Is large-scale nuclear poised for a comeback?
SMRs have long had the industry's attention, but with the surge in energy demand, shuttered nuclear plants may be ready for a second act.
Photo credit: Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Photo credit: Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Large-scale nuclear power could be ready for a revival.
In the past few years, the splashy small modular reactor industry has faced some very public setbacks. After a wave of project announcements, including by the Utah Municipal Associated Municipal Power System (UAMPS) and Energy Northwest, little progress has been made in actually deploying the technology. Regulatory and economic barriers have stunted the industry’s growth, and the fact that there are so many different designs has complicated things further.
But the country still needs firm baseload generation to meet clean energy and net zero goals. And because the technology is proven, both advanced and traditional large-scale nuclear represent an opportunity to counterbalance the variability of renewable energy resources on the power grid before SMRs.
Large-scale nuclear comes in two flavors: existing nuclear plants built through the second half of the last century, many of which are now shuttered; and new large-scale reactors like George Power’s AP1000 at the Vogtle plant. While no new plants are currently under construction, there are 41 closed reactors. That infrastructure represents untapped clean energy capacity, if only the industry is willing to tap into it.
Jacopo Buongiorno, the director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, told Latitude Media that there’s an attitude shift underway, despite the fact that building new plants has become increasingly fraught.
“The world of energy has changed,” he said. “There is much greater awareness of the environmental, economic and grid stability value of nuclear plants.”
Challenges of SMRs
Regulatory and economic headwinds keep stalling first-of-a-kind SMR projects.
Most notably, the Utah Municipal Associated Municipal Power System backed out of a project with the SMR company NuScale that originally involved twelve reactor modules that would generate a total of 600 megawatts.
In this case, the challenge wasn’t so much regulatory — NuScale is the only SMR provider to receive approval from the National Regulatory Commission for its reactor design — as it was economic. Announced in 2018, the estimated cost of the project was initially pegged at $3 billion. But it continuously faced cost increases that resulted in a final price tag of $9.3 billion in 2023 before it was scrapped early this year.
The high cost and lower energy of output of SMRs can make the projects hard to justify. But Kasparas Spokas, director of insights and integration strategy at the Clean Air Task Force, argued that the smaller scale of the projects makes them more accessible. “SMRs may not present lower level-costs in the near-term,” said Spokas. “But the lower total plant cost expands the customer base and allows more iterations to lower costs over the long-term.”
For all types of nuclear, both SMR and large scale, Buongiorno said roughly 70% of overall costs come from constructing the plant. Because SMRs produce less energy than traditional reactors, those costs are spread across fewer electrons, driving the cost per megawatt up.
But regulatory approval precedes construction and cost calculations. SMR designs have to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the sole regulator of nuclear power plants and research reactors in the U.S.
The NRC subjects new designs to a safety review and an environmental review before issuing a permit. Because the vast majority of SMR designs are new and untested, the review process takes more time than it does for traditional reactor technology that has a long operational history.
Once a reactor is licensed, a new permitting process starts for constructing and operating the specific project, which includes safety and environmental impact evaluations. These evaluations can take years to complete; NuScale waited four years to receive a license on its 50-MW reactor design.
But the biggest challenge for small SMR companies is paying the NRC licensing fees. The fee-based agency charges about $300 per hour for licensing inspections. NuScale shelled out close to $50 million to the NRC for its first licensed reactor.
Players in the SMR market are trying to reduce that economic and regulatory friction stagnating the industry. The new startup The Nuclear Company plans to reach its goal of deploying six gigawatts of nuclear by 2030 by using already-licensed technology to build reactors. And the nuclear reactor titan Westinghouse announced last year that it took the shortcut of effectively downscaling a 1000-MW reactor design to 300-MW. The AP300 is based on licensed technology, but has not yet received a license itself.
It remains to be seen how these developments will translate into building SMRs in the coming years. For now, large reactors still produce the bulk of nuclear energy in the U.S.
Large reactors are making a comeback
The newest nuclear reactors for power generation are at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle. Reactors 3 and 4, completed last year, were the first deployment of the AP1000 reactor in the United States. Although the construction process was plagued with delays and cost overruns, to nuclear devotees the plant’s completion is proof that new large-scale nuclear power plants can be built.
But Vogtle also illustrated that the U.S is not very good at building large reactors from scratch. And as a result, it may be the last of its kind for a while; in the past two decades, building these massive projects has fallen out of favor, and construction productivity has declined.
Buongiorno, though, has not lost hope, and argued that a combination of standardization — “5-6 plants with the exact same team” and “very clear” budget and scheduling expectations — and permitting reform could make new large-scale projects easier to build.
But what is perhaps more promising, especially given SMR woes and the urgent demand for clean firm power, is repowering shuttered plants.
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For instance, the owner of Michigan’s Palisades Power Plant, Holtec International, plans to restart the 800-MW reactor in October of next year. Palisades closed in 2022 after providing electricity for the state for 40 years.
If approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the project could pave the way for other shuttered reactors across the country to be restarted. Buongiorno said bringing closed reactors back online is a cheaper way to meet clean energy goals than only building new ones. But, he caveated, it won’t be cheap.
“The investment necessary to bring back these reactors is not small: on the order of a couple of billion dollars per reactor,” he said.
Both Spokas and Buongiorno are among a group of nuclear proponents that are skeptical of the ability for LCOE to capture the full value of nuclear plants, given that it does not consider the remaining system capacity or ancillary service needs and costs. Instead, they argue that the value should consider how generation facilities reduce total system cost and minimize barriers such as transmission buildout, land use competition, and supply chain availability.
And crucially, Buongiorno added, booming industries like data centers and clean manufacturing create a new class of customers “ready to pay more for electricity that is 24/7 reliable and carbon-free”; he cited the example of data center power purchase agreements priced at up to $100 per megawatt-hour.
But the U.S. will need to do more than just restart closed reactors to decarbonize the grid.
“Restarting closed facilities is clearly cheaper than building new ones, but there are only so many of those,” said Buongiorno, adding that there’s also a need for new construction.
And according to Spokas, the high up-front investment in nuclear is bound to pay dividends in the long-term. "If you don’t include nuclear,” he said, “generally you get the highest cost pathways to decarbonization.”
