I speak with Jigar Shah (head of DOE’s Loan Programs Office) about all things nuclear, including its recent performance, the strategies that could revive and accelerate it, new nuclear technologies and what small modular reactors actually are, and the role that nuclear will play in a decarbonized economy.
Just finished listening and I am again hit with the palpable hype that is the nuclear circle jerk. Your guest shot right over the underlying assumptions that all his models were based on, those assumptions are absolutely critical to how arguments are made. It’s assumes demand, and a stable political environment. What he doesn’t even touch on are nuclear non-proliferation issues and potential terrorism or intentional damage to plants by MAGA Republicans. It also assumes a reasonable intact political structure that looks similar as today. All of that is very much in question right now and nuclear for better or worse has all kinds of problems associated with it.
I also want to invite any nuclear proponent to visit the abandoned mine and mill sites that my part of the country is riddled with. Uranium mining is nasty and has left a legacy of death, disease, and destruction.
So let the nuclear cheerleaders rah rah rah, and let Senator Barrasso push nuclear when he isn’t busy working to undermine our democracy. Nuclear is a bad deal and not worth the costs. Let dinosaurs die.
Great podcast but he brings a Panglossian view. He glossed over waste and terrible history of costs - in WA alone you may recall "WPPS" and the Trojan plant that closed prematurely at great cost. The "we need everything" view is questionable - we need what makes sense with current technology and economics. You made a great point about lack of intermittency and his response made no sense: if flexible demand (e.g., hydrogen production) can soak it up and deliver it later, the same would work for solar and wind. Finally, I don't believe big tech's (or bitcoin miners) desire for steady power is a public problem: It makes no sense to subsidize generation or take risks for them- they can solve that themselves, with public constraints making sure it's clean.
Nuclear is a huge distraction from the faster and cheaper clean energy solutions that we should be focusing on. Want proof? Georgia’s Plant Vogtle has been under construction for 15 years and is still not done. It’s $11.1 B for 1,024 megawatts- an insane ratepayer ripoff that should be criminalized. Jigar danced around the truth of that, claiming that lessons learned will make the next one(s) faster and cheaper. Nearly everything he said was false. See my LinkedIn page for corrections.
Thanks Dave, good podcast. Another problem we need to solve with nuclear is obtaining the fuel. Here in New Mexico we've seen what that's done to uranium miners and their communities and it's pretty terrible. If you have a next in the series, please ask the question.
What is missing from a high RE energy system is not a nuclear shaped gap and I don't think it can be squeezed into it. Nothing baseload is going to survive on ever fewer hours a day or on a few days or weeks a year. The effective capacity factor - the proportion that is sold at a profit - goes down in response to the periods of abundant wind and solar and the economics, already difficult, will only get worse.
I think we'll see a LOT more batteries - which barely existed as an option 7 years ago when the first large Tesla battery got installed in South Australia; whole mega battery factories have been built and batteries from them installed since then. That fast. Investment in new solar factories - the IEA thinks production will reach 1 TW per year within the next two years - is already exceeded by that in new battery factories (and unwise to discount the ability of battery R&D to keep exceeding expectations). And I think investment will turn to pumped hydro storage, not nuclear and it will fit the long/deep storage role that RE will need better. And I don't expect to see Hydrogen as energy storage at all, but confined to industrial uses where production, storage and use are all on-site, avoiding transporting it.
I think the confidence to invest in storage at large scale was always going to wait on wider electricity industry confidence that there will be enough solar and wind at scales to justify it and calls for it to be a prerequisite were more about impeding RE than advancing it.
Except in nations where governments can autocratically decree nuclear - and are prepared to pay for the higher energy costs and complications - nuclear will struggle. Around here the largest bloc of support for nuclear is locked away behind Right politics' Wall of Denial (no climate problem, no need), with their primary use for nuclear being a rhetorical blunt instrument against climate activism and saving fossil fuels from global warming and renewable energy. It is used as a political bar too high intended to force everyone under and to stay with fossil fuels, not over.
But when/if the Wall of Denial does come down... I will expect they will choose RE, out of free market ideology.
It seems that the case for nuclear is dependent on longer-duration storage remaining very expensive, as well as the nuclear industry getting its act together.
One problem is focusing on 100% or 24x7 clean. Google, MS, etc., seem to be contributing to this, along with activists. This is distracting us from the path from 30% renewables/clean to 80%+ renewables/clean. Whether it's "transmission-constrained" or not. There have been studies of NM and CO that show very high clean %s are possible w/o any of this baseloadish geo or nuclear. And at very low costs. But it does require some expensive storage at some point, and 5-10%ish rarely-dispatched backup from gas and then maybe switching that to very expensive H2/storage, but only a tiny bit of it, if that last little % matters enough.
IMHO, it's much, much more important to get to 85% clean electric while moving 85% of heat and gas/diesel to that pretty clean electric. Or if this geo heat can be found "everywhere" use it for district heating instead of trying to convert it to electric with very expensive 20% efficient turbines.
But CO and NM are not CT. So in places with lots of cooling water and little land, add nukes. Not in the CO river basin, which includes the Bill Gates thing in south WY. That's just weird politics, as is the apparent inability to site new renewables in WA.
The all-of-the-above approach to decarbonization rarely questions demand. Can we afford to be demand-neutral as long as users can pay? Can we afford to be demand-neutral if it perpetuates unsustainable energy and resource usage?
Thanks for this, David. Please please please convince Jigar to debate Marc Jacobson as an "all of the above vs. no miracles needed" follow-up! I'd buy front row seats.
Thanks David and Jigar Shah. I know it's Jigar's job to support nuclear (not just renewables). That's a difficult task! I think Jigar makes a good defense for nuclear. Problem is, nuclear isn't very defensible.
For just a second put aside safety and cost (those are two big things to put aside).
If the stated goal is to decarbonize electricity by 2035 I just don't see how new nuclear can contribute much. My understanding is that there are no plants in the permitting process today. If they started today and matched Vogtle's original timeline (which they blew past) the next new reactor will not come online until around 2034. BTW those "trained" engineers and construction workers are not going to just sit around waiting for the next project. They are already on new jobs.
If that is the case the issues that nuclear is intended to address, transmission capacity, etc, have to be addressed anyway. Luckily we just heard a podcast about re-conductoring.
So is this a case of 2035 being unrealistic and the government is saying one thing and preparing for another?
the "I could sleep on a bed of spent fuel and get more from the environment" - isn't radiation exposure cumulative? If the bed is producing an equal level to background, that means your are experiencing twice background no? If a source is so low as to be indistinguishable *from* background then it's producing far less than background levels.
That was a good podcast. Jigar Shah is always both amusing and informative. I’m not entirely sure what the specific, “not really small and not really modular,” refers to when it comes to NuScale. Is it because the generators themselves require a pretty bit investment and capital and a big capex footprint?
The BWRX-300 I get it, it’s just a scaled down version of an old design. Which is a point in its favor.
Just finished listening and I am again hit with the palpable hype that is the nuclear circle jerk. Your guest shot right over the underlying assumptions that all his models were based on, those assumptions are absolutely critical to how arguments are made. It’s assumes demand, and a stable political environment. What he doesn’t even touch on are nuclear non-proliferation issues and potential terrorism or intentional damage to plants by MAGA Republicans. It also assumes a reasonable intact political structure that looks similar as today. All of that is very much in question right now and nuclear for better or worse has all kinds of problems associated with it.
I also want to invite any nuclear proponent to visit the abandoned mine and mill sites that my part of the country is riddled with. Uranium mining is nasty and has left a legacy of death, disease, and destruction.
So let the nuclear cheerleaders rah rah rah, and let Senator Barrasso push nuclear when he isn’t busy working to undermine our democracy. Nuclear is a bad deal and not worth the costs. Let dinosaurs die.
Great podcast but he brings a Panglossian view. He glossed over waste and terrible history of costs - in WA alone you may recall "WPPS" and the Trojan plant that closed prematurely at great cost. The "we need everything" view is questionable - we need what makes sense with current technology and economics. You made a great point about lack of intermittency and his response made no sense: if flexible demand (e.g., hydrogen production) can soak it up and deliver it later, the same would work for solar and wind. Finally, I don't believe big tech's (or bitcoin miners) desire for steady power is a public problem: It makes no sense to subsidize generation or take risks for them- they can solve that themselves, with public constraints making sure it's clean.
Nuclear is a huge distraction from the faster and cheaper clean energy solutions that we should be focusing on. Want proof? Georgia’s Plant Vogtle has been under construction for 15 years and is still not done. It’s $11.1 B for 1,024 megawatts- an insane ratepayer ripoff that should be criminalized. Jigar danced around the truth of that, claiming that lessons learned will make the next one(s) faster and cheaper. Nearly everything he said was false. See my LinkedIn page for corrections.
It’s difficult to be calm about waste storage when you’re downstream from Hanford, which remains an insanely expensive shitshow.
Thanks Dave, good podcast. Another problem we need to solve with nuclear is obtaining the fuel. Here in New Mexico we've seen what that's done to uranium miners and their communities and it's pretty terrible. If you have a next in the series, please ask the question.
https://www.propublica.org/article/new-mexico-uranium-homestake-pollution
What is missing from a high RE energy system is not a nuclear shaped gap and I don't think it can be squeezed into it. Nothing baseload is going to survive on ever fewer hours a day or on a few days or weeks a year. The effective capacity factor - the proportion that is sold at a profit - goes down in response to the periods of abundant wind and solar and the economics, already difficult, will only get worse.
I think we'll see a LOT more batteries - which barely existed as an option 7 years ago when the first large Tesla battery got installed in South Australia; whole mega battery factories have been built and batteries from them installed since then. That fast. Investment in new solar factories - the IEA thinks production will reach 1 TW per year within the next two years - is already exceeded by that in new battery factories (and unwise to discount the ability of battery R&D to keep exceeding expectations). And I think investment will turn to pumped hydro storage, not nuclear and it will fit the long/deep storage role that RE will need better. And I don't expect to see Hydrogen as energy storage at all, but confined to industrial uses where production, storage and use are all on-site, avoiding transporting it.
I think the confidence to invest in storage at large scale was always going to wait on wider electricity industry confidence that there will be enough solar and wind at scales to justify it and calls for it to be a prerequisite were more about impeding RE than advancing it.
Except in nations where governments can autocratically decree nuclear - and are prepared to pay for the higher energy costs and complications - nuclear will struggle. Around here the largest bloc of support for nuclear is locked away behind Right politics' Wall of Denial (no climate problem, no need), with their primary use for nuclear being a rhetorical blunt instrument against climate activism and saving fossil fuels from global warming and renewable energy. It is used as a political bar too high intended to force everyone under and to stay with fossil fuels, not over.
But when/if the Wall of Denial does come down... I will expect they will choose RE, out of free market ideology.
It seems that the case for nuclear is dependent on longer-duration storage remaining very expensive, as well as the nuclear industry getting its act together.
One problem is focusing on 100% or 24x7 clean. Google, MS, etc., seem to be contributing to this, along with activists. This is distracting us from the path from 30% renewables/clean to 80%+ renewables/clean. Whether it's "transmission-constrained" or not. There have been studies of NM and CO that show very high clean %s are possible w/o any of this baseloadish geo or nuclear. And at very low costs. But it does require some expensive storage at some point, and 5-10%ish rarely-dispatched backup from gas and then maybe switching that to very expensive H2/storage, but only a tiny bit of it, if that last little % matters enough.
IMHO, it's much, much more important to get to 85% clean electric while moving 85% of heat and gas/diesel to that pretty clean electric. Or if this geo heat can be found "everywhere" use it for district heating instead of trying to convert it to electric with very expensive 20% efficient turbines.
But CO and NM are not CT. So in places with lots of cooling water and little land, add nukes. Not in the CO river basin, which includes the Bill Gates thing in south WY. That's just weird politics, as is the apparent inability to site new renewables in WA.
The all-of-the-above approach to decarbonization rarely questions demand. Can we afford to be demand-neutral as long as users can pay? Can we afford to be demand-neutral if it perpetuates unsustainable energy and resource usage?
Thanks for this, David. Please please please convince Jigar to debate Marc Jacobson as an "all of the above vs. no miracles needed" follow-up! I'd buy front row seats.
Thanks David and Jigar Shah. I know it's Jigar's job to support nuclear (not just renewables). That's a difficult task! I think Jigar makes a good defense for nuclear. Problem is, nuclear isn't very defensible.
For just a second put aside safety and cost (those are two big things to put aside).
If the stated goal is to decarbonize electricity by 2035 I just don't see how new nuclear can contribute much. My understanding is that there are no plants in the permitting process today. If they started today and matched Vogtle's original timeline (which they blew past) the next new reactor will not come online until around 2034. BTW those "trained" engineers and construction workers are not going to just sit around waiting for the next project. They are already on new jobs.
If that is the case the issues that nuclear is intended to address, transmission capacity, etc, have to be addressed anyway. Luckily we just heard a podcast about re-conductoring.
So is this a case of 2035 being unrealistic and the government is saying one thing and preparing for another?
the "I could sleep on a bed of spent fuel and get more from the environment" - isn't radiation exposure cumulative? If the bed is producing an equal level to background, that means your are experiencing twice background no? If a source is so low as to be indistinguishable *from* background then it's producing far less than background levels.
Thanks. So basically doable, but not the utopia some people have been making out. Very interesting article.
That was a good podcast. Jigar Shah is always both amusing and informative. I’m not entirely sure what the specific, “not really small and not really modular,” refers to when it comes to NuScale. Is it because the generators themselves require a pretty bit investment and capital and a big capex footprint?
The BWRX-300 I get it, it’s just a scaled down version of an old design. Which is a point in its favor.
If transmission is a constraint, is there a future for distributed SMRs, e.g. at high density urban centers and microgrids?