The Daily - A Radical Reboot of Nuclear Energy

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Nuclear power, once the great hope for a clean way to meet the world’s energy needs, fell out of favor decades ago.Brad Plumer, who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming for The New York Times, explains how one company with a radical idea is now working to bring it back.Guest: Brad Plumer, who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming for The New York Times.Background reading: Work is starting in Wyoming coal country on a new type of reactor. Its main backer, Bill Gates, says he’s in it for the emissions-free electricity.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Nuclear power, once the great hope for a clean way to meet the world's energy needs, fell out of favor decades ago. Today, my colleague Brad Plumer explains how one company with a radical idea is now working to bring it back. It's Monday, July 29th. Brad, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So you cover climate, and you've been reporting on something that doesn't normally come to mind when I think of climate change, and that's nuclear power.

It hasn't really been part of the conversation about how to fix climate change really at all in recent years. But now you've found that that is changing. Tell me about that. Yeah. So there is a ton of innovation and a ton of investment pouring into nuclear power right now. And a big part of the reason for that is there's this growing sense among experts and policymakers that in order to fight climate change, we really need a wide variety of clean energy technologies. Right now, we have solar power, we have wind power. Those are growing incredibly fast and really doing quite well, but they don't run all the time. The sun's not always shining, the wind's not always blowing. And so having something else like nuclear power that can run all the time would just be incredibly valuable

and might even be necessary if we want to solve climate change. And that seems pretty important right now, right? I mean, we've got these heat waves across the United States, storms feel more severe, and wildfires are more and more destructive. So finding new sources of clean energy is a pretty urgent task right now. Exactly. But also, in addition to fighting climate change, we just need a lot more electricity in general. There's this enormous growing demand for power from new data centers, from growing interest in artificial intelligence, from electric cars, from all these new factories that are

popping up to build solar panels and batteries. And so you have a lot of companies that are just urgently looking for clean energy sources that can run 24 hours a day. So to meet all of these needs right now, there has been a huge push by the U.S. and other countries to figure out how to make nuclear energy, which is emissions-free, really a big part of the solution. But question, hasn't the nuclear power industry been around for a long time? Yeah, it's a very well-established technology that's been around since the 1950s. But the history of using nuclear technology to make electricity has been pretty rocky.

It's had a lot of ups and downs. And the country has really fallen both in and out of love with nuclear over time. So when nuclear power was first developed in the 1950s and 60s, there were incredibly high hopes for it. Electricity, man's most versatile source of power. And now man is using a powerful new source of electric power. The atom. People saw it as this potentially unlimited cheap energy source. Two ounces of uranium-235 can produce as much electrical energy as 800 carloads of coal. It's clean energy, no air pollution, powering electric cars.

There were interviews where officials were predicting that, you know, one day all new power plants would be nuclear, just solving so many of the world's problems. So already back then, they had this vision for a fossil-free future through nuclear. Oh, absolutely. The same atoms that send power surging from huge atomic power stations are also opening new realms which only the endurance of nuclear power can conquer. By the end of the 1960s, you had more than 50 nuclear reactors under construction across

the United States. And in the beginning, they were actually quite affordable. But as more of these plants got built, people discovered different issues with them, flaws that needed to be corrected, safety issues that need to be addressed with regulations. And you had federal regulators, the agency that is now known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, laying out new rules and safety standards and regulations for these plants. Ray, I wanted to ask you about that because when I think of arguments against nuclear, I think, you know, that it's not safe.

Like, that's the main obstacle. So can you explain some of that thinking? Like, what are the safety issues here? So with any nuclear plant, there really are potential risks to people and the environment. Nuclear power plants create radiation that needs to be contained. And if you have a big dose of radiation that leaks out into the environment, that can be potentially very harmful to humans and nearby wildlife. And then the plants also produce radioactive waste that takes a long time to decay and needs to be safely stored for many hundreds of years. The safety record for nuclear

power has been extremely good in the United States, and that's largely because the plants have a ton of safety features to contain radiation leaks. And a lot of that has come because the plants are very strictly regulated. So nuclear plants then are pretty safe despite the risks. So where did this public perception of danger come from then? So the reality is no technology is ever going to be completely risk-free. There's always the potential for an accident. And then you had this big shock event in 1979. For many years, there has been a vigorous debate in this country about the safety of

the nation's 72 nuclear energy power plants. That debate is likely to be intensified because of what happened early this morning at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. A reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania partially melted down. I heard a very loud noise that sounded like a huge release of steam. Looked out the window, it was geyser steam that was raising up in the air. So that meltdown released some radioactive gases into the environment, which was really concerning. You had hundreds of thousands of people evacuate from the nearby area.

The radiation inside the plant is at eight times the deadly level, so strong that after passing through a three-foot-thick concrete wall, it can be measured a mile away. There were no deaths or big health effects that resulted from the meltdown. The leak ended up being relatively small, but it was huge national news. It's a lot worse than what they're telling us. Typical lies. They had to close all those nuclear power plants down. It really horrified a lot of people across the nation, and it caused enormous disruptions in the industry.

And in a lot of ways, it was the beginning of the end of nuclear power in the United States in the 20th century. There were dozens of reactors still under construction at the time of Three Mile Island. And suddenly they were all put on pause while regulators reviewed safety rules. They put in place a bunch of new, stricter regulations across the industry. Everything from training staff to upgrading piping systems and fire equipment. Some projects ended up being delayed for 10 years, and the cost of building a nuclear power plant really went through the roof after that accident. In other words, after Three Mile Island, there was legitimately a concern about safety, and the regulations just piled on, and that made building new plants prohibitively expensive. That's right. You get a couple different explanations for what happened there.

Some blame the industry for poorly managing projects, but you also get a lot of people who say that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had piled on too many rules and driven up the cost of nuclear power. And you do get an argument about whether those regulations are reasonable. You might say, look, nuclear power is inherently dangerous. We should regulate it as strictly as possible. There are others who point out that we have a bunch of different regulatory bodies in the U.S., like the FDA, that looks at drugs. And they tend to weigh the benefits. With the risks of new technology, a lot of critics of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say that it only focuses on the risks. And when you regulate like that, technologies can become unaffordable.

Basically, utilities couldn't afford to take the financial risk of building a new plant anymore. They didn't know how long it would take. They didn't know how much it would cost. And they were scared off. Okay, so that explains how the hopes for nuclear power died. The potential for danger became big enough that simply making these plants became too expensive, too complicated, too unwieldy. And we basically stopped building them. But as we talked about earlier, the need for clean energy has grown enormously since then. So what is happening now? What's the state of nuclear energy in the U.S. today? So now what we're starting to see is a whole bunch of startups and companies going back to the drawing board and completely rethinking nuclear power technology to try to make it more affordable, to try to make it faster to build. They are coming up with new ideas for nuclear power plants that are radically different from what we've seen over the past 50 years.

are radically different from what we've seen over the past 50 years. And now, this summer, we're actually seeing the construction of the very first of these plants in Wyoming. We'll be right back. So Brad, you said that new companies are now trying to revive this nuclear industry and update it for the present day, and that we're seeing that happening in Wyoming. What's going on there? So in southwest Wyoming, there's this coal town called Kemmerer. Outside the town is this giant coal plant that's scheduled to close in the next 15 years. And then just down the road, this startup called TerraPower has just begun construction on a nuclear power plant in June, which is the only nuclear power plant currently under construction

in the United States. Thanks so much for joining us all here today for the groundbreaking of America's next nuclear power station, Kemmerer Unit 1. So I went to the groundbreaking for this plant, and Chris Levesque, the CEO of TerraPower, was there talking about how excited he was to finally start building this new plant. Not only is this America's next reactor, it's the first advanced reactor in the free world. And the man who started this company is Bill Gates.

I want to acknowledge the great work done by the TerraPower team, starting with Chris. But, you know, it's kind of a dream. And here we are making it a reality. So Bill Gates, who I think of as a public health guy, not really a nuclear power guy. Why is Bill Gates involved in a nuclear power plant? Yeah, Bill Gates has been interested for a long time in trying to figure out how to solve climate change. And at this groundbreaking,

he told the story of how his interest in nuclear power got started. It was around 2005 when I was talking to some physics friends of mine about the need for electricity and really trying to understand from them why nuclear power had gotten so expensive. And he said he was talking to his scientist friends who explained how the economics of nuclear power just weren't working, basically for all the reasons we talked about earlier. And they talked to me about how if you started anew and were willing to embrace innovation,

you could build something that was both safer and cheaper. And so we started a company with a very bold idea to revolutionize nuclear power. So that inspired Gates to start TerraPower around 2008. He hired a team of hundreds of engineers to redesign a nuclear power plant from scratch because he believed the technology was the key to the country's growing energy needs. So here we are, standing on what will soon be the breadrock of America's energy future. And I can't wait to be here when we turn the reactor on. Thank you.

Okay, so what do they come up with? So I'll try not to get too technical here. Okay. But most nuclear power plants today basically use the atomic fission to heat up a bunch of water and create steam to generate electricity. They're basically giant kettles. But the problem with that is because the water is highly pressurized, these plants often need heavy piping, thick containment shields to protect against things like steam explosions and other accidents, and that makes them very complex and

very expensive. So TerraPower decided that instead of using water to use liquid sodium, and the advantage of that is that it operates at lower pressures. And in theory, you don't need a lot of the same heavy components, the thick shields, other safety features that traditional light water reactors need. And what's the advantage of that, Brad? So the idea is if you don't have as many components, it should be cheaper in the long run. They're making smaller plants so that you're not investing as much money up front and the risk is not quite as big. And how much approximately would it cost to build one of these things? Right now, they're estimating that the initial plant will cost around $4 billion.

Now, I talk to a lot of people who expect that to rise a lot as they struggle with novel technology, struggle with novel technology, but their hope is that eventually that they can provide nuclear power for around half the cost of traditional nuclear power plants. Wow, half the cost. But the plant is smaller, right? So does that mean, you know, this smaller, cheaper plant actually produces less energy? It produces a lot less energy than the traditional big plants. But the hope is that you build a bunch of these and eventually you get better at building these over time and the costs come down. And their dream scenario is in the 2030s and the 2040s, the country has a pretty potent source of clean energy that can supplement all the wind and solar power that we're building now. But building that first plant is a gamble. They've never done it before. Things could go wrong. It could be more expensive than they thought. But one thing that's unique about TerraPower is that they have Bill Gates behind them, one of the world's wealthiest men, and he can afford to take that

gamble on the first few plants. Right. You can afford to lose $2 billion if you're Bill Gates, right? That is more or less what he said. So for this first plant, he's already invested more than a billion dollars of his own money into it. The Department of Energy has pledged up to about $2 billion. And then there are other private investors. But what he said is he has pledged up to about $2 billion. And then there are other private investors. But what he said is he has pledged to stick with the project, even if it goes over budget, as they work through some initial growing pains. And that's pretty unique. There are a lot of electric utilities and power companies out there that have said, we'd love to have a nuclear power plant once you've figured out the

technology and bring the costs down. But we don't want to be the first one to do it. Right. They don't want to be the first one in line in the bungee jump, right? Right. Okay. So this company has the vision. It has the money. It's already started working toward making all of this a reality. You saw Bill Gates out there with a shovel in Wyoming. What's the likelihood that this will actually work? So they have to prove that they can build this plant, and it's going to be tough. There are a huge number of obstacles they face that are pretty daunting. The plant won't be finished until 2030 at the very earliest.

And a lot of people I talked to thought even that might be optimistic. One big hurdle they face is that their reactor uses this specialized type of enriched uranium fuel that currently only Russia makes. And that's a big problem. Right. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, TerraPower said, okay, we're not going to buy our fuel from Russia. We need to get somewhere else. Congress has stepped in and basically approved billions of dollars to build up a domestic nuclear fuel

supply chain. But that's going to take time. But that's a very significant hurdle. I mean, years to build up our own supply chain. It's very significant. And it's a potential risk for the plant. And maybe a bigger issue right now is that at the moment, their plant hasn't been fully approved by the regulators, by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They've submitted an application. They can basically

start building all of the parts of the plant around the nuclear reactor where the atomic fission occurs, but they can't start construction on the reactor itself yet. That approval will take at least two years and possibly longer, and that's a big risk for them. Is that a deal breaker? So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has told me that they have received the application and they are very eager to show that they can approve new nuclear technology. But the catch is that for five decades, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has largely overseen those old light water reactors. That's the technology they're most familiar with.

That's what they're comfortable with. So now they suddenly have to get comfortable with a brand new technology and ensure that it's safe. That sounds like it's going to take a long time. It could take a while. And TerraPower has to convince regulators that their plant doesn't necessarily need the same expensive safety equipment that other reactors have. The theory behind them is that these reactors should be inherently safer and don't require as many costly components and safety features. But there are definitely some people worried that regulators may be too inflexible and may not be up to the task.

Okay, so this is hard. There are a lot of obstacles. Is there anywhere where these kinds of nuclear reactors are actually up and running? So no one's trying to build a reactor exactly like TerraPower's. But right now, Russia and China are building a large number of nuclear reactors,

and they're also building some advanced models that they hope they can export around the world. You know, China right now is building at least 23 nuclear reactors. We have one, this one in Wyoming. So a lot of U.S. officials really think of this as a race because they don't want to see China and Russia exporting their nuclear technology around the world,

establishing these long-term relationships with other countries and becoming the dominant suppliers of the technology that the United States invented in the first place. In fact, Congress has been putting a lot of pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They have basically been saying, we want these new advanced reactors. You need to get these approved in a timely fashion. So everyone's watching to see how this process goes.

So Brad, if we look at the big picture of what's going on right now, I wonder if the urgency of the climate crisis, you know, just how acute it's become, is going to change how we think about the risk-benefit analysis of nuclear power, you know, the one that we were talking about before. Like, do the tight regulations that made a lot of sense in the 1980s and the 1990s, we put them in place for some very good reasons, do those now make less sense because of the real pickle that we find ourselves in climate-wise? So there's always going to be demand for pretty strict regulations around nuclear power, just because there are real risks involved. But I think what we've started to see in Washington

is both Republicans and Democrats start to rethink whether we've struck the right balance. In June, we saw Congress, with big bipartisan majorities, pass a bill aimed at reforming the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to streamline approvals of new reactor designs, to increase staffing at the agency.

But also there was a pretty striking provision in that bill that basically told the NRC to consider not just the safety of reactors, but also the benefits of nuclear energy technology to society. And the idea is that we should really weigh the risks against the benefits of nuclear power. You know, there are a lot of challenges to building nuclear power. There are technical obstacles, there are financial obstacles. But if nuclear power is going to make a comeback, it will probably require a big shift in how people view the technology and how they weigh the risks of the technology.

And I think we're starting to see that shift. Brad, thank you. Thank you so much. We'll be right back. Israel and Lebanon, after Israeli forces hit Lebanon with multiple strikes overnight in response to a deadly rocket attack that hit a soccer field in an Israeli-controlled town. Israel blamed Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Lebanese group, for the attack on the Druze Arab town of Mashdal Shams, which killed 12 people, most of them children. It was the deadliest assault on Israeli-controlled territory since Israel and Hezbollah began exchanging missile and rocket fire in October.

The Israeli response appeared to stop short of a major escalation, but there were still fears that the fallout from the rocket launch would lead to all-out war. And. And the flame has been lit for the Paris Games. On Friday, the 33rd Olympic Games kicked off in Paris. Hundreds of thousands of spectators braved heavy downpours to line the banks of the River Seine for the first opening ceremony to take place outside of a stadium. No mugs.

And you can't forget about China. As the competition got underway... And it's the first for Team USA in Paris. the U.S. scored its first Olympic gold in swimming for the men's relay. Swimmer Katie Ledecky scored her first medal in the 400-meter freestyle. scored her first medal in the 400-meter freestyle. Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern, Diana Nguyen, and Sydney Harper,

with help from Shannon Lin. It was edited by Lexi Diao and Brendan Klinkenberg, contains original music by Rowan Nemisto and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.