Seven More Things You Thought You Knew About Nuclear Energy

There are a number of signs pointing to a nuclear renaissance. New reactor designs, growing global interest in firm and clean electricity generation, and increased investment in reactor developers and adjacent industries all signal a potential bull market for new nuclear. But, common misconceptions about the nuclear industry remain pervasive.

Last September we listed seven of those misconceptions; here are seven more.

The key to success for advanced reactors is standardizing a design and building it over and over.

This sounds good if you’ve never built anything, but reality is trickier. No mass-produced product—not airplanes, not pick-up trucks, not laptops—comes out exactly right the first time. Engineering doesn’t work that way. The trick is to build it once, and make some tweaks to optimize subsequent models, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recognizing the changes as refinements, and not entirely new concepts, so that the improvements are regulated as amendments, not wholesale do-overs.

The part that must be standardized is the core design. This doesn’t mean reactor core. “Core design” is an engineering term that enables innovation while maintaining the major characteristics. But it isn’t a “standard design,” which, for regulators, means identical design.

A chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1990s, Ivan Selin, once observed that France, which has a successful and largely uncontroversial nuclear program, has one kind of reactor and 365 kinds of cheese; the United States, he said, has the opposite. There is an element of truth to this; our reactors are bespoke. A control room operator is licensed for two or three reactors at most, and analyzing and maintaining so many unique designs is inefficient. When one reactor operator finds a glitch in a component, reactor owners can’t even tell initially if they have that component in their plants.

But the cure isn’t identical units. It is allowing small changes and recognizing the difference between big differences and small ones. The system has to allow space for learning by doing, while still achieving some standardization.

But the nuclear industry has gotten itself into an odd position with the NRC, because of the way the licensing system has evolved. At the beginning of the nuclear age, a company that wanted to build a reactor would apply for a permit to start moving dirt, and then for a construction permit. As the plant was being built, the company would apply for an operating license, which was based on the design—a design that was being completed as the construction work progressed. The idea was to shorten the total time it took to complete the project, by letting design and construction overlap.

A parallel in the consumer world might be pouring a foundation for a new house before deciding what color to paint the interior walls, or perhaps some more serious details, like whether a bathroom door should lead to a bedroom or a hallway. If you had to take out a construction loan and pay interest on it until the job was complete, why waste time doing everything in sequence, instead of in parallel?

This turned out to cause problems. Without a finished design at the outset, workers would pour concrete or install pipes for various systems that later turned out to conflict with each other. The result was “re-work,” or tearing out nuclear-grade construction to do something different. At times, haste made waste.

So the industry and the NRC came up with a different system, design it first and then get the design licensed. Then build it. Conceptually, it was an attractive approach. It created the idea that the builders knew from the outset exactly what they would be doing, and that this would make it easier to predict the cost and schedule.

But doing something the first time turns out to be very hard. And if a design needs to be changed to move a piece of steel a few inches one way or the other, that means developers need to get a license amendment, which is a cumbersome change. This was a key problem that delayed the construction of Vogtle units 3 and 4, two AP1000 reactors, near Augusta, Georgia. Some changes were as simple as moving some steel studs inside a concrete wall a few inches, to make space for a door. The fact that this required something as serious as a license amendment has discouraged the industry from using the NRC’s newer licensing system, called Part 52. Instead they have gone back to the older system, because the designers know there will be changes as they build, and they want fewer regulatory slowdowns.

“Building identical copies” is a talking point, not an engineering strategy. Developers know better. The next AP1000 will incorporate the changes from Vogtle, and thus it will be better. Continued optimization and learning yields significant cost savings and performance enhancements.

The NRC needs to embrace this reality or it will be a barrier to innovation.

After we get the regulatory problems out of the way, we’re well set up to build lots more reactors.

Optimizing the regulatory system is necessary but not sufficient. There are other issues, like the supply chain for hardware and people. After years of atrophy, our ability to turn out big structures like reactor vessels, and even smaller ones like specialized valves and pumps, is limited. So is the supply of welders, pipefitters, quality control specialists, and instrumentation and control technicians who can build and operate new reactors. We also have a bottleneck in uranium fuel. We have a whole supply chain to rebuild, but inducing private companies to invest in that means convincing them that there is going to be a sufficient market.

Consider a parallel in the aviation industry. Lots of companies will compete to produce parts for an airplane like the Boeing 737, because there are thousands in service, and even for a specialized new variant, there are likely to be hundreds built. But only 20 Concorde supersonic jet transports were built, of which two were pre-production prototypes, two were development aircraft, and only 14 were in commercial service. Private companies don’t like tooling up for production runs that short, or investing in nuclear-specific Quality Assurance programs. Some reactors today are running on parts that are no longer routinely manufactured, and a whole specialty has developed in figuring out what spares to keep in inventory, to avoid having a reactor shut down while an obscure part is special-ordered.

There is also a craft worker problem. In 2013, when work started on Vogtle 3 and 4, in Georgia, and on V.C. Summer 2 and 3, in South Carolina, the Energy Department was also trying to build a nuclear fuel facility at the Savannah River Site, also in South Carolina. The combination created a shortage of nuclear-qualified welders, pipefitters and electricians. The shortage was relieved only when work stopped on the South Carolina projects.

The industry would be better off without the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Working with the NRC is frustrating, slow and expensive, but it has value. To prosper, the industry needs the NRC, but needs it to work better.

The NRC is supposed to set requirements and let applicants figure out how to meet them; instead, it is often prescriptive, telling them exactly what to do. Rather than, “Prepare a nutritious dinner for 10 guests,” the NRC tells developers what ingredients to use, no matter what is on the menu. And the NRC potentially takes years to do it, all the while charging the applicant $317 per hour that NRC staff spends on evaluating the menu. This is also known as the “bring me a rock” problem. The saying goes, bring me a rock and I will tell you if it is the correct rock.

The industry complains about inefficiency at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but also praises it. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s biggest trade association, calls the NRC “a strong and effective regulator.” The trade association lauds the Commissions for having “resident inspectors” at each plant who will order the plant shut down if they believe it is unsafe. Aggressive, intrusive regulation may be a burden, the industry is saying, but it is also a benefit.

A safety regulator is necessary to protect the public and the environment. In the absence of a regulator, the industry wouldn't even know what standards would be acceptable for them to self-implement.

That means we need a better NRC, not no NRC. Having a functioning regulator is essential. For one thing, nobody wants to live next to a nuclear plant that the NRC doesn’t say is safe. For another, nobody abroad wants to buy such a plant. And the alternatives could be worse; several developers and state attorney generals have brought a suit against the NRC, claiming that the Atomic Energy Act doesn’t give the NRC jurisdiction over very small reactors, and they should be regulated by the states. But the states aren’t set up to do that kind of work, and more lawsuits and delays seem inevitable if they take over, not to mention the fragmentation of a national market, as differing states impose differing standards.

Instead, the NRC should use regulations appropriate to the level of risk. That means alignment with Congressionally set risk thresholds, and scaling regulatory applicability to what is necessary to provide oversight. Many new designs have a lower risk than already licensed research reactors, which the statute requires the Commission to impose only the “minimum amount of regulation of the licensee” necessary. This will require NRC reform.

The NRC is what it is; it can’t improve

The NRC has recently completed some licensing actions ahead of schedule, and has shown increased concern about its own effectiveness. It’s been trying to reform for 30 years, with mixed success, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. What the NRC needs most to do is to get set up for evaluating and approving reactors that are highly similar, without starting from scratch each time. Most of the new designs are in the range of one third as large—in power capacity—as the reactors now running. That means that if the United States wants to double or triple its nuclear capacity, the NRC will be licensing dozens or scores of reactors every year. It can’t hope to do that taking them on a case-by-case basis.

The staff recently took a step towards rationalizing the licensing of projects that are highly similar. It said it would consider the license application of a company with a new technology for cleaning up mine waste. This was significant because the thing being licensed could be the technology, not the cleanup. One system, once licensed, could be used on hundreds of mines, vastly reducing the bureaucratic overhead involved in one category of nuclear projects.

Decisions like that will be essential or the wait to get a license will preclude a nuclear renaissance.

And the five-member commission has sometimes embraced key principles needed to re-make the agency, like telling the staff to form rules that set requirements without specifying the particular way that they should be met—known as performance-based regulation. Getting the staff to actually change its culture to work that way is a separate task. The NRC must take implementation of the ADVANCE Act in text and spirit to reform, but it doesn’t have another 30 years to do it if the U.S. is going to scale up nuclear energy.

Among other steps, the NRC should stop focusing on the most remote and improbable risks, and should integrate its risks assessments, to recognize that failure to permit deployment of a new, safe technology means continued use of older technologies that threaten human health and safety, like fossil-fueled power plants.

But it has made some progress. The NRC has modernized its emergency preparedness rules to take account of the characteristics of advanced reactors, permitting smaller emergency planning zones, sometimes ending at the plant fence.

To implement the ADVANCE Act, the Commission updated the NRC’s mission statement to fully embrace what the statutory mandate has always been—enabling the safe use of civilian nuclear energy for the benefit of society and the environment. The Commission must now commit to implementing that mission and make decisions, including efforts to modernize, that do not unnecessarily limit the benefits of nuclear energy. With that framing, a lot of changes become self-evident and justified.

The Trump Administration’s shake up of government bureaucracy is good for the nuclear industry.

Some of it might be, but implementing government programs requires a dedicated, experienced civil service staff. And wholesale cuts to the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office might not leave anybody around to sign the checks that will help get new nuclear projects built. Firings at the Tennessee Valley Authority board of directors have left the agency without a quorum, at least until President Trump can appoint replacements and the U.S. Senate can confirm them.

The NRC has been trying to hire staff to meet the expected wave of reactor applications. Many of the staff that are currently leaving are those most needed, the ones that will help the agency to innovate or fill critical roles. The impulse to cut staff, as DOGE and Trump have demonstrated across federal agencies, would outright damage the NRC’s ability to function well.

Orders requiring agencies to “sunset” outmoded regulations won’t help the nuclear scale up. Many of those rules pertain to obsolete reactor designs that nobody will ever build again. Getting rid of them will reduce the number of exemptions needed, but will mostly become a distraction for a very busy NRC staff that can’t keep up with more urgent work, like finishing rulemaking that solves the problem.

Shaking up the system is a problem, because uncertainty is a direct barrier in some cases. It creates a harder-to-quantify hesitancy to move forward. A more strategic approach is needed.

We can’t have a “Nuclear Renaissance” until we know what to do with spent fuel

We do know what to do with spent fuel.

Spent fuel, in the form of ceramic pellets wrapped in metal tubes, is stored in deep pools of ultra-clean water for a few years until the heat generation subsides. Then it is moved into steel capsules filled with inert gas, sealed tightly, and encased in concrete. These dry casks have no moving parts, and will last for many decades, if not centuries. In the meantime, a cluster of casks sufficient to hold decades of fuel from a giant electricity generator has a footprint the size of a tennis court or two. Unlike fossil generators, reactors are not putting waste into the air or the water.

Eventually, either the casks will be buried deep underground, where they will be isolated until the radiation levels have fallen to a level of radioactivity comparable to the natural uranium that the fuel came from, or the casks will go through a processing plant, where unused materials will be removed for use in making new fuel. Then the remainder will go underground.

At the moment, the balance of uranium supply and demand produces a fuel price that does not economically justify recovering useful materials from spent fuel, but because of the political impasse over finding a burial site, we have the luxury of testing the economic question in future decades.

Meanwhile, two factors give hope for a consensus on a site. One is the very substantial amount of money in a government account for waste disposal, money that could fund economic development and other benefits at a host site. The other is being able to follow the example of others. Three countries are moving rapidly towards burial: Finland, Sweden and Canada. All are using geologic structures similar to those present in the United States.

Nuclear is too slow and too expensive to make a contribution to stabilizing the climate

In late April, China approved construction of five twin-unit nuclear plants, or ten reactors, for $27.4 billion. The price, for a generator that will run more than 90 percent of the hours in a year, and can be located near load, is quite competitive. It’s worth noting that China could simply choose to only add more solar, since it already dominates global solar panel production. But it isn’t choosing to do that, because it recognizes the benefits of nuclear energy, including a lower-cost energy system.

And in China, nuclear certainly is not too slow. Nearly every Chinese reactor that has entered service in the last 15 years has been built in seven years or less, which is reasonable for an asset that has a lifetime in the range of sixty to eighty years. We could build them that fast, too, if we got the cobwebs out of the production system.

We must recognize that Federal priorities are changing, shifting away from control of climate-changing emissions, but there are excellent reasons in addition to climate to displace fossil fuels with nuclear. Advanced reactor deployment will cut emissions of soot, which research by the Clean Air Task Force finds may be causing 100,000 to 200,000 excess deaths in the United States every year. Nuclear deployment will also cut smog, a threat to human health, and acid rain, which damages forests and lakes. This is in addition to substantial national economic benefits.

China achieved cost reductions both on solar and nuclear energy by strategically building a supply chain to reach scale, not one-off demonstrations. In this country, the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program is a good start for one-off demonstrations, but it’s not sufficient to build an industry; that will take gearing up a supply chain, a workforce and a regulatory system, to support a stream of orders. Of course, even with a strong strategy in place, there is no substitute for actually building plants.