A Nuclear Power Plant in Your Backyard? Future Reactors Are Going Small
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future everything listeners. A quick note. Before we get into this piso's, which is all about the future of nuclear power, we want to hear from you.

Do you think the U. S. Should build more but smaller nuclear power plants to provide electricity.

Why or why not? Let us know. Email us at F V.

Podcast at W. S. Dot com. Thanks for listening. Now on to the show. What do you think of when you hear the word's nuclear power plant? If you are like me, you may have picked up a lot of what you think you know about nuclear energy from.

That's right. The simpson was probably my first introduction to nuclear power from homer er's day job as a nuclear safety inspector. Nuclear, it's a nut to smile and joe vision nuclear.

Power.

though, shockingly, the show isn't exactly scientifically accurate. The U. S. Office of nuclear energy actually publish to pressure with the section titled four things the simpson got wrong about nuclear. Did you know nuclear waste isn't a glowing Green liquid? And surprise, surprise, homer simpson is not a model safety inspector.

One thing the show did get right is the size of the springfield nuclear power plant, IT looms over the tower skyline. The cooling towers are really big, like they are in real life. But what if a nuclear reactor could be shrink down to fit into a small warehouse .

instead of the large concrete domes that you typically think up for a containment? We've got to a very small steel containment vessel.

say ras is the chief technical officer and one of the cofounder ers of new scale power, a company that's working on a new generation of nuclear power generators.

Reactive vesle sits inside the container vessel. We pull a vacuum in the containment, and we immerse IT in a pool of water. That's the whole design based a react inside of a steel thermometer and war.

the very first nuclear reactor ever built during the manhattan project in the nineteen nineties fit under the football field at the university, chicago. But now most nuclear power plants are like the alvin w. voto. Electric generating plant in georgia, which takes up four times as much land as new york city central park and sports cooling towers that stretched sixty stories into the sky and IT needs a lot of staff. When the plant's newest reactor comes online next year, more than sixteen hundred people will be working on site daily.

That's Jordan damel son, a test engineer at new scale power. He works at one of their test sites at organ state university and corvus, a small college town. Kassel, along the west bank of the little mat river, feels like a hanger.

Sixty more? No, probably around fifty, fifty, fifty are right. There are cables and wires going everywhere, like piketty drills and ranches scattered on working tables. This prototype is not nuclear powered, but IT gets put through its paces to make sure a real reactor would be safe in the event of an accident. We have around five hundred so data channels just for temperature measured.

Uh, some of our temperature instruments get pulled and removed and replace with brand new fresh calibrations every two or three tests because we're here testing accident scenarios. So it's pretty violent, uh, transitions pretty extreme commissions new scales ably assembled. The reactor modules will be about seventy six feet tall. That's less than half the size of some of the most advanced nuclear reactors currently an Operation because hose reel says new scales. Big plan is to build small.

We want to develop something that was a easy to manufacturer, could actually be manufactured in a factory as a post on site, uh, could be transported easily, that we can reduce the cost. And IT was more about a plague and play .

kind of a design from the wall street journal. This is the future of everything. I'm dandy Lewis. Today, we're looking at small modular nuclear reactors because the future of energy is electricity. And while wind and solar have come a long way, we'll need more options to feed our need for power. How much small nuclear power plants fit in and can they help make the grid Greener stick out?

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Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task? Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

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there. Was a lot of fear of nuclear weapons following world war two, as heard in a promotional cartoon released by general electric .

in nineteen fifty. Dom ross, all our lives.

But there was also a lot of promise around .

nuclear power because here, in fact, is the answer to a dream as old as man himself, a giant of limitless power at man's command.

depicting atomic power's potential as a literal giant of energy. Gs cartoon painted a picture of an atomic powered future with limitless technological .

potential of electric power to entire cities is far from impossible. Wild nuclear power in locomotives, submarine ines chips and even very large airplanes may all but revolutionize future transportation on land, sea and air.

While nuclear power plants and submarines do exist, the use of atomic energy never became as widespread as that promote predicted, in part because the nuclear energy industry figured the best path forward was to build a small number of very large power plants.

traditional nuclear power plants, the type that we've been building and Operating for the past forty, fifty after the gig, what killed the large beast?

right? Yakup o born journal o is a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the massachuset institute of technology. He says the thought was that big centralized power plants would provide plenty of cheaper electricity. In practice, building them was complicated.

A lot of the cost overruns and schedule delays that we have seen in the construction of these large gogo scale reactors were associated with the inability to manage large construction sites and very complex supply chains.

Now that may be changing in .

the past four years. You have a lot of investors that are coming into the space.

Jena er hiller covers energy for the wall street journal.

Bill gates and sam altman and people like that have become interested in this area and they are looking for carbon free power sources and seeing a need as you try to reduce Greenhouse gas emissions. Bill gates.

as the chairman of tera power, which is developing slightly scaled down nuclear reactors, and sam altman, the cofounder of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, is a major investor in another nuclear energy startup called oko.

Small reactors have always been around. There's always been like a contingent of people in the nuclear power world who see a use case. But there's also been an interest just broadly from the investment world in building difficult things like rockets. Were an electric vehicle company, and I would put nuclear reactors into the category.

The difference now is that companies designing small modeler reactors say they're trying to build equipment, not infrastructure.

Fundamentally, what we're trying to do is build smaller plants that we can build more of in a factory quality controlled setting to really get the cost down to a repeating predictable range.

Clay sale is the C E O of x energy. It's another company developing small modular nuclear reactors.

Can we create something that is smaller, that is appropriate for incremental growth in the grid, uh, that we can simplify, that we can build in a factory free rapid skid mounted ship IT out to the site and assembling lit in a period of months rather than constructed in a period of decades?

The U. S. Government also seize this approach to nuclear power as an important tool in the future that relies much more on electricity.

Currently, hundred gigawatts provides twenty percent of our nations electricity. approximately. There's ninety three, three Operating nuclear reactors.

Later this year, there will be ninety four. Those k go scale plants are really helpful for that base. Slowed power.

Katherine huf is assistant secretary for nuclear energy in the U. S. Energy department. SHE runs the office overseeing and promoting the nuclear power industry.

If you can scale down the size, the complexity of these devices, you can start building nuclear reactors more like airplanes than airports. And you get Better economies of scale, ideally by saving on time and going over budget and things of this nature because is more predictable than an onsite construction.

That's the electricity that's always there when you go to turn on the lights or plugging your phone day or night, no matter the day of the week or time of year. Half says nuclear energy is becoming an increasingly important part of the U. S.

Government's planned to power the country with low carbon electricity. You may be asking yourself, how is nuclear energy low carbon? Essentially, nuclear power reactors generate electricity from heat. All of the commercial nuclear power plants in the us.

Use the energy released by nuclear to heat up water and generate pressurized steam that steam turns turbines to generate electricity or IT could be used for industrial purposes. Look at back to that in a bit. But unlike coal or natural gas, nuclear reactors don't release carbon into the .

atmosphere as countries, regions, businesses contemplate their future plans for reducing carbon emissions. A nuclear is one technology that um that they got a consider .

that's yakup one journal the M I T researcher.

It's an incredibly dense energy source, so you don't need a big supply chain that continuously feed the the power plant with fuel the same way that you we've call, for example, also the machine itself. The reactor is very, very compact.

But wall street journal reporter Jennifer hiller says conventional nuclear power plants also come with some disadvantages in the energy market.

Natural gas became so inexpensive in the U. S. That you had nuclear reactors having to compete. And that really helped kind of unwind the economics of conventional nuclear power.

Nuclear power plants generate plenty of cheap electricity once they're up and running, but building the plant itself is really expensive. Most of them are custom built for a specific location, which takes a lot of capital investment. Compare that to natural gas, which is cheap and plentiful in the us.

Natural gas power plants also cost less up front to build. And there's also the safety question, especially after disasters like the meltdown at the fu kashima die che nuclear power plant in japan in twenty eleven. It's unclear whether anyone was directly killed or second by radiation exposure from the accident, but more than one hundred and sixty thousand people were dispersed and at least thirty thousand people still haven't returned.

Broadly speaking, nuclear power tends to be pretty safe, but when they do have an accident, IT can be big and in catastrophic.

And there's the added concern about nuclear waste, which can take thousands of years to decay. But some advocates for nuclear energy says smaller reactors would help here because they use less fuel to begin with. While advances, safety systems need less human intervention. This is what hose ras is trying to do at new scale.

The real aha moment for me was when I worked for the international tomic arg ency in viana.

He served as a technical expert on passive safety systems.

and I kept hearing the same thing. We can afford the large thousand mega ot reactors. They are just too expensive. We don't have the grid to support a thousand watts. They wanted something smaller.

So he started working on a design for a smaller power plant that could still supply the consistent levels of carbon free electricity that makes nuclear energy so attractive, one that doesn't need hundreds of makers of land or cool tower that stretch hundreds of feet in the air.

New scale isn't the only company designing small modular reactors for the global energy market, but IT is the first company to have one of its designs certified by the U. S. Nuclear regulatory commission.

One of our modules will produce about seventy seven megawatts electric. This buy about sixty thousand, and homes can be powered by one.

It's a lot less electricity than a conventional nuclear power plant would generate. But rates and his team designed their system to be able to string together multiple reactor modules to generate a similar amount of electricity.

Our twelve module plant is nine hundred and twenty four megawatts. A conventional large plant pressing one work is about a thousand megawatts. So we're comparable, but we're in a much smaller .

fit print and each of those modules can Operate independently, meaning a new scale plant could start producing electricity and start making money once the first module is installed. Rail says this also makes the plant safer. That's because its cooling systems rely on passive systems to prevent meltdowns like reaction, culling steam to keep the nuclear fuel submerged in water, unlike conventional nuclear power plants, which require offside power to run their cooling systems during emergencies.

See if you have a hurray e comes through IT knocks out the grid commercial to compare lanes today, they would have to shut down.

A nuclear meltdown happens when the chain reaction that produces heat goes out of control, generating more heat and pressure than the system can handle, and melting down the reactor's components that can cause an explosion and release radioactive materials into the environment. The nuclear regulatory commission requires all existing nuclear plants in the U. S. To be able to draw electricity from the power grid in order to prevent this during in an emergency shutdown, but ray says that's not the case. For new scales, simpler er reactors for our plant.

you have one module providing all the housework ads for the other models. So that means all the models can remain essentially a full power close to full power. And then whenever the dispatcher calls and says, okay, we need power to help restore this section of the grid, we can provide that power.

But that's a couple steps into the future because no one has yet built a working small modular reactor in the us. And there are other questions to answer about what I will take to build a new atomic age. More on that after the break.

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Ash, learn more.

We've talked about how building smaller nuclear reactors could make them cheaper and easier to build. So how about replacing the sheer amount of electricity a single large power plant can generate?

We're try you just think completely different about nuclear. Instead of economies of scale, let's go for economies of value.

X energy C, E O play cells as small modular reactors can help because they can be installed wherever electricity .

is needed that makes geographic locations more available to us, whether it's replacing a coal plant that has suffered from suburban encroachment or uh, whether it's citing, uh, plant you next to a data center or next to an industrial facility.

A recent U. S. Energy department report estimated that a first of a kind, small modular reactor like those x energy and new scale are designing, could cost as much as three billion dollars to build. That's a lot of money, but it's a lot less than the thirty billion dollars spent building the two new reactors at Georgeous voto nuclear power plant cell says, to make the economics work and to avoid being Priced out by cheaper fuels like natural gas, nuclear energy will have to expand beyond municipal power grids. To industry me.

what is the petrol chemical industry other than a applying uh he and pressured to crack molecules and then recombine right. And a lot of that pressure is produced to state. And so there's a huge market for steam on the U.

S. Gulf coast and in other industrial applications in today. That market is met with by berny natural gas.

Earlier this year, x energy partners with dough chemical and the U. S. Energy department to jointly develop a four unit modular nuclear facility at .

an industry plant. Those will provide steam to a specific plan, their sea draft plant and counting county taxes. IT will also provide electricity to the plant and the excess electricity would could be sold and injected into the texas grid cell.

says tapping this market can expand the demand for nuclear energy in the future.

We can't decarbonised economy just by, you know, getting electric vehicles and planting solar farms and wind park.

He hopes small modulate reactors will one day power everything from chemical plants to hydrogen generators. Server farms used to train artificial intelligence. But wall street journal reporter Jennifer hiller says building a lot of small nuclear reactors instead of a few big ones may not solve the scale problem on its own.

That was the argument essentially for building larger plants, and that did not work in terms of driving cost down on the large reactor front. And so they're saying now instead of building large, we will build lots of small things and that will drive the cost down instead. And that is just a question. We don't have the answer to that yet.

Plus, hiller says any next generation nuclear reactors will still have to go through stringent regulatory hurdles to make sure they are safe.

You do have to answer the question of, can you really put small reactors all over the country? Is every community going to be welcoming of smaller reactors?

Because there are still risks associated with nuclear reactors. There have been at least thirty four serious nuclear power planet accidents worldwide since one thousand fifty two, and a recent study by researchers from stanford university and the university of british columbia suggests small modulate reactors would actually produce even more radioactive waste than big conventional plants. Some countries are even facing out their use of nuclear energy, including germany, which shut red its last nuclear power plants in April. At the same time, renewable energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal might just get cheaper as nuclear costs remain uncertain.

That is one of the key criticisms you hear is that just everything else gets a whole and cheaper in the next decade, and meanwhile, you're building an expensive nuclear reactor.

Again, despite the big promises, no fully functional small modular nuclear actors have been built in the U. S. yet. And while their benefits may look good on paper, they still have to prove themselves in the real world.

I am cautiously optimistic, but let me say up front, there is a lot of marketing, a lot of hype. And so everything has to be taken with the great soul.

That's yc, a born journal. Again, the researcher from M. I T.

This early projects are absolutely key to establish credibility and confidence for this industry, credibility with investors, confidence themselves that they can deliver. So if these early projects are gonna be, again, massively lake and massively more expensive than the industry as advertised, then it's gonna be a real tough proposition to go back to the investment unity and say, 4， twenty billion dollars, because now i'm onna give up.

Cost and demand are still issues that these companies have to address. New scale was planning to build its first small modular reactor in the U. S. At the idaho national laboratory, the hope was to start generating electricity by twenty and twenty nine, but the project was cancelled earlier this month when IT became clear they're weren't enough customer signed up.

New scale says he does have other similar projects in the works, including one with standard power to build two reactors in pensylvania and ohio by twenty nine. Even so, one journal says nuclear power still shows a lot of promise in replacing fossil fuels. Some coal and natural gas plants could even be retrofitted with small nuclear reactors to pump out clean energy.

There are almost excited to be replaced by the small modular reactors. You get to reuse a lot of the infrastructure that already exists at that site as missal lines don't care the electricity y is coming from.

not to mention all the other infrastructure that's already built at these sites like roads plummet and power lines. One journal says replacing old fossil fuel plants with nuclear power could also keep well paying jobs in these communities, too.

Coal fire plants here in united states are typically located in areas which are gonna suffer mightly if those assets go out of business and they are not replaced with something else that employees, locals, that provides well pay jobs. And nuclear small modular reactors can do that.

Plus, he says that having a range of energy sources, solar, wind and nuclear, for example, will make the power grade more stable and resilient in the long run, especially as the need for electricity in the U. S. Continues to grow. Bon journal says the nuclear power industry has its best chance to really take hold now and help lead the way into the future of plentiful carbon free electricity.

They're very much under the microscope at the moment. And this is their time, this is their moment. It's their chance. It's exciting and the ball is in their courts of the speed.

The future of everything is the production of the wall street journal. Stephanie ogan fritz is the editorial director of the future of everything. This episode was produced by me.

Danny Lewis, our frat checker, is a partner. Nathan Michael level and Jessica fenton are our sound designers, and road artha music cather's up is our supervising producer. I shall all muslim is our development producer.

Scott away and Chris centers are the deputy editors and philaner patterson as the head of news audio for the wall street. Like the show, tell your friends and leave us a five star review on your favorite platform. Thanks for listening.

Amazon q business is the new generative A I assistant from A W S, because many tasks can make business slow, as if waiting through mud a help.

Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task? Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q, got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at AWS dot com. Slash, learn more.