Tag Archives: Nuclear Power

Kathryn Porter On Nuclear Power

If ever there was a case for massive government intervention, this is it.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

Another excellent article by Kathryn Porter:

I write a lot about what isn’t working in the energy transition – so what do I think will work?

The answer is nuclear power. Not fusion, but regular fission power. Nuclear has a number of key advantages, not found all at once in any other source of energy. Nuclear produces no carbon dioxide emissions in operation, it has a very high energy density in that a lot of energy is produced from a small geographic footprint, and it is not intermittent. Less well-known is the fact that nuclear power stations actually can “load-follow” – this means they can vary their output in response to changes in demand.

Of course, there are downsides. Nuclear has a very high capital cost and an extremely stringent regulatory regime, and there are the issues of nuclear waste and public acceptance.

The UK Government has spent a lot of time and effort trying to design incentive schemes to encourage private investment in the sector, with minimal success. It has launched Great British Nuclear to kick-start interest in small modular reactors (SMRs) and expects to co-invest in these projects. But the fact is that nuclear power is beset by large and unquantifiable risks, which mostly come from government itself. The entire German nuclear power industry was recently ordered to shut down, for instance, in the wake of the Fukushima powerplant incident: this despite the fact that no health effect to anyone from Fukushima radiation “is ever likely to be discernible” according to the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Every new nuclear project faces interminable legal action from anti-nuclear activists. There are legislators in every Western nation who make no secret of their opposition to nuclear energy, though some of these have changed their stance after realising how helpful it is in meeting net-zero goals.

In this kind of environment, it’s reasonable that the private sector should be reluctant to take on political risks. The government should go beyond incentive schemes and simply pay for new reactors, particularly large ones, out of public funds. I am not an advocate for widespread state ownership in the energy sector, but in the same way that we do not expect the private sector to finance physical security – the military and police – we should not necessarily expect it to fully finance energy security. It would be more efficient, and potentially cheaper for consumers, were the Government to get over its squeamishness about putting large infrastructure on its balance sheet and ensure that more reactors are built.

The issue of regulation is also possible to improve. Since Fukushima, despite the fact that basically no health consequences occurred, regulation has become even more risk averse. For example, the existing UK Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors may be forced to close early (some already have) because of the risk that a single control rod may fail to deploy in the event of an earthquake of a magnitude never experienced in the history of the UK. Not only can these reactors be safely shut down if fewer than a fifth of the fuel rods deploy, there are also two further shut-down methods should this fail. It’s no wonder that nuclear power is the safest form of generation with the lowest number of deaths per unit of energy generated.

The issue of waste also turns out to be a lot less thorny than expected. Most of today’s waste problems date back to the early days of nuclear power when waste was not handled correctly. The cleanup from this is an ongoing challenge. Modern reactors produce less waste, and the protocols for correct handling are now established. According to government data, the total mass of radioactive waste in stock and estimated to be produced in the UK over the next 100 years will be around 5.1 million tonnes. In contrast, around 5.3 million tonnes of hazardous waste come from UK households and businesses every single year.

When it comes to public acceptance, the best place to start is on the sites of previous reactors since the local population is used to living next door to nuclear power which has been a source of jobs.

There are significant opportunities for both large and small nuclear reactors. Despite the hype, SMRs are still some years away from being available commercially, and we can’t afford to wait. We should hurry up and build some more large reactors.

The most promising large-scale technology is the APR-1400 advanced light water reactor developed by Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO). Six of these have been built in South Korea and the UAE, with another due to open soon. They have been delivered broadly on time (in eight years) and with modest cost overruns. Another option is the European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) which EDF is building at Hinkley Point C and another of which recently opened at Olkiluoto in Finland. Unfortunately, the three EPR projects in Europe (the other being the flagship development at Flamanville in France) have been beset with massive delays and cost over-runs. It’s a similar story with the Westinghouse AP1000, another pressurised water reactor which has just been completed at Vogtle in Georgia with a second unit due next year.

A further option would be an Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR). These were built on time – in just five years – and on budget in Japan before the Fukushima incident. While ABWR supply chains may be stale, they could be refreshed if multi-site orders came in.

SMRs provoke a great deal of interest, for good reasons. Companies such as Dow Chemical are exploring their use to deliver high temperature heat to their facilities: on-site nuclear is one of the more credible options for zero-carbon high temperature industrial processes. Dow is working with X-Energy to deploy an SMR at its UCC Seadrift Operations site in Texas, by about 2030. The companies hope to start construction in 2026.

Again, as ever with nuclear, the main hurdle is regulatory. US developer NuScale recently secured certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) but said the process ran from 2008 to 2020, cost half a billion dollars and generated two million pages of documentation. And that certification is only applicable in the US – NuScale would have to go through it all again if someone wanted to deploy its  technology in the UK or elsewhere.

The UK Government has said it wants to co-operate with trusted national regulators, and this would be a good place to start – if the technology is good enough for the NRC it should be good enough for the UK and vice versa (of course, site-specific approvals must still be on a case by case basis).

The main British contender in the SMR space is Rolls Royce which was assumed to have an advantage given its role in nuclear submarine propulsion. Unfortunately, small civil reactors are quite different to military ones which run on high-enriched fuel, so there was less to leverage than expected. The company is on the slow road to UK design certification.

SMRs are essentially small versions of conventional nuclear technologies. The idea, which has also been trialled by Westinghouse for large-scale projects, is to build as many components as possible off-site using a modular approach, with reduced on-site engineering. An even more interesting prospect is a fully plug-and-play, transportable “micro-reactor” plant with virtually no on-site engineering. Again, Westinghouse is at the forefront, with a micro-reactor it expects to be built and fuelled fully off-site. The product, named eVinci, would run for around eight years before being taken away for re-fuelling, leaving no waste behind. It uses a novel passive cooling technology. Recently the company successfully produced a prototype of one of the main design components.

If micro-reactors work, their potential would be huge. They could be installed at industrial sites to generate electricity, and potentially produce hydrogen to fuel very high temperature operations such as glass-making, where the temperatures are difficult or expensive to achieve other than through combustion. They would also be ideal in various off-grid locations which currently rely on diesel generators.

Unlike these proven fission technologies, I am less optimistic about fusion. Recent “breakthroughs” have misled the public as they ignore the vast amounts of energy required to power the plant. The technology needs to improve by orders of magnitude before more energy comes out than goes in. It’s also worth noting that people talk about fusion power as though it would be free from the radiation and waste problems of fission: this is emphatically not the case. Worthwhile fusion power has been supposedly imminent for more than half a century, and it’s liable to be a very long time before it arrives. We should not put off building fission capacity to wait for it.

Fission power makes Net Zero actually possible to achieve, and has the huge benefit of being an established technology that fits very well with the way our electricity grids were designed to work. There is no need for backup generation, extra power lines, or additional balancing costs, all of which are needed when intermittent renewable generation is installed.

In 1956, the first civil nuclear power station in the world was built at Calder Hall in Cumbria with the nearby homes in Workington being the first to receive electricity generated from nuclear power. It ran for 47 years generating enough power to run a three-bar heater for 2.85 million years. We need to rediscover that same ambition and power up our nuclear sector once again.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/01/nuclear-power-green-energy-tech-net-zero-miracle/

If we do rollout large amounts of nuclear, then clearly wind power is a dead end technology, and we should put a stop to all new projects, as they will be superfluous.

Although nuclear reactors can vary their output, as she points out, to merely act as a back up for intermittent renewables would totally destroy their economics.

It would be absurd to spend hundreds of billions on both wind and nuclear, when the latter could do the job on its own.

There is, by the way, an easy solution to the problem of environmental activist opposition to nuclear – simply tell them the choice is nuclear or gas!

Wind & Solar Chaos Driving Demand For Safe, Reliable & Affordable Nuclear Power

Former Ansto CEO Dr Adi Paterson says the world is starting to see a big shift in nuclear energy, which will reduce the price of electricity in a reliable and safe manner. “We’re seeing a big nuclear world and then the microreactors and the small reactors are starting to come online in various places,” Dr Paterson told Sky News host Chris Kenny.

Small-modular-reactors

From STOP THESE THINGS

Nuclear power’s renaissance is the inevitable response to the wind and solar transition’s inevitable failure.

Sunshine and weather-dependent solar and weather-dependent wind are no match for serious generation sources, like safe, reliable and affordable nuclear.

Incapable of delivering electricity on demand, wind and solar have never been true competitors with coal, gas or nuclear power generators.

Instead, over the last twenty years or so, they have been like a parasitic cancer, eroding and destroying the power grids that host them. When you hear wind and solar advocates talking about maintaining the existing generators until they can find some magic bullet storage system or make hydrogen gas (presumably economically), it’s like a tumour realising that if the host dies, it dies too.

Wind and solar will continue to bleed the system dry until power consumers recognise that the whole system is terminal. Coupling routine power rationing and mass blackouts with rocketing power prices, should do the trick.

Numerous countries in Europe have worked out that their power systems need urgent resuscitation, and are delivering with the construction of new generation nuclear plants.

The Finns are in, the French led the way (and they’re demanding more) and the Italians have also eagerly signed up to Europe’s nuclear power renaissance. The Swedes, not to be outdone, have ditched their impossible-to-meet 100% renewable energy target (simply because it was premised on adding ever-increasing intermittent wind and solar capacity) – and is on track to build 10 large-scale nuclear plants, with palns to lift their ban on uranium mining giving it access its own fuel supply, independent of Russia. All sensible stuff.

But not a bit of it in Australia. Not yet, anyway.

Sky News’ Chris Kenny talks to Adi Paterson about how the chaotic (occasional) delivery of wind and solar power is driving an inevitable demand for nuclear power.

‘Reliable and safe’: World seeing global shift to nuclear energy
Sky News Australia
Chris Kenny and Adi Paterson
26 October 2023

Former ANSTO CEO Dr Adi Paterson says the world is starting to see a big shift in nuclear energy, which will reduce the price of electricity in a reliable and safe manner.

“We’re seeing a big nuclear world and then the microreactors and the small reactors are starting to come online in various places,” Dr Paterson told Sky News host Chris Kenny.

Dr Paterson said it’s essential Australia transitions to nuclear energy as the quality of Australia’s electricity goes down.

“South Australia is losing jobs because renewables don’t just provide a challenge to the standard coal base power but if you have too much of it, what they call instantaneous penetration of 100 per cent,” he said.

“You actually reduce the quality of the frequency control that means 800 jobs have already left South Australia.”

Transcript

Chris Kenny: Now two years ago today here on Sky News, we had my documentary, Going Nuclear, in which I spoke to experts here and around the world about why nuclear energy was the logical solution to Australia’s and the world’s net-zero dilemma. You know the story. It’s a dense form of energy. It doesn’t require massive amounts of land for new transmission lines and wind and solar farms, and it doesn’t produce greenhouse gases. Here’s a reminder of what the doco contained. In this clip, it starts off with a look at small modular reactors or SMRs.

Video: As we shut down coal-fired power stations like this one in Port Augusta, SMRs could quickly replace them onsite.

My understanding is you could actually deliver to that site an SMR, connect it into the transmission grid and virtually flick the switch.

Yes, it is capable of fitting in with existing grid infrastructure and therefore replacing existing fossil fuel coal-fired power stations and that’s a real advantage. Because the grid costs can be expensive. So if you have a solution that can plug and play, you don’t need to upgrade all of your grid to accommodate it.

The younger generation is being brought up in a world where climate change is front and centre. And when you look at the facts and the science and you look at the data and you compare all of the energy generation sources that we have, nuclear has such a good story to tell from a climate change perspective. But also enabling us to continue our current way of life and indeed improve it.

Chris Kenny: Yeah, it’s all about the future generations and they might wonder why the boomers are so hung up on the so-called risks of nuclear energy. Well, let’s see if the debate has advanced over the past two years by catching up with one of the experts from that doco, Adi Paterson, who used to run Australia’s research and medical nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights.

Adi, good to talk to you again.

Dr Adi Paterson: It’s good to be back.

Chris Kenny: Two years on. Tell me, how do you think the debate has changed over the past two years?

Dr Adi Paterson: I think the two big things that have changed is we are starting to see a big shift globally. The Finnish reactor, which was apparently too expensive and took too long, is now on and has reduced the price of electricity to a third of what it was. So we know that they can look expensive, but your electricity gets cheaper, more reliable and safer, frankly.

Chris Kenny: And other changes.

Dr Adi Paterson: I think the big other changes that happened, many countries like Canada has just completed a big prefab of its nuclear power plants. We’ve seen many new to nuclear countries start up their reactors, the UAE for example. So we are seeing a new big nuclear world and then the microreactors and the small reactors are starting to come online in various places.

Chris Kenny: Yeah. Now let’s talk about what’s happened in the political debate in Australia because there’s been a significant shift. The coalition, especially under our opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has been very strong on nuclear. Just have a look at what he said even today. This is Peter Dutton, earlier today.

Peter Dutton: We’ve started the debate in relation to the small modular reactors around nuclear that can firm up the renewables in the system. In Ontario, they’ve got about 60 to 70% of nuclear firming up their renewables. They pay half the kilowatt-hour rate that we do here in Australia. So if we want to halve our electricity prices, we should look to the examples we see in Ontario and elsewhere.

Chris Kenny: Yeah, that’s pretty forward-leaning stuff from Peter Dutton. Adi, it seems obvious that the next federal election you’re going to have a nuclear policy from the coalition. Exactly what it’s going to say we don’t know yet. A nuclear proposal versus the government still holding out. Will that be a good step?

Dr Adi Paterson: I think it’s an essential step. The quality of electricity is going down. South Australia is losing jobs. Because renewables don’t just provide a challenge to the standard coal-fired base load power. But if you have too much of it, what they call instantaneous penetration of a hundred percent, which is a strange term, you actually reduce the quality of the frequency control. That means that 800 jobs have already left South Australia. Precision manufacturing is under threat in the place where we want to have nuclear propulsion in submarines.

Chris Kenny: Yeah. You talk about having that, I think it’s great we’re going to have that political contest. But with something as controversial, as volatile as this issue, don’t we need bipartisan support? We’ve just seen with referendums how you really need bipartisan support to get them delivered. Might it not be the same with nuclear energy?

Dr Adi Paterson: I think it’s true. When I worked with the Obama administration in the US, there was bipartisan support. That has intensified recently. I think that most of the democratic world has got over the anti-nuclear fever of the previous generations. But most important, the cost of electrons and quality of electricity that we need for a modern, post-manufacturing but smart economy means that you have to have quality electricity. We cannot have quality electricity with intermittent renewables.

Chris Kenny: Yeah, we’re getting more expensive and less reliable energy every day at the moment. Now, I just want to get you on the technology here because the coalition keeps pushing these SMRs, the small modular reactors. There’s this new technology and there’s no doubt if they come off the assembly line from Rolls-Royce or some of the other major manufacturers, that’d be a great fit for some locations in Australia. But that’s also politically easy to talk about that. Isn’t there more of an obvious need for maybe some modern versions of traditional fixed nuclear large reactors, say in a place like the Hunter Valley or the Latrobe Valley?

Dr Adi Paterson: I’m a big supporter of gigawatt scale. The big plants, in a way they’re the anchor tenants of a really reliable electricity grid. I’m also a big fan of these microreactors. You know the big red middle of Australia, microreactors replacing the diesel grid. We need the microreactors. We might need small modular reactors in some places. But to get the simplest, quickest, and most elegant solution that we need, it’s gigawatt scale reactors where we’ve got coal plants now.

Chris Kenny: When you’ve looked at the energy challenges, the zero emissions challenges for not just Australia but the world, when I talked to you during that documentary two years ago, you said that the facts, the science, the economics are also obvious that this is inevitable. It’s going to happen sometime. So therefore the quicker we move surely, the cheaper and more effective it’s going to be.

Dr Adi Paterson: To me the real test was Sweden, because Sweden had really been channelling Australia and they’ve changed their minds. They’ve realised that with all of the wind they put up and all the intermittency they put into their grid, they couldn’t make it work. Sweden used to have its own nuclear capability back in the day of making tiny little reactors, but they’re now going to go and build the next generation of reactors. They’ve got bipartisan support. I don’t think it’s a street fight. I think it’s people working together for the best solution for Australia.

Chris Kenny: It’s time for us to catch up.

Dr Adi Paterson: It’s grownups in the room and it’s for a grownup future, to be frank.

Chris Kenny: Adi, thanks so much for joining us. Great to hear from you again.

Dr Adi Paterson: Thank you very much.

Chris Kenny: Adi Paterson, he used to head up ANSTO and therefore run the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor site south of Sydney, which is not used for energy. It’s used for research and for medical supplies.
Sky News

Resistance Is Futile: Net-Zero CO2 Targets Can Only Be Met With Nuclear Power

3 Comments
NuScale Power

From STOP THESE THINGS

The fact that those pushing net-zero emissions targets aren’t talking seriously about nuclear power, says it all.

If energy policy is left in the hands of the wind and sun cult – and other weather-obsessed lunatics – it won’t be long before we’re all left sitting freezing or boiling in the dark.

Those with financial skin in the game keep pushing for the purported elimination of carbon dioxide gas emissions, even if only at a fictional accounting level. A balance sheet somewhere will eventually claim that Nation ‘X’ has reached a (supposedly virtuous) target of net-zero emissions.

Digging into the net-zero narrative always returns to the same question; viz, if eliminating carbon dioxide gas emissions in the electricity generation sector is the object, then why, oh why, does this crowd ignore the only stand-alone power generation source that does not generate carbon dioxide gas in the process?

Nowhere is that question more obvious than in Australia, where lunatics really have taken over the asylum.

Australia is the only OECD country to not have the benefit of nuclear power; it banned nuclear power generation back in 1998 and has never had a nuclear power plant. Notwithstanding that Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves and, despite its shifting policy of limiting the number of mines and states that have banned them, is the world’s third-largest uranium exporter.

In those circumstances, it beggars belief that Labor’s Energy Minister – the witless Chris Bowen – can maintain an argument that Australia (apparently unique amongst all nations) can reject nuclear power generation and somehow meet his net-zero carbon dioxide gas target using nothing but wind and solar.

As the Australian’s Judith Sloan points out below, if Australia wants to meet its suicidal net-zero target, then the only path is nuclear power generation.

Nuclear resistance casts Australia as energy laggard nation
The Australian
Judith Sloan
22 August 2023

Judged by the reaction to my column last week, many readers share my concerns about the planned transition of the energy system outlined by Energy Minister Chris Bowen. It’s already clear that the vision of an electricity grid powered almost entirely by renewable energy by the end of the decade and linked by many kilometres of new transmission lines is unachievable.

As for the proposition that electricity prices will fall, it’s similarly clear that the modelling on which this appealing idea was based is fundamentally flawed. In particular, the work undertaken by the CSIRO bizarrely assumes all the capital costs of transmission and distribution associated with the transition are simply written off at the end of the decade. The reality is the investors will continue to earn guaranteed returns on these investments and these will feed into higher consumer prices.

It’s anyone’s guess what Bowen will be up to in 2030 but it’s odds-on to a dollar that he won’t be the climate change and energy minister. But the point is that the fate of the electricity grid, and energy generation more broadly, is too important to be left to day-to-day politics; it requires careful planning and implementation by those who really understand how the system works.

Sadly, the leadership and staff of the Australian Energy Market Operator appear to be incapable of this task given the faulty and impractical Integrated System Plans the agency releases. The incompetence of state government ministers and bureaucrats, in combination with starry-eyed fantasies of renewable energy zones, simply adds to the developing nightmare.

The features of the failing transition are obvious already. Snowy 2.0 is behind schedule and now it is predicted that the pumped-hydro project alone will cost $10bn – the original estimate was $2bn. Many billions of dollars for additional transmission will also be needed.

The Marinus Link between Tasmania and Victoria increasingly looks unlikely to go ahead as its cost blows out from $3.1bn to $5.5bn and the fiscally fragile Tasmanian government baulks at bearing the higher figure. Absent this link, the slew of renewable energy projects in Tasmania envisaged as part of the transition is unlikely to proceed. This setback also exposes Victoria’s energy transmission plans.

As for Queensland’s energy transition plans, the inclusion of two large-scale pumped-hydro projects increasingly looks absurd, both in terms of costs and feasibility. There is strong local opposition to the project outside Mackay. The only upside to Queensland’s plan is the intention to keep its (relatively new) coal-fired plants going until renewable energy plus storage can provide guaranteed electricity.

One of the most worrying aspects of this unfolding tragedy is Bowen’s closed mind when it comes to other options to achieve a reliable and affordable grid as well as meeting decarbonisation goals. His muted objection to gas is part of the problem and the fact this energy source is not part of the national security mechanism, the capacity mechanism to provide back-up power to the grid in the event of power shortfalls, is close to incomprehensible. But his fierce and ongoing opposition to nuclear power as the greenest form of 24/7 generation simply beggars belief. His unfounded assertion that nuclear is simply too expensive must be tested by the market on the basis of the government lifting the completely unjustified ban on nuclear power.

There are more and more countries that beg to differ with Bowen’s assertion. France, Sweden, Finland, Britain, Canada, South Korea, the US and others are all ramping up investments in nuclear energy. If nuclear power is too expensive, it’s news to these economic powerhouses. We really run the risk of being left at the starting gate unless we make this shift.

The turning point for Labor is the signing of the AUKUS deal and its commitment to the use of nuclear-powered submarines. As part of this agreement, we are required to ramp up the nuclear-related workforce substantially and to deal with the waste on our shores. It is the perfect correlate to the establishment of a domestic nuclear power industry.

The lessons being learnt by other countries will prove useful and should allow us to short-circuit some of the lengthy delays that have plagued the nuclear industry. Indeed, there is clear evidence that the high expense of nuclear has been partly the result of massive over-regulation and a tendency for heel-dragging by the authorities. The comparison between the US and Canadian regulators is telling in this context, with the Canadian regulator much more efficient and cooperative.

There are several technology choices we could make, including simply using the tried-and-true ones. The South Koreans, for instance, are finalising several plants using the current principal technology. In Australia, these plants could be easily located where coal-fired plants exist or have existed: the sources of water and their proximity to transmission lines make them perfect sites.

There is also the option of providing a pilot site for TerraPower, the new form of nuclear generation promoted by Bill Gates.

Work is proceeding in Wyoming, US; the plant will generate 350 megawatts to 500MW. While the cost of this plant is estimated to be $US4bn ($6.2bn), the expectation is the next ones could cost as little as $US1bn. This form of nuclear generation doesn’t require significant amounts of water or auxiliary power. Interestingly, there was fierce bidding to have the plant located at the various possible sites.

If it were not for Bowen’s, and Labor’s, ingrained opposition to nuclear power that has little justification in the current climate, it could be exciting times for the electricity industry in Australia.

Small modular reactors will also likely be part of the mix; after all, we currently have them floating around the oceans. The Canadians have made a major commitment to their development and Rolls-Royce is working day-and-night to achieve SMRs as a commercial option for that company. In time, Australia may be simply be able to buy them off the shelf.

Of course, the renewable energy industrial complex is likely to arc up because the most sensible thing to do, if decarbonisation is the paramount concern, is simply to go with nuclear and forget short-lived, unreliable intermittent wind and solar, even with the fanciful addition of batteries.

In the short term, it is possible to make nuclear and renewable energy complementary. But as the turbines and panels reach the end of their short lives, it won’t make much sense to replace the landscape-scarring installations. But the key now is to get on with it.
The Australian

America’s Declaration of Energy Independence Means More Nuclear Power

From STOP THESE THINGS

Nuclear power doesn’t depend on the weather, and it doesn’t depend upon the whims of despots and cartels. Uranium, the highly-concentrated energy source at its heart, is abundant and readily extracted. All it takes is the wit and the will to do so.

Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves and, despite its shifting policy of limiting the number of mines and states that have banned them, is the world’s third-largest uranium exporter. Happy to export it, but too dim to use it ourselves, thanks to a 25-year-old ban on the use of nuclear power.

On the other hand, the USA has been using it for generations, but has dropped the ball when it comes to extracting and profiting from its own extensive reserves.

As Robert Bryce outlines below, if America wants to make good on its declaration of energy independence, it needs to start by exploiting its very own uranium bounty.

No U
Substack
Robert Bryce
9 June 2023

Ever since the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, American energy policy has largely orbited around the hackneyed idea of “energy independence.”

I put that phrase in quotes because the concept has never had a clear definition or concrete goal. The idea of energy independence has been used to justify a myriad of policies including oil shale (not shale oil), corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, and many others. As I explained in my third book, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence, the phrase provides a “prized bit of meaningful-sounding rhetoric that can be tossed out by candidates and political operatives eager to appeal to the broadest cross-section of voters… With energy independence, America can finally dictate terms to those rascally Arab sheiks from troublesome countries. Energy independence will mean a thriving economy, a positive balance of trade, and a stronger, better America.”

I went on to explain that the concept gained traction after the September 11 attacks and that many Americans got “hypnotized by the conflation of two issues: oil and terrorism” and the claim that buying oil from the Persian Gulf means that “petrodollars go straight into the pockets of terrorists like Mohammad Atta and the 18 other hijackers who committed mass murder on September 11.”

But here’s the rub: over the past 50 years (it’ll be exactly 50 years in October) the dubious concept of energy independence has only been applied to oil. No other energy commodities were given the same weight or consideration. That blindness to our reliance on foreign supply chains for critical energy commodities is about to bite back in a big way.

A looming shortage of enriched uranium and HALEU (short for high assay low enriched uranium), could derail the nuclear renaissance before it gets started. And that shortage will be particularly problematic for the United States, which operates the world’s biggest fleet of reactors and accounts for about 30% of global nuclear electricity generation.

As can be seen in the graphic below, four decades ago, the U.S. nuclear sector was largely self-sufficient in uranium and nuclear fuel supplies. In 1980, the U.S. produced a record 43 million pounds of uranium oxide. Today, it isn’t producing any uranium oxide. Over the past four decades or so, the U.S. went from being the world’s biggest exporter of nuclear fuel to its biggest importer. And much of that fuel (about 14%) is coming from Russia, the world’s biggest enricher of uranium. About 46% of the world’s enrichment capacity is controlled by Russia.

The U.S. wants to get off of Russian suppliers and a bill introduced in the Senate in March, authored by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) and three other Republicans, aims to prohibit imports of Russian nuclear fuel. But there are no credible scenarios that will fix the nuclear-fuel supply problem in short order. Reducing our reliance on foreign uranium supplies will likely take a decade or more if – and that’s an enormous if – Congress acts quickly to address the problem.

Before going further, let me be clear, there’s plenty of good news coming from the nuclear energy sector. Consider these recent developments:

In January, NuScale Power — which went public a year ago and now trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SMR — won approval for its SMR design from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

On May 11, X-energy and Dow announced plans to build four of X-energy’s high-temperature, 80-megawatt gas-cooled reactors at the chemical company’s plant in Seadrift, Texas. The companies said they will submit a construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and that they expect construction “to begin in 2026 and to be completed by the end of the decade.” (X-energy plans to go public sometime this year.)

On May 29, the Unit 3 reactor at Plant Vogtle in Georgia reached 100% of its designed power output of 1,100 megawatts, making it the first new reactor to come online in the U.S. since 2016. Further, Georgia Power expects fueling of the Unit 4 reactor to begin over the next few weeks. The generator should begin producing juice later this year.

There’s also plenty of positive news coming out of Europe. Last month, in Paris, 16 European countries met in what’s being called a new “nuclear alliance” that aims to reduce their reliance on Russian nuclear fuel. The group includes Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and the U.K. The group, according to one French official, aims to “relaunch” the nuclear industry in Europe. That launch is already underway. Romania, Poland, and Estonia have all announced plans to build new reactors and Britain gave approval for construction of the 3,200-megawatt Sizewell C plant last year and the government is issuing the needed permits.

But those European countries are going to be competing with the U.S. for new supplies of uranium, enriched uranium, and nuclear fuel assemblies. And they will be doing so in a business that’s dominated by a handful of countries: Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, and Russia. And of those, the U.S. may only be able to count on Canada and Australia.

Kazakhstan, which mines about 43% of the world’s supply of uranium, has a deal to supply China with nuclear fuel and it delivered a second batch of that fuel earlier this month. Furthermore, last month, Kazakhstani authorities allowed a Russian firm to take control of a key Kazakh uranium mine. As reported by OilPrice.com “Once this mine is fully operational, Kazatomprom’s control of the uranium industry in Kazakhstan will be reduced from its current 50% dominance and will ensure that Moscow can acquire at least some of the supplies it needs. Currently, Russia uses more than twice as many tons of uranium as its domestic mines produce, 5,500 tons against 2,500 for last year.”

In other words, Russia is facing a uranium supply pinch, too. And it’s now competing with China for Kazakh uranium. Per OilPrice: “Kazakhstan may not be able to increase exports to one country without reducing them to another.”

Thus while there’s no shortage of interest, positive media coverage, and capital, the nuclear sector is facing an impending shortage of the fuels needed to run both the existing reactor fleet and the fleet of future reactors, including SMRs.

The best reporting on this topic has been done by Matt Wald, who has written two excellent articles about the fuel-supply issue for the American Nuclear Society. See here and here. On April 14, he wrote, “The American nuclear industry adheres to a philosophy of analyzing every conceivable ‘what if,’ at least for hardware. But at the moment, with nuclear fuel, the industry is in what the engineers might call an ‘unanalyzed condition.’”

Wald came on the Power Hungry Podcast last week and told me that the lack of fuel “has certainly delayed” the nuclear renaissance because so many of the new generation of reactors need HALEU. “There’s no place to get it,” he said. “It’s not a technical problem, it’s a commercial problem and especially a problem of commercial inertia.”

The lack of HALEU has already led to at least one public announcement of a delay. In December, TerraPower, a nuclear startup that plans to build an advanced reactor in Wyoming on the site of an old coal plant, said it was delaying the expected start of its reactor for two years due to the lack of fuel. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the only commercial source of HALEU fuel to no longer be a viable part of the supply chain for TerraPower, as well as for others in our industry,” said Chris Levesque, the company’s CEO. “Given the lack of fuel availability now, and that there has been no construction started on new fuel enrichment facilities, TerraPower is anticipating a minimum of a two-year delay to being able to bring the Natrium reactor into operation.”

Two years? Given current conditions, it will more likely take four years, or even longer.

In February, Centrus Energy, the only domestic producer licensed to produce HALEU, said that “A full-scale HALEU cascade, consisting of 120 individual centrifuge machines, with a combined capacity of approximately 6,000 kilograms of HALEU per year, could be brought online within about 42 months of securing the funding to do so.” But Centrus hasn’t secured the needed funding. And six metric tons won’t be nearly enough to meet demand. The Department of Energy estimates that more than 40 metric tons of HALEU will be needed by 2030.

This week, I talked to a nuclear engineer who has spent decades in the industry and asked not to be named. “It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem,” said the engineer. “You can’t produce the HALEU without solid orders for new reactors. But you can’t get reactor orders if you can’t be sure you’ll have fuel.”

Congress has recognized the problem. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on nuclear fuel in March. At that hearing, Joseph Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation Energy, the biggest producer of nuclear electricity in America, was blunt, saying the U.S. is “on the verge of a crisis in conversion and enrichment” of nuclear fuel. Constellation operates 23 reactors in five states with a total capacity of 21 gigawatts. On June 1, it bought NRG’s stake in the South Texas Project. (Austin Energy owns 16% of STP.)

Dominguez said “It is critical that we re-shore our capability to overcome global dominance by Russia in these areas. We do not have time to wait…Congress must authorize and fund a $3.5 billion investment as part of a public-private cost-share partnership with conversion and enrichment suppliers.”

The DOE appears to be waking up. The agency released a report last month called the “Critical Materials Assessment, 2023.” It ranked uranium as a “near critical” material that is facing substantial supply risk. On Monday, the agency said it is seeking “feedback” on two requests for proposals to acquire HALEU. In a June 5 press release, it noted that last year’s Inflation Reduction Act provided $700 million for the HALEU Availability Program which was authorized under the Energy Act of 2020. But $700 million won’t be nearly enough. A full-scale enrichment project to produce HALEU will likely cost about $5 billion.

Furthermore, the U.S. doesn’t just need enrichment, it needs to be mining for uranium. But, as can be seen in the graphic below, domestic uranium mining has collapsed. Of course, lots of other countries have bigger uranium reserves than the U.S. Nevertheless, the U.S. ranks 16th in overall reserves, with about 102,000 tons. And the U.S. has large undeveloped deposits including the Coles Hill Uranium Project near Chatham, Virginia.

But even if investors wanted to mine for uranium in the U.S., the Biden administration has shown it’s unwilling to permit any new mines, of any kind, anywhere.

In January, it blocked a copper and nickel mine in Minnesota by withdrawing more than 200,000 acres near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from mining for 20 years. Also in January, it blocked a gold and copper mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Last month, it halted plans for a copper mine in Arizona. This month, it revoked a permit for the proposed NorthMet copper-nickel mine in northeastern Minnesota. As Isaac Orr noted in a piece for the Center of the American Experiment, the move  means the project “is effectively dead for the immediate future.”

The punchline here is clear: the U.S. cannot hope to decarbonize its electric sector without nuclear energy and lots of it. Yes, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and its cumbersome and over-long approval procedures, are a major hindrance. (NuScale Power got its reactor approved in January, but the approval process took six years and cost the company more than $500 million.) But the nuclear renaissance will not happen if the U.S. is wholly dependent on imported uranium and imported nuclear fuel.

In short, Congress is going to have to formulate a comprehensive national industrial policy focused on nuclear energy. That policy will have to include domestic mining for uranium. It will also have to, as Wald said on the Power Hungry Podcast, create the nuclear equivalent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve so that the U.S. nuclear fleet is assured of fuel security. Affordable, reliable, and resilient electricity from our reactor fleet should be seen as a national security imperative. Having a secure source of nuclear fuel for our most important energy network, the electric grid, isn’t a luxury. It’s essential.

Wald has another good idea: Congress should fund a program that creates a floor price for enriched fuel so that domestic producers can be assured that the bottom won’t fall out of the market and leave investors in enrichment facilities with worthless assets. I’d go a step further and provide a floor price for domestically mined uranium. As Wald concluded in his May 19 article for the American Nuclear Society, the events of the past few years, combined with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have created a “new consensus: that institutions bigger than corporations — namely, governments — should be involved.”

Getting Congress to act — and act quickly — on these issues will be difficult. But it is increasingly clear that the future of nuclear energy in America must have strong, decades-long, bipartisan support from Congress and whoever is sitting in the White House. It will also require some rethinking about the meaning of energy independence.

Clarification: Much of this article focused on the need for HALEU. I neglected to note that some of the SMR designs now aiming for commercialization don’t need HALEU. Instead, they will use low-enriched uranium, or LEU. As my friend, Rod Adams notes there are about half a dozen new reactor designs that use LEU instead of HALEU. He explains those reactors “won’t put a significant new burden” on the available supplies of nuclear fuel and should be able to build first-of-a-kind reactors and early commercial units using existing supply chains.
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