Decarbonizing the U.S. economy by 2050 will require doubling the country’s nuclear energy generation by deploying 100 GW of advanced reactors while also building a domestic supply chain for the high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) needed to fuel those plants, according to two new reports from the Nuclear Innovation Alliance (NIA).
Released Tuesday, “Fission Vision” acknowledges NIA’s 100-GW target may seem daunting, “but nuclear energy has been constructed this quickly in the United States before. Over 100 GW of light water reactors were constructed in the United States between 1960 and 1990,” the report says. “Application of modern manufacturing and construction practices can help us meet or exceed historic nuclear energy deployment rates and enable the doubling of domestic nuclear energy production by 2050.”
But the second report, focused on HALEU, cautions, “The main challenge of developing a mature commercial HALEU fuel cycle is that high assurance of long-term HALEU demand is needed to justify significant capital investments by fuel cycle companies, while high assurance of near- and midterm HALEU availability is needed to support the business case for the deployment of advanced reactors. Federal policy and investment to jumpstart HALEU fuel cycle activities could help provide these initial market signals and catalyze development of a mature and sustainable commercial market.”
More urgent still, the Department of Energy is funding two advanced reactor demonstration projects, and according to NIA, their main source of HALEU is a Russian state-owned company called TENEX.
Speaking at a Tuesday webinar, NIA Executive Director Judi Greenwald said that “a whole-of-society effort” would be needed “to create the technical, policy, social and commercial conditions” to deploy advanced nuclear “at scale and at pace.” She called on DOE to launch an Advanced Nuclear Energy Earthshot, similar to its hydrogen and long-duration storage Earthshots, “to integrate DOE’s efforts with the broader innovation and commercialization ecosystem that includes private companies, universities and other entities.”
The Earthshot initiatives are specifically aimed at bringing down the costs of emerging technologies. For example, the Hydrogen Shot is targeting a price of $1/kg for green hydrogen within a decade — an 80% drop from its current price of about $5/kg. However, setting out a similar cost-reduction goal for nuclear would be difficult, Greenwald said, because of the range of applications for different-sized reactors.
The HALEU report, on the other hand, drills into the details of near-, mid- and long-term market development, looking at the role of the federal government either to ensure demand as a guaranteed offtaker of HALEU, or to help build out the processing plants and other facilities via a cost-sharing program with commercial suppliers. For example, the report estimates that early development of advanced reactors will need upward of 20 MT of HALEU at a price of $15,000/kg.
Thus, a federal offtake program for 10 MT/year could cost about $1.5 billion, not including costs for transportation or storage, the report says.
On Time and on Budget
Its lack of specificity notwithstanding, Greenwald said that “Fission Vision” is intended as a high-level rallying point for industry and government, underlining the integral role that NIA says nuclear must play in U.S. clean energy goals. President Biden has called for the country to decarbonize the electric grid by 2035 and achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economywide by 2050.
As variable renewables increase on the grid, nuclear will be a critical source of firm, clean, dispatchable power, Greenwald said. “Climate solutions have to match the scope of the challenge,” she said. “Meeting our climate goals requires us to think bigger and consider the role advanced nuclear energy can play at scale.”
Further, “nuclear plants closed or not built are almost always right now replaced with fossil fuels,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, a D.C. think tank. “That’s bad for the economy; it’s bad for security; it’s bad for public health; and it’s bad for climate.”
Specific objectives in “Fission Vision” include:
- ensuring projects are built on time and on budget by rebuilding the domestic supply chain and providing incentives to attract private investment;
- tackling the complex social and environmental justice issues involved in nuclear regulation, siting and permitting, and the storing of spent nuclear fuel; and
- integrating nuclear into clean energy planning and policies via “sensible and technology-inclusive” initiatives and a range of projects combining nuclear with renewables and storage, as well as repowering fossil fuel sites with advanced nuclear.
Freed also added another objective to the mix: developing a domestic advanced nuclear sector to promote U.S. competitiveness and leadership in global markets, where it currently lags behind Russia and China, as noted by the World Nuclear Association. Advanced nuclear plants built in the U.S. and exported overseas will be “a crucial tool to strengthen energy security for our allies abroad and reduce our dependence on energy supplies from authoritarian regimes,” he said.
The Nuclear Narrative
Freed and other speakers on the Tuesday webinar said that the narrative on nuclear has changed in recent years, with former opponents and skeptics now at least open to taking a second look. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has similarly shifted the discussion in Europe, said Adam DeMella, global government affairs leader for GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy.
“Events in Ukraine have accelerated the energy transition, but they continue to push the importance of energy security to the fore,” DeMella said. “The U.S. has a key role to play here, but we have to get it right. If we don’t get it right, someone else will fill that void.”
A fundamental part of the new narrative is that nuclear technology itself is evolving. The advanced or next-generation nuclear reactors now in development use a higher-grade fuel, allowing for smaller, safer facilities that can use water, molten salt, gas or liquid metal for cooling and produce less waste. They can also more quickly adjust their output to match demand and provide both electricity and heat for industrial uses, such as the production of green hydrogen.
HALEU is the higher-grade fuel required for advanced reactors. It has concentrations of uranium-235 — the isotope needed for sustained nuclear reactions — at close to 20%. The uranium used in existing light water reactors has uranium-235 concentrations of about 5%, while weapons-grade uranium has concentrations of more than 90%.
Jessica Lovering, executive director of the nonprofit Good Energy Collective, laid out “the progressive case for advanced nuclear” her organization is trying to build. The success of the DOE demonstration projects and those that follow will depend on “genuine community support and buy-in,” she said. “And this will set an example for other communities that might be interested in hosting.”
Issues like permitting and siting for projects and nuclear waste storage are “heavy lifts” that will require coordination across public and private sectors, Lovering said. But she argued that advanced nuclear technologies, “particularly small modular reactors and microreactors, offer some opportunities for more equitable deployment of nuclear. They’re not a silver bullet, but they do facilitate more community ownership and control over energy production,” she said, particularly pointing to emerging economies that may not have the demand or infrastructure for a large reactor.
DeMella agreed that successful demonstration of small modular reactors will be key. He called for increased funding for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ensure adequate staff and expertise for the licensing of new plants. For example, DOE’s two demonstration projects are both slated to be online by 2028, and the licensing process for new reactors at the NRC can take up to five years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Beyond licensing, he said, the industry will also need to simplify reactor designs and develop new excavation methods to cut project costs.
Bridge to the Future
Developing a HALEU supply chain in the U.S. presents yet another challenge.
Led by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Republicans in March introduced a bill (S. 3978) that would ban the import of Russian uranium, with a companion bipartisan bill introduced in the House of Representatives.
Barrasso has also introduced a second bill (S. 4066) that would mandate that DOE prioritize securing a domestic supply chain for HALEU by using its own nuclear stocks to produce the fuel. One of DOE’s advanced nuclear demonstration projects — the 345-MW Natrium project being developed by TerraPower and GE Hitachi — is to be built in Wyoming.
The NIA report says that at present, only one facility in the U.S. ― the Centrus American Centrifuge Demonstration project in Piketon, Ohio ― is licensed to produce HALEU and only in limited amounts, about 1 MT/year. The report estimates that an initial group of advanced reactors, including the DOE demonstration projects, will require 20 MT of HALEU.
Building out additional new processing facilities would provide the foundation the country needs for mid- and long-term advanced reactor development, but according to NIA Project Manager Patrick White, “it’s not clear at this moment if they could be brought online quickly enough to meet the near-term demand.”
Drawing on DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s stockpile would be “challenging programmatically,” the HALEU report says. With existing facilities, this option could produce a stopgap amount ― 5 to 10 MT — of HALEU per year, and while possible, the U.S. would need to balance HALEU production with other national security considerations. Significant federal investment would also be needed but “would not result in robust new HALEU production infrastructure possibilities,” the report says.
“Determining the best path forward on near-term HALEU absent supply from Russia requires us to examine the capabilities of different enrichment and fuel cycle providers to bring new capacity online, the timing and material needs for advanced reactor developers, and the ability of DOE to allocate … federal uranium supplies to HALEU production,” White said in an email to NetZero Insider.
DeMella also sees trade-offs ahead. Industry and government will need to cooperate to “figure out what’s ready to deploy in the near term, and work on those things in the near term, and then continue to work on the improvements that come in the next generation and the generation beyond,” he said. “Because if we don’t have a bridge to the future, we don’t ever get to the future.”
