New nuclear designs are gearing up for deployment. What does this mean for the regulator? We’re asking the expert, Doug True, who is NEI’s chief nuclear officer.
What demand do you expect to see for advanced nuclear energy over the next 25 years?
I think it’s become clear that there’s going to be huge demand for new nuclear in the future. We recently did a survey of our member utilities that operate nuclear plants, and they identified that they believe they could use up to 90 gigawatts of new nuclear to support their companies’ decarbonization goals. These are the companies that run the grid and understand what it takes to provide reliable, affordable power to their customers. The interesting thing about this survey is that it was done before the Inflation Reduction Act was even really contemplated—we did it back in February— and so we think those numbers are probably going to go up. And we also think that demand is going to be moving to the left, meaning people are going to be doing it sooner as we go forward because of some of the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act that supports not just our current fleet but the future fleet.
Is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ready for this demand?
In short, no, not today. The reason for that is that for the last 30 years they’ve been basically regulating a fixed number of companies operating the same facilities, but our future as I just described is much brighter than that. The next 5-7 years are going to be really important in being able to see those technologies move through the regulatory process.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the preeminent regulatory agency in the world, and they’re looked to as the standard-bearer for nuclear power around the world. It’s important they get this right and demonstrate how we can move forward with advanced nuclear here in the United States to help enable other countries to be able to follow and meet their own decarbonization objectives.
As demand increases and the industry brings new nuclear online, how does the regulatory framework need to evolve?
New designs have a lot of inherent safety features that make them safer while still providing the carbon-free, reliable electricity that we’re used to, and that’s going to require the NRC to take a more risk-informed and performance-based approach. And we already know the next several years there’s going to be at least a dozen applications. We hear discussions about even more beyond that, and those designs are all different types. So the processes and practices the NRC undertakes need to accommodate that breadth of applications.
One key to this is that we are focused on what’s important to safety and that we are not unduly burdening these new technologies with unnecessary baggage or delays in their licensing processes. Once the technology is demonstrated as safe, it should be able to move forward quickly and be deployed rapidly in multiple places.
What benefits will these advanced technologies provide that the regulator should consider?
The designs include a number of different features—for example, innovative fuel designs, different coolants instead of using water—and each of those bring different characteristics that help them meet these other needs beyond electricity, as well as generate cost-competitive electricity.
These facilities are going to be largely built in factories and then brought to the site and assembled. This is far different than the past where we were constructing everything on site from scratch, and that will take a different regulatory view, but it also will allow us to bring them online faster and more reliably cheaper over time as we get the manufacturing capabilities built up.
Some of these designs also have the capacity to potentially reuse some of the used fuel from our current fleet as their fuel source of the future. That will be a new development for this and could sustain the industry for a very long time.
How will the regulatory framework need to change to meet the growing interest in new applications like hydrogen and steam?
What’s significant about these advanced technologies is that they are going to be used in a lot of different ways. They’re going to be used to provide clean drinking water, to provide hydrogen, to provide process heat for chemical facilities and other facilities, as well as the electricity we know our nuclear plants can provide as they do today. They’re going to come in a lot of different shapes and sizes to meet different needs whether it is being located near a manufacturing facility or in a remote location or powering a data center.
This means they are going to be deployed in different places, used for different purposes that the regulator has not necessarily seen before. So, all of these attributes lead to a need for the regulator to be looking at different aspects of safety but continuing to focus on what’s important to safety to continue to enable this technology to take its role in helping the country meet its decarbonization goals broadly across the economy.
Just as important as regulatory modernization is a workforce to build new nuclear plants. How can we prepare now for the workforce needed to build the nuclear of the future?
We’re talking about potentially doubling the size of the current deployment or more of nuclear plants in the United States. We’ll need to invest in STEM programs to make sure we have the technical folks to support this. We’ll need to invest in developing trade schools and community colleges to develop the workforces we need to build these facilities. And we need to be moving forward with educating the public on the fact that nuclear is going to be part of this future. So that they can understand that nuclear provides a long-term career, 40-60 years of operation in a well-paying job as we’ve done for the last 50 years.
Another really important dimension of this is as we transition off of fossil fuels, there’s an opportunity at these plants to transition that workforce from, for example, a coal plant to a nuclear plant. We need instrument techs, we need pipefitters, we need operators. All of those folks can be transitioned to similar roles in a nuclear plant. This will enable communities to keep their workforce intact, keep their tax base intact and will provide a ready workforce to be able to transition from those fossil fuels to the nuclear of the future.
