Is Nuclear Already Squandering its Renaissance?

Jacopo Buongiorno is Professor of Nuclear Science & Engineering at MIT and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. Nick O’Hara spoke to him about the state of the industry – and its seeming inability to capitalise on favourable shifts in public attitudes toward nuclear energy

Nick O’Hara: It seems longer, but it was only two years ago that we felt like we were riding the crest of a wave, as we designed the first season of the Gridlocked podcast. You introduced me to Joshua Goldstein, who was working on a film with Oliver Stone about how humanity needed to look again at nuclear energy if we were to get real about combatting climate change. You had led a research project that provided the evidence base to persuade California’s Governor to reverse the decision to close Diablo Canyon, his state’s last operational nuclear power plant. A new breed of pro-nuclear environmental activists were making their voices heard as we moved into 2023. Oliver Stone’s film was released, fortuitously at the same time as our podcast (!) and the year culminated at the Dubai COP28 Summit with the landmark declaration of more than 20 countries – including the US, France, UK and Canada – calling for a tripling of global nuclear energy production by 2050. While no clear roadmap for achieving this was specified, the mere recognition of the key role of nuclear energy in reaching Net Zero was a significant symbolic breakthrough.

I look at things from a communications perspective; it felt to me that the narrative on nuclear energy was changing. However, despite the improved ‘mood music’ I was concerned that the new story wasn’t being told anywhere near as effectively as it could be. Roll on to the summer of 2024 and, far from capitalising on favourable headwinds, it feels like we are in danger of slipping backwards. As I say, I’m looking at this from a communications perspective. I turn to you for the technical expertise – is nuclear already ‘blowing’ its second coming?

Jacopo Buongiorno: It’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, in the US and most everywhere else there is very strong support for the current fleet of nuclear power plants. They provide 24/7, carbon-free, inexpensive electricity: we expect that practically all these plants will continue to operate for decades to come, which entails significant investment in license renewal, maintenance and equipment upgrades. All this is happening and is great news for the environment, the industry and the local communities that host these plants. Furthermore, there is broad recognition of the role that nuclear energy could play in decarbonizing all sectors of the economy, beyond the electric grid. On the other hand, outside China, new nuclear plants are not being built at the pace required to displace a substantial amount of fossil fuels. This is due to a plethora of challenges in the US and Europe around supply chain, for both fuel and equipment, licensing of new designs, financing, market conditions and availability of qualified workforce.

NO: Okay, so there’s a lot to delve into here … let’s start with the supply chain issues. Is this the key reason why building new large reactors has become prohibitively expensive in the US or United Kingdom compared to say, South Korea or Russia?

JB: The immaturity of the supply chain is a major root cause of the cost overruns and schedule delays we have seen in new reactor builds in the US and Europe in the past 15 years. Things are getting better for a handful of designs that have been built in multiple units, such as Westinghouse’s AP1000 and EDF’s EPR. GEH’s BWRX-300 project in Canada is also intended to be the first of a series of potentially up to eight units, which would facilitate investment in the supply chain. The Chinese, the Koreans and the Russians are much better positioned in terms of supply chain simply because they have been building new reactors continuously for 50 years. The supply chain for nuclear-grade equipment is either exercised or lost very quickly because maintaining those qualifications and expertise is expensive and not justifiable unless there are active recurring revenue streams.

Fuel is a different story. All LWR-based advanced reactors, for example, the AP1000, BWRX-300, Nuscale, Rolls Royce SMR, etc use less than five percent enriched uranium in the form of uranium dioxide fuel pellets which is a well-known and generally cost-effective technology. However, prices of natural uranium (yellow cake), uranium conversion and enrichment have increased significantly in the past two years due to a combination of decades-long underinvestment by the US in these basic steps of the nuclear fuel cycle, and the simultaneous reduction of reliance on Russia for these services after its invasion of Ukraine. This has created a mismatch between supply and demand that has driven up prices. Steps are being taken to grow back our capacity: I don’t see this as a serious obstacle to the growth of nuclear energy in the US and globally in the long term.

Other advanced reactor designs, not using water as a coolant, need either higher enrichment – between five and 20 percent – or a different fuel form altogether; for example, TRISO, metallic fuel or both. Here the supply chain is deficient, to put it mildly. In particular, fabrication of the popular TRISO fuel is an expensive, cumbersome and delicate batch-type process with very tight specifications, since the safety case for TRISO-fuelled reactors hinges heavily upon the fuel quality. So far only the Germans got TRISO right at industrial scale back in the 70s and 80s. The US has demonstrated good TRISO fuel quality in a limited R&D program run by the national labs. Investments are being made by the private sector, assisted by the US Government, but whether these new fuels will be ready for the advanced reactors that are being built now is a real concern. Needless to say, no fuel, no reactors!

NO: ‘No fuel, no reactors!’ That could catch on as a strapline.

JB: Ha! Or better still, ‘no fuel, no party!’

NO: We could work with that! You just mentioned Germany getting TRISO-fuelled reactors right … and I started off by reminiscing about the optimism of 2022/ 2023. Of course it wasn’t all good news for nuclear: 2023 was also the year that Germany closed its last three remaining reactors. The response from the industry seemed surprising to me. I heard a lot of groans, but I couldn’t see who was leading the call – or mobilising – to reverse the decision, despite the efforts of some of us to highlight the madness of Germany’s energy policy …

JB: I think Germany is a lost cause for nuclear, at least in the foreseeable future. Germany’s political system, on both sides of the aisle, has embraced a fideistic 100 percent-renewable approach to the energy transition, in which nuclear plants have been permanently shut down and replaced by a mix of natural gas from Russia and solar and wind on German soil. The approach so far has produced negligible reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in their energy prices, a severe degradation of their energy security, and most recently an almost comical return to dirty coal power plants in an attempt to stem Russian gas supplies. What’s worse, Germany has been trying to bully every other country in Europe into moving away from nuclear energy and adopting their failed energy policy … overall, an unmitigated disaster. I don’t think it makes much sense to spend time and resources on the nuclear conversation in Germany at the moment.

NO: Well, let’s try to move on to more positive territory. What’s the state of play with progress on advanced nuclear? There was a lot of buzz around Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) in 2022 and 2023, how much of that publicity and PR actually converted into tangible deployments?

JB: Some, but not a lot. There is one project that could be characterized as SMR underway in North America at the moment: the BWXR-300 project at OPG’s Darlington site in Ontario, Canada. We could also see a new project based on X-energy’s high-temperature gas-cooled reactor technology in Texas, and finally one in Wyoming which will demonstrate Terrapower’s sodium-cooled reactor design, although that reactor does not use a modular construction approach.

The basic misunderstanding regarding SMRs is about their economic value proposition. Yes, each reactor will be less expensive and easier to construct than a traditional large reactor (LWR). This is expected to reduce the uncertainties and financial risk for each project, which is a very good thing. Moreover, there are many potential applications – for example, small power grids, repowering of coal plants, co-location with data centers and factories – where an SMR makes sense, especially if the unique attributes of nuclear – i.e., carbon-free, 24/7, stable prices, etc – can be monetized. However, the jury is still very much out on whether SMRs will produce energy at a cost that is lower than large LWRs. In fact, in my opinion they will not, because the costs of equipment, operators and fuel do not scale linearly with power output, so despite the creative efforts in design simplification and automation, I think electricity and heat from SMRs will be more expensive than from large reactors. This applies to water and non-water-cooled reactor designs.

NO: What I find completely baffling is why there isn’t more excitement about portable ‘plug and play’ microreactors – AKA nuclear batteries (NBs). It could just be that NBs are the best thing since sliced bread, as the expression goes. They are probably also the best thing most people – outside of the nuclear industry – have never heard of. What’s going on with comms for NBs?

JB: Ah, this is my favorite topic! NBs have many interesting features. Firstly, they are co-located with end users, which eliminates most of the transmission costs and price markups. Secondly, their capacity can be incrementally provisioned, which minimizes the magnitude of the project’s upfront debt. Thirdly, in combination with modularized production facilities NBs can make finished products whose price is less sensitive to the cost of the energy input. Because they are so small, they will generate energy at higher cost than large reactors, so they don’t make sense for commodity markets like the grid. BUT NBs can enable nuclear energy penetration in non-commodity markets. In my group we have shown that there is a whole range of important markets in which the features of NBs will give them a natural competitive edge over all other energy systems, including the grid itself, large nuclear reactors, renewables and fossil fuels alternatives. Examples of these markets include production of high-value added steel, glass and food products, or powering mining sites and clean hydrogen facilities at the community scale. This is a new way to think about nuclear energy altogether, one that may not be naturally suited to a traditional electric utility business model.

NO: Yes! This is why I say they’re the best thing since sliced bread … they are humanity’s chance to create tomorrow’s world, today.

JB: I agree, and this also points to a broader question of why isn’t the nuclear industry more active in branding its products with the general public. Given the potential societal value of advanced nuclear technologies such as the NBs, companies like Westinghouse and BWXT, to mention only a couple of representative examples, are well positioned to become household names like Boeing or Apple. However, the nuclear industry is constantly bogged down by a range of important but ‘inward’ challenges related to supply chain, regulatory reform, financing.

So, to your opening point about the industry’s story not being told effectively, we need to change how nuclear does communications. There is a history and culture of low engagement with media and public, which comes from the influence of the US nuclear navy’s modus operandi, and decades of punitive policies and bad press. The result is that branding and market-facing engagement have always taken the back seat. I’m interested in stimulating a reversal of this situation because nuclear will reach its full potential economic value only if there is a genuine market ‘pull’ vs the traditional industry/government ‘push’.

NO: Amen to that.

Jacopo Buongiorno will be one of the speakers at The Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES) symposium on Harnessing the Unlimited Potential of Uranium to Supply Clean Energy to the World at the MIT Campus on October 24^th-25^th. Click here to book your place.