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The Nuclear Company is betting on the old school approach.
More than any other form of zero-carbon energy, nuclear energy seems to be stuck between its past and its future. There are currently 94 working reactors in the United States, fewer than there were in 1990. With the country’s growing energy needs in mind, the federal government has made generous incentives and tax credits available for constructing new nuclear power, operating existing plants, and for re-opening shuttered plants. It has also literally rewritten the rulebook for nuclear power to encourage the development of smaller advanced reactors that are supposed to be, eventually, cheaper to build at scale.
But in the meantime, there’s the confused present.
Despite more reactors closing than opening in the past decade, nuclear remains the largest source of carbon-free energy on the U.S. grid. Right now, there are only a handful of reactor designs certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but no actual plans to build any more of them. The two most recently built reactors in the U.S., Vogtle 3 and 4, are both AP1000s, the latest version of the workhouse United States nuclear design — massive light water reactors, the most common reactor type, which use regular water as a coolant. (The other approved designs include the ESBWR, a GE-Hitachi reactor, and the APR-1400 — both versions of large, light-water reactors, both more likely to be built overseas than at home.) The NRC has approved just one small modular reactor design, but a recent attempt to actually build it for a coalition of utilities fell through.
The two reactors that have been built recently, Georgia’s Vogtle 3 and 4, were each delivered years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. “So there was a feeling in the industry that we weren’t going to build anymore AP1000s,” Jessica Lovering, co-founder and executive director of the Good Energy Collective, told me. “And that was a shame because we just got all this experience from doing this big project.”
Lately, however, utilities have been asking a provocative question. What if, instead of waiting for one of the many nascent advanced reactor technologies to take off, we just ... keep building AP1000s, instead?
Anyone who wants to build or buy new nuclear power might have a new partner in The Nuclear Company, which wants to build a 6 gigawatt fleet of reactors — to start — using “proven, licensed technology,” according to the company’s public statements. Juliann Edwards, The Nuclear Company’s chief development officer, wouldn’t specify which technology in particular the company is planning on deploying, but she did tell me it plans on doing so one after the other, in sequence, hoping to drive down the massive price of building a new reactor. “We’re definitely focused on fleet scale deployment,” Edwards said.
“Six has been this magic number that comes back again and again and again,” Ted Nordhaus, founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute told me. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, for instance, called for 6,000 megawatts — a.k.a. 6 gigawatts — of new nuclear built with a new production tax credit as an incentive, exactly what Edwards and crew are planning to deliver.
The Nuclear Company won’t be designing or operating the reactors. Instead, Edwards told me, “picture us as the front end as well as throughput to operations. That’s ensuring that a project gets developed, licensed, all the necessary environmental permits, interconnect filings,” working with utilities that have licensed and permitted development sites already lined up. The company is focusing particularly on the big new sources of electricity demand — data centers and manufacturing — which likely means it will concentrate its activities in the East and Southeast. As far as areas where nuclear development has already been approved, Utility Dive identified sites in Florida and South Carolina that are licensed for AP1000, while others in Michigan and Virginia are authorized to use GE-Hitachi reactors.
The reason having this fleet approach matters, Lovering told me, is that building out a supply chain and getting the requisite investment is much easier when everyone involved knows there’s going to be six reactors’ worth in the pipeline, and costs could fall as the reactors are constructed. “If it was just a one-off project, I’d be much more skeptical,” she said. “It’s always easier to get financing for a proven project that's already up and running.”
John Kotek, the head of public policy for the Nuclear Energy Institute, concurred. He told me in an emailed statement that The Nuclear Company’s business model “demonstrates the innovation needed to meet the demand for clean, reliable nuclear energy.”
But there’s a reason much of the nuclear advocacy and policy community has seen advanced reactors as the solution to building out the scale of nuclear power needed to help power a growing grid without carbon emissions. Nordhaus’ Breakthrough Institute is one of the biggest boosters of nuclear, with a focus on reforming the regulatory system in order to make advanced nuclear more economical.
“The market for a 1 gigawatt reactor is a very large public works project,” Nordhaus said. “No one in the world has ever built one of these things on spec. Instead, they’re typically built by national energy companies, or, in the United States, by utilities who are able to essentially charge their customers for the massive costs of construction.”
While the nuclear industry has, with lots of intellectual and public support from groups like Nordhaus’s Breakthrough, oriented its energies toward advanced reactors, The Nuclear Company likely has fans in the Department of Energy, which would really like to see more large reactors getting built soon. “There’s a lot of energy right now, being driven in part by [Secretary of Energy Jennifer] Granholm and [the Loan Programs Office’s] Jigar [Shah], who are like, We need to get nuclear steel in the ground and get more AP1000s built,” Nordhaus said.
Granholm has called for a buildout of new nuclear “at a scale not seen since the ’70s and ’80s.” The Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, meanwhile, has been supporting nuclear since its founding following the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and Shah has scolded utilities and state regulators for demanding the government essentially provide cost overrun insurance before they even think about building a new AP1000, pointing to the incentives and loans available from the feds.
Nordhaus, who called himself “skeptical” about The Nuclear Company’s plans, told me that his goal was “to get technology to market that would be feasible to build outside a vertically integrated market. I don’t see how nuclear has a future in this country if you don’t do that.”
That’s Edwards’s goal, too. She’s confident that The Nuclear Company could build even in restructured electricity markets where utilities can’t tap their ratepayers to build expensive new plants, she told me. “We need to be able to get in a cycle where maybe we're breaking ground and by the late 2020s. And then we're going into putting neutrons on the grid by the mid 2030s.”
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Suburban streets, exploding pipes, and those Santa Ana winds, for starters.
A fire needs three things to burn: heat, fuel, and oxygen. The first is important: At some point this week, for a reason we have yet to discover and may never will, a piece of flammable material in Los Angeles County got hot enough to ignite. The last is essential: The resulting fires, which have now burned nearly 29,000 acres, are fanned by exceptionally powerful and dry Santa Ana winds.
But in the critical days ahead, it is that central ingredient that will preoccupy fire managers, emergency responders, and the public, who are watching their homes — wood-framed containers full of memories, primary documents, material wealth, sentimental heirlooms — transformed into raw fuel. “Grass is one fuel model; timber is another fuel model; brushes are another — there are dozens of fuel models,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me. “But when a fire goes from the wildland into the urban interface, you’re now burning houses.”
This jump from chaparral shrubland into neighborhoods has frustrated firefighters’ efforts to gain an upper hand over the L.A. County fires. In the remote wilderness, firefighters can cut fire lines with axes, pulaskis, and shovels to contain the blaze. (A fire’s “containment” describes how much firefighters have encircled; 25% containment means a quarter of the fire perimeter is prevented from moving forward by manmade or natural fire breaks.)
Once a fire moves into an urban community and starts spreading house to house, however, as has already happened in Santa Monica, Pasadena, and other suburbs of Los Angeles, those strategies go out the window. A fire break starves a fire by introducing a gap in its fuel; it can be a cleared strip of vegetation, a river, or even a freeway. But you can’t just hack a fire break through a neighborhood. “Now you’re having to use big fire engines and spray lots of water,” Scopa said, compared to the wildlands where “we do a lot of firefighting without water.”
Water has already proven to be a significant issue in Los Angeles, where many hydrants near Palisades, the biggest of the five fires, had already gone dry by 3:00 a.m. Wednesday. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones explained in a news conference later that same day.
LADWP said it had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the fires started, but the city’s water supply was never intended to stop a 17,000-acre fire. The hydrants are “meant to put out a two-house fire, a one-house fire, or something like that,” Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, told me. Additionally, homeowners sometimes leave their sprinklers on in the hopes that it will help protect their house, or try to fight fires with their own hoses. At a certain point, the system — just like the city personnel — becomes overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the unfolding disaster.
Making matters worse is the wind, which restricted some of the aerial support firefighters typically employ. As gusts slowed on Thursday, retardant and water drops were able to resume, helping firefighters in their efforts. (The Eaton Fire, while still technically 0% contained because there are no established fire lines, has “significantly stopped” growing, The New York Times reports). Still, firefighters don’t typically “paint” neighborhoods; the drops, which don’t put out fires entirely so much as suppress them enough that firefighters can fight them at close range, are a liability. Kearns, however, told me that “the winds were so high, they weren’t able to do the water drops that they normally do and that are an enormous part of all fire operations,” and that “certainly compounded the problems of the fire hydrants running dry.”
Firefighters’ priority isn’t saving structures, though. “Firefighters save lives first before they have to deal with fire,” Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the author of an ongoing case study of the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California, told me. That can be an enormous and time-consuming task in a dense area like suburban Los Angeles, and counterintuitively lead to more areas burning down. Speaking specifically from his conclusions about the Camp fire, which was similarly a wildland-urban interface, or WUI fire, Maranghides added, “It is very, very challenging because as things deteriorate — you’re talking about downed power lines, smoke obstructing visibility, and you end up with burn-overs,” when a fire moves so quickly that it overtakes people or fire crews. “And now you have to go and rescue those civilians who are caught in those burn-overs.” Sometimes, that requires firefighters to do triage — and let blocks burn to save lives.
Perhaps most ominously, the problems don’t end once the fire is out. When a house burns down, it is often the case that its water pipes burst. (This also adds to the water shortage woes during the event.) But when firefighters are simultaneously pumping water out of other parts of the system, air can be sucked down into those open water pipes. And not just any air. “We’re not talking about forest smoke, which is bad; we’re talking about WUI smoke, which is bad plus,” Maranghides said, again referring to his research in Paradise. “It’s not just wood burning; it’s wood, plastics, heavy metals, computers, cars, batteries, everything. You don’t want to be breathing it, and you don’t want it going into your water system.”
Water infrastructure can be damaged in other ways, as well. Because fires are burning “so much hotter now,” Kearns told me, contamination can occur due to melting PVC piping, which releases benzene, a carcinogen. Watersheds and reservoirs are also in danger of extended contamination, particularly once rains finally do come and wash soot, silt, debris, and potentially toxic flame retardant into nearby streams.
But that’s a problem for the future. In the meantime, Los Angeles — and lots of it — continues to burn.
“I don’t care how many resources you have; when the fires are burning like they do when we have Santa Anas, there’s so little you can do,” Scopa said. “All you can do is try to protect the people and get the people out, and try to keep your firefighters safe.”
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Thursday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for many of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At about 27,000 acres burned, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 2,000 structures damaged so far, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 1,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Opponents of offshore wind in Atlantic City are trying to undo an ordinance allowing construction of transmission cables that would connect the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project to the grid.
3. Benton County, Washington – Sorry Scout Clean Energy, but the Yakima Nation is coming for Horse Heaven.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In Connecticut, officials have withdrawn from Vineyard Wind 2 — leading to the project being indefinitely shelved.
In Indiana, Invenergy just got a rejection from Marshall County for special use of agricultural lands.
In Kansas, residents in Dickinson County are filing legal action against county commissioners who approved Enel’s Hope Ridge wind project.
In Kentucky, a solar project was actually approved for once – this time for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In North Carolina, Davidson County is getting a solar moratorium.
In Pennsylvania, the town of Unity rejected a solar project. Elsewhere in the state, the developer of the Newton 1 solar project is appealing their denial.
In South Carolina, a state appeals court has upheld the rejection of a 2,300 acre solar project proposed by Coastal Pine Solar.
In Washington State, Yakima County looks like it’ll keep its solar moratorium in place.