What If We Just Build More Normal Nuclear Plants?

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.”