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 can 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 difficulty. “I’ve seen some disturbing developments in current occasions, the place phrases like ‘rubber-stamping nuclear tasks’ are being stated,” Shirvan stated throughout that occasion.
Throughout the speak, Shirvan shared statistics exhibiting 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 motive 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 contemplate the up-front funding wanted to construct an influence plant.
Plant Vogtle in Georgia hosts the latest additions to the US nuclear fleet—Items 3 and 4 got here on-line in 2023 and 2024. Collectively, that they had a capital value of $15,000 per kilowatt, adjusted for inflation, in accordance with a current report from the US Division of Vitality. (This wonky unit I’m utilizing divides the whole value to construct the reactors by their anticipated energy output, so we will examine reactors of various sizes.)
That quantity’s fairly excessive, partly as a result of these had been the primary of their variety 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 value for first-of-a-kind superior nuclear vegetation will possible run between $6,000 and $10,000 per kilowatt, in accordance with 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 venture, however they aren’t essentially considerably cheaper than effectively constructed typical vegetation, in case you normalize by their dimension.