When President-Elect Biden takes office this week, he will bring a renewed focus on addressing climate change by promoting clean energy innovation.
The groundwork has already been laid for major action to protect the climate, as the issue has gained more attention and state policymakers and energy companies across the country have been making long-term commitments to reduce carbon emissions. The only unanswered question is: what technologies will be used to achieve these commitments and make a significant impact in addressing climate change?
As a nuclear engineer and nuclear energy policy wonk, I think what’s happened this last year has shown us the answer to that question.
2020 saw enormous activity from the nuclear industry and the establishment of a pipeline of advanced nuclear technologies that will be available in the 2020s and early 2030s. Despite the challenges of last year, nuclear energy racked up quite a set of accomplishments.
Early on, Oklo Inc. submitted an application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for their Aurora fission battery, which will be built at Idaho National Laboratory; the NRC also completed the review of the NuScale Power LLC small modular reactor (SMR) design certification. Later in the year, the U.S. Department of Energy reached an agreement to provide $1.4 billion through a cost-share to assist Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) and NuScale in building that SMR by 2029. Finally, in October and December, DOE announced nearly $3.9 billion in funding through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP).
So how does this create a pipeline of technologies?
Let’s take a look at the ARDP. DOE’s initiative establishes funding in three “pathways” to develop different advanced reactor technologies with varying commercialization timeframes.
The demonstration pathway supports two companies, TerraPower LLC and X-energy LLC, to deploy their advanced reactors in seven years. The risk reduction pathway will fund designs to be commercialized approximately five years after that. BWX Technologies Inc., Holtec International, Kairos Power LLC, Southern Company Services and Westinghouse Electric Co. are supported in this pathway. Lastly, the Advanced Reactor Concepts-20 pathway supports designs with the potential of being demonstrated in the 2035 timeframe. Three organizations—Advanced Reactor Concepts LLC, General Atomics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—are supported through this pathway.
In total, there are 10 organizations being supported through the ARDP that hope to demonstrate a variety of reactor technologies—currently at different levels of readiness—from 2027 through 2035. When combined with the projects from Oklo, UAMPS and NuScale, which will deploy in the 2020s, there will be multiple designs featuring different technologies capable of a range of power outputs available in the 2020s and early 2030s. Taken together, they provide a robust pipeline of solutions to help reduce carbon emissions.
The efforts of all of the companies mentioned above—many of which are provided for through the DOE’s ARDP—will help pave the way for a variety of new designs. For example, two companies in the ARDP’s risk reduction pathway are building test reactors to support a larger commercial design. Kairos Power will design, build and operate the Hermes reduced-scale test reactor supporting the development of the commercial-scale fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor—a drastically different type of reactor technology that uses TRISO fuel pebbles instead of standard fuel rods. Southern Company Services will design, construct, and operate the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment—the world’s first critical fast-spectrum salt reactor, which will be relevant to TerraPower’s molten chloride fast reactor.
This diversity of technologies being developed is important too because the energy sector is still evolving and there could be a variety of technologies and power levels that will be desired by customers (whether that end user is a remote community in Alaska, a small or large utility in the 48 contiguous states, or a process heat user). More options allow customers to make the best decisions possible for their power needs and carbon commitments.
Often, the “future of carbon-free energy” can seem vague or aspirational when we need it to be clear and concrete so we can reduce carbon emissions quickly. But when I see four commercial advanced reactor projects (UAMPS/NuScale, Oklo, TerraPower and X-energy) and two test reactor projects (Kairos and Southern Company Services) working to deploy in the 2020s, as well as other companies developing their designs, I am excited and encouraged.
This pipeline of advanced nuclear technology, as well as other exciting developments in carbon-free technology, means that meeting the ambitious climate goals of our policymakers is not only possible, but also in our not-too-distant future.
