For some, the word nuclear
may conjure images of mushroom clouds or bring
back memories of disturbing nuclear disasters like
Chernobyl and Fukushima. Today, fears over nuclear
safety are at the forefront again as Russia's war on
Ukraine rages on. The nuclear threat remains
present. Russia has control of the
Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern
Ukraine. This was after an unprecedented attack on
that facility. The nuclear weapons program
was the first atomic program, and out of that
grew the application of that technology, of the
splitting of the atom for energy production, not for
destruction. And so it's very difficult
to separate those two things. And a lot of people
who are, for example, concerned about nuclear
weapons and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons and things like that tend to be anti nuclear
reflexively as a function of the connection between
those two things. There's so much fear and so
much misinformation. And I think even now our
media and TV like our entertainment, it's a
convenient villain, I think nuclear is, because it is
scary and radiation scary and our industry hasn't
done a good job of talking about that. Like how it's
okay to be scared, but that's not the same thing
as dangerous. Despite public fear around
nuclear power, the technology has proved to be
an emission-free, reliable way to produce large
amounts of electricity on a small footprint. As a
result, sentiments about the technology are beginning to
change. Even Elon Musk has come out
as a vocal proponent of nuclear power. The United States derives
over 50% of its zero carbon output for electricity from
its nuclear power plants. And so there's been a lot
of money both at the state level and now at the
federal level, for keeping existing nuclear plants
open so that we continue to retain that zero carbon
value. And also a lot of money
going into what's called 'the next generation of
nuclear power,' which is smaller reactors that are
designed to be safer, and cheaper and easier to
deploy. CNBC visited Idaho National
Lab to see one of these next generation nuclear
reactors. What you're looking at is
called PCAT. It's a full-scale prototype
of the Marvel reactor, and the Marvel reactor would be
the first of its kind that will be able to demonstrate
how we can really miniaturize a nuclear
system into something that is portable and
transportable. There are 93 commercial
nuclear reactors at 55 sites operating in the United
States, with 26 reactors in some phase of
decommissioning. Only two new reactors, at the Vogtle
plant in Georgia, are currently under
construction. Most of the historical
reactor development happened in the 1950s, sixties and
early seventies. This was at a time when our
energy demand was growing very quickly, much more
quickly than it is now. And sources of energy were
thought to be relatively scarce. All 93 of the nuclear
reactors operating commercially in the U.S.
today are what are known as light water reactors. The most widely used fuel
for such reactors is uranium, a common metal
mined from rocks all over the world. The United
States imports the majority of its uranium. Canada,
Kazakhstan and Russia are among the nation's biggest
suppliers. But in the wake of the war
in Ukraine, the United States is urging domestic
producers to step up. A light water reactor works
primarily by using fission reactions to produce heat. Nuclear fission occurs when
a heavy atom, like a uranium atom, is bombarded with
neutrons or interacts with with neutrons. These
particles interact with the nucleus of a uranium atom
and makes it unstable. It splits apart. When it
splits apart, it produces large quantities of energy. That energy release heats
up the coolant, which in light water reactors is
water. That heated water then
produces steam. The steam turns a turbine,
which turns a generator, which produces electricity. Worldwide there are about
440 operational nuclear reactors that are
responsible for supplying around 10% of the world's
electricity. The United States, once a
leader in building out nuclear power plants, has
today fallen behind countries like Russia and
China. There were several accidents
which really affected the public perception of
nuclear power. The Three Mile Island
accident in 1979, the Chernobyl accident in 1986,
and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. There hasn't been
much construction of nuclear power recently because of
the change in perception after these accidents. And also in the nineties,
the deregulation of the energy markets in the
United States left nuclear power competing with all
other kinds of energy on an open market. And in those
markets, natural gas is cheaper. The sheer volume of money
which is required to build large reactors in the
United States today and the amount of time that it
takes is a significant disincentive. Any utility
company is going to say, you know what, it's a lot
easier for me to build a gas plant. It's cheaper and
people don't care as much. Aside from challenges around
public perception, costs and construction time, another
often cited criticism is the fact that nuclear power
plants produce radioactive nuclear waste. Allison
Macfarlane specializes in nuclear energy and nuclear
waste disposal and served as chairman of the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission for two and a
half years. Once the spent fuel comes
out of a reactor, it's very hot, both radioactively and
thermally. That material needs to be
placed in a pool where there's active cooling,
water's actively circulated, and that keeps that
material cool while some of the initial radioisotopes
decay away. And then it does get cool
enough, after about five years, that you can remove
it from the pool and put it in dry storage, which are
basically these concrete and steel casks that sit on a
concrete pad and passively cool the material. But yes, that's a that's a
safe practice and it's a standard practice all
around the world to do that. In the U.S., nuclear waste
is stored at the nuclear reactor facilities because
there's no national waste repository. Plans to
establish such a repository at Yucca mountain in Nevada
have been thwarted by local and federal politics. There are some countries
like France that also reprocess spent nuclear
fuel. It is possible to take used
fuel and process it, recover the useful materials, the
remaining enriched uranium, the other fissile material
such as some of the plutonium, and that could
be used as fuel in future reactors. But that too is not a
perfect solution. That costs a lot of money. We won't do that in the
U.S. because uranium is
plentiful and cheap. Another common argument
against nuclear power is that we already have other
renewables to help us decarbonize. Nuclear is a baseload power
source. That means it runs all the
time. For renewables to be used
all the time, you need to have a huge build-out of
battery technology. Right now, that doesn't
exist. Nuclear power in the United
States has changed its future, and its prospects
have changed quite substantially over the last
2 to 3 years. There were a number of
plants that were in line to be shut down and some were
shut down. But a number of states and
now the Biden administration has made a determination
that you need those plants and their zero carbon
electricity output in order to meet the climate
objectives of the country and also at the state
level. The war in Ukraine has
disrupted energy markets in Europe and reignited
conversations around the need for countries to be
energy independent. In the wake of Fukushima,
the German government made a determination to shut down
all of their nuclear energy and make themselves even
more dependent on Russian natural gas. Back in the U.S., one of the
plants scheduled to be decommissioned is Diablo
Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo,
California. The state's last remaining
nuclear power plant has a long history of
anti-nuclear protests. Lately, there's been heated
debate on whether to extend the plant's lifespan beyond
its planned 2025 retirement. The reasons why nuclear
power plants are shut down are often complicated and
typically come down to political and economic
factors. The two drivers for nuclear
are price and politics. But one Diablo Canyon
employee says that the clean energy produced by the
plant is still needed. Part of the reason that the
closure of Diablo Canyon was announced so early in 2016
with a nine year lead time, was so that we could
prepare and get more clean energy online so that when
we shut Diablo Canyon, we could replace it with clean
energy and we just haven't made much progress. Heather Hoff has worked at
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant for over 18 years. In 2016, she co-founded
Mothers for Nuclear, an activist group that
supports the protection of existing nuclear power
plants, as well as the construction of new ones. Still, Hoff says she
understands the reluctance to embrace nuclear power. And it's something that she
herself struggled with when she started working at
Diablo Canyon. My family was pretty nervous
about me working there, and I was a little nervous as
well. I'd heard a lot of stories, you know, of scary
things and just didn't really know how I felt
about nuclear. I spent the first probably
six years of my career there asking tons and tons of
questions and eventually kind of changed my mind
about nuclear and realized that it was in really good
alignment with my environmental and
humanitarian values. Californians seem to be
changing their views, too. A recent poll found that
44% of voters are in support of building new nuclear
plants, compared to 37% who oppose such a measure. But
that's not to say Hoff never questioned her newfound
respect for nuclear power. In March 2011, a
9.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of
Japan, triggering a tsunami. Suddenly, the world had a
nuclear disaster on its hands. Brian, for the first time,
Japan declared an atomic emergency at two nuclear
power plants and Japanese officials say they have
lost control of two reactors. For any existing reactor. What you need is to be able
to continue to pump the coolant around the fuel so
that it doesn't get too hot and then melt down. And
what happens is in Fukushima, the electricity
went out. And then in every reactor,
there's backup generation, which is mostly diesel
fuel. But the diesel generators
in Fukushima were on the ground and were swamped by
the tsunami. And so they weren't able to
keep the coolant pumping. And so the fuel melted
down. It's sitting at the bottom
of the reactor. And then the explosions
that you saw was the build up of hydrogen inside of
the reactor containment that then blew. I was actually in the
control room at Diablo Canyon during the few days
when the Fukushima events were unfolding. And it was super scary. And it's like my worst
nightmare as an operator, you know, to be there and
think about these other operators just across the
ocean from us and they don't know what's going on with
their plant. They have no power. They
don't know if people are hurt. Some of what I was
hearing on TV and the media was pretty scary. But then, you know, like
when we actually learned what was going on, it
wasn't as bad as I thought. No one was actually hurt by
events that happened at the plant, and that was really
surprising to me. So I kind of went from
like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to quit to like,
Oh, now I feel even more strongly that nuclear is
the right thing to do. Although there have been no
direct deaths attributed to the Fukushima disaster
itself, over 160,000 people were evacuated from their
homes as a result of the tsunami and nuclear
incident. About 41,000 have not yet
been able to return home. Some experts predict that
it will take another 30 years to clean up the
Fukushima plant. But there is some good
news. A 2021 report concluded that the doses of
radiation that Fukushima residents were exposed to
are such that future radiation associated health
effects are unlikely to be discernible. After every major nuclear
accident, there has been a regulatory response and the
industry in the United States and around the world
has been required to make changes, often substantial
changes, to their facilities. We learned that
in the case of the Fukushima accident, for instance,
that we've never planned for more than one reactor to
meltdown at a site at a time. Sites had
insufficient backup capabilities in case more
than one reactor went down at a time. And so all
reactors were required to build up their capabilities
against natural hazards and reevaluate natural hazards. Experts say the 1986
Chernobyl accident was the result of flawed reactor
design and inadequately trained personnel.
Chernobyl is, to this day considered the world's
worst nuclear disaster. In many ways, it forever
altered the way nuclear reactors are built and run. What you see when you look
at it, any nuclear reactor that's of the current
generation, is this big curved concrete covering
over the reactor, what is called the reactor vessel. And so that didn't exist in
Chernobyl. So when it melted down and
it spread a lot of radiation, it was a
disaster. Today, the industry is
working on another crop of nuclear power reactors
known as advanced reactors. Advanced reactors will have
very few refueling cycles. It's going to have
extremely improved economics. And the safety
pedigree has to be extremely high to the point where
there are accident scenarios that are not even possible. Compared to conventional
light water reactors. Advanced nuclear reactors
are designed to be simpler and may use different fuel
types and coolants in order to improve operational
performance and safety. Among these advanced
nuclear reactors are molten salt reactors, high
temperature gas reactors and sodium cooled fast
reactors. All of these technologies
are based on technological concepts which were
developed in the early phase of nuclear power. But
there's now a desire by governments to try and
perfect them in a way that we haven't been able to do
in the past. For the past two years,
Yasir Arafat and his team at Idaho National Laboratory
have been working on a prototype of an advanced
nuclear reactor known as Marvel. While the current
fleet of large nuclear power reactors can each produce
upwards of 1,000 megawatts of electricity, Marvel is
what is known as a microreactor. As their name
suggests, microreactors are much smaller in size and
operate at a much smaller scale, producing less than
20 megawatts of electricity. Though being a prototype,
Marvel will only produce about 100 kilowatts of
electricity. Instead of powering an
entire city. A single microreactor can
be used to power a hospital, military base or disaster
zone. The advantage, Arafat says,
is that microreactors can be manufactured at scale in
factories, significantly cutting costs and
construction time. Plus microreactors would
increase electric grid resilience because if one
reactor goes down, it can easily be swapped for
another. But use cases for microreactors go beyond
electricity production. A lot of the end customers,
they're not necessarily looking for electricity,
but they're looking for high-grade heat for
different applications, running a chemical process
or industrial process, or even using low-grade heat
for district heating. This machine can actually
deliver both. As for safety, Arafat points
to several features. First, automation. These systems are designed
to be self regulated, so you don't require hundreds of
operators to run these. You essentially would need
one or two just for oversight, but they
wouldn't necessarily need to control the system
manually. Eventually, Arafat envisions
a system that won't require any operators. Instead, the
reactor would be able to self-regulate,
automatically adjusting to the energy needs of the
power grid. In case something does go
wrong, the systems would also be equipped with
shielding. There's going to be
extensive amount of shielding around these
systems that actually not only provides radiation
protection, but also provides protection from
external weather conditions or manmade hazards. As opposed to water, the
Marvel reactor will use a sodium potassium eutectic
mixture coolant designed to more efficiently remove
heat from the reactor core. The fuel will also be
different. We're using a fuel called
uranium zirconium hydride. Why do we use this fuel? Because it actually has a
very strong safety pedigree that is inherent to the
physics of the material. So when the reactivity goes
up, the reactor automatically powers down
almost instantaneously. That allows us to design a
reactor that is extremely, extremely safe. Another characteristic of
Marvel's fuel is that it's more highly enriched than
the fuel used in conventional light water
reactors, meaning you need less of it and it does not
need to be swapped out for new fuel as often. But
there is a catch. The standard enrichment
level in a light water reactor is about 4% and
4.5% uranium. In an advanced reactor, it
needs to be closer to 19%-20%. And the challenge
you have is the International Atomic Energy
Agency has a standard that says any enrichment above
20% is weapons usable. And so everyone is aiming
for as close to 20% as they can get without going over
that limit, because nobody wants to be accused of
trying to proliferate nuclear weapons. And so the
development and creation of this high enrichment fuel
doesn't exist in the United States at the moment. We're
pouring money into these advanced reactor
development programs, and the fuel doesn't exist. But the U.S. government is
working on establishing a domestic supply chain for
advanced reactor fuel. As a prototype, Marvel is
not designed to be a commercial nuclear reactor. The whole purpose of this
machine is not to come up with a commercial system. It's to come up with a
system that can test new technologies to enable
commercial designs out there. Marvel is expected to be up
and running by the end of 2023. We have not really built a
new nuclear system, not just in the national lab here,
but as a nation for a few decades. So we are trying
to use the Marvel reactor not to go through the
design, development and demonstration, but also
invent, reinvent the process that lets us go there. Also on Idaho National
Laboratory's campus sits a large dome known as EBR-II. Originally the site of an
experimental sodium fast reactor, the dome is now in
the process of being refurbished to test the new
crop of microreactors. This dome is going to allow
us to work with private sector innovators to bring
their reactor technologies up to operation for the
first time. So we can remove fuel and
materials and test its performance and verify that
the performance of the materials and the fuels and
the reactors is going according to what we
expect, based on modeling and simulation and a lot of
testing that we do prior to starting up the reactor. The Defense Department and
companies like X-energy, NuScale and Bill
Gates-backed TerraPower are all slated to test reactors
at Idaho National Laboratory in the next decade. Our schedule on developing
and deploying these reactors makes us competitive
globally and offer solutions that China and Russia won't
be able to. To in addition to advanced
reactors, governments and private companies are
working on machines to scale and commercialize nuclear
fusion. Such a reaction produces
energy by fusing atoms together, instead of
breaking them apart. In theory, these devices
would produce more energy than they would consume
without expelling long-lasting radioactive
waste. A prototype of such a
fusion device. Called a Tokamak, is being
constructed in France as part of an international
effort called ITER. The project has so far cost
around $22 billion and is expected to be turned on in
2025. There are a lot of folks who
are skeptical of our ability to move forward and to
demonstrate in a manner that's timely relative to
climate change. But history counsels us to
be more hopeful because we have done this before and
we now have an enormous commitment from the federal
government, as well as the private sector, to go ahead
and do this again. To do it differently and to
do it better, but to do it with urgency that that our
situation demands.
