-scaled fusion, but I think I know what you're going to say to that.
Adam Stein (01:07:58):
It's too challenging to predict anything. It's really just a guess. If you have a timetable that you're confident about, then you are just confident that a specific technology will get to that breakthrough at a specific point. And that's just really a guess.
Cody Simms (01:08:14):
Anything else? Can't end on that. You can't end on, we're all just guessing.
Adam Stein (01:08:18):
Wow. That's probably true. In our view, with the best analysis and the best research that we can find or do ourselves, nuclear energy has to be, in some sense, in some way, part of the energy system to ever get to net-zero. So it's not a matter just of how much nuclear energy do we expect in the future. And whether you think one scenario is too optimistic or too pessimistic, it is highly unlikely we will ever get to net-zero with many different problems to solve without it. So we need to start developing it now and removing barriers to innovation now so it can ultimately play that role.
Cody Simms (01:09:14):
Adam, thank you so much.
Adam Stein (01:09:16):
Thank you.
Jason Jacobs (01:09:17):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (01:09:21):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (01:09:30):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at MCJCollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter @MCJPod.
Yin Lu (01:09:43):
For weekly climate op-eds, jobs, community events, and investment announcements from our MCJ venture funds, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Cody Simms (01:09:53):
Thanks, and see you next episode
