A Good Day for Nuclear Energy

Yes, yes, yes!

You can sum up the actions announced by the White House yesterday in one word: deployment.

In fact, the name of the event was White House Summit on Nuclear Deployment, for good reason.

Deployment is hard where nuclear energy is concerned. But does it have to be? The answer is “no” and the Biden-Harris Administration is banking on the idea that if you bring the right people to the table, problems can find solutions.

To that end, the Administration announced the formation of a Nuclear Power Project Management and Delivery working group. While led by key federal government players essential to the process (such as the Department of Energy), it will engage those stakeholders who are designing, developing and (eventually) constructing our new nuclear energy facilities. There are many lessons-learned from the recent Vogtle project, for instance, that could benefit future nuclear energy construction projects. Sharing that information (similar to what INPO does for plant operations and with adequate IP protections) could make future projects run smoother and more efficiently, even with diverse technologies.

Having utilities, investors (energy intensive industries), labor and others involved, as planned, is vital to making this process more inclusive and, frankly, more destined to succeed in “delivering an efficient and cost-effective deployment of clean, reliable nuclear energy and ensuring that learnings translate to cost savings for future construction and deployment,” as the official Fact Sheet states.

The Military Role

The U.S. Army will soon release a Request for Information to help develop a deployment program for SMRs and microreactors at U.S. Army sites. There are roughly more than 400 of those of various sizes across the U.S. with the larger ones ideal for smaller advanced nuclear technology.

The U.S. Air Force and, separately Project Pele, are already making progress that will help inform the Army initiative. The military will be a strong partner in developing technology that can most certainly fit civilian applications (data centers and manufacturing centers), and in doing so make them available to utilities and industry much faster.

Department of Energy

The DOE is our nuclear energy NASA of the space race days. Yesterday’s announcement came with two important links: a “primer” on advanced reactors and a “capital cost reduction pathway tool” to “assess cost drivers for new projects” prepared by a team from Idaho National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The “primer” is notable for including the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor in the “advanced” category. As a Gen III+ design with passive safety systems and modular construction it certainly qualifies. Two AP1000s just made Plant Vogtle in Georgia America’s single largest carbon-free energy generation source.

It’s also important as an educational tool for new generations of nuclear energy supporters to show that nuclear technology is evolving, just as the technology they use in their everyday lives continues to evolve.

And it speaks truths. Nuclear energy is carbon-free. I once recall being asked at an event to take down a stand-up banner that proclaimed nuclear as clean energy because some in attendance found it offensive. Nuclear is clean energy. Always has been. The safety of the current fleet and a strong nuclear regulator go hand-in-hand. The NRC is working to adapt its best-in-class processes to the licensing of non-light-water reactors while continuing to fulfill its mission.

The Bottom Line

It’s all coming together, but there is much work left to do this decade to achieve greatness in the next.

This event was needed. We must maintain the visibility of the effort. And the momentum.

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Of Data Centers and Aluminum Smelters

Have you noticed? Things are popping for nuclear energy (in a good way). A slew of news stories are charting a pathway to a nuclear energy future that holds a tremendous amount of promise.

The month of March kicked off with Amazon Web Services announcing a deal with Talen Energy to acquire a data center complex adjacent to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station in Pennsylvania, a two-unit nuclear plant that generates nearly 2,500 Megawatts of carbon-free, reliable electricity. Susquehanna directly feeds to the data center complex, known as Cumulus. Amazon used to only talk about renewables when talking about carbon-free energy resources, so this move to nuclear is significant.

This week, we saw a super encouraging announcement from Google about an initiative “to accelerate the deployment of advanced clean electricity technologies, including advanced nuclear, next-gen geothermal, long-duration storage, clean hydrogen, and others,” according to a LinkedIn post from Maud Texier, Global Director of Clean Energy and Decarbonization Development at Google.

Google is teaming with Microsoft and steel-producer Nucor Corporation to aggregate the clean energy needs of these large power users. That need, 24/7/365, will serve to drive development of these clean energy technologies. For nuclear that likely means SMRs and microreactors.

The line of the announcement that stuck out to me: “and make them more widely available for all energy consumers.” That’s true leadership.

It’s the type of bold statement that has the power to create a groundswell for other power-hungry industries to re-think the art of the possible where nuclear energy is concerned. (Credit also to X-energy and Dow).

Sounding the Alarm on Aluminum

Which brings me to the Canary Media (aptly named) article by Maria Gallucci published Tuesday.

The article hit home because I used to live in Warrick County, Indiana, home to Alcoa’s Warrick smelter, which has been on a roller coaster of fits and starts in the past decade with announcements that its was being permanently retired only to have some of its potlines re-started, then at least one curtailed in 2022.

As Gallucci points out, our clean energy future needs aluminum. Badly. She writes:

Aluminum is a key component of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, heat pumps and power cables. It’s mind-bogglingly ubiquitous beyond the energy transition, too, found in everything from soda cans, deodorant and smartphones to car doors, bridges and skyscrapers. The lightweight material is the second-most-used metal in the world after steel.

But the U.S. is losing its aluminum production infrastructure. Plants are closing or being curtailed as the worldwide price for this commodity fluctuates and concerns about the climate grow.

Aluminum production also requires a lot of electricity, and in many cases that electricity is generated by coal. Such is the case for the Warrick smelter, which is powered by the four-unit Warrick Power Plant. The plant had scrubbers installed which helped reduce its pollution output but not eliminate it.

Enter nuclear energy

In 2022, the Department of Energy identified more than 300 existing and retired coal plants that could house a nuclear plant instead. For those coal plants located adjacent to aluminum smelters it would be a radical clean energy transition – really good high-paying jobs and immense environmental benefits. Organizations such as DOE-NE's GAIN, EPRI, the Nuclear Innovation Alliance and others are providing the supporting research to show how it can work. It will be up to the nuclear energy industry to show we can do this.

The coal-to-nuclear effort is picking up steam. The Financial Times reported this week that work is starting soon by TerraPower on their Natrium reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, at the site of a retiring coal plant. Currently, the sodium fast reactor is expected to be operating in 2030. That’s a timeframe that is advantageous for delivering carbon-free power to other coal plant sites that now support aluminum smelters, perhaps reinvigorating the U.S. aluminum industry and enabling deployment of more clean energy resources in the U.S.

To sum up

We are in one of nuclear energy's most critical decades. Nuclear has the potential to rise, or fall, based on the work that will unfold in the next six years to commercialize new technologies and secure orders for existing technologies.

The moment for nuclear energy's finest hour is upon us.