A current NPR investigation discovered that the Trump administration had secretly rewritten nuclear guidelines, stripping environmental protections and loosening security and safety measures. The federal government shared the brand new guidelines with corporations which might be a part of a program constructing experimental nuclear reactors, however not with the general public.
I’m reminded of a chat throughout our EmTech MIT occasion in November, the place Koroush Shirvan, an MIT professor of nuclear engineering, spoke on this situation. “I’ve seen some disturbing developments in current occasions, the place phrases like ‘rubber-stamping nuclear tasks’ are being mentioned,” Shirvan mentioned throughout that occasion.
Through the speak, Shirvan shared statistics displaying that nuclear energy has a really low fee of harm and loss of life. However that’s not inherent to the expertise, and there’s a cause accidents and deaths have been low for nuclear energy, he added: “It’s due to stringent regulatory oversight.”
Are next-generation reactors going to be financially aggressive?
Constructing a nuclear energy plant shouldn’t be low-cost. Let’s think about the up-front funding wanted to construct an influence plant.
Plant Vogtle in Georgia hosts the latest additions to the US nuclear fleet—Models 3 and 4 got here on-line in 2023 and 2024. Collectively, that they had a capital price of $15,000 per kilowatt, adjusted for inflation, based on a current report from the US Division of Vitality. (This wonky unit I’m utilizing divides the whole price to construct the reactors by their anticipated energy output, so we are able to examine reactors of various sizes.)
That quantity’s fairly excessive, partly as a result of these have been the primary of their sort constructed within the US, and since there have been some inefficiencies within the planning. It’s value noting that China builds reactors for a lot much less, someplace between $2,000/kW and $3,000/kW, relying on the estimate.
The up-front capital price for first-of-a-kind superior nuclear crops will seemingly run between $6,000 and $10,000 per kilowatt, based on that DOE report. That might come down by as much as 40% after the applied sciences are scaled up and mass-produced.
So new reactors will (hopefully) be cheaper than the ultra-over-budget and behind-schedule Vogtle challenge, however they aren’t essentially considerably cheaper than effectively constructed typical crops, in case you normalize by their measurement.
