Who's powering nuclear energy's comeback?
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Nuclear energy seems to be back in favour. This week at the cop twenty nine climate change conference, discussions are underway about how nuclear can help the world reduce carbon emissions. Also, the biden administration announced to go to triple nuclear energy production in the U. S. By twenty fifty.

The inflation reduction act is helping with that with eight, ten of subsidies. And those subsidies are part of the reason that this year amazon, microsoft and google each signed massive deals to build nuclear projects. The companies have a vacuous appetite for electricity as artificial intelligence data centers chew up more and more energy.

The U. S. Lost its appetite for building new nuclear power plants several decades ago for a few reasons.

First, it's incredibly expensive to build. Also, meltdowns and environmental risks slopped large in the public imagination. But a new form of nuclear power generation called small modulate reactors aims to change that. This is the indicator of from planet money. I entirely .

woods and i'm willing wong today on the show, could nuclear energy work differently? This time we prove the C. E. O of the company working with google on its small modular reactor project, and we ask how I will deal with concerns about cost, safety and waste.

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Google wants to power all its data centres without fossil fuels, but it's not just satisfied using solar, wind and batteries with ra subsidies. And the prospect for always on energy, nuclear power, is attempting possibility.

In october, google announce that would buy a ton of nuclear energy from a company called caro's power starting in twenty thirty. If this plan succeeds, IT would be the equivalent of enough power for more than four hundred thousand homes.

Google deal is for energy from what's called small, modular, reactive. Though small is in potentially as little as a three story building module, is to be a lot of them made the same way. Now to be clear.

there are no modern small modulate reactors producing energy commercially in the U. S. Right now.

But there are one proposed answer to a big issue with traditional nuclear power, which is that it's really expensive. Mike laughter is the C E O of ky. Rose power, the company that google is working with.

Nuclear plans today in the convenient way is really expensive and it's not obviously gonna be economically Better than um alternative sources.

Throughout the thousand nine hundred and fifties and sixties, nuclear engineers initially tried to drive down costs by honest economies of o so instead of building a few medium size reactors, you could build one really enormous one. And that did work in bringing down electricity costs. In many cases. Nowadays, running in existing nuclear facility is cost competitive with solar and wind and natural gas, but the costs of building, starting and eventually decommissioning a nuclear power plant are enormous, is far more expensive than methods like solo with battery storage.

Nuclear power plants are also acceptable to cost overruns among mega projects. Nuclear is among the worst offenders of cost low outs. The average nuclear plant ends up at more than double the plant expense.

There are two major reasons for these cost over ands. First, each point is unique. Different locations, different local safety considerations, different sizes that makes IT easier to base something up when the new design doesn't account for all the ventures.

When you have really long capital intensive projects or mega projects, there's a lot of process that gets added in there. And there's the sense that you don't get a lot of opportunities to to build the big thing. And so people tend to put more into IT because you can want to get as much out of that opportunity as you can, and that's tremendously expensive.

The second reason is that because IT takes so long to able to plant, experience is hard to find .

when those cycles are twenty to thirty years as they are nuclear. You need to just make sure that, like you have processes that people will remember what what you did not twenty years ago, which is not an easy thing.

Small nuclear modeler reactors aim to address both those problems. By building small and modulate, there will hopefully be simplified and identical each time, and they'll allow more people to come experts at building them.

actually building things and getting that experience and knowing where to invest time and energy is, is absolutely crucial. What's very elusive and nuclear technology is being able to follow that learning curve.

learning curve, meaning basically, each time something is built, developers get experience that leads to a more efficient process, and therefore that thing gets cheaper to produce. Solar and wind are good examples, with costs now a tiny fraction of what they were a couple decades ago. But this has not happened with nuclear energy historically.

So that's that's the concept. Um I think that the reality of translating that idea into into reality is shouldn't be trivialized. What's gone wrong is is absolutely essential for us to to avoid kind of those pdfs.

But even if mix company chios does succeed and eventually building cheaper of modular nuclear reactors, nuclear power still has its critics. Like, is nuclear power safe? Evacuation after nuclear meltdowns like focus, ma and her novel were hugely disruptive. On the other hand, the worst commercial nuclear of power point accidents in american history, which is three mile island in pensylvania, exposed nearby residents to less radiation than a chest CS ray.

All told, the number of deaths caused each year by nuclear power are incredibly small. They're comparable to that of solar and wind. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got millions of deaths caused by fossil fuels each year, mostly from air pollution.

Mike says that Carlos is using one of the safer forms of fuels and cool lands, and that he expects the risk of meltdown ns would actually be lower with small modular reactors because this more standard zone plus, you know, he does not want to melt down either.

We have to have a reliable plant in order to have an economically viable product. And for us, the requirements of of protecting the Operators and protecting the investment actually fully like fully covers everything that's necessary to ensure health and safety of of the public.

On the nuclear waste question that says highly radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, caro's would under waves to the department of energy, according to the department of energy, is safely storing nuclear waste and more than seventy sites across the U. S. Using steel and concrete. But it's struggling to find places for long term storage in the face of local opposition.

Another criticism is that given the need to decode ize quickly, we just don't have the time to wait for small modulate reactors to get developed, to get approved by the authorities and start producing energy on a commercial basis. This could be a decade s long process.

We brought this to mike lfb, whose deal with google is that we'll start producing energy. And thirty.

the twenty thirty deadline sounds soon to me, especially given small modular reactors and exactly the mainstream technology in the U. S. Right now, not to mention that, that needs to go through the nuclear regulatory commission. Why are you confident that twenty thirty is a job timing?

So um twenty thirty is certainly an aggressive time. I and and carrs and google both share um a strong sense of urgency that we need. We need demonstrations and we need them quickly. It's thought other technologies which are which are the enemy of the competition, its its carbon carbon is the enemy. So basically any strategy or technology which allows us to really the carvers are going be high about those can be good things, in my view, for the system all now.

the small modulate react experiment is boosted by subsidies, the inflation reduction act in particular. And the fate of those subsidies remains to be seen. And the president elect trump in the new congress.

For his part, trump pointed to small modular reactors as a potential answer to long running cost concerns surrounding the energy source. So we might see more companies trying this new option. This episode was produced by cuba cats .

me with engineer my voluntary er or gigas sanchez was fact by Sierra is kicking canin edits the show and the indicator is a production of N P, R. I like that nuclear option. Y, I like this .

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