AI is recharging the nuclear power debate

Dr. Jeffrey King: We are entering a time of national competitiveness. How we power our technology is going to be a big piece of that. I think it is very important that we, in the United States, do not fall behind in AI and these technologies, and nuclear’s a very, very necessary or a very, very desirable piece of that.

Teri Viswanath: Welcome to CoBank’s Power Plays. I’m Terry Vishwanath, the energy economist at CoBank. I’m joined by my co-host and banking colleague, Esther Simon. Today, we’re talking about nuclear power, why a technology that has powered the grid for decades is suddenly back at the center of the conversations we’re having about reliability and meeting the next wave of large load growth.

Esther Simon: Nuclear has become an increasing part of that conversation because it offers something unusual: large amounts of firm around-the-clock generation without direct carbon emissions.

Viswanath: To really help us sort through the technology and maybe the obstacles to getting at the next wave of nuclear generation online is that we’re going to speak and catch up today on this podcast program with Dr. Jeffrey King. He’s a professor and founding director of the nuclear engineering program at Tennessee Tech University. Hello, Jeff.

King: Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Viswanath: Jeff, I know you just mentioned you’re two weeks into the semester. When you talk to your students, what is the one misconception that you often have to correct about why nuclear developments slow?

King: It’s a good question. It isn’t a single factor. I’d say, the one we obviously always combat is the belief that it was solely one of the accidents that shut down the industry, that it was Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island, or Fukushima more recently. It wasn’t simply that we were running full tilt ahead and then we had a couple of incidents and everything stopped. There was an economic driver there as well.

It was the thought there was going to be a strong demand, and then in the ‘70s, you had the oil crisis hit. I think part of it is we discovered conservation or the need to spend large amounts of money on large capital projects to provide the large amounts of baseload power was not necessary for a very long period of time. Certain things have changed recently that are leading us in the direction of looking at nuclear power again.

Simon: When people talk about a nuclear renaissance or this resurgence of nuclear, what are some things that listeners of those conversations should take seriously? Maybe, what should they treat with a little more caution?

King: There’s a couple of terms that get used a lot. I gently try to tell people not to use them. One of them is nuclear renaissance because we’ve used that term about three or four times. It’s not as bad as Manhattan Project 2.0. We’re in a fragile period. I think it’s a period of time for those of us who are big nuclear supporters to be very excited. But it’s also time to be very, very cautious because we still don’t have the deep public trust and confidence that other industries do. We are in a time period where the demand for power just took off again.

We’ve got this wonderful new technology, meaning artificial intelligence or machine learning, whatever you want to call that technology, that’s just taking hold, that is going to massively change everything. And it is a very power-hungry technology. That is going to drive us towards needing to address that in a utility sense. That drives the discussion about nuclear. We also need to be cautious and not think that just because it’s a new time period, it’s this new renaissance that we don’t still have to learn the lessons or we can forget the lessons that 80 years of experience with very smart people have taught us.

Viswanath: There seems to be the existential threat of not having enough power, not having enough carbon-free power, maybe has not risen to the level of getting us there. It’s not the same singular terrifying fear that Nazi Germany is building an atomic bomb. I’m curious what the next wave will look like. Maybe the bold, big Manhattan Plan project board looks a little different. What does that next wave look like?

King: Admiral Hyman Rickover, in some ways, is regarded as the father of the nuclear navy, but also, in many ways, the civilian nuclear movement. He’s got a great monograph about paper reactors versus real reactors. It points out that paper reactors are always wonderful. They’re on time, they’re under budget, they never have problems, and they look great. You spend enormous amounts of time solving what you thought on paper were apparently trivial problems. I think it’s going to be a slow climb. We could change that equation, but it’s going to take a national will and the scope of the Manhattan Project.

You have to remember what the Manhattan Project was in terms of actual amounts of resource. It was, a significant portion of the war budget was going into that project. On top of it, you basically had the scientists, engineers, and people involved in that project, and you took them to a remote location and not forcibly told them they couldn’t leave, but you put them in conditions they only tolerated because it was wartime. I’m beginning to think it may take the government committing to not just a few billion dollars, but a lot of billions of dollars to just get it started.

Simon: I’ve heard quite a bit of talk recently about SMR [small modular reactor], so I’m very interested in that conversation. What remains experimental within that timeframe? Then, what milestones should the industry be watching for?

King: I think there’s a lot to be said for the tried-and-true technology. The water-cooled reactors are very well-proven. I do sometimes think it’s a little bit like automobiles. There’s actually a whole lot of concepts other than the standard internal combustion engine that are really cool if you’re a car geek. The water-cooled reactors, the BWRX 300 design, for instance, is a boiling water reactor. The new scale reactors, the Voyagers, were modified pressurized water reactors.

I think in a lot of ways, there’s a lot to be said for those being probably the easiest lift. We have a project in the Tennessee Valley Authority building a boiling water reactor, that BWRX 300 design, that I’m watching very closely because I think that one has a really good chance of making it over the finish line and not having a whole lot of new challenges. But we also have new reactor designs. We do have some molten salt reactors here, the Kairos design reactor. I’ve toured their facility a lot and gone and seen their facility a lot. They have a very well-thought-out stepwise plan to get to commercialization.

I think the two milestones to watch is if one of the small, water-cooled reactor designs makes it through the gate. That’ll be the first thing, but then it’ll be, are there ones that follow it? The promise of small, water-cooled reactors is not realized at one, and it’s probably not even realized at two or three. It’s not until you get to four or five, 10, you start seeing the benefits of the factory construction and the economy of scale that we’re hoping for there.

Viswanath: What are we looking at in terms of potential for nuclear development? What level of development do you see?

King: Potentially, it’s very high. It’s going to be a matter of what we, as a society, decide we want in terms of our power mix. If I were to speculate, I would suspect that you’ll see a lot of the restarts, probably come to pass. There were a number of reactors that shut down because their economic case wasn’t affordable at the time. That’s the Palisades project, for instance.

Then there’s others. I forget what the name of it is, but it’s the renaming of Three Mile Island. They’re restarting that one because it has a very long history of running efficiently, and effectively, and safely. I think there’s a lot to be said there. I think you’re going to see more of these buildouts and more of these steps, definitely. I think you’ll continue to see the relicensing. You’ll continue to see the requests to keep operating what we call the generation 2 reactors, that are approaching the end of their licensing. I don’t think right now anyone is going to be eager to shut those down. That they’re much more likely to request another 20-year life extension from the NRC, providing they can prove that you’ll see that operated.

And then, and then I hope that we do, you know, we do see some of these developments coming to pass at that time period. I mean, it would be very exciting if the Natrium reactor started or any of the other projects.

But I think the real key is it’s going to have to be more than one. I It can’t be just one of a kind on any of these. To really say we’ve turned the corner, you’ve got to see multiple builds.

Simon: How significant is fuel availability as a factor in the next generation of reactors?

King: The availability of uranium is really not a big problem. There’s lots of uranium out there, and you don’t need much uranium in a relative sense. The challenge actually is some of the processing along the way to get to the reactor grade. That’s where you start talking about the enrichment. In some of the advanced reactors, they need to enrich the fuel more. That’s where the bottleneck is. It’s not so much the fuel availability as it’s the enrichment availability.

Conversion is also an interesting topic. We only have, right now, one place that does conversion in the United States, which is a chemical transformation from the form that we buy and sell uranium, which is yellowcake, to turn it into uranium hexafluoride, which is the form that we use when we enrich it. If we didn’t have access to that, we actually would have a lot of difficulty.

Viswanath: The growth of our nuclear development occurred at the same time that there was this important megatons-to-megawatts program occurring. Disarmament was leading to a lot of fuel that needed a place or needed a home.  Now we find ourselves in an interesting world. Fuel, we don’t need a lot of it, we still need it. It may be more costly because we actually have to build the supply chain. What do we do with spent fuel? Let’s talk a little bit about those concerns and what’s happening there.

King: The energy density in uranium is about 50 million times more than the energy density of oil, for instance. You have this just massive energy density, which means that you don’t need much material, which means that things like waste issues and fuel supply are much less of a problem. We’ve put off dealing with it for quite a while. I like to remind people, in many cases, it means that the waste from 50 years of nuclear power is still at the plants. It’s important to remember that that waste form is a solid ceramic. It’s not a glowing green liquid.

I’ll use a Tennessee example because that’s where I am now. We got to visit Watts Bar, and we’re going to visit again in a few weeks. When you stand in their parking lot, you can see another parking lot where all the spent fuel casks from their entire operating history are in that parking lot. It gives you a feel for how small this problem actually is. It’s not a non-problem, but it’s not massive tailing piles or massive fly ash piles like you’re dealing with some of the other industries.

But we do have to deal with it, and the hope that we’ll, once again, go back and look at reprocessing. That’s recycling the waste to produce more fuel. We are going to have to approach that carefully. You have to approach with concern for the people involved, and you can’t just force your way into them. I hope that we remember that lesson as we begin to start talking about this waste issue again, or we will simply repeat history.

Simon: Maybe along those lines, is there anything that others or other countries have done with regard to waste policy community siting that there can be lessons learned or that we maybe should be studying?

Viswanath: The important issue here is that, wow, half of the capacity being built right now in an accelerated way is occurring in China.

King: One important thing to remember, of course, with China is that it’s a very different government and a very different society. The Chinese approach to many projects and convincing the public to do things is not going to work in our society. They don’t have elected representatives who have to get re-elected every couple of years. We have to figure out that.

I think France is a better example. They spent a lot of effort bringing the public along, and really thinking about nuclear, and conveying how important it was to the public good. I find that many American nuclear facilities are not what you would call beautiful. Whereas you go to France, and there was one of their waste sites that we went to, and it was surrounded by glass sculptures and artwork, and it actually hosted an art gallery inside the facility. There was much more of an effort of thinking of these as a public benefit, as opposed to just this industrial structure that we were going to build.

That’s really the lesson, is that you have to approach these things carefully and, very often, work with the public. Start early and help the public understand what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, and how it benefits them, and also letting it benefit them. If you have to take a negative in your community, whether that’s a waste landfill, a data center, whatever, and you see no benefit from it, you have a massive incentive to push back against it. Our society allows a lot of pushback, and so we have to figure out how to share those benefits.

Simon: Thinking about the entire conversation that we’ve had here, what’s one piece of advice that you might give to utilities and or policymakers as they prepare for this next chapter of nuclear development?

King: I think one of them is not to get too caught up in the shiny new technology. There’s, I think, a lot of opportunity to latch onto the new thing and abandon the thing that worked well. There’s also a certain amount of, at times, claims that I think are beyond what can actually be supported. Having some caution and thinking about what really works. What technologies are proven versus what technologies are promissory?

I think, from a policymaker standpoint, I think also looking at choosing the right places to do these first-of-a-kinds. Something like Tennessee Valley Authority, which is one of the reasons I’m here, Tennessee Valley Authority is a great place to do a first-of-a-kind nuclear project. They’re big. They’re a mixture of corporate and government. They can absorb a price shock.

Viswanath: Getting beyond those paper reactors is what we’re talking about?

King: Yes.

Viswanath: That we need to stand up something other than paper reactors.

King: Yes.

Viswanath: That is really helpful. Do you tell your students that are studying this particular science? Are you optimistic about this next wave of nuclear development?

King: I’m both optimistic and cautious. Nuclear is not going away. Even if we still struggle with new builds, we’re not in an environment where you’re going to be shutting down the old plants. There’s still a lot of opportunity for them. I still am optimistic about nuclear and nuclear’s role. I hope it expands greatly.

Viswanath: Hey, Jeff. This has been a terrific conversation. I really want to thank you for helping us understand what the practical realities will look like. Thanks so much. Thanks to our listeners for joining Power Plays. We’ll continue tracking how rising demand, reliability needs, and new technologies are going to reshape the power sector.