Just like the Renaissance followed the “Dark Ages,” a nuclear renaissance is on the verge of awakening in the United States.
When trying to predict the future, it is useful to look back to what happened in the past. There was a golden age in the past for nuclear power reactors in the United States. A twenty-year period of reactor construction that dwarfs anything since anywhere else in the world occurred between 1970 and 1990. During that period, eighty-six nuclear power reactors got operating licenses.
After 1990, the dark age began. In the last twenty years, 2005 to 2025, only three reactors have gotten operating licenses. The first of the three, Watts Bar 2, began construction in 1973, was suspended in 1985, restarted in 2007, and completed in 2016. Construction of the last two licensed reactors, Vogtle 3 and Vogtle 4, began in 2009. Originally, the two were expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), but the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than $30 billion. Vogtle 3 began operating on July 31, 2023, and Vogtle 4 on April 29, 2024.
The local customers in Georgia are very upset because of the high price of electricity that is needed to cover the huge cost of the new reactors. Two other Westinghouse reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but construction on them was halted in 2017.
It is worth making a simple calculation to get some perspective on what a $15 billion cost for a single reactor means. If one of the Vogtle reactors runs at full power, it will produce about 800 million kilowatt-hours of electrical energy per month. If that energy was sold at the current price of the United States average at 12.9 cents per kilowatt-hour, the yield would be about $100 million.
If a mortgage was taken out to pay that $15 billion at an interest rate of six percent, then, for a thirty-year mortgage, the monthly payment would be about $90 million, and for a forty-year mortgage, about $80 million. The income from the sale of the electricity is barely able to cover the mortgage payment.
Of course, there are other expenses that also have to be paid. This simple calculation does raise the question of whether such a reactor can possibly make money for its owners. It does not, however, answer the question.
The record of reactor construction over the last twenty years is deeply distressing. One reactor was completed forty-three years after construction had begun. Two reactors had their construction halted, and the construction company filed for bankruptcy. And finally, there were two reactors that ran over budget, and the construction time ran longer by a factor of two.
There are other consequences of this slow rate of construction. The skilled workforce withers away. The industrial infrastructure that fabricates the parts for new reactors withers away. The confidence of possible future customers withers away.
The industry is not dead. TerraPower applied for a construction permit for an advanced power reactor in Lincoln County, Wyoming, at the end of March 2024. NuScale Power Corporation is trying to get small modular reactors into the world. The DOE is investing $900 million dollars in small modular reactors. But all this is happening on the scale of one reactor. A renaissance happens on the scale of tens of reactors.
There are signs of a new dawn in the domain of electricity production, the fracturing of the monolith of one-gigawatt reactors, and the prospect of being able to sell heat for industrial purposes. For the last twenty years, electricity consumption has been constant in the United States, but there are now signs of increased demand and projections of rapid increases needed to power artificial intelligence data centers and the growing fleet of electric vehicles. In the golden age, electrical power generation increased by about six percent per year. Now, it will likely be much higher.
There also has been an expanding vision of what type of reactors might be required. Now, output electrical power from ten megawatts to 1,000 megawatts is being explored. From reactors that you might transport by truck, by train, or by plane to a required site, to small modular reactors, to the large-scale reactors that have been built for decades, reactors are also being considered as carbon-free sources of heat for industrial processes.
There is an appreciable appetite for nuclear reactors as a power source, as there is for other sources of electrical power. Nuclear power can compete if it is affordable, not massively more expensive than other sources, and if reactors are delivered on time. Reactors need to be delivered soon — say in five to, at most, ten years from now. And to make a significant impact on electrical production capacity, about fifty to one hundred new reactors would need to be operating by 2050.
If we are not on the threshold of a nuclear renaissance, should we relax and address the nuclear slump in construction, as we have been doing — that circumstances will improve with the new appetite for reactors and that the industry will fix itself?
The US nuclear construction industry is in dire straits. If it is to take its place in the world, it needs to reconstruct the capacities that it had in its golden age.
Nuclear power reactors are not going to disappear as a source of power. The construction of more than sixty reactors in other countries is proceeding, particularly in China. If the United States wants a significant portion of that market, it needs to rehabilitate itself. A good part of that process is not to assign blame for the current situation but to identify what made the golden age golden and reestablish the pillars that supported that golden age in the industry. There is a need for the industry to be reborn.
About the Author: Derek Boyd
Dr. Derek Boyd is professor emeritus at the Physics Institute for Research in Electronics & Applied Physics at the University of Maryland. His research interests include developing diagnostics for the electrons in high-temperature plasmas, particularly those plasmas generated in large tokamaks. Professor Boyd received his doctorate from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1973.
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