August 7, 2025 • 26 mins
Electricity demand is booming, and it’s not just because of artificial intelligence. So much so that many are ready to revisit the idea of nuclear power. Microsoft signed a $16 billion deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power their data centres for the next 20 years.
But developed countries haven’t built more than a handful of new reactors in decades. When they have tried, the cost of those nuclear plants and the time to build them has been extraordinary. Will this renewed interest yield different results? Nuclear scientist and partner at venture capital firm DCVC Rachel Slaybaugh joined Akshat Rathi on Zero to discuss how these new dreams of growing nuclear power can become a reality.
Explore further:
- Nuclear Fusion Is Unlimited Clean Power. So When Can We Have It?
- Long-Unloved Nuclear Power Is Staging a Comeback
- UK Inks Investment Deals on £38 Billion Nuclear Plant
- Three Mile Island's Nuclear Reboot Moves Into the Fast Lane in Win for Microsoft
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Siobhan Wagner, Sommer Saadi and Mohsis Andam. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati this week. Why the
West can't build nuclear electricity demand is booming, and it's
(00:21):
not just because of AI. We are electrifying a lot
of things, from cars to heating to heavy industry, and
that's got a lot of people thinking where will all
this electricity come from? And how can we make sure
it's available whenever it's needed. One of the technologies that
people are turning to or turning back to, is nuclear.
(00:43):
In fact, the demand is so great that in the US,
previously decommissioned nuclear reactors are being turned back on. Microsoft
last year signed a sixteen billion dollars deal to reopen
the three Mile Island Nuclear power Plant to make sure
they have enough electricity to power their data center for
the next twenty years. The bigger conversation, of course, is
(01:04):
about building out new reactors, something the West hasn't done
at scale for decades, and when it has tried in
recent years, the cost of those nuclear plants and the
time to build them has been extraordinary. Take the example
of the Vocal Nuclear Power Plant in the US state
of Georgia. Its two newest units, built in the last
(01:25):
two years, cost thirty seven billion dollars, nearly three times
the original cost, or take Hinkley Point C in the UK.
Its construction began in twenty seventeen and was expected to
be completed by twenty twenty five, but long delays mean
it might not be operational until twenty thirty one. And
(01:46):
yet there is growing interest in nuclear so it's worth
exploring the state of the technology and whether these dreams
can become a reality. Some quick basics first, there are
two major types of nuclear reactions produce energy. Fission where
atoms are split, it is what all commercially operating nuclear
plants use today, and fusion, where atoms are fused together.
(02:11):
That is what some are hoping will solve our energy
needs once and for all, but there is no commercial
fusion plant yet. For the next two episodes, we'll focus
on the commercially available technology fission. In today's episode, we'll
specifically look at the state of large nuclear fission reactors
that are in operation in around thirty countries and how
(02:32):
to build more of them. In next week's episode, we'll
look at small modular reactors, which many hope will be
the future of nuclear fission. In theory, faster, easier, and
cheaper to deploy. Joining zero for both those episodes is
Rachel Slabor. She's a partner focused on climate sustainability and
energy at the venture capital firm DCBC. Before that, she
(02:55):
was a tenured professor of nuclear engineering at the University
of California in books. Rachel, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So we're going to talk a lot about how Western
countries can start building nuclear power plants again. But before
we get into the meat of the conversation, I want
to know what I can do to become a licensed
nuclear reactor operator that you are, well not anymore so.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I as an undergrad. I was a reactor operator at
Penn State's research reactor, which is a different thing than
a commercial power reactor. But I studied for a year
and took an exam and you know, read lots of
manuals and did lots of drills. So if you have
the time and go to a facility, I'm sure you
can figure it out.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Oh that's excellent. I mean, if it's only a year,
I think that's manageable.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, a year at a reactor that is so safe
it can't melt down A commercial power reactor. It's long,
all right.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Start with a little bit of history. First, Europe and
America used to be great at building nuclear power plants.
The US even today has the world's largest fleet of
nuclear power plants, and countries like France have a huge
share of their electricity coming from nuclear even today. But
when it comes to building new nuclear the story is
(04:21):
really in Asia. So tell us why did the West
stop building nuclear power plants altogether?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah, I mean, we stopped building them mostly due to
the flattening of power demand and inflation. Right, So in
the early eighties, interest rates were very high. Oil shocks
of the seventies, conservation became a really big deal, and
so load growth in the US changed, and that was
combined with really high interest rates. So even if you
(04:48):
could build a project pretty well, a big, expensive project
with fourteen percent interest rate is just not economic. And
so that combination of things, and then nuclear fell out
of public favor. There was a lot of resistance to
it for various reasons, and so throughout the eighties and
(05:08):
most of the nineties, nuclear power just wasn't of interest
in the United States and to some extent in Europe
not quite as badly. It's country by country there and
then nuclear became of interest again in the United States
in the early two thousands to begin with, when natural
gas prices were really high, and so when gas was
(05:30):
eight dollars in mmbtu, now nuclear powers looking pretty good.
And then in the two thousands we figured out fracking
and gas went down to three dollars in mmbt, you
and nobody cared about nuclear anymore. So that it's been
kind of a journey since the seventies.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
And it is not that the West has not built
any nuclear power plants. There's one being built here in
the UK, there was one built in the state of
Georgia in the US. The trouble has been that all
these recent nuclear power plants have been very expensive. So
in the UK the average cost of power is about
(06:06):
seventy pounds per MEGAWATR. The Hinkley C poplant, which is
under construction, has been guaranteed a price of one hundred
and twenty seven pounds per megawodar. So why is it
that nuclear pop plants in the West have become so expensive.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
It's a collection of reasons. One of the reasons is
the West in general and the US especially are very
bad at megaprojects. So in general, megaprojects are expensive. They
are typically overscheduled and over budget. And my flippant answer
there is that when you add radiation, that doesn't solve
(06:44):
that problem. Right, So we can't build a bridge on
time and on budget, why could we build a nuclear
power plant on time and on budget. So partially is that,
the other part is that historically we haven't had significant
load growth, and so you're building a reactor one at
a time, or maybe two at a time, and so
(07:05):
you never get enough reps in to actually drive the
cost down. So when people say first of a kind,
if everything is a first of a kind, it's more
expensive when you get to enth of a kind. I'm
putting air quotes here. That's when you hit the actual
projected costs. And in the case of large projects, n
is usually like four. You don't have to build hundreds
(07:28):
of them to get to that cost. But when you
build the same project repeatedly, you know, even on number
two compared to number one, all of the things that
were maybe not one hundred percent figured out and the
design or figured out, the supply chain is exercised, the
workforce has done it before, right, So part of it
is we just aren't aren't building enough of the same thing.
(07:49):
And then the other thing is we're bad at construction
projects for a whole bunch of reasons. People have written
about that are like too many subcontractors. And yes, if
you have subcontractors that are suing each other during the project,
it's probably going to slow down and become more expensive.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
I also heard from Ernest Monies, who was the former
Secretary of Energy, that the Vogel nuclear power plant in
Georgia needed two thousand electricians and there weren't two thousand
electricians in rural Georgia, and they all had to be
moved and that just took so much longer. And of
course the US did not plan to build another nuclear
(08:26):
power plant, so now those two thousand electricians have disappeared
into wherever there are electrician jobs. And that kind of
problem also shows up in construction activity here in Europe.
So that adds to the cost.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
That's exactly right. And you can say the same thing
about welders in these skilled trade positions.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So one way in which I want us to talk
about nuclear is to just look at it in these
five different buckets. The first bucket being the old school
large power plant design that exists that we've built many reactors,
and countries like China are building many more of. Then
there are these advanced reactors which could be safer, cheaper,
(09:07):
could use fuel in a more efficient way than there
is small modular reactors, which are essentially maybe old school
or advanced, but in a small form factor. And now
these days there's even microreactors, things that you could literally
put in your backyard in a shipping container or even
something smaller. And they're all very interesting. But let's start
(09:29):
with the thing that exists at scale, which is these
old school reactors. What are they and why is it
that those were the reactors we built most of and
continue to today.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, we call them large light water reactors, and by
large they actually are large, like a gigawatt of electric output.
And by light water we mean regular water, because the
nuclear industry likes to name things in ways that are opaque.
Sometimes there are also heavy water reactors, and that's where
a hydrogen in the water molecules have an extra nucleon
(10:04):
in them, they have some different properties. Those exist mostly
in Canada. Large light water reactors so they use water
to both cool the fuel and transfer the heat. So fundamentally,
a nuclear reactor is taking usually a uranium two thirty
five atom, which is a big, heavy, unstable atom, and
you add a neutron, and the addition of that neutron
(10:27):
causes enough extra energy in the atom that it becomes
so unstable it splits into two pieces, and in that
process it releases heat. So it's just a really complicated
way to boil water. So the water in light water
reactors is both cooling the fuel to keep it safe
and then transferring that heat so we can use that
heat to make electricity. The fuel in those reactors it's
(10:50):
uranium two thirty five, about five weight percent compared to
uranium two thirty eight. Specifying this because there's talk of
enrichment quite a bit out in the world these days,
and in nature, uranium two thirty eight is ninety nine
point three percent of the uranium, and so we have
to increase the two thirty five percentage. The fuel pellets
(11:13):
are ceramics, so they're very stable. Think of like you know,
a coffee cup. It's not going anywhere. It's not a
pile of ooze. It's like a ceramic material that the
fuel is inside. Those are in metal tubes that are
tall and skinny. We heat up the water, we create steam,
turn a turbine. Why did we do it that way.
It's just the easiest way to make it happen. So
(11:35):
there are all these properties around, like what energy is
the neutron when it causes the fission to happen. What
materials are absorbing the neutrons, Because when a fission happens,
a few more neutrons are released, and those neutrons are
available to go on to cause more fission. So it's
all about keeping the chain reaction steady. So a lot
of like what reactor design is is keeping the right
(11:57):
number of neutrons in the system. It's just easy to
do that with water reactors. And also historically, you know,
the nuclear Navy in the United States is really where
nuclear power was born. At the time, the major competing
design was a sodium cooled reactor. But sodium and water
(12:17):
do not mix interact quite energetically, and so at the time,
you know him and Rickover, the very famous admiral of
the US Nuclear Navy, was I don't know if we
can swear on the show, but I'm going to say
his quote. Anyway, if the sea was made out of sodium,
some asshole would try to put a water reactor in it.
So really it was the nuclear Navy. Having a water
(12:41):
reactor in the ocean made much more sense. And so
it was kind of a VHS versus Beta Max and
I need a new analogy for this century. But lightwater
reactors went.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Out Facebook versus MySpace. Well, I don't know there are
many analogies that we could come up with, but okay,
let's take a tun here, because it's important to you
raise this point on nuclear weapons and enrichment. So my
understanding of this is that because you have to enrich
uranium to thirty five, you're going from this point seven
(13:13):
percent to three to five percent for fuel. You do
use the equipment which are centrifuges, the things that the
US targeted in Iran in the recent bombing attack, and
those same centrifuges or perhaps higher speed ones could be
used to enrich it all the way to ninety percent,
which is what you need for weapons grade uranium. It
(13:36):
is important to recognize that this connection between nuclear power
and nuclear weapons does exist. There are nuclear plants in
countries that tend to have nuclear weapons. There are nuclear
plants in other countries, but those are typically built or
provided for by countries that have nuclear weapons. So there
(14:00):
are regulations around who can have a nuclear reactor, who
can provide the nuclear fuel for those reactors, And there's
a very good reason why those regulations are in place,
because if you give everybody the capacity to make highly
undriched uranium, they could go all the way to a
nuclear weapon, which we know North Korea has been able
(14:22):
to do in the recent past. How much of what
we talk about next could also lead to a risk
of nuclear proliferation.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
So overall, nuclear reactors can be connected to nuclear weapons,
but often aren't, and it's pretty straightforward to prevent that.
And then there are a few of these areas where
you need to watch more closely. And maybe one related
point is you correctly specified how much material you need
for a weapon is totally different than what goes into
(14:57):
a reactor, and so as a result, a nuclear actor
cannot explode like a nuclear weapon. They are very different physics,
they're different things. So it is on the front end
of the fuel cycle when you're doing enrichment that is
one of the places where you really need to pay attention,
and that's why we have groups like the International Atomic
Energy Agency that sets standards and norms and does monitoring
(15:20):
and so it's totally possible to have a peaceful nuclear
program and do it responsibly and transparently, and that is
totally a thing. It's also possible to have your fuel
provided for you, whether you just don't want to deal
with the enrichment process, maybe your country just doesn't need
to stand up that capability because it is kind of
a pain. So there are lots of choices. And then
(15:41):
the other one where people look is in recycling of
nuclear fuel. Now that is not something that is done
broadly today. France has a partial recycle process, Russia does
some recycling, Japan has done some recycling, so there is
some around the world. But that's the process where you
take the fuel that we used in the reactor, and
(16:02):
when we take that fuel out, actually most of the
energy is still available in it. There's still some uranium left,
and there's actually plutonium that was created in the reactor
process that can also be used to power reactor, so
you can take out that uranium and plutonium and use
it again. And uranium in plutonium can be used to
(16:22):
make weapons, and so in that recycling process, we have
processes where the uranium and plutonium are never by themselves
in a weapons usable form, and so it's really about
using the processes that don't lend themselves to proliferation, and
again that transparency and accountability. So we don't have a
wide recycling program right now, but some of the advanced
(16:44):
reactors we'll talk about later are set up to facilitate
recycling should we choose to do so in the future.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Join us after the break when I ask Rachel Slabob
why nuclear has become a China story and if the
West can ever catch up. And Hey, if you're enjoying
this episode, please rate and review Zero on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify. Recently, a listener who goes by Danny Utah
one O eight said the Zero team does a great
job evaluating new technologies, trends, and industries through a journalistic lense.
(17:19):
Thank you, Danny Utah one O eight. Coming to advanced reactors,
(17:41):
one of the arguments that people have made to me
is that why are we thinking about these advanced reactors
of any kind at all? We know this thing that
we've made for the last sixty seventy years safely light
water reactors, we can make many of them, and anyway,
we've learned from engineering that the more you make something,
(18:02):
the cheaper it gets. And why not just stick to
the old stuff, and that would be the way to
bring back nuclear power plants to the West. What's wrong
with that argument?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Yeah, it is an argument that does hold weights, especially
in some countries. Or if we really did decide, hey,
we're going to build a whole bunch of reactors and
drive the cost down, it's possible we could do that.
There are a couple of reasons advanced reactors are attractive.
One is we're just not good at megaprojects. So instead
of trying to become good at megaprojects, what if we
(18:34):
did something different that we're better at, like small modular
factory manufacturing, where we tend to do better. So one
of it is that economics may work out better where
you're trading. You know, you're losing on economy of scale,
but if you can't actually execute the project to get
the economy of scale anyway, then we should take a
different plan. And then the advanced reactors do have some
(18:57):
features that can be desirable, So some of them, and
it's a big range of technology types, so I'll try
to speak generally. But some of them can operate at
higher temperatures. So if you're looking for decarbonized process heat,
now you can have quite high temperatures that you can
use for industrial processes. Also, when they're at high temperatures,
(19:18):
they work more efficiently, so you get more bang for
your buck out of the fuel. Some of them can
facilitate recycling, and so in a world where we have
increased energy demand, we want to limit uranium mining. Or
when you do the recycling the waste that comes out
at the end is radioactive for less time, it's easier
to manage. You have less of it, right, So that's
a desirable property. And as I mentioned, they might be
(19:42):
more economic. And then the last reason is it's easier
to make them in more sizes and not every market
needs a gigawot. We don't always want to grow a
gigawott at a time. Not every grid needs that, especially
if you're talking about more behind the meter projects. Now,
if you have more sizes of reactor choices, they might
(20:06):
be a better fit for different market applications.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
And we're talking about all this now for nuclear, because
there is rising power demand in western countries as a
result of AI, as a result of electric cars and
heat pumps, and this change in trajectory and power demand
is what is making people go, Yes, we've got all
the solar and wind and that's great, and we're going
(20:28):
to build a lot of it. Maybe not in the US,
given what's happening with the politics there, but you know
everywhere else. Yes, we're going to support this thing, but
it's not going to provide power all the time, and
for data centers especially, we're going to need that power
all the time. But then there's the argument, which is
if it's going to take first these light water reactors
(20:50):
five ten years to build, that's too long. Second, if
you want to build these advanced reactors, maybe smaller ones,
you're still going to have to go through the process
of getting the reactor design and approved, finding people who
would want to buy it, and that's still going to
take five or ten years. The power demand for these
AI hogs is right now. So what is the reason
(21:12):
why they're even looking at nuclear.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
I think there's expectation that, yes, there's power demand today
and in the future it's going to be even bigger,
and so you can cobble together the tools you have
right now, which honestly is kind of challenging because you,
i mean, turbines for gas plants are also five years
back ordered. Right It's like really hard to build anything
(21:35):
right now, and so you are going to need all
the tools in your tool belt looking twenty thirty and beyond,
because we're growing now. We don't know how fast we're
going to grow. People are building data centers, but you
can imagine if you look at that growth rate, it
leads to some pretty big numbers in the future. And
so if you don't start working on the nuclear reactors now,
(21:56):
you definitely won't have them in five years when you
need them.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Use address the question that the story of nuclear right
now is in Asia, It's really in China. It is
the place with nearly half of all new reactors being built.
It is the place which bloomogenif quotes builds these reactors
at one fifth the cost of the most recent reactor
built in the US, and China has the plan to
(22:23):
build about one hundred and fifty of these by twenty
thirty five, which would make the fleet be double the
size of what the US fleet, which is the largest currently.
Why is China doing it so cheaply? And is it
because it's making the same thing again and again.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah, I will say there is some transparency issues that
we don't one hundred percent know the answer, but the
answer is similar in China as it is in Korea,
as it is in the other non Western you know,
the rest of the world places where their reactors are
being built. So it is the same exact design and
they are building it over and over again, and that
(23:00):
infrastructure of how they build projects is much more efficient
than how we do things here. When reactors are built inexpensively,
it tends to be vertically integrated. You have one organization
that is very well coordinated building these things, and then
right you have a design, you know what it is,
you build it over and over the same exact way.
(23:21):
You have people who have done it before, both the
construction managers and the project managers, as well as the
welders and the electricians. So it's that consistency and clarity
of design and clarity of plan are two really big
factors that you are building a thing that you know
exactly what you're building, and the orchestration of that construction
(23:44):
is really well done, and those are the things that
have been missing in the West so far. But it
is not just China, it's also Korea, the Middle East, Turkey.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
But then let's talk politics, and especially politics from both
the polar side and from the policy side. Now, in
the US you have gone through a whipsaw on climate
policy between presidents from Obama to first drum presidency to
Biden to second Trump presidency. Why do you think nuclear
(24:17):
can have a future in the US where this whipsaw
is likely to continue because the polarization between parties has grown.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Interestingly, nuclear has become a bipartisan issue. Really. The Biden
administration was the first Democratic admin to embrace nuclear, and
so that crossover view of climate benefit and resilience and security.
Nuclear is one of the technologies where that's true. Geothermal
(24:46):
is actually another one where there's a stability, a domestic ownership,
so it's viewed from sort of a resilience lens, and
then it also has all these climate benefits. So it's
one of the very few technologies that is agreed upon
by both parties. So we've actually, over the last ten
(25:07):
years seen increasing support for nuclear regardless of administration.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
That was a lot of fun. Thank you, Rachel. Next
week we're going to talk about small modular nuclear reactors
and whether they can be built at scale.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah, thank you, akx Sha. It was great to be.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Here, and thank you for listening to Zero. Now for
the sound of the week. That's the sound of a
balloon being popped and the echoes that follow inside the
(25:46):
cooling tower of a nuclear power plant. If you like
this episode, please take a moment to rate and review
the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode
with a friend or with a nuclear bro. This episode
was produced by Oscar Our. Theme music is composed by
wonder Lee. Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison, Dengate, Samersadi, Moses
(26:06):
Andim and Sherwan Wagner. I am Akshatrati Back soon.
Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati this week. Why the
West can't build nuclear electricity demand is booming, and it's
(00:21):
not just because of AI. We are electrifying a lot
of things, from cars to heating to heavy industry, and
that's got a lot of people thinking where will all
this electricity come from? And how can we make sure
it's available whenever it's needed. One of the technologies that
people are turning to or turning back to, is nuclear.
(00:43):
In fact, the demand is so great that in the US,
previously decommissioned nuclear reactors are being turned back on. Microsoft
last year signed a sixteen billion dollars deal to reopen
the three Mile Island Nuclear power Plant to make sure
they have enough electricity to power their data center for
the next twenty years. The bigger conversation, of course, is
(01:04):
about building out new reactors, something the West hasn't done
at scale for decades, and when it has tried in
recent years, the cost of those nuclear plants and the
time to build them has been extraordinary. Take the example
of the Vocal Nuclear Power Plant in the US state
of Georgia. Its two newest units, built in the last
(01:25):
two years, cost thirty seven billion dollars, nearly three times
the original cost, or take Hinkley Point C in the UK.
Its construction began in twenty seventeen and was expected to
be completed by twenty twenty five, but long delays mean
it might not be operational until twenty thirty one. And
(01:46):
yet there is growing interest in nuclear so it's worth
exploring the state of the technology and whether these dreams
can become a reality. Some quick basics first, there are
two major types of nuclear reactions produce energy. Fission where
atoms are split, it is what all commercially operating nuclear
plants use today, and fusion, where atoms are fused together.
(02:11):
That is what some are hoping will solve our energy
needs once and for all, but there is no commercial
fusion plant yet. For the next two episodes, we'll focus
on the commercially available technology fission. In today's episode, we'll
specifically look at the state of large nuclear fission reactors
that are in operation in around thirty countries and how
(02:32):
to build more of them. In next week's episode, we'll
look at small modular reactors, which many hope will be
the future of nuclear fission. In theory, faster, easier, and
cheaper to deploy. Joining zero for both those episodes is
Rachel Slabor. She's a partner focused on climate sustainability and
energy at the venture capital firm DCBC. Before that, she
(02:55):
was a tenured professor of nuclear engineering at the University
of California in books. Rachel, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So we're going to talk a lot about how Western
countries can start building nuclear power plants again. But before
we get into the meat of the conversation, I want
to know what I can do to become a licensed
nuclear reactor operator that you are, well not anymore so.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I as an undergrad. I was a reactor operator at
Penn State's research reactor, which is a different thing than
a commercial power reactor. But I studied for a year
and took an exam and you know, read lots of
manuals and did lots of drills. So if you have
the time and go to a facility, I'm sure you
can figure it out.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Oh that's excellent. I mean, if it's only a year,
I think that's manageable.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, a year at a reactor that is so safe
it can't melt down A commercial power reactor. It's long,
all right.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Start with a little bit of history. First, Europe and
America used to be great at building nuclear power plants.
The US even today has the world's largest fleet of
nuclear power plants, and countries like France have a huge
share of their electricity coming from nuclear even today. But
when it comes to building new nuclear the story is
(04:21):
really in Asia. So tell us why did the West
stop building nuclear power plants altogether?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah, I mean, we stopped building them mostly due to
the flattening of power demand and inflation. Right, So in
the early eighties, interest rates were very high. Oil shocks
of the seventies, conservation became a really big deal, and
so load growth in the US changed, and that was
combined with really high interest rates. So even if you
(04:48):
could build a project pretty well, a big, expensive project
with fourteen percent interest rate is just not economic. And
so that combination of things, and then nuclear fell out
of public favor. There was a lot of resistance to
it for various reasons, and so throughout the eighties and
(05:08):
most of the nineties, nuclear power just wasn't of interest
in the United States and to some extent in Europe
not quite as badly. It's country by country there and
then nuclear became of interest again in the United States
in the early two thousands to begin with, when natural
gas prices were really high, and so when gas was
(05:30):
eight dollars in mmbtu, now nuclear powers looking pretty good.
And then in the two thousands we figured out fracking
and gas went down to three dollars in mmbt, you
and nobody cared about nuclear anymore. So that it's been
kind of a journey since the seventies.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
And it is not that the West has not built
any nuclear power plants. There's one being built here in
the UK, there was one built in the state of
Georgia in the US. The trouble has been that all
these recent nuclear power plants have been very expensive. So
in the UK the average cost of power is about
(06:06):
seventy pounds per MEGAWATR. The Hinkley C poplant, which is
under construction, has been guaranteed a price of one hundred
and twenty seven pounds per megawodar. So why is it
that nuclear pop plants in the West have become so expensive.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
It's a collection of reasons. One of the reasons is
the West in general and the US especially are very
bad at megaprojects. So in general, megaprojects are expensive. They
are typically overscheduled and over budget. And my flippant answer
there is that when you add radiation, that doesn't solve
(06:44):
that problem. Right, So we can't build a bridge on
time and on budget, why could we build a nuclear
power plant on time and on budget. So partially is that,
the other part is that historically we haven't had significant
load growth, and so you're building a reactor one at
a time, or maybe two at a time, and so
(07:05):
you never get enough reps in to actually drive the
cost down. So when people say first of a kind,
if everything is a first of a kind, it's more
expensive when you get to enth of a kind. I'm
putting air quotes here. That's when you hit the actual
projected costs. And in the case of large projects, n
is usually like four. You don't have to build hundreds
(07:28):
of them to get to that cost. But when you
build the same project repeatedly, you know, even on number
two compared to number one, all of the things that
were maybe not one hundred percent figured out and the
design or figured out, the supply chain is exercised, the
workforce has done it before, right, So part of it
is we just aren't aren't building enough of the same thing.
(07:49):
And then the other thing is we're bad at construction
projects for a whole bunch of reasons. People have written
about that are like too many subcontractors. And yes, if
you have subcontractors that are suing each other during the project,
it's probably going to slow down and become more expensive.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
I also heard from Ernest Monies, who was the former
Secretary of Energy, that the Vogel nuclear power plant in
Georgia needed two thousand electricians and there weren't two thousand
electricians in rural Georgia, and they all had to be
moved and that just took so much longer. And of
course the US did not plan to build another nuclear
(08:26):
power plant, so now those two thousand electricians have disappeared
into wherever there are electrician jobs. And that kind of
problem also shows up in construction activity here in Europe.
So that adds to the cost.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
That's exactly right. And you can say the same thing
about welders in these skilled trade positions.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So one way in which I want us to talk
about nuclear is to just look at it in these
five different buckets. The first bucket being the old school
large power plant design that exists that we've built many reactors,
and countries like China are building many more of. Then
there are these advanced reactors which could be safer, cheaper,
(09:07):
could use fuel in a more efficient way than there
is small modular reactors, which are essentially maybe old school
or advanced, but in a small form factor. And now
these days there's even microreactors, things that you could literally
put in your backyard in a shipping container or even
something smaller. And they're all very interesting. But let's start
(09:29):
with the thing that exists at scale, which is these
old school reactors. What are they and why is it
that those were the reactors we built most of and
continue to today.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, we call them large light water reactors, and by
large they actually are large, like a gigawatt of electric output.
And by light water we mean regular water, because the
nuclear industry likes to name things in ways that are opaque.
Sometimes there are also heavy water reactors, and that's where
a hydrogen in the water molecules have an extra nucleon
(10:04):
in them, they have some different properties. Those exist mostly
in Canada. Large light water reactors so they use water
to both cool the fuel and transfer the heat. So fundamentally,
a nuclear reactor is taking usually a uranium two thirty
five atom, which is a big, heavy, unstable atom, and
you add a neutron, and the addition of that neutron
(10:27):
causes enough extra energy in the atom that it becomes
so unstable it splits into two pieces, and in that
process it releases heat. So it's just a really complicated
way to boil water. So the water in light water
reactors is both cooling the fuel to keep it safe
and then transferring that heat so we can use that
heat to make electricity. The fuel in those reactors it's
(10:50):
uranium two thirty five, about five weight percent compared to
uranium two thirty eight. Specifying this because there's talk of
enrichment quite a bit out in the world these days,
and in nature, uranium two thirty eight is ninety nine
point three percent of the uranium, and so we have
to increase the two thirty five percentage. The fuel pellets
(11:13):
are ceramics, so they're very stable. Think of like you know,
a coffee cup. It's not going anywhere. It's not a
pile of ooze. It's like a ceramic material that the
fuel is inside. Those are in metal tubes that are
tall and skinny. We heat up the water, we create steam,
turn a turbine. Why did we do it that way.
It's just the easiest way to make it happen. So
(11:35):
there are all these properties around, like what energy is
the neutron when it causes the fission to happen. What
materials are absorbing the neutrons, Because when a fission happens,
a few more neutrons are released, and those neutrons are
available to go on to cause more fission. So it's
all about keeping the chain reaction steady. So a lot
of like what reactor design is is keeping the right
(11:57):
number of neutrons in the system. It's just easy to
do that with water reactors. And also historically, you know,
the nuclear Navy in the United States is really where
nuclear power was born. At the time, the major competing
design was a sodium cooled reactor. But sodium and water
(12:17):
do not mix interact quite energetically, and so at the time,
you know him and Rickover, the very famous admiral of
the US Nuclear Navy, was I don't know if we
can swear on the show, but I'm going to say
his quote. Anyway, if the sea was made out of sodium,
some asshole would try to put a water reactor in it.
So really it was the nuclear Navy. Having a water
(12:41):
reactor in the ocean made much more sense. And so
it was kind of a VHS versus Beta Max and
I need a new analogy for this century. But lightwater
reactors went.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Out Facebook versus MySpace. Well, I don't know there are
many analogies that we could come up with, but okay,
let's take a tun here, because it's important to you
raise this point on nuclear weapons and enrichment. So my
understanding of this is that because you have to enrich
uranium to thirty five, you're going from this point seven
(13:13):
percent to three to five percent for fuel. You do
use the equipment which are centrifuges, the things that the
US targeted in Iran in the recent bombing attack, and
those same centrifuges or perhaps higher speed ones could be
used to enrich it all the way to ninety percent,
which is what you need for weapons grade uranium. It
(13:36):
is important to recognize that this connection between nuclear power
and nuclear weapons does exist. There are nuclear plants in
countries that tend to have nuclear weapons. There are nuclear
plants in other countries, but those are typically built or
provided for by countries that have nuclear weapons. So there
(14:00):
are regulations around who can have a nuclear reactor, who
can provide the nuclear fuel for those reactors, And there's
a very good reason why those regulations are in place,
because if you give everybody the capacity to make highly
undriched uranium, they could go all the way to a
nuclear weapon, which we know North Korea has been able
(14:22):
to do in the recent past. How much of what
we talk about next could also lead to a risk
of nuclear proliferation.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
So overall, nuclear reactors can be connected to nuclear weapons,
but often aren't, and it's pretty straightforward to prevent that.
And then there are a few of these areas where
you need to watch more closely. And maybe one related
point is you correctly specified how much material you need
for a weapon is totally different than what goes into
(14:57):
a reactor, and so as a result, a nuclear actor
cannot explode like a nuclear weapon. They are very different physics,
they're different things. So it is on the front end
of the fuel cycle when you're doing enrichment that is
one of the places where you really need to pay attention,
and that's why we have groups like the International Atomic
Energy Agency that sets standards and norms and does monitoring
(15:20):
and so it's totally possible to have a peaceful nuclear
program and do it responsibly and transparently, and that is
totally a thing. It's also possible to have your fuel
provided for you, whether you just don't want to deal
with the enrichment process, maybe your country just doesn't need
to stand up that capability because it is kind of
a pain. So there are lots of choices. And then
(15:41):
the other one where people look is in recycling of
nuclear fuel. Now that is not something that is done
broadly today. France has a partial recycle process, Russia does
some recycling, Japan has done some recycling, so there is
some around the world. But that's the process where you
take the fuel that we used in the reactor, and
(16:02):
when we take that fuel out, actually most of the
energy is still available in it. There's still some uranium left,
and there's actually plutonium that was created in the reactor
process that can also be used to power reactor, so
you can take out that uranium and plutonium and use
it again. And uranium in plutonium can be used to
(16:22):
make weapons, and so in that recycling process, we have
processes where the uranium and plutonium are never by themselves
in a weapons usable form, and so it's really about
using the processes that don't lend themselves to proliferation, and
again that transparency and accountability. So we don't have a
wide recycling program right now, but some of the advanced
(16:44):
reactors we'll talk about later are set up to facilitate
recycling should we choose to do so in the future.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Join us after the break when I ask Rachel Slabob
why nuclear has become a China story and if the
West can ever catch up. And Hey, if you're enjoying
this episode, please rate and review Zero on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify. Recently, a listener who goes by Danny Utah
one O eight said the Zero team does a great
job evaluating new technologies, trends, and industries through a journalistic lense.
(17:19):
Thank you, Danny Utah one O eight. Coming to advanced reactors,
(17:41):
one of the arguments that people have made to me
is that why are we thinking about these advanced reactors
of any kind at all? We know this thing that
we've made for the last sixty seventy years safely light
water reactors, we can make many of them, and anyway,
we've learned from engineering that the more you make something,
(18:02):
the cheaper it gets. And why not just stick to
the old stuff, and that would be the way to
bring back nuclear power plants to the West. What's wrong
with that argument?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Yeah, it is an argument that does hold weights, especially
in some countries. Or if we really did decide, hey,
we're going to build a whole bunch of reactors and
drive the cost down, it's possible we could do that.
There are a couple of reasons advanced reactors are attractive.
One is we're just not good at megaprojects. So instead
of trying to become good at megaprojects, what if we
(18:34):
did something different that we're better at, like small modular
factory manufacturing, where we tend to do better. So one
of it is that economics may work out better where
you're trading. You know, you're losing on economy of scale,
but if you can't actually execute the project to get
the economy of scale anyway, then we should take a
different plan. And then the advanced reactors do have some
(18:57):
features that can be desirable, So some of them, and
it's a big range of technology types, so I'll try
to speak generally. But some of them can operate at
higher temperatures. So if you're looking for decarbonized process heat,
now you can have quite high temperatures that you can
use for industrial processes. Also, when they're at high temperatures,
(19:18):
they work more efficiently, so you get more bang for
your buck out of the fuel. Some of them can
facilitate recycling, and so in a world where we have
increased energy demand, we want to limit uranium mining. Or
when you do the recycling the waste that comes out
at the end is radioactive for less time, it's easier
to manage. You have less of it, right, So that's
a desirable property. And as I mentioned, they might be
(19:42):
more economic. And then the last reason is it's easier
to make them in more sizes and not every market
needs a gigawot. We don't always want to grow a
gigawott at a time. Not every grid needs that, especially
if you're talking about more behind the meter projects. Now,
if you have more sizes of reactor choices, they might
(20:06):
be a better fit for different market applications.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
And we're talking about all this now for nuclear, because
there is rising power demand in western countries as a
result of AI, as a result of electric cars and
heat pumps, and this change in trajectory and power demand
is what is making people go, Yes, we've got all
the solar and wind and that's great, and we're going
(20:28):
to build a lot of it. Maybe not in the US,
given what's happening with the politics there, but you know
everywhere else. Yes, we're going to support this thing, but
it's not going to provide power all the time, and
for data centers especially, we're going to need that power
all the time. But then there's the argument, which is
if it's going to take first these light water reactors
(20:50):
five ten years to build, that's too long. Second, if
you want to build these advanced reactors, maybe smaller ones,
you're still going to have to go through the process
of getting the reactor design and approved, finding people who
would want to buy it, and that's still going to
take five or ten years. The power demand for these
AI hogs is right now. So what is the reason
(21:12):
why they're even looking at nuclear.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
I think there's expectation that, yes, there's power demand today
and in the future it's going to be even bigger,
and so you can cobble together the tools you have
right now, which honestly is kind of challenging because you,
i mean, turbines for gas plants are also five years
back ordered. Right It's like really hard to build anything
(21:35):
right now, and so you are going to need all
the tools in your tool belt looking twenty thirty and beyond,
because we're growing now. We don't know how fast we're
going to grow. People are building data centers, but you
can imagine if you look at that growth rate, it
leads to some pretty big numbers in the future. And
so if you don't start working on the nuclear reactors now,
(21:56):
you definitely won't have them in five years when you
need them.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Use address the question that the story of nuclear right
now is in Asia, It's really in China. It is
the place with nearly half of all new reactors being built.
It is the place which bloomogenif quotes builds these reactors
at one fifth the cost of the most recent reactor
built in the US, and China has the plan to
(22:23):
build about one hundred and fifty of these by twenty
thirty five, which would make the fleet be double the
size of what the US fleet, which is the largest currently.
Why is China doing it so cheaply? And is it
because it's making the same thing again and again.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah, I will say there is some transparency issues that
we don't one hundred percent know the answer, but the
answer is similar in China as it is in Korea,
as it is in the other non Western you know,
the rest of the world places where their reactors are
being built. So it is the same exact design and
they are building it over and over again, and that
(23:00):
infrastructure of how they build projects is much more efficient
than how we do things here. When reactors are built inexpensively,
it tends to be vertically integrated. You have one organization
that is very well coordinated building these things, and then
right you have a design, you know what it is,
you build it over and over the same exact way.
(23:21):
You have people who have done it before, both the
construction managers and the project managers, as well as the
welders and the electricians. So it's that consistency and clarity
of design and clarity of plan are two really big
factors that you are building a thing that you know
exactly what you're building, and the orchestration of that construction
(23:44):
is really well done, and those are the things that
have been missing in the West so far. But it
is not just China, it's also Korea, the Middle East, Turkey.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
But then let's talk politics, and especially politics from both
the polar side and from the policy side. Now, in
the US you have gone through a whipsaw on climate
policy between presidents from Obama to first drum presidency to
Biden to second Trump presidency. Why do you think nuclear
(24:17):
can have a future in the US where this whipsaw
is likely to continue because the polarization between parties has grown.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Interestingly, nuclear has become a bipartisan issue. Really. The Biden
administration was the first Democratic admin to embrace nuclear, and
so that crossover view of climate benefit and resilience and security.
Nuclear is one of the technologies where that's true. Geothermal
(24:46):
is actually another one where there's a stability, a domestic ownership,
so it's viewed from sort of a resilience lens, and
then it also has all these climate benefits. So it's
one of the very few technologies that is agreed upon
by both parties. So we've actually, over the last ten
(25:07):
years seen increasing support for nuclear regardless of administration.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
That was a lot of fun. Thank you, Rachel. Next
week we're going to talk about small modular nuclear reactors
and whether they can be built at scale.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah, thank you, akx Sha. It was great to be.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Here, and thank you for listening to Zero. Now for
the sound of the week. That's the sound of a
balloon being popped and the echoes that follow inside the
(25:46):
cooling tower of a nuclear power plant. If you like
this episode, please take a moment to rate and review
the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode
with a friend or with a nuclear bro. This episode
was produced by Oscar Our. Theme music is composed by
wonder Lee. Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison, Dengate, Samersadi, Moses
(26:06):
Andim and Sherwan Wagner. I am Akshatrati Back soon.
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