The State of Play for Nuclear Energy in the United States

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) invites you to watch a briefing about the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) nuclear energy programs. Through provisions in the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and $1.8 billion in fiscal year 2023 funding for nuclear energy research, development, and demonstrations, the Administration and Congress have strongly supported the existing reactor fleet and invested in next-generation technologies. This briefing highlighted nuclear energy programs underway from basic research to demonstration projects, including work happening across DOE’s national labs.

Panelists discussed DOE’s current approach to nuclear energy, the evolution of deployment in the United States, and the path ahead for DOE’s nuclear energy work. Topics included what is next for advanced reactors, securing a domestic fuel supply of high-assay low-enriched uranium (uranium enriched to between 5 and 20 percent), engaging with communities, and safely managing spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste through a consent-based siting approach.

Highlights

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) within the Department of Energy (DOE) works to advance nuclear energy science and technology to meet U.S. energy, environmental, and economic needs. NE focuses on research and development that prioritizes the continued operation of the current fleet of nuclear reactors, building new reactors, securing and sustaining the nuclear fuel cycle, and expanding international nuclear cooperation.
Developing small modular reactors (SMRs) and micro-reactors will offer siting flexibility, scalability, and energy uses beyond electricity. With less space required for emergency planning zones, SMRs can be more suitable for environments like repurposed retired and retiring fossil fuel plants.
Nuclear energy has a small, well-accounted waste footprint across the nuclear fuel lifecycle. Environmental monitoring is important to bolster trust in nuclear energy safety. Monitoring waste provides data to local communities, detects anomalies, and keeps operators accountable.
There is a large and growing group of private companies across the country that are interested in developing advanced nuclear energy specifically to meet clean energy needs.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho)

The Idaho National lab is a world leader in making clean energy innovation a reality through its investment, research, and development of nuclear energy strategies.
The Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (L. 115-248) and the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (P.L. 115-439) were designed to spur nuclear innovation by reducing financial and technological barriers.
The Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act of 2023 (ADVANCE Act) ( 1111) is intended to bolster nuclear infrastructure.

Dr. Kathryn Huff, Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy

The Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) within the Department of Energy (DOE) works to advance nuclear energy science and technology to meet U.S. energy, environmental, and economic needs. NE focuses on research and development (R&D) that prioritizes the continued operation of the current fleet of nuclear reactors, building new reactors, securing and sustaining the nuclear fuel cycle, and expanding international nuclear cooperation.
The R&D budget of NE supports nuclear science and technology missions by national laboratories, universities, and industry.
Stopping the premature closure of existing nuclear power plants due to economic reasons can save gigawatts of clean firm power on the grid.
Nuclear energy is the largest source of carbon-free energy in the United States. It accounts for 18 percent of all electricity generated and 47 percent of all carbon emissions-free electricity in the United States.
R&D programs enhance the performance of nuclear energy plants, extend their lifetime, reduce operating costs, and develop advanced fuels.
Historically, conventional nuclear power plants run at single power, at baseload, and cannot vary their generation. However, advanced nuclear technology provides many opportunities for reactors to vary in power to complement renewable energy facilities. Advanced nuclear technology also provides thermal storage capabilities that allow reactors to stay at high temperatures while the amount of electricity they dispatch to the grid can vary.
Developing small modular reactors (SMRs) and micro-reactors will offer siting flexibility, scalability, and energy uses beyond electricity. With less space required for emergency planning zones, SMRs can be more suitable for environments like repurposed retired and retiring fossil fuel plants.
NE is developing micro-reactors for off-grid communities and backup power, the kind of situations that diesel generators often address.
There are a number of communities and assets across the country that we cannot leave behind in the transition to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Nuclear reactors are especially suited to leveraging grid, workforce, and other assets at retiring or retired coal plant sites.
Repurposing unabated fossil plants could deliver place-based solutions to advance an equitable energy transition.
A recent DOE study shows that 80 percent of U.S. coal communities could benefit from replacing their coal plants with nuclear ones. Each community could gain 650 new permanent jobs, additional economic activity of $275 million, and an 86 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Leveraging existing infrastructure would reduce total system costs.
The DOE has recently released reports on long-duration energy storage, clean hydrogen, and commercializing advanced nuclear.
To get to the net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 goal, the buildout of nuclear energy will need to be aggressive. Clean firm power will be necessary to support variable renewable energy.
To secure and sustain the global nuclear fuel cycle, conversion and enrichment capacity must be expanded, a strategy for integrated waste management of spent nuclear fuel must be developed, and consent-based approaches to siting interim storage facilities must be implemented.
A consent-based siting approach would consolidate the 70 locations across the country where communities are currently hosting spent nuclear fuel but never agreed to host it for the long term. The DOE was supposed to take title of this fuel in 1988.
This consent-based approach prioritizes people and communities; seeks willing and informed consent; is flexible, adaptive, and collaborative; is responsive to community concerns; centers equity and environmental justice; and is informed by public feedback.
NE supports R&D cooperation across borders to ensure research focuses on peaceful uses of nuclear power as well as to ensure the ability of the United States to have a voice in global leadership on this topic.

Jhansi Kandasamy, Executive Director, Idaho National Laboratory Net-Zero Program

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is one of 17 National Laboratories across the country. National Labs are a bridge between R&D and deployment, and INL focuses on nuclear energy and homeland security.
Idaho does not have a commercial nuclear power plant—only a testing facility.
INL’s Net-Zero Program will be deployed right at INL to illustrate how nuclear energy can be used to achieve such a goal.
INL’s energy is primarily clean because it comes from hydropower, but the extreme climate changes facing Idaho may impact water availability. Nuclear energy offers a 24/7, secure, reliable, and carbon-free source of energy that is not as climate-dependent.
A micro-reactor or small modular reactor can provide electricity, heat, and hydrogen to help cities achieve net-zero emissions.
INL is on the path to including nuclear as a part of its energy portfolio.
Transitioning INL’s vehicle fleet to electric and using hydrogen and R-99 fuel [a renewable fuel] will cut carbon emissions from its transportation fleet of more than 600 vehicles.
Hydrogen produced using carbon-free electricity from a nuclear reactor can also be turned into ammonia for use as a clean fertilizer.
There are six parts in the roadmap to get to net-zero through nuclear energy at INL: using the deployment of an on-site microreactor as a case study for time-to-market and operability considerations; infrastructure and siting; licensing and regulation; fuel cycle issues; finance and contracting; and public engagement.
INL has been working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, utilities, and DOE to collaborate on advanced nuclear energy. INL is also working with the state of Idaho, universities, tribal nations, and countries with net-zero goals on nuclear energy development.
“Marvel” is a DOE-funded home-grown, 100 kilowatt reactor. INL plans on using it to generate electricity for an electric vehicle charger.

Haruko Murakami Wainwright, Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor, Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nuclear energy has a small, well-accounted waste footprint across the nuclear fuel lifecycle.
Nuclear waste is the best-managed and best-isolated waste in human history.
Environmental monitoring is important for providing assurance.
Nuclear waste first appeared with nuclear weapon production. More than 100 sites across the United States have been used for nuclear weapon production. These sites have soil and groundwater contamination, radionuclides, metal, and organic contaminants. These sites serve as lessons for how to handle nuclear waste and what the key contaminants from nuclear waste are.
From about 250 tons of natural uranium, one gigawatt-year of energy can be generated while creating only 30 tons of spent fuel that can be stored underground.
By comparison, 2,000,000 tons of coal are necessary to generate one gigawatt-year of energy. This releases 6,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 500,000 tons of coal ash. This coal ash is a contaminant that cannot be properly stored and is often disposed via surface disposal methods.
Nuclear energy requires less mining activity and produces less waste than coal energy.
Renewable energy waste is difficult to track due to the sector’s rapid expansion, but one study estimated that renewable energy would produce 3,000 tons of waste to produce one gigawatt-year of energy. Another study found that solar panels and batteries release heavy metal contaminants.
There are three waste isolation systems for nuclear waste: high-level radioactive waste isolation, low-level (uranium mining) waste isolation, and hazardous waste isolation.
High-level radioactive waste isolation involves an engineered waste canister, clay, and uses deep underground repositories. This has a compliance period of 10,000 to 1,000,000 years.
Low-level and hazardous waste isolation are near-surface methods that use a clay cover and geomembrane to limit water infiltration and leaching. Low-level waste isolation has a compliance period of 500 to 100,000 years, and hazardous waste isolation has a compliance period of 30 years.
Radioactive waste toxicity decays over time, but some hazardous waste toxicity never decays.
There was no regulation on general hazardous waste until 1965, when the Solid Waste Disposal Act was introduced.
As soon as the United States began producing nuclear power in 1955, there were recommended guidelines on disposal of high-level waste.
Currently, there are no high-level waste disposal sites in the United States, so all of the spent-fuel of nuclear energy has been stored in dry casks, which are usually steel cylinders welded or bolted shut that are surrounded by additional steel or concrete.
A nuclear energy plant produces about two to three casks worth of spent fuel every year. These casks are constructed to withstand extreme scenarios and weather events, and there have been no accidents or leaks since 1986.
Advanced nuclear reactor companies are developing waste management plans ahead of construction to handle waste from different fuels, structural materials, and coolants.
Environmental monitoring is important to bolster trust in nuclear energy safety. Monitoring provides data to local communities, detects anomalies, and keeps operators accountable. Monitoring plays a key role in consent-based siting.
Advanced long-term environmental monitoring systems are being developed.
The Nuclear Waste Educators’ Network focuses on developing community resources on nuclear waste. The network also aims to develop a diverse and inclusive community that considers the concerns of people regarding nuclear energy.
Engineers should design waste isolation systems that they would be comfortable having in their own communities. They need to design from the “waste up.”

Patrick White, Project Manager, Nuclear Innovation Alliance

The Nuclear Innovation Alliance is a think tank focused on creating the conditions for success for advanced nuclear energy as a climate solution.
There are four main takeaways on commercializing advanced nuclear energy: nuclear energy can play a major role in creating a clean energy economy, advanced reactors have a wide array of different commercial use cases beyond electricity production, developers are leveraging DOE support to accelerate reactor deployment, and continued federal support and incentives can catalyze private investments.
Advanced nuclear energy is an important complementary clean energy source to help fully decarbonize U.S. energy production. Fully decarbonizing energy production requires clean buildings, clean industry, and clean transportation, which is going to take a variety of different energy sources, including heat, electricity, hydrogen, and ammonia.
Clean energy production is a combination of three different factors: “variable” clean energy, clean energy storage, and “firm” clean energy.
Firm clean energy includes hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear. This energy can lower overall system costs and increase the likelihood of meeting U.S. decarbonization targets.
There is a large and growing group of private companies across the country that are interested in developing advanced nuclear energy specifically to meet clean energy needs. Companies such as GE Hitachi, TerraPower, Kairos Power, NuScale, and X-energy have major R&D projects and are looking at deploying the first generation of advanced nuclear technology in the United States.
Utility partners and industrial energy users have expressed interest in deploying advanced nuclear energy, and projects are beginning to be deployed.
Ontario Power Generation, the largest electric utility in Ontario, Canada, recently announced that it is going to deploy the GE Hitachi BWRX-300 Advanced Small Modular Reactor to support its decarbonization strategy. The project is going to provide 1.2 gigawatts of new nuclear energy that is going to operate for the next 80 years in Canada.
As a way to remove some of the carbon emissions in chemical manufacturing, Dow Chemical has partnered with the company X-energy to look at the deployment of an advanced high-temperature gas reactor at one of their chemical production facilities.
Public-private partnerships are accelerating the demonstration and deployment of first-of-a-kind advanced reactors. The Office of Nuclear Energy’s various programs, including the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP), the Advanced Reactor Concepts-20 (ARC-20) program, and the Risk Reduction awards, provide resources for various companies to deploy advanced reactors.
Smaller micro and test reactors coming online in 2025 to 2027 will provide operational data and an initial proof of concept. During the latter half of the 2020s and into the early 2030s, full-scale commercial reactors will be coming online that are trying to demonstrate that they can produce power at scale.
Developers are preparing to submit a large number of formal license applications for review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023.
The development and deployment of these reactors has been supported by collaborations with the national labs, such as the Idaho National Lab.
The DOE’s Pathway to Advanced Nuclear Commercial Liftoff report highlights how to move from the first-of-a-kind demonstration to wide-scale deployment of nuclear energy. This requires an orderbook to build out industrial demand, product management to execute on-time and on-budget delivery, and supply chains to build large-scale capacity to construct reactors.
An example of this pathway is GE Hitachi leading on its BW RX 300 design. This project is a scaled down version of reactor technologies that GE Hitachi has operated for decades.
In 2022, the Nuclear Energy Institute conducted a survey of its 19 member utilities. They are projecting the deployment of more than 300 new SMRs by 2050, equivalent to 90 gigawatts of new nuclear generation.
Continued federal support and incentives can catalyze private investments in advanced nuclear energy. To create the conditions for success for advanced nuclear energy the United States need a combination of federal programs and effective regulation.

Q&A

Q: What are the challenges or opportunities the United States faces with advanced nuclear energy both domestically and internationally?

Huff

The challenge at the core of nuclear builds is ensuring that reactors are deployed on-time and on-budget. SMRs need to be built modularly in such a way that they can be built more on time and on budget.
Investing in R&D is crucial. Nuclear fission power plants are an American invention, and it is important that the United States remains a leader for technologies such as nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and a hydrogen economy.

Kandasamy

The United States is a leader in advanced nuclear power. The first commercial nuclear power plant provided electricity to a city in Idaho. To continue leading this field, research must continue.
We need to identify the technologies and advanced reactors we can move forward both nationally and globally.

Wainwright

Spent fuel disposal and interim storage are major issues in the nuclear industry. The narrative around nuclear waste must be changed, because while many people talk about the dangers of nuclear waste, nuclear waste has been the best managed waste.
We should not put the burden of nuclear waste on rural areas.

White

We need to figure out how to change the market conditions so that companies are clamoring to build advanced nuclear plants.
How do we change financial incentives at a federal or state level so that nuclear power makes sense in companies’ long-term energy strategies?
How do we create regulatory conditions to ensure public trust and decrease barriers for private companies?

Q: How are you getting the private sector to see a stable commercialization pathway that they are willing to commit to?

Huff

Several utilities already using nuclear power are well positioned to think about what it means for them to deploy more nuclear power.
The DOE’s Pathway to Advanced Nuclear Commercial Liftoff report recommends having overrun insurance for projects that go over budget and over schedule.

White

There needs to be successful proof of commercial viability.
If there is a standardized product that can be deployed in large numbers, risk is reduced.

Q: I have heard a lot about how coal plant skills and jobs are transferable to new nuclear plants. What are the challenges to making this transition?

Huff

A nuclear reactor typically operates about 18 months and then has to be refueled. During that endeavor, skilled workers are brought onto the site. These workers have other jobs when they are not working at the nuclear power plant. Many workers switch between nuclear plant and coal plant maintenance. There are skilled workers who translate tasks such as steam turbine maintenance from plant to plant.
The construction of the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia took thousands of skilled craftspeople. Those thousands of workers are now nuclear trained and easily deployable to new nuclear plant projects across the country.

White

The DOE has identified potential sites that can be transitioned from fossil fuel to nuclear generation, but we are still figuring out which sites are going to be the most compatible and provide the most economic advantages.
One big question the industry and other stakeholders is still working through is how much existing fossil fuel infrastructure should be reused?
In terms of workforce, the United States need to be intentional in the transition. If the coal plant shuts down and the nuclear plants do not open for five years, then many workers will move out of the industry.

Q: Coal plants are shutting down at one pace and coal to nuclear conversions are happening at another pace. How do we align these paces?

Kandasamy

We need to start the transition early in order to maintain the workforce. If the nuclear plant is not going to be ready for five years after the shutdown of the coal plant, you can continue to operate the coal plant until the nuclear plant is ready or provide workers temporary employment opportunities in renewable energy projects, such as wind or solar.

Q: What factors are affecting the commercialization potential of advanced nuclear? If batteries keep advancing at the pace they have been advancing, does nuclear power still have an advantage?

White

If you have renewable resource availability and both short- and long-term duration storage, a 100 percent renewable system may make sense. Not all parts of the world are going to have the resource availability for 100 percent renewable energy, however.
A lot of developments in the battery space are needed to increase storage capacity from gigawatts-hours to terawatt-months.

Wainwright

In terms of battery storage, we need to think about waste and life cycle cost. For example, what are the potential impacts of mining in developing countries.
Most of these technologies are optimized for cost and energy storage capacity, but we should also consider the environmental impact across the lifecycle of each technology.

Q: Are there any resources Congressional staffers should be looking out for?

Huff