Nuclear Plant Journal, January-February 2016 NuclearPlantJournal.com
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financed by venture capitalists, coming
up with new ideas and addressing many
of the issues that have been sticking
points for a long time. Like what do you
do with used nuclear fuel? And you have
transuranic actinides in the fuel. What do
you do with that? The traditional answer
is that you store it in Yucca Mountain,
right? That was the answer. But now
people are saying, maybe that’s not the
best idea. There’s plenty of energy in
there. We could get that energy out if
we develop different kinds of nuclear
systems. And so, there are smart people
thinking up all kinds of alternative ideas.
The difference is that they are actually
getting interest from prominent venture
capitalists, for example Bill Gates, who is
financing TerraPower.
And the recurring theme is, we can
do this better. An example that brings
this home is if you think about what
has happened in every other element of
technology over, let’s say, 40 years. We
have evolved into things that we couldn’t
even imagine. I think we’re long overdue
for some real technological breakthroughs
in this industry.
3.
Now that we are having this
“grassroot” approach with these young
people directly going to the venture
capitalists and trying to raise funds, is
that going to fuel the growth of nuclear
energy technology?
I think it has the real potential for
addressing many of the issues that have
been the problem or have been among the
reasons why nuclear has not received as
much recognition or support in the past.
What we’ve ended up doing is building
large machines that produce great, safe,
reliable, economic energy, but cost a lot
of money to build. Unleashing innovation
and the creativity around that will make
a big difference. It was exciting for me
to hear at the White House Summit on
Nuclear Energy that the government
is now saying, we need to encourage
that innovation. They are coming up
with ways to get the national labs more
accessible to the private sector, so if you
have a concept you can test it. Currently,
we have very little testing capability left
in the United States. If you have a fast
reactor concept, there are no operating
fast reactors in the United States, and
you would have to go to Russia to test
materials in a fast reactor.
Letme say, we havemade tremendous
progress in commercial nuclear power.
Capacity factors are obviously way
up from what they were 20 years ago.
Capacity factors used to be 60%, and
now they are consistently over 90%. We
have been good at making the existing
technology better, but fundamentally
it’s the same technology, and little has
changed in half a century. Now, we have
a great opportunity.
4.
Describe the current challenges to
the nuclear power industry in the United
States?
We have 61 plants, 100 operating
units in the United States today
1
. The
statistic that everybody always hears is
that it’s just less than 20% of the total
electricity generated in the United States.
I think an even more important number is
the 20% of electric generation makes up
two thirds of all the non-carbon emitting
generation in the United States. So
over 60% of the energy production that
doesn’t release carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere comes from nuclear.
That’s an important number when
you start talking about any of the existing
nuclear plants shutting down. We keep
hearing the announcements of companies
making the decision to shut down their
operating plants. Every one of those plants
is being replaced, and that generation is
being substituted with a carbon-emitting
source. It’s usually natural gas. You
don’t meet the goal of decarbonizing
the electric sector by replacing nuclear
units with natural gas units. The question
is why we are allowing this to happen?
It has been occurring because we have
created a market framework in the United
States that does not give nuclear credit
for what nuclear does. Nuclear runs 24
hours a day; it runs all the time. We have
90% capacity factors without any CO
2
emissions. Yet, there is nothing in the
market that gives credit for that.
Nuclear fuel is on-site. It’s reliable.
You have the ability to generate it under all
weather conditions. In the marketplace,
the primary thing that matters currently is
the next day’s generation cost. You bid
into the market, and many of the other
sources, the intermittent sources, are
subsidized to the point that they can bid
into the market at essentially zero cost.
That makes it very difficult for nuclear
plants to compete in that framework.
5.
Provide an overview of the effect of
EPA’s current ruling on nuclear energy?
The big flaw in the EPA’s rule as it
currently exists is that it gives no credit
to existing plants, nor does it give any
credit for those plants, if they go for
license extension. The only thing you
can get credit for is a power upgrade or
a new plant. You don’t get any credit at
all for the existing generation. The world
cannot even begin to approach reaching
climate targets if existing nuclear plants
are not retained. There is still work to be
done there.
Contact: Tracy Marc, American
Nuclear Society, 555 N. Kensington
Ave. La Grange Park, Illinois, IL 60526;
telephone: (708) 579-8224, email:
