The nuclear energy policy landscape in the US has changed significantly during the past 5 years. Once seen as an issue with enormous differences between the political parties, it has become one of the few topics on which both parties can have a civil discussion and agree on many key provisions in supportive legislation.

Matt Crozat is the Nuclear Energy Institute’s Executive Director for Strategy and Policy Development. He and his supporting team have played a role in helping Representatives, Senators and their key staff members to understand the value supplied by operating nuclear plants and the advanced nuclear power systems that are being developed.

Some of the progress began with efforts at the state level and then proceeded to capture the attention of the national level politicians and leaders.

We talked about the strong financial support provided to operating plants to keep them economically viable and about the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that will encourage and reward the deployers of new nuclear power plants.

We talked about the results of an NEI survey of companies that own and operate the existing nuclear fleet that provided an intriguingly large number of expected new capacity additions between now and 2050. (Spoiler alert: Though representing a limited portion of the potential buyers, those companies expect to add enough reactors to double current nuclear generating capacity by 2050.)

Efforts to ensure capable supply chains and workforce development for that kind of growth have begun, but there is a lot of work remaining to be done. We discussed the importance of committed orders to convince suppliers that investments will produce product sales and the importance of jobs to ensure that workers are convinced to invest in developing their skills and education.

An important topic in our discussion was the importance of a consistent, steady effort and the extreme cost and vulnerability that can be imposed by wide swings in support that lead to bumpy, halting efforts.

We talked a bit about the potential that one or more of the companies that already own issued and active combined licenses for AP1000s may recognize that their decision matrix has changed in the past 2 years, with dramatic movements upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and then again upon passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

I’d wager that construction on those project could be organized to begin within about two years from the time the corporate board is convinced that is an investment worth the time and resources involved.

For reasons of fairness and not leaving anyone out of the mentions, we did not discuss the numerous organizations and individuals that helped achieve the successful change in the policy landscape.

I hope you enjoy the episode. Please participate in the discussion here with comments, questions and suggestions.

Dr. Lindsay Krall is a geochemist currently working on projects characterizing the behavior of radioactive isotopes that will eventually be stored in a deep geologic repository being designed in Sweden for construction within the next decade. During a three year post doctoral period she worked under a MacArthur Foundation grant program to study the projected production of waste from small modular reactors. She received mentoring and guidance from Dr. Allison Macfarlane and Dr. Rodney Ewing, but performed most of the work as an individual researcher. As we discussed during this episode of the Atomic Show, the study topic was only marginally related to her academic and professional field.

During her post doc period, she presented various stages of her work at conferences and in journal articles. She told me that those progress reports generated few questions and apparently little interest.

But the final paper documenting her study results produced a minor eruption inside the world of people that are interested in the development and deployment of small modular reactors and advanced nuclear energy production systems. The paper, titled “Nuclear Waste from Small Modular Reactors” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. It included the discussion-provoking conclusion that “SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than LWRs.”

Aside: I question the author’s choice to use the word “will” instead of “might”. There are far too many uncertainties and technology-specific conditions for such certainty. End Aside.

Unlike most of the thousands of study papers published in scientific journals each year, this one stimulated immediate attention with articles in mainstream outlets like Bloomberg, Reuters, The Globe and Mail, and the Register, presumably written by journalists that had access to a pre-print version of the paper. That active promotional effort was a bit of a surprise to the study’s primary author, though she had been advised by her coauthors to be ready for media inquiries.

Dan Yurman at Neutron Bytes published a detailed review of the paper.

The study focused on three SMR designs out of the dozens that are currently under development. The three selected systems included the 160 MWth version of the NuScale Power Module, a version of the Terrestrial Energy Integrated Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) and the Toshiba 4S. Developers of the NuScale Power Module and the IMSR published prompt responses to the PNAS paper, the Toshiba 4S has not been under active development for at least half a decade.

Both of the responses challenged the study’s decision to use obsolete versions of designs that are still evolving and have not yet been built. They challenged some of the paper’s assumptions about neutron leakage and stated that it cannot be computed with simple volume-related equations. One statement from the paper received particular attention from Terrestrial Energy.

“Molten salt- and sodium-cooled SMRs will use highly corrosive and pyrophoric fuels and coolants that, following irradiation, will become highly radioactive.”

No reactor design proposes to use pyrophoric fuels and sodium coolant activity levels are generally low enough to allow it to be handled as low level waste.

One of the key study decisions received little attention in the widespread coverage about the study’s critical conclusions. For reasons of simplification, resources and study duration, the authors chose to ignore recycling, reuse, dilution and reprocessing, even though all of those waste reduction techniques are being actively researched as part of the DOE’s advanced reactor development program.

This study also neglects to consider reprocessing, recycling, and dilution because these treatments will not eliminate the need for the storage, transportation, treatment, and disposal of radioactive materials.

While it’s true that waste reduction techniques do not completely eliminate waste, that statement is incongruous in a paper that quantifies waste production and numerically compares it to existing systems.

Dr. Krall and I had an enlightening discussion about her work and some of the responses it has generated. She hopes that the paper will help to stimulate more work on the back end of new reactor development projects. She recognizes the value of nuclear energy and appreciates the fact that she is currently living in Scandinavia, where there are a relatively large number of operating nuclear reactors and not very much natural gas supplying electricity.

Note: This episode was planned to be produced in a more timely fashion after the paper was released, but production delays changed the schedule. After a couple of attempts that included a gross operator error (failing to push the record button) I met with Dr. Krall on October 26th to discuss her paper, its widespread distribution and the impacts of the paper’s results.

I hope you enjoy the episode and choose to participate in the discussion here.

Dr. Chris Keefer is one of the busiest and most successful nuclear energy advocates working today. He is a Canadian emergency room doctor, the founder of Doctors for Nuclear Energy, the founder and host of the Decouple podcast, the founder of Decouple Media, and the founder and President of Canadians for Nuclear Energy (C4NE).

And to think, just a few years ago, Chris was a free thinking progressive who had only thought negatively about nuclear energy if he bothered to think much about it at all.

We talked about his journey from a tribal antinuclear thinker – one who thought negatively about nuclear because most of the people they knew did – to an openly and consistently pronuclear advocate who believes that nuclear energy plays an important role in our present and an increasingly vital one in our future.

As the Crown corporation’s sole shareholder, the province of Ontario requested Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to determine if it could safely continue operating the Pickering nuclear power plant. On September 29, 2022, OPG announced that planned to keep the Pickering nuclear plant operating for at least one more year. It also announced that it would conduct a new evaluation to determine if refurbishing the plant for an additional 30 year period was justified. Chris and his team at C4NE declared that September 29 should now be called Pickering Day.

OPG requires approval from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) for its revised schedule. The CNSC, which employs a rigorous and transparent decision-making process, will make the final decision regarding Pickering’s safe operating life. OPG will continue to ensure the safety of the Pickering facility through rigorous monitoring, inspections, and testing.

Over the past several years, C4NE fought what was initially a lonely battle to save Pickering and to prevent Ontario from dramatically increasing its use of natural gas to supply electricity to Canada’s most industrialized province. As it continued to show up to various meetings, events and even parliamentary sessions, C4NE accumulated a following that included other advocates, plant workers, union organizers and local business leaders.

They reminded people that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission had approved a plan to refurbish Pickering before the 2009 closure decision. They pointed out that the energy market had changed dramatically since that decision, which was made in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008 and at a time when “cheap natural gas” seemed to be clean and infinitely available.

We also discussed the coincidence that OPG announced it was open to keeping Pickering for 30 more years just three days after it announced a dam-breaking deal with Microsoft to begin selling clean energy credits sourced from its nuclear and hydro-electric fleets. That deal should be the first of many announcements from major tech companies that have made pledges to power their data centers with clean power on an hour by hour basis, constantly matching demand with supply.

This is an evolution and an improvement over the trading system of exclusive “renewable” energy credits where companies purchase enough credits so that their total energy demand is matched by the total energy production of sources like wind or solar that are not likely to be producing power to supply demand at the time that the demand occurs.

Aside: Atomic Insights has an article in the works to more completely describe the clean energy credit deal and the system that Ontario is developing to track and trade the credits. Look for that article to appear here in the near future. End Aside.

Chris and I then ranged into a number of other topics focused on Canada’s nuclear energy leadership and its opportunities to prosper in the continuing Nuclear Renaissance. (Please remember, the original Renaissance took about 50 years to get going. Historians still differ in their declarations of when the 300 year-long period actually started.)

We live in “interesting” times; nuclear energy is a powerful tool that can help address our biggest economic, environmental and geopolitical challenges. People like Chris Keefer are helping to increase awareness of the usefulness of that tool.

I hope you enjoyed the show and participate in the discussion here.

Marcus Seidl is a German nuclear professional who received his PhD in nuclear physics in 2002, a year after his home country decided that it would exit nuclear energy in favor of investing in a large roll out of renewable energy sources.

He has worked for German utility companies, for a vendor erecting a state-of-the-art high neutron flux research reactor, and is now employed by PreusseneElektra as a nuclear physicist. He also teaches part time at Technische Universität München | TUM · Department of Nuclear Engineering.

During our discussion, any opinions he expressed were his alone. He does not represent his employers.

As a researcher, he recently started a project called Unique Safety Features and Licensing Requirements of Small Modular Reactors | Frontiers Research Topic (frontiersin.org). A self-described “traditional utility guy” he considers any reactor that generates considerably less than 4,000 MWth to be a smaller reactors.

During our pre-show correspondence, Marcus shared the following commentary explaining his interest in researching safety and licensing of smaller reactors and reasons why they address particular challenges associated with conventional extra-large reactors.

I am a traditional utility guy – which means that every reactor which generates noticeably less than 4000MWth is a “small” reactor. Especially in the US there is a distinction between small modular reactors, micro reactors and advanced reactors. From my perspective they are all “small”. In part this adjective is also justified because most of these designs are expected to be mass produced or consist of prefabricated modules and hence cannot be of the same size as a traditional LWR.

The reason why I initiated the ‘special research’ topic: the issue of energy security and climate change are two important factors which currently favor nuclear: it is a compact source of energy (you can easily build up strategic fuel reserves) and it has a small CO2 footprint. So, why are we waiting? Why are there still doubts that nuclear power can help solve these issues? It is not the sole solution, it is not a silver bullet, but it can be part of the solution. From a conservative utility perspective traditional LWRs would be the most reliable bet. For some reasons big, complicated infrastructure projects are out-of-favor today. SMRs have many new design details and confidence must be built that they are safer, more reliable and easier to license.  

Therefore the “research topic” intends to put current research into perspective: we have great experience from many years of traditional LWR operation, we have learned from earlier, advanced reactor concepts and today we have many modern engineering tools. This should be a good basis to fulfill the promises of the next generation of reactors. In my opinion it is important to understand the history of reactor development, to demonstrate that compared to earlier designs and methods we justifiably can be more confident to bring the technology to its next level. And SMRs are not just scaled down versions of bigger plants. They are small in order to make the core damage frequency much smaller than that of their bigger brothers.

As a scientist I am a fan of radical honesty and transparency: reactors are just machines which are an optimized solution for a specific problem. Certainly, there will be failures and setbacks. If a machine encounters conditions for which it was not optimized, it likely will fail. Compared to the risks our fathers took more than 50 years ago, we are now in a much better position. This is why I am optimistic that a new generation of reactors and higher safety standards are possible. Nevertheless, these are complex technological products and they are full of surprises and also “small” reactors will not fully fulfill expectations. No reason to worry, this is the way evolution works: engineering is a sequence of problems, solutions and more problems. Therefore, the research topic invites regulators and sceptics for “perspectives” to explain their concerns.

Small reactors are sometimes criticized for lacking economies of scale and scope. Yes, this may be true from a fuel efficiency point of view.  But these reactors solve another problem: the inability of many organizations to think long-term, being burdened with short-term financial performance. Small reactors are one answer to this environment. But history will not stop here. It may also turn out that small reactors are a necessary, first step to rebuild confidence for projects with larger reactors later.

Nuclear fission is a compact source of energy and therefore also a compact source of spent fuel. I do not like the term “waste” because the question is what you mean with “waste”? The fission products, the actinides, the structural materials? Is it a lack of imagination to not find other solutions than digging holes for them?

To date the question of how to deal with spent fuel has not satisfactorily been answered. Often for political reasons development of new technological solutions has been abandoned. Therefore, it is useless to criticize the current back-end solutions. Better technologies are urgently needed here, too. Nevertheless, the big advantage of nuclear spent fuel is that it is compact and easily controllable. Its volume is small, and it does not spread all over the atmosphere like CO2 emissions.

I do not worry about spent nuclear fuel and long-term storage: it looks like a problem now, but future generations which much better tools and knowledge will “solve” it. No reason to be concerned. Also, we do not use nuclear energy for fun but to solve a problem now: provide energy security and avoid CO2 emission. Climate change is an existential threat, spent nuclear fuel is not.

We are incredibly lucky that nuclear fission works for large scale energy generation – this is not well appreciated, and the technology’s disadvantages are over-emphasized. Many energy-generation processes work in the laboratory, but current tools and know-how are not yet sufficient to employ them for energy generation: fusion works in the laboratory, but for power-plant scale the process has been energy negative for a long time. Storing energy in the form of matter / antimatter pairs also works in the laboratory but is still far too inefficient to use for practical purposes. That nuclear fission has practical utility is due to a fortunate combination of three natural constants: 

1. The size of the neutron fission cross section. If the neutron fission cross section would be as small as the photo-fission cross section, then we probably would not have any reactors, or they would look very differently

2. The number of secondary neutrons per fission event: if there would be less than 1 secondary neutron, no chain reaction would be possible, no neutron amplification would be possible, it would be very expensive to generate enough external fission neutrons. 

3. Fraction of delayed neutrons: if only prompt neutrons existed, then reactor control would be very difficult. 

Luckily all three above mentioned parameters are of the right size to make commercial reactors possible. With fusion or matter/antimatter we might not be so lucky. So, we need to be grateful that energy generation by nuclear fission is working! This is a reason for celebration.

By now you will have noticed that I had my 20 years of professional nuclear career in Germany and it shows how a reliable technology still can fail even though it created no harm. This is hard for me to accept because all the engineering was done right. It is a caveat for those enthusiasts that even the perfect, next generation reactor may not be deployable in some countries or regions. It also shows the skewed risk perception many people have: during Covid-19 about 100000 Germans because of the virus. During 50 years of nuclear power plant operation nobody in the public was harmed. Nevertheless, many Germans are satisfied with “living with the virus” while still being skeptical or afraid of nuclear. This is logic turned upside down.

The German experience also shows the impact of what I call the “dictatorship of a stubborn minority”. Likely, most Germans do not really care about nuclear. They are neutral. But there has been a hardcore group of people who stubbornly refuses to discuss nuclear power rationally. Some of those people are now in government. The same government who urges people to deal “rationally” with the Covid-19 pandemic. These are all contradictions which are hard to swallow for a scientist or engineer.

We talked mostly about Marcus’s thoughts about smaller reactors as expressed above but strayed into areas where he could offer a unique perspective on nuclear history and future.

I hope you enjoy the show. Please share your thoughts and reactions in the comment thread.

Marcus shared a couple of other works of nuclear energy art.