X-Energy is the lead recipient for one of two industry groups selected to receive $80 M in Department of Energy (DOE) funding as part of a public-private partnership program to demonstrate advanced nuclear power plants on an aggressive time table.

Its primary partner in the endeavor is Energy Northwest, which currently owns and operates the Columbia Generating Station in eastern Washington. Energy Northwest will be the owner and operator of the demonstration power station, which will consist of a four-unit installation of X-Energy’s Xe-100 high temperature gas cooled reactor.

Each unit is designed to produce 80 MWe, resulting in a power station output of 320 MWe.

Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program

The award is part of the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which also includes two additional development pathways with longer horizons. The $80 M in FY 2021 funds is a down payment that will provide funds for completing detailed design work and beginning the licensing process.

Future appropriations will be required to complete the projects; the funding opportunity announcement for the program included an award ceiling of $4 B to be shared among three different development pathways.

For Atomic Show #287, I spoke with Darren Gale, X-Energy’s Vice President for Commercial Operations. Darren is the company executive with direct responsibility for executing the company’s contract with the Department of Energy and delivering on the promise to design, license and construct an advanced nuclear reactor power plant.

The ADRP has an aggressive target date for beginning to deliver electricity to the grid is the end of 2027. During our conversation, Darren explained how his company is positioned to deliver on its promise.

Xe-100 Design history

We spoke about how X-Energy has been working on its high temperature pebble bed reactor design for more than a decade. X-Energy was founded in 2009 by Kam Ghaffarian, a successful entrepreneur who founded Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies (SGT) in 1984. Dr. Ghaffarian remains the owner of X-Energy, but is being joined by additional investors.

The design is mature and the company has been engaging with the NRC for several years. It expects to be able to submit a license application within the next year or two; part of the uncertainty includes determining the most appropriate and streamlined licensing pathway.

The Xe-100 is a helium-cooled, high temperature pebble bed reactor that has a number of similarities to the Chinese HTR-PM. They share a common heritage tracing back through the South African HTGR program and to the German AVR demonstration reactor.

As Darren explains, the Xe-100 includes a number of refinements in its fuel design and in its fuel handling system that enable more efficient fuel use.

Another design difference is that each Xe-100 reactor/steam generator modules are connected to its own Ra...

Chris Wright is the CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services, which recently became the second largest US company performing the work of drilling and completing oil and gas wells in shale formations.

He is a leader in the field of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well drilling, having been involved in the revolutionary technology development since the days when George Mitchell was stubbornly experimenting in the Barnett Shale.

Among those who focus on the energy industry and attempt to understand its current situation in order to gain some insights into the future, the growing natural gas supply in the US gets a lot of attention. Cheap natural gas gets credit for a steady drop in annual US CO2 emissions as it has pushed a growing amount of coal out of the market.

That same product – cheap natural gas – has also been blamed for reducing revenues enough at a number of existing nuclear plants to push their owners into closing the plants for economic reasons. Despite successful efforts to reduce operating costs at those plants, shrinking top-line revenue from selling electricity into low-priced wholesale markets means they do not make enough money to meet corporate goals.

After hearing Chris Wright on Robert Bryce’s excellent Power Hungry podcast, I realized it would be worthwhile to invite him onto the Atomic Show to provide a deeper explanation of the revolution in natural gas production.

Chris gets into some deep technical details about how technology has dramatically improved in his field. He explains how competition and a relentless focus on providing a better product has driven that improvement.

He is justifiably proud of the benefits that his industry has provided to the world, but he also provides some important support and advice to people who are working to improve nuclear fission energy.

It might surprise many, including some of Chris’s colleagues, to learn that Chris describes himself as a huge supporter of nuclear fission energy. He provides some compliments and some tough love for those of us who are working to improve the technology’s chances of competing and serving customer needs.

I think you will thoroughly enjoy listening to Chris’s thoughts about energy and its importance for human development and prosperity.

As always, I’m interested in hearing what you think. I’m pretty sure this show will provoke some deep thinking in what might be completely new directions, so I’d like you to share some of those thoughts.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a stretch goal of completing its next research and test reactor by the end of 2025. It has assembled a team that includes several other major universities, national labs, and industrial partners.

It has selected the MMRTM, a product that is being developed by USNC (Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation), for its ability to meet most of a long list of important attributes that will support a wide range of university research and development goals.

For this Atomic Show, I spoke with Dr. Katy Huff, Dr. Caleb Brooks – both of whom are on the UIUC engineering faculty – and Mark Mitchell, the USNC executive leading the MMR development program.

They explained the history of their visionary project and provided the basis for their firm belief that they can license and build a new research and test reactor within the next five years.

Why does UIUC need a new reactor?

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has a long tradition of leadership and innovation in nuclear science, technology and engineering. For 38 years (1960-1998) it proudly operated the Triga-Mark II research reactor to support student development and to contribute to the advancement of nuclear science and technology.

But that valuable asset was, like so many US research reactors, decommissioned during the Dark Ages of US nuclear power development in the 1990s.

By the end of that decade, student enrollment in nuclear engineering and science majors had dropped to near the fiducial level, there were few, if any prospects for new nuclear power projects, and federal support for nuclear research had been completely eliminated in during several budget cycles.

Universities didn’t see any reason to keep supporting research reactors, so they shut them down.

But concerns about fossil fuel sustainability and climate change have helped to renew global interest in nuclear energy development and deployment. Students are again selecting nuclear focused majors and are developing new ideas about ways to use nuclear technologies to improve the human condition.

Even though student interest in nuclear has been growing in the US for at least 15 years, university research reactor shutdowns have continued and no new ones have been built.

Leaders in nuclear at UIUC decided several years ago that they need to take aggressive action to address the growing challenge of increasing student population and fewer physical reactors for them to use in their education, research and professional development programs.

Why the MMR? Why now?

University research reactors have always been modest in their thermal power capability, and they have generally been designed with passive safety features that make them appropriate for student learning and management.

Even though the 15 MWth MMR is designed to provide useful power and electricity, it is also designed to be extremely safe without operator action. With its molten salt heat storage separating the nuclear reactor heat source from the adjacent plant heat conversion system, it is also designed for flexibly shifting its production from electricity to heat or to other useful products.

That flexibility is attractive to a large university that has a variety of student research endeavors along with a large physical plant that includes on-campus power a...

Meredith Angwin has become an authority on the arcane topic of governing electric grids in the United States. She’s concerned and thinks others will may share her concern when they recognize there is a key missing element in grid governance.

There is no organization or individual that is responsible for making sure that electricity is generated, transmitted and delivered to customers.

Various organizations, often with competing or conflicting interests, have shared responsibility for different parts of the system that includes generators, transformers, switchyards, transmission lines, distribution lines and billing systems, but “the market” has been assigned the responsibility of supplying wholesale electricity.

And that market is not the free market, but instead is a hybrid that is governed by an ever changing stack of layered rules where many of the important decisions are made by participant groups that do not include customers or even enabled representatives of customers.

A growing portion of the grid’s electricity is dependent on free, but uncontrolled natural flows. Another portion comes from generators whose fuel is delivered by capacity-limited pipes in a “just in time fashion.” When the natural flows are interrupted or something interferes in the pipelines’s capability to deliver fuel, generators stop producing power.

There are processes that can be called into action, but costs can skyrocket in times of scarcity. Some market players thrive in times of crisis and have few incentives to ensure those crises never arise.

Meredith has produced an accessible, clearly written book that reveals important aspects of a complex topic. It deserves to be on the reading list for people who are interested in electricity.

It belongs in the library of every congressional and senatorial office. At least one person in each staff should be assigned the task of reading it and preparing a report for their member.

Governors and state level legislators might want incorporate lessons revealed in the book and reconsider their decisions to rely more heavily on markets than on well-regulated monopolies with an obligation to serve.

Meredith is a delightful guest who brings the wisdom of a long and productive professional career to her writing and speaking engagements. I’m pretty sure you are going to like this show.

As always, I invite you to participate in the discussion thread.

Jessica Lovering, Rachel Slaybaugh, and Suzy Baker founded and lead Good Energy Collective, a policy research organization that is actively "building the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of the broader climate change agenda."

Inspired by the dynamic leaders and new organizations that are successfully making the case that addressing climate change is an imperative that demands immediate action, they determined that now is the time to build coalitions and join forces with others who share similar concerns.

They recognized that nuclear energy is often left out of discussions, and they believed that needed to change. They have each been studying and working in nuclear energy fields for a decade or two and understand that it is fundamentally capable of supplying the clean, abundant, reliable and affordable energy that should be more equitably available to everyone.

But they also recognized that "nuclear" needed to look very different from the image that it currently creates when the word is spoken or written.

Not only is there a need for additional new technologies and designs that make nuclear energy accessible to broader applications and a greater diversity of customers, but methods used to talk about nuclear energy need to be improved and modified to suit current times. Old ways of doing things need to be altered in recognition of past failures, real and perceived.

Though they believe there is a continuing role for large nuclear power plants that can serve the needs of densely populated cities, they also know that the spectrum of communities and customers is so large that it demands a wide variety of solutions.

They are devising and promoting new ways of engaging with people who might eventually choose to use nuclear technology to address their energy needs. But before that happens, they have to learn, trust and accept. They want to help create situations that have better chances of success because entire communities are supportive and encouraging.

Good Energy Collective was officially launched in August 2020, but it has been busily publishing reports, stimulating discussions and developing coalitions. Its leaders do not believe there is any time to waste. They are highly motivated to make rapid changes that will enable a better story to be told about the future of nuclear energy.

Please listen carefully to these amazing women tell their story and share their plans to modernize nuclear energy products, projects and perceptions.

Dr. Chris Keefer

Chris Keefer is the creator and host of the Decouple Podcast. He is an emergency room doctor whose activist bent and desire to make the world a better place has led him to become a nuclear energy proponent.

Chris is the founder and a director of an organization called Doctors for Nuclear Energy.

One of his biggest current efforts is serving as the co-director of #SavePickering, an initiative open to all who want to save and refurbish the Pickering nuclear power plant in his native Ontario.

That plant is a 6 unit facility currently rated at just under 3 GWe. It is one of the primary tools enabling Ontario to have one of the cleanest electricity grids in the world, with almost no contributions from any fossil fuels.

But it is currently scheduled to be closed. As is often the case in North America, most of Pickering's electricity production will be replaced by generators that burn natural gas.

Chris and I chatted about our shared interests in nuclear energy, protecting nature and empowering humans to achieve greater prosperity. We agreed that increasing access to clean, reliable, abundant electricity is a key to achieving our goals.

I think you will enjoy the show. Please let us know what you think by participating in the comment thread.

Paris Ortiz-Wines Global Coordinator, Stand Up for Nuclear

Paris Ortiz-Wines wants you to Stand Up for Nuclear Energy. She is the global coordinator for the annual, month-long event that includes actions in several dozen locations around the world.

On this episode of the Atomic Show, Paris explains how she came to be a pro-nuclear activist, why she believes nuclear energy is an important enabler of human prosperity, and why she believes that technology and prosperity are good for both people and the environment.

I think you will enjoy our conversation. I trust it will inspire you to learn more about the actions that are happening all around the globe. Even if you must do it from your home, please Stand Up For Nuclear and show your support of this important technology.

Zion Lights

Zion Lights is a formally trained science communicator, author of a carefully researched book titled The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting, and an experienced environmental activist who worked for a year as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion.

About a month ago, she began openly advocating for an expansion of nuclear energy as a major tool in the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Her conversion wasn't sudden, she spent about a decade independently learning about the value of nuclear energy.

Even after she had decided that nuclear was far safer and more important than she had been taught to believe, she was careful about openly advocating for the technology. That was something that just wasn't done by her peers and close associates.

While still a member of the Green Party, she realized that curiosity about nuclear energy was almost taboo. That realization led her to almost immediately leave the party because she did not understand why such an important topic could not even be discussed.

With a growing sense of unease about the directions taken by some of her fellow members of Extinction Rebellion, Zion decided to leave the organization. Coincident with her separation from XR, she and Michael Shellenberger had several widely separated conversations. Eventually she accepted Shellenberger's offer to become director of a newly-formed UK branch of Environmental Progress.

Zion and Michael have determined that the UK is an important center of nuclear energy industrial development. She is bringing her experience, education and passion to the task of spreading good news about nuclear power.

We had a wide ranging discussion about her journey from a firmly entrenched member of the Green Party, activist environmental organizations and even an environmental alarmist to become a vocal proponent of using nuclear fission to enable clean prosperity.

Please join in the discussion and welcome Zion Lights to the community of pro-nuclear advocates and technological optimists.

Michael Shellenberger's new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All has provoked numerous reactions and conversations. It is a carefully researched, 400 page work where 25% of the book is endnotes that document sources for the statements in the book.

Michael is a stranger to the "go along to get along" mode of thinking, writing and speaking. By clearly stating his positions, he generates strong reactions among those who either agree or disagree.

His book documents extensive travels and deep conversations that have led him draw challenging conclusions about many current issues.

He asserts that nuclear weapons are not going to be abandoned. He believes that those who focus their concerns on those horrific devices should be doing everything they can to prevent their use instead of expending effort in a fruitless pursuit of a nuclear weapons-free world.

An important part of reducing risk for nuclear weapons use is to continue to promote development and eliminate scarcity wherever possible.

He notes that cities, factories and increasingly productive agriculture are a proven part of lightening human impacts on the natural environment. They concentrate people and allow more space for nature to flourish. They are also the means by which currently wealthy nations have become wealthy; denying those useful development paths to poor nations solidifies poverty.

He asserts that vegetarianism is an ideology or religion that is strongly influenced by a disgust reaction and that its importance for stabilizing climate has been exaggerated.

He acknowledges that competitors have played a role in the war against the atom, but he believes most campaigners are sincere even if they have been misinformed or misled by their peer groups to fear nuclear energy and radiation. (I maintain that money is far more important than ideology, but there is always room for different opinions.)

Michael is a thinker, a researcher and a writer who makes a strong case for environmental humanism.

He acknowledges that human society has many issues that need to be forthrightly addresses by the best available means, but he is firm in his conclusion that it is counter productive to attempt to stimulate action by frightening people with exaggerated scenarios not backed by solid science.

Please join in the discussion. As always, your comments are welcome.

Global First Power (GFP), Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) recently announced that they had formed a joint venture called Global First Power Limited Partnership. That venture will build, own and operate an installation called the Micro Modular Reactor (MMR) at the Chalk River Laboratories site.

MMR nuclear plant

Mark Mitchell and Eric MGoey joined as guests on Atomic Show #278 to provide depth and background information about the technology and the project that was not included in the press release.

Mark is USNC's director for the MMR project. Eric wears two hats, one at GFP and one at OPG. For GFP, he is the director of outreach and communications. For OPG, he is the director of remote power generation.

We talked about the project's genesis and the joint venture's mission of proving through doing that the system design can be licensed, manufactured, assembled and operated in a cost-competitive way.

Eric provided a brief overview about OPG. He explained that it is committed to providing clean, reliable power both to grid-connected customers and to customers in areas that are not connected to the grid. He described how OPG has a current charter to serve markets throughout Canada and into the United States, and how it hopes that the MMR project will open new markets to the company.

For this first of a kind project, the MMR is a 15 MWth, 5 MWe power system with essentially two main plants. The nuclear plant is a helium-cooled, fission reactor-heated system that circulates helium through a heat exchanger. The adjacent plant is a conventional steam plant that circulates water through a heat exchanger/boiler and a steam turbine/condenser.

Between the two plants is a molten salt heat storage system that acts to buffer heat supply and steam demand. It gets heated by helium that has passed through the reactor. Hot molten salt transfers heat to boil water, creating high pressure steam to turn the turbine.

This arrangement allows the supplied grid to rapidly respond to load changes while enabling operators and control systems to vary reactor power output in a more gradual and efficient manner.

The reactor heat source differs from other high temperature gas reactors. It uses the same Triso coated particle fuel often chosen for gas cooled reactors and some molten salt cooled systems. Instead of using a random graphite matrix material to produce fuel elements from Triso particles the MMR uses USNC's patented Fully Ceramic Microencapsulated (FCM) fuel.

That innovation replaces random graphite with densely packed silicon carbide (SiC) as the matrix used to produce fuel elements. According to corporate literature on this feature, FCM fuels can retain fission products without failures at temperatures approaching 2000 C.

MMRs are designed to operate for 20 years between fuel system replacements.

While we talked a bit about the technological specifics, most of my conversation with Mark and Eric revolved around business considerations, the importance of developing manufacturing competence, the importance of effective cost controls and the importance of transparent engagement with regulators and potential customers.

Your participation in the comment thread is always welcome. If questions arise that need more details, I will seek assistance from the show guests.

I hope you enjoy listening.