[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," we'll hear about small modular nuclear reactors.

How long before SMRs are gonna be operating commercially at scale?

- Tell me what scale and I'll give you a date.

[Scott] Yeah.

- There are at least five U.S. companies that are on track to have at least four reactors built by 2033.

- And so what would stop that?

- I don't see the big showstoppers.

I see that utilities are very risk averse.

- Yes.

- And so, they're gonna be waiting to see who's first, who's gonna build the first one.

- We need to figure out how to make it happen.

Not if we should make it happen.

[Scott] Up next on "Energy Switch," the potential benefits and challenges of SMRs.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by, The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, are similar in scale to those used on aircraft carriers, but are now proposed for electricity generation and industrial heat.

Because they're smaller than a traditional reactor and modular, they can be built in a factory and then assembled on site, potentially providing economies of scale and efficiencies.

But new SMR designs face challenges in deployment.

We'll talk about the pros and cons with Jose Reyes.

He's the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Nuscale, the Co-designer of their small modular reactor and Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering at Oregon State.

Adam Stein is the Director of Nuclear Energy Innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, formerly an engineer and engineering consultant for many power projects.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," the promising new technology of small modular reactors.

Well, welcome.

Glad you're here.

- Thank you.

- Why would our viewers care about a small modular nuclear reactorx?

What's the buzz and why would a listener care?

- Yeah, no, I think it's very timely.

I think nuclear power and small modular reactors, in particular our design, is really essential to the clean energy transition.

- Okay.

- What we need right now is 24-7 carbon-free base load power that's affordable and that's scalable.

And I think SMRs meet that bill.

- Anything to add to that?

- In addition to 24-7 clean power, we also need more grid reliability, which nuclear power can provide, clean well-paying jobs.

- Yeah.

- And solid investment opportunities as well for long-term investments.

- Okay.

What's small mean?

Small means something different to everybody.

So, what's a small modular nuclear reactor?

- Yeah, that's a debated topic actually.

In general, it's considered to be 300 megawatts or less, which is about a third of the size of our existing reactors in operation today.

- Say I don't speak megawatt.

- Right.

Well, we have many natural gas power plants in this country.

Most of those are around 300 megawatts.

So it's a comparable.

- Okay.

- To about a natural gas plant.

- Gotcha.

And what's a typical wind turbine?

- Oh, like two and a half megawatts.

- Two megawatts.

- Yeah.

It's relatively small.

- Two or three.

- Up to 15 megawatts at this point.

- On offshore?

- Yes, up to.

- Okay, so those are the largest.

So one small mod reactor about 100 wind turbines.

- Yeah.

Now, for our design, of course, our SMR is only 77 megawatts.

And so that would be enough to power like Corvallis.

It's about 50,000 residents.

Just to give you a sense of scale.

- You say your reactor, you're with Nuscale.

- Nuscale Power, right.

Yeah, yeah.

So, the advantage of going small, of course, is that it's scalable.

You can build it in a factory.

So, that's very different than what's done today.

Makes it easier to transport.

- And can I put them together modularly?

Could I have 77 times three or four?

- Yeah.

So, we looked at that, you know, our first customer in Romania is looking at a six-module plant.

[Scott] Oh.

- So six modules.

And we can go up to 12 modules.

- So if you had 12, you'd be almost the same as one large nuclear reactor today, about a gigawatt or 1,000 megawatt.

- 924 megawatts.

- Gotcha.

- Yeah.

- And modular means?

- Modular means you can build major components in a factory type setting and ship them to site and assemble them, major components on site.

In some cases, with the smallest reactors, you can ship the entire reactor vessel fully assembled to site.

But with larger systems, up to say 300 megawatts, you're not gonna be able to ship the entire reactor vessel to site already constructed.

It'll just be too large.

- Okay.

- And so, the question about modularity is what components can you build in the factory setting and then take to site separately to assemble large components on site instead of building them from the ground up on site like we have done in the past.

[Scott] Right, gotcha.

Okay, your technology, 77, gimme a physical feel for size.

What does that look like?

- So, each module is about 15 feet in diameter.

- 15 feet?

- 15 feet in diameter.

- That's it?

- And 72 feet in length.

So it's a tall cylinder basically.

And that's the reactor as well as the containment.

So, instead of the large concrete dome that you typically think about for a containment, we replace that with a small steel containment vessel.

So, it's capable of high pressure and it's immersed in water so it acts as a heat exchanger.

So when they're installed, I mean this, the building's built, the pool is built, you're basically delivering those in three pieces or so, they're flanged, and you insert them into the pool.

- Underground?

- Underground, yeah.

- Oh.

[Jose] Yeah, and you assemble them in the pool.

- And then you connect them to the main turbines or the individual turbines.

- Right.

What are some other benefits, Adam?

- Over other energy technologies?

- Yeah.

- Or over other nuclear technologies?

- Both actually.

- We've talked about a little bit of the benefits already.

They provide clean energy.

They provide energy around the clock.

- Clean meaning no emissions.

- No emissions.

All the waste is contained.

- Okay.

- The mining streams are cleaner than other mining streams.

So not just operation, the entire supply chain is cleaner.

- Just because it takes less stuff or?

[Adam] Takes much less stuff.

- Okay.

- It takes less material input and less energy input to build nuclear power plant than any other energy source.

- Okay.

- Per output of unit energy.

- So that's an environmental advantage.

- Yeah, that's an environmental huge win.

- Okay.

- It also doesn't provide as much pollution in terms of particulate matter.

[Scott] As like burning wood or oil or coal or burning anything, huh?

- Correct, yes.

- Okay.

- Thousands of early fatalities a year from burning things to create energy can be avoided with nuclear energy.

- Okay.

[Adam] So it's a very large benefit to public health.

- Okay.

- It provides reliable energy.

It operates when you expect it to, even severe winter storms or other major disasters don't generally affect it like it does other energy sources.

[Scott] Okay.

Interesting.

What are the advantages over other larger nuclear reactors?

- Larger reactors fit the use case of some customers.

It's not that they shouldn't be used anymore.

They just don't fit the use case of all customers or all demands that the public would have for the needs of society.

- Okay.

[Adam] So you can make use of the existing infrastructure.

- Gotcha.

- The transmission lines, water resources, and importantly, a host community that already knows how to do power generation.

- Yeah, yeah, I mean it seems like fit for purpose almost.

- It literally is fit for purpose.

- Other benefits and downsides?

- One of the big benefits I see just by going smaller is that you can locate these in many more places, that in the past you didn't.

[Scott] Oh, okay.

- So, for our, yeah.

So, for our design, for example, we're approved without any requirement to be connected to the grid.

[Scott] Interesting.

Gimme a sense of the cost per gigawatt for an SMR versus a large reactor.

- New SMRs are going to be somewhere between 9,000 and $6,000 for first-of-a-kind plants.

- Per kilowatt?

- Per kilowatt, which is high, but that's for the first-of-a-kind plant.

We expect with multiples usually around 10 reactors per design to come down to, on average, somewhere around $5,500 a kilowatt.

We found that some capital costs you couldn't really reduce, even with iteration, they're just difficult to build components.

Some capital costs dropped dramatically with iteration, but the workforce, transferring the workforce from one project to the next with experience was a huge factor in cost reduction.

And that doesn't happen if we can't sequence building.

- Yeah.

- So, cost reductions are very location dependent, but they're also timeline dependent, and the costs come down faster the sooner that we start building more of them.

If we take a more rapid approach to deploying new nuclear, the costs will come down faster.

- So designs, what's the Nuscale SMR design?

And then maybe we'll talk about some other ones as well.

- Sure, yeah.

So, the Nuscale design is a light water reactor.

- All right.

- This is conventional in the sense that I think there's 400 operating light water reactors around the globe.

- The big ones?

- The big ones.

- Yeah.

- And it has a very well established supply chain.

So, we're using conventional fuel.

[Scott] And the pellets are uranium pellets?

- Uranium pellets, uranium oxide pellets.

- Okay.

- And they're, for us it's low-enriched, so, it's less than five percent enrichment.

- Gotcha.

So it's basically this, I don't wanna oversimplify here, but very similar technology to what we've had for 40, 50 years, just a lot smaller.

- Smaller, but it's also innovative in how it's packaged.

- So, there's other SMRs out there, Adam, give us a highlight list.

- There's several ways you could classify other reactors.

The first is thermal neutrons, which is what water reactors are.

They need to slow the neutron down.

- Right.

- And then that creates more efficient reactions.

That's a whole class of reactors.

And then there's fast neutron reactors where you don't wanna slow the neutrons down.

And that higher energy gives you different burn-up for the fuel and different other advantages.

- Right.

- Some of those are cooled by sodium, liquid, molten sodium.

Some are cooled by molten salt.

- You mean salt?

Oh, sodium's different from salt?

- Elemental sodium, just sodium.

- Okay.

- Just pure sodium.

There are some that are using heat pipes.

Almost every laptop in the country has a heat pipe cooling its processor.

That technology is being applied to on a much larger scale to micro reactors.

But there are over 50 reactor developers.

- Fifty?

- Yes.

- For SMRs?

- Yes, SMRs and micro reactors.

- Wow.

Now a micro reactor is even smaller or?

- Even smaller.

So, between 300 megawatts and five megawatts is considered SMR.

- Okay.

- Five megawatts or less is considered to be a micro reactor.

- Gotcha.

- Five megawatts could easily power a very large skyscraper.

- So, a five megawatt is a skyscraper.

- More than a skyscraper, easily.

- Incredible.

Okay, so you've gone through several technologies.

Anything big that we missed there?

- So, high temperature gas reactors generally use helium as their coolant.

And those are the highest temperature ones such as X-energy's.

- Okay.

- But it allows those reactors to get up to a much higher operating temperature, which is useful for some industrial processes.

- Okay.

- Which is why their first demonstration project will be with Dow Chemical.

- Okay.

- Who wants not just the electricity, but the heat as well.

- Correct me if I'm wrong, Adam.

All the SMRs that are non light are using a higher enriched type of fuel.

- Yes.

- Is it the HALEU?

- HALEU.

- Yeah, High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium.

- And that's not, that's kind of hard to get these days, right?

I mean, is there an issue with fuel or?

- Currently there is an issue with that.

I think, I don't know if the majority of that fuel comes from Russia is that?

- Russia was the only supplier until recently.

There's a demonstration plant in Ohio now that will produce around one ton of demonstration fuel by the end of the year.

- Okay.

But so, fuel is an issue, but we're working to address that.

- Yes.

- With safe partners.

- It's not an issue for light water reactors, yeah.

- Why is that?

- Because we're low-enriched uranium.

- And we have plenty of that around?

- We have plenty of that.

We have a facility in Richland, Washington, which manufactures the fuel assemblies.

So, those are readily available.

And so, the existing fleet has the lower-enriched fuel, but for the higher-enriched fuel, that's where the challenge is.

- The facility has to be able to enrich it further to get to a higher level of enrichment, generally around 19.75 percent enrichment as opposed to five for conventional reactors.

And it needs to be licensed to handle that material at that level as well, which most of the existing facilities aren't licensed to handle that.

Russia was not the chief supplier of uranium for the world.

It was more than a third of the capacity for enriching the uranium, which is why they were a bottleneck.

- Okay.

- The U.S. is now moving forward with the HALEU demonstration project in part to replace the enrichment chain.

- Interesting.

So, the big differences in designs are different fuels, I mean the uranium, but higher-enriched, lower-enriched, and then the way you cool them.

Different strategies for cooling.

That's kind of the big things in terms of SMR differences.

- Yeah, and I guess on the regulatory side, I think there's some pretty big differences in terms of how you would license a non-lightwater reactor versus a lightwater reactor.

- Okay.

Gotcha.

- Yeah, we spent about $500 million just getting the design ready and the documentation right to submit to the regulator.

Forty-two months for us to get our design approved after we submit the application.

- Forty-two months?

- Yeah.

We spent another $200 million responding to NRC inquiries, did additional testing.

Another 70 million in fees.

So, you know, the barrier to entry is fairly high.

It doesn't matter what the technology is.

- What's going on?

Why does it take so long?

Why are you spending hundreds of millions of dollars?

- Yeah.

- What am I missing?

- The 42-month period to get our design certified was half the time of the previous applicant.

- Incredible.

[Adam] There's, if I could jump in on that.

- Sure.

- Congress just reduced the timeline for licensing for the second, third, fourth of a design, one that's already been built to 25 months.

[Scott] They said you will get this all done in 25 months?

- Yes.

- Bipartisan?

- Yes, almost unanimous.

- I actually don't believe you anymore now.

I don't, I'm not gonna believe anything you ever say again.

[Adam] House and Senate.

- The SMRs have always had a very strong bipartisan support.

[Scott] That's awesome.

[Adam] Yes.

- I mean, I'm in my mid-60s, I was trained to be quite fearful of nuclear.

Are these things safe?

Are SMRs safe?

Give us a feel for this.

- I think you'll be hearing a term passively safe.

So, for our design, for example, under the worst-case conditions, the reactors shut themselves down without any operator action, without any AC or DC power.

And they remain cool for an unlimited period of time without the need to add water.

Now, the reason we can do that is because you have the reactor vessel, you have two valves on top, two valves on the side above the core.

If you lose power, they spring open.

- Right.

- They're normally powered shut.

- Oh, I see.

- You lose power, they spring open and now you're in a safe mode, so.

- Is this all modeling?

'Cause you've never tested this, right?

- We've spent about $100 million in testing.

- Oh, you have?

- So, we've got, you know, the scaled, one-third scale prototype.

We've got the full scale steam generators that we built in Italy.

The fuel assemblies have been tested at the, with Framatome both in the U.S. and in Germany and in Canada.

The control rod drives, the drop control rod drives have all been tested in Germany.

- Right.

- And so, overall we've spent $1.8 billion de-risking the design in terms of regulatory space, commercial ability, operations and maintenance, and even control room.

- Interesting.

You buy all that?

- I've reviewed his design certification.

So yes, I do buy all that.

Nuclear energy has proven itself to be safe.

By the numbers, it is the safest form of major energy that there is in the world.

The challenge is in perception.

There have been some well-documented major accidents and those live on in people's view of nuclear energy.

- Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.

- Correct.

There are much more substantial accidents of other energy sources that nobody talks about.

- Okay.

- And so if you are choosing a different energy source, you're actually choosing a higher risk energy source.

Around the world, there are more coal miner deaths per year than there has been in the history of nuclear energy for all deaths.

- Including Chernobyl?

- Yes.

- Yeah.

Okay.

Well look, let's talk about climate a little bit.

Emissions is a big deal.

These gonna lower emissions?

- Yeah, I think it's very encouraging if you think about just replacing a coal-fired plant.

[Scott] Yeah.

- You know, one of our a 12-module Nuscale plant would avoid about 10 million tons, metric tons of CO2 emissions per year.

So just from that one plant.

- Ten million tons a year.

- For a 12-module plant.

- For a 12-module plant.

And they qualify for tax credits or?

- Yeah.

Well, the Inflation Reduction Act was a big incentive to get these plants built.

- Oh, it was?

- The most recent tax credits are technology neutral.

They're focused on what is the output in terms of emissions.

- Nice.

That's a good thing.

So, what's it gonna take?

What's it gonna take to get the U.S. industry kinda going here?

- Well, what we found is that if you wanna have a plant up and running by end of the decade, you need to be ordering your long lead items today.

So, actually you need to order them last year.

[Scott] Okay.

- So, that's something that we've done.

We've ordered all of our long lead items.

We're looking right now at Romania as being possibly the first project for Nuscale.

- How much government support's needed in the mix?

- Well, I think the government's been very, very supportive so far.

And maybe Adam knows a little more about the most recent developments.

- Government has already appropriated over two and a half billion dollars to advanced reactor demonstrations for the TerraPower and X-energy projects.

And they're looking to appropriate even more to make sure that there's multiple reactors that will get built with an order book behind them to not be one-off plants.

- Okay.

- So, what is it going to take is a little bit of a different question.

We need utilities to step up and say, "We wanna order these" and they need to order them early.

There are planning timelines of usually five years for an integrated resource plan for utilities.

That is a much shorter timescale than the 10 years to do long lead item ordering.

And so, they need to be looking farther in the future than usual to say that they wanna order a nuclear plant.

- How long before SMRs are gonna be operating commercially at scale?

- Tell me what scale and I'll give you a date.

- Yeah.

Let's say one six-SMR assembly, like half a gig.

- Oh, okay, well.

- Yeah.

- For us, we have a lot of confidence of, by the end of the decade.

Certainly that plant in Romania will be built.

- Okay.

- If a customer came tomorrow, then they would have to kinda get in the queue.

- There are at least five companies that are U.S. companies that are on track to have at least four reactors built by 2033.

- Okay, so a decade, little under.

- So, the chances of being at scale for at least one of them by then are is very good.

- Okay.

So, what would stop that?

What's gonna cause that not to happen?

- I mean, all the indications are that we're gonna see an accelerated growth because the energy demand is just increasing so rapidly.

[Scott] Yeah.

- In terms of licensing, at least for us, you know, we've worked with the NRC since, well, we submitted our design certification back in 2016.

So, we've worked with them for a long time.

The path forward is clear.

[Scott] Yeah.

- So, I don't see the big showstoppers.

I see that utilities are very risk averse.

[Scott] Yes.

- And so, they're gonna be waiting to see who's first, who's gonna build the first one.

So, that'll be something.

The other part of it is that many of the customers don't wanna own the plant.

And so, that's where this power purchase agreement model, I think could be a big plus to moving the whole.

[Scott] Who does own the plant then?

- So, at that point, the developer would own it.

- Right.

What else could stop it?

- My concern is not deploying the first half a gigawatt, as you said, to get the scale.

It's the second, third, fourth orders after that.

That's what we don't have yet.

We don't have a clear picture of where those are gonna go, who the customers are gonna be.

And as Jose said, it's not clear who's going to move first and then the utilities are gonna maybe say, "Okay, we want the first mover after we see that it's running."

And that's too big of a gap.

We need to start the second plant before the first plant's finished.

So, a intermediary build-own-operate type model does help mitigate that.

- Right.

- If the company can carry enough capital to build multiple plants and own-operate them before they have offtake agreements.

I see that as the major showstopper.

- Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Well, look, this has been terrific, a lot of real good detail and insight and experience that you guys are bringing to bear on this.

Final thoughts, Adam, I'll start with you.

- I would say that nuclear energy provides substantial benefits to both the grid and the public.

- Yeah.

- And we need to roughly keep that at least at 20% as we grow demand to maintain system reliability and low cost.

And advanced nuclear in particular is very well suited to solving the needs of replacing the energy sources that we're retiring using our infrastructure we have, while at the same time, addressing the demand growth.

It's also a critical component for decarbonizing the grid.

- Yep.

- We need to figure out how to make it happen, not if we should make it happen.

[Scott] Same question.

- You know, I believe nuclear power is essential to the energy transition, in particular small module reactors.

What we need right now is 24-7 base load power that's carbon free, that's affordable, and that can be scaled up.

And I think that's where we're headed.

And I'm very excited about the future of nuclear power in this country.

- Yeah.

Well look, this has been terrific.

Really enjoyed our visit.

Adam, thank you for being here today.

Jose.

- Scott, thank you so much.

- Always good to see you.

And thank you for being here.

Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

Existing nuclear reactors have provided dispatchable, emission-free electricity for decades.

Some SMR designs use the same conventional uranium fuel and water cooling.

Others use high-assay HALEU fuel and alternative cooling methods.

These may be fit for different purposes.

Several SMRs could be cited at a retired coal plant to replace its electricity, or could power remote cities.

Others could provide heat to chemical plants or industry.

Many people are concerned about safety though Adam said nuclear is the safest form of energy per unit output.

I researched that and it appears to be true.

Jose said his and other SMR designs are passively safe.

The reaction physically stops during an outage.

But SMRs will face other challenges: enriching fuel, then managing spent fuel, public perception, and building a trained workforce.

But the biggest challenge may be economic.

Getting risk-averse utilities to invest in expensive new designs long enough to make them commercially successful.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.