This is the seventh installment of our Science at the Edge series, where we explore the benefits, tradeoffs, and risks associated with innovative solutions while unpacking questions about ethics, policy, or public perceptions.

Nuclear energy is back in the conversation. A new state-of-the-art reactor just broke ground in Wyoming. Colorado has added nuclear to its options for meeting its emissions goals. And a new generation of nuclear technology promises safer, cleaner, and more flexible power that can operate in more places. But economic, regulatory, and waste disposal are still hurdles for the new wave of nuclear power.

In this webinar from April 29, 2026, we spoke with Jessica Lovering, Senior Fellow at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, and Christine King, Director of the Gateway for Acceleration in Nuclear initiative (GAIN) at Idaho National Laboratory, about what makes this next generation of nuclear technology different, what is still unknown, and what it means for our energy future in Colorado and beyond.

Watch a video of this discussion on our YouTube channel. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Next Generation Nuclear

 MAX NEUMEYER: Hello everyone. Welcome to Science at the Edge. My name is Max Neumeyer. I'm the Deputy Director for Policy and Engagement here at the Institute, and I'll be your moderator for today's discussion. Most of you know, but the Institute for Science & Policy is a project of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and we work to connect scientists, decision-makers, and the public through convening, storytelling, and research. Science at the Edge is our series that explores new and emerging ideas in science and technology, and how they affect society.

Today, we'll be taking on nuclear energy, a topic that generates some strong opinions on both sides, and that is also getting some new attention and reconsideration from across the political spectrum. Last year, Colorado amended its definition of clean energy to include nuclear. And as you may have seen in the Colorado Sun today, the Colorado legislature will debate a new bill tomorrow that would streamline permitting and allow large utilities to charge customers for new nuclear research.

Also, right now, just across Colorado's northern border, a new nuclear reactor has broken ground. Many say it's safer, cleaner, and more flexible than what's come before. But nuclear energy, like all forms of energy, has some important trade-offs and risks that need to be considered. We wanted to have this conversation today because the next generation of nuclear reactors deserve a closer look, and also because the public's concerns deserve honest answers.

Before we dive in, we want to hear from you, so we're going to open an audience poll that is meant to give us a sense of who's in the room and where we're starting from. While you fill out that poll, I would love to introduce our guests and have them tell you a little bit about themselves and their work.

Meet the Panelists

MAX: Today we're incredibly lucky to be joined by Jessica Lovering, who is a Senior Fellow at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, and Christine King, director of GAIN, the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear, at the Idaho National Laboratory. I'd like Christine and Jessica to introduce themselves in a little bit more detail, and as they do, I've asked them to incorporate a bit of background information on nuclear energy to prime us for our conversation. So, Christine, as you tell us a little bit about yourself, can you incorporate some context about the state of the existing fleet of nuclear power plants in this country?

CHRISTINE KING: Absolutely, thank you for the invitation. I'm Christine King. I've been the director of GAIN for about six years. I came to the Idaho National Labs following 27 years with the existing fleet in the United States and globally. In the U.S. today, we operate 94 reactors on 58 sites. We operate a light-water reactor fleet, and predominantly that's what we operate globally. And what that means is we use purified regular water as the coolant in the reactor. There are other reactor designs; hopefully you watched the introductory video and you heard about different coolants that we use for different advantages. We have the most experience in operating nuclear reactors across the globe; our reactors are the oldest. Generally, we operate upwards of 450 reactors across the globe. Our work at GAIN is about understanding how nuclear fits into energy generation in the future, and I'm excited to be here.

MAX: Fantastic. Jessica, in your intro, can you explain some of the concerns that have been raised about previous and current generations of nuclear reactors?

JESSICA LOVERING: Thanks for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation. I really got interested in nuclear right around or a little bit before the Fukushima accident, really driven by my concern about climate change. And I knew that nuclear was a really important tool as it's zero carbon and other emissions, but also had a lot of challenges. I was living in Colorado at the time, and saw a lot of anti-nuclear sentiment, and so I got very interested in more of the policy side in terms of how could we make use of this tool in our work to reduce carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, but still engage with and understand and address the real challenges that nuclear had. Things like the safety concerns, nuclear waste, and environmental justice issues around mining. Something that really got me interested in the beginning was a focus on cost and how nuclear is seen as too expensive. One way that people were working on reducing the cost was by focusing on innovation and new reactors. And how that ties into safety is - yes, the current fleet is already super safe - but there's a promise that with a lot of these new reactor technologies, they can achieve that same level of safety in ways that are cheaper and simpler in their engineering.

Fast forwarding a bit to the 2020 presidential election, there was a lot more focus on climate change and policies and really ambitious commitments to decarbonizing, and also this renewed focus in the mainstream on environmental justice and an openness to nuclear, but there wasn't really anyone bridging the two. So that's when I co-founded, with some other nuclear experts, the Good Energy Collective, where we really focused on grappling with those tough challenges with nuclear around environmental justice issues, community engagement, and things like that. And moving forward, now I am Senior Fellow of Nuclear Innovation Alliance. We're still at federal policy, but I'm also a researcher, Uppsala University in Sweden, which is where I am physically right now.

MAX: Thank you for joining us from the other side of the world. The poll results are in, and it looks like we have a range of folks joining us. A fair amount of people who are new to the topic, most who are familiar, and then some more knowledgeable and some people who work in this sector or in an adjacent sector. And similarly with our questions around how people feel about nuclear, there's a range of perspectives here. We're definitely going to dive into some of those concerns that you just brought up there.

Poll results from live audience on April 29, 2026.

"Gen IV" Reactors Explained

MAX: I'd like to start with you, Christine. You recorded a very helpful primer video that I hope many in our audience got a chance to take a look at. For those in the audience that didn't get a chance to watch it or who are new to this topic, can you briefly explain the difference between the existing fleet of light-water reactors and the several new types of reactor designs that we call “Gen IV (four)” ?

CHRISTINE: You ask quite a challenging question, but I'm up for it. In 90 seconds, the biggest difference is that we're building them in different sizes. You're probably very familiar with our 1000-megawatt plants, one-gigawatt plants with the hyperbolic cooling towers, which was on your title slide. We're not building them that big, likely, in the future. When you hear small modular reactor, that means hundreds of megawatts. When you hear micro reactors, you're thinking about something less than 50 megawatts.

The other aspect of this is using the thermal energy. So you can take the thermal energy and make steam and then make electricity, which we plan to continue to do. We also can use that thermal energy to help to decarbonize the industrial sector. So some of these new reactors are high-temperature gas reactors, which means we have gas as the coolant and they operate at a high temperature. So you're noticing a theme: engineers are not very creative about the way that we name things, so we're pretty straightforward in the names. The high-temperature gas reactors are a good replacement for coal or natural gas that is being used with industrial facilities; think steel making, forging, specialty chemicals, that type of thing.

Finally, these new reactors are taking advantage of work that we've done decades ago, specifically at Idaho National Labs. We have demonstrated many of these reactors. We've built 52 different demonstration reactors at Idaho National Labs. So, looking beyond the light-water reactor technology, looking into the benefits of molten salt, going from a thermal spectrum to a fast spectrum. And what that enables in some cases is a different safety scheme, which allows us to have passive and inherent safety. Passive safety: think about that in terms of using your engineering to do natural circulation. Inherent safety is taking advantage of the physics; for example, with a fast reactor, it's a self-limiting nuclear reaction, the hotter it gets. So that's the short story on nuclear 101.

MAX: And real quick, Christine the reactor that is being built in Wyoming right now, the Natrium reactor, what type of reactor is that?

CHRISTINE: That is a Sodium Fast Reactor, 350 megawatts. But it also is partnered with solar salt batteries that allow it to peak up to 550 megawatts for five hours, which is an attribute that allows the utilities to take as much wind and solar as is available, but also have a backup in case it's not.

Safety

MAX: Jessica, Christine mentioned passive safety. This is often described as one of the most important features of this next generation of nuclear reactors. This means that if something goes wrong and the engineers just walk away, the reactor shuts itself down. For a Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor like the Natrium one in Kemmerer, Wyoming, how does that work? And are there any failures that passive safety features don't address?

JESSICA: Christine mentioned there's a lot of variety and a lot of different kinds of nuclear technology that we count in this advanced nuclear “gen four” umbrella, with a focus specifically on the Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor. I don't want to get too into the technical details, so I think I can keep it pretty high level, but something common across a lot of these technologies - not all of them - is that they operate closer to normal atmospheric pressure. What that means is water, for all of its great properties, turns to steam at pretty low temperatures for nuclear reaction. And then you have to have this big pressure vessel that keeps that water liquid so it can run through the reactor and keep cooling it. But a lot of these advanced reactor technologies, or Gen IV technologies, use something else for the coolant that stays liquid at very high temperatures. And so that means that it can keep cycling through the reactor, keep moving the heat out, and you don't have to have that intense scale structure to keep the pressure in because it's close to normal atmospheric pressure.

Sodium is a metal, and it runs through this reactor as a liquid metal, so it’s very hot. And something else that's important in a lot of these designs is that they can cool with natural convection. So what that means is, you can think of it like a pot of soup on your stove, and the hot liquid rises and then it cools, it falls down to the bottom. So if you lose some of your reactor, you don't need to have all these intense pumps that keep moving the coolant. They can operate, in different ways, on their own to keep moving that heat, even without outside power or outside pumps because of physical properties. So, natural convective cooling is that inherent or intrinsic safety feature.

And as Christine said, sodium, in particular, has a self-limiting function. What that means is the hotter it gets, the less of that fission nuclear reaction that you have in the core. So it kind of slows down and cools down on its own.

In terms of other accidents, the designers of these plants are trying to think of everything; they're trying to go through any possible accident scenario - what if an airplane hits it? What if it floods? What if there's a fire? How does it operate in all sorts of different conditions? So these are definitely going to need to be run through our safety regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), to make sure they understand everything, but they are trying to think of every possible scenario and make sure the reactor operates safely in all those different conditions.

Cost and Timelines for Reactors

MAX: Great. I want to stay with you, Jessica, for a moment longer. I have another tough question that I think comes up a lot when we think about building out a new generation of nuclear power plants, and that's the cost and timeline. The last nuclear reactor that was built in the United States was built in Georgia. From what I understand, it came in approximately $19 billion over budget and was years behind schedule. The construction permit was granted in 2009, and the two new reactors entered service in 2023 and 2024. And that seems more the rule than the exception. So why does nuclear energy consistently cost more and take longer than projected? Is this a fixable problem, or is it just baked into this type of energy?

JESSICA: The big challenge here, and the reactors you mentioned, and some of the other recent examples, like Flamanville in France and Olkiluoto in Finland, that had these very bad experiences going long overdue and long over budget. These are really first-of-a-kind reactors. And not just first builds of that design, but also kind of restarting the industry in these countries. The U.S., France, Finland hadn't built nuclear reactors in many decades. In the U.S., we hadn't started a new project in 30 years. So, it's kind of not just first-of-a-kind, but sort of restarting an industry.

What we do see is that in countries that have successive builds of similar designs, standardized reactive designs, they do come down in cost, and they do get better at building them. And this wasn't just something that happened back in the seventies in France, but also more recently in South Korea, and it's happening in China today. There was a really good paper that came out last summer looking at Chinese nuclear costs. And you see, they invested in the domestic supply chain and the workforce, and they see these costs come down over time. And that makes sense. We see that in a lot of other industries, energy technologies like wind turbines and solar panels.

But it is also a challenge for these really big projects. You see this in all sorts of infrastructure projects, these big mega projects, anything over a billion dollars. It's tough to manage a project like that. It's tough to manage a big construction team and a huge infrastructure project. So, something else that the nuclear industry is looking at doing differently is moving from doing nuclear like a big infrastructure project to doing it more like a commercial product. And so that's the move towards Small Modular Reactors (SMR). There are many different sizes in there, but you can do modular components even for large reactors, and modularization in general has a really good track record of helping bring down costs as you standardize the construction process. And so that's why you see, as Christine said, a lot of these reactor technologies are much smaller, even down to micro reactors, which fit in a shipping container. And so that's a big motivation for the industry of why they went smaller, is to change kind of the paradigm of how they're building nuclear from these huge projects, which are difficult to manage, to something that you could ideally build on an assembly line.

MAX: Interesting. What about the element of permitting and environmental impact assessment? Making sure that these projects are safe for humans and not harmful to the environment is critical. Is that part of the reason that construction takes so long? And is anything different in terms of the regulatory processes for this new generation of nuclear?

JESSICA: I can start, but Christine can jump in too. There's definitely a need that industry has called for, but also a lot of other folks who work in the policy space and want to see more nuclear for climate or energy security reasons, that the licensing process needs to be streamlined and somewhat more efficient. I don't really think it's been the main barrier, the main cost, or main driver of these cost overruns in the past. But as we're moving towards new reactor technologies, especially non-light-water reactor technologies, these advanced designs, the licensing process we had was really optimized for water-cooled technologies. And so there was a sense going back a decade that we needed to modernize the licensing so that it could handle these new designs and be more efficient with these new designs, or more risk-based and informed around these new designs. So there are some new processes in place. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but there's something called “Part 53”, which is for advanced reactors, and then now something called “Part 57”, which is for micro reactors or really low consequence reactors, aiming to develop new rules. But there's a lot happening that's driven by legislation like the ADVANCE Act, which passed in 2024. And so things are moving, and there's been a lot of progress, and there's been even faster licensing. Some of the latest applications that have gone through have been done much faster than in the past. So things are already more efficient, and there's already been a lot of progress on licensing, but I don't think it's been the main driver of these cost overruns because you do see in other countries, even in China, you see very similar regulatory processes and regulatory standards.

CHRISTINE: The biggest cause of the cost overruns is starting to build something before your design is complete. Think about even doing a project in your garage and you're like, “okay, I kind of have an idea of what I'm going to do.” And you start your project and then, four trips later to Home Depot or Lowe's, whichever is closest to your house, there you are. And you've probably thought, “oh, this $50 raised bed for my garden now ended up at $200 because I didn't think completely through it as I was buying my supplies,” or that type of thing. So most important is complete your design.

And this is where the licensing process comes in. What we're seeing today is folks putting their standard design in for review. Once we have a standardized design, then we will start to see us building those time and time again. One of the things we did in the United States is for every nuclear power reactor we built, we customized it just a little bit. And it's that “just a little bit” that ends up costing us a lot of money.

I do want to dig in real quick on two things that I'm excited about relative to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC is a very collaborative organization globally, and one of the things that they're doing is participating with the UK as well as Canada on some of the reviews that have already started in their countries. What that means is in Canada, they're building the BWRX 300 and the NRC is participating in the technical review of that. So, when the BWRX 300 shows up in the United States to be licensed, we have staff that are already familiar with the design. So that will be helpful in the licensing process.

What I'm also interested in on the environmental and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) side of things, and this came as a requirement of the ADVANCE Act, is to look at how we site and use potential brownfields in the future. When we look at siting for nuclear power plants, we actually have added a pretty hefty nuclear pedigree to the data that we require to site that power plant. The NRC has been reviewing whether, if you, for example, have an operating coal station, you know a lot about that site itself, and could we use the metallurgical data from that site to help determine whether you could put a nuclear power plant there in the future? My personal research has been on brownfields. I know Jessica has looked at brownfield reuse as well. As we think about building this new energy system of the future, if you take nothing else away from this webinar, please be a proponent for using land we've already dug up. Brownfield reuse - not only for not digging up green fields or starting from scratch - many of these have installed infrastructure that's helpful, like substations and transmission nodes and things like that, that we should make the most use of from a sustainability perspective. We're not rebuilding all of that steel. We're not manufacturing or installing all of that new steel. I've taken you off course, but that's what I would say about the licensing process and what I'm excited about.

Supply Chain

MAX: Today, in that Colorado Sun article, they were talking about the Comanche Coal plant as a potential site for a nuclear reactor in the future. I want to take us now to the nuclear fuel cycle and the supply chain. The U.S. imports 95% of the uranium that is used by our existing nuclear fleet. We do have uranium deposits in the U.S., including inactive mines here in Colorado and active mines in other states in the west, but most of our uranium comes from Canada and from Kazakhstan. I understand there's a lot of uranium, but maybe it's not being mined in Australia and a few other countries. Furthermore, many of these advanced reactors, including the one in Kemmerer, Wyoming, require High Assay Low Enriched Uranium, or HALEU, which is enriched to higher levels than conventional nuclear fuel. Until recently, Russia dominated the global HALEU supply. Jessica, can you tell us where the nuclear fuel supply chain stands today? Are we going to be able to supply the next generation of these advanced nuclear reactors with a domestic supply of uranium and nuclear fuel? Is that important? How do you think about that?

JESSICA: Opinions on this differ, but I don't think we necessarily need to have a domestic source of uranium. There's lots of uranium in countries that we're quite close with, like Canada and Australia. But enrichment is a big bottleneck. And that's something where diversifying the number of countries and the facilities and expanding the facilities that can do enrichment outside of Russia is very critical. And there has been a lot of progress in that space after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sanctions on Russian energy exports. The past and current U.S. administrations have been investing money to build up new enrichment capabilities in the U.S., and also a lot of our allies have been doing the same, because there are good enrichment facilities across Europe, and we do have some in the U.S. So, definitely something that needs to be expanded. And then for HALEU, there's also been some good programs to invest in procuring HALEU for these advanced reactors before they come online.

CHRISITINE: Looking at where the first cores might come from for these advanced reactors, in particular, the advanced reactor demonstration projects, the national labs and the Department of Energy are looking at some down-blending of some of our available uranium that we have in the DOE system. But we're also standing up and supporting new fuel line projects that focus exactly on what Jessica was talking about, the enrichment side of this.

If you don't mind, I'll give you a rather mundane example of how to think about it. First of all, not every new reactor being built is considering using High Assay Low Enriched Uranium. I would say about a third of them are using light-water reactor technology and plan on using low-enriched uranium. So that's at about 4-5% uranium. That's like taking an over-the-counter medication. When you go to HALEU, that's enriching the uranium up to about 20%, so that might be like getting a prescription. And then anything above that is what you can get in an operating room. That's the way to think of the different levels of enrichment and how they are used. I do have a different analogy for adult beverages, but we won't go there.

MAX: What about thorium and other alternatives to uranium? Is that like the non-alcoholic beer? Or how does thorium fit in, and is it realistic?

CHRISTINE: Thorium is realistic. It's likely. One of the challenges that we have is what Jessica was discussing. There's a significant amount of infrastructure work that needs to be done to support a uranium fuel cycle. So a thorium fuel cycle is not on our near-term list of to-dos. It doesn't mean that it won't be something that shows up in our nuclear system 20 to 30 years from now. However, thorium reactors are of interest globally, and there might be other countries that are standing up thorium fuel supplies, and there are distinct advantages to thorium. But, as I mentioned, we have a significant amount of work in domesticating our uranium supply.

MAX: Another part of this supply chain conversation is around nuclear fuel reprocessing. Many nuclear proponents point to reprocessing spent nuclear fuel – I won’t call it nuclear waste; it's spent nuclear fuel – as a potential solution to the domestic supply chain issue, if there is one. Is this technically feasible? And maybe more importantly, does it pencil out economically? I understand France, which gets the majority of its energy from nuclear power, does a lot of reprocessing. Does it work in France?

CHRISTINE: We do know how to do this and I will say, you can call it waste. Until we reuse it, it's nuclear waste. So recycling is just recapturing the uranium from the waste product that we have. And there's a significant amount of fissile material left after a fuel bundle has been in a reactor for six years. The reprocessing is reusing it, so it's turning it into a new fuel form, and there's a lot of benefit for us to do that, looking at the production of HALEU and using our current nuclear waste from our existing fleet as an input for the reprocessing.

Economically, it does not pencil out today. And that is one of the innovations that some of these new companies are looking at, which is how they might be able to enrich and make that an economic process. Jessica might want to share a little bit more about France. The short story I'll tell you on France is they not only reprocess their waste, but they reprocess for other countries, which gives them a significant volume moving through their facility. And I think that's how they've solved the economics. But it's not a high-profit-margin business at this point in time.

JESSICA: A lot of people think that reprocessing or recycling is not allowed or it's illegal in the U.S., and that was true for a short period of time. But it's been legal to do since the 1980s. The main obstacle has been cost. Uranium has been quite cheap and so it's just made more sense to use fresh fuel. But if you're thinking about expanding nuclear and needing a lot more fuel in the future, then long-term sustainability requires that you probably are going to need to do some recycling if you have a big growth in nuclear power. In countries where they really depend on nuclear and also don't have domestic uranium, that was a big motivator for France. And now Japan also has spent a long time building a big reprocessing facility that should come online very soon. And so, they're going to start recycling their fuel as well. And that's because it's part of their industrial policy to have a more sustainable fuel cycle.

But something I will say, it is expensive the way it's currently done, and there are different ways that you could recycle or reprocess a fuel. There's been some work: ARPA-E had a program looking at innovations in fuel recycling. And a lot of the goal there was finding ways to bring that cost down or ways to do recycling at a smaller scale economically. So it can be economic at a really large scale with the current technology, but looking for different ways of recycling that could be done on smaller volumes of fuel more affordably. And so there are some companies in the U.S. that are looking at new or different recycling or reprocessing technology. So, there's innovation happening there as well.

Nuclear Energy and the Grid

MAX: I've been asking some tough questions about cost and timeline and supply chain and safety, but I want to turn now to the positive case for nuclear power. What is it that nuclear energy adds to our grid? I understand it's considered base load power. Christine, can you explain what that means, what it adds to our energy mix, and the implications for stability on our grid?

CHRISTINE: I've been in this business over 30 years, and I have to say, the number of people who are learning about how electricity gets made seems to increase on a daily basis, which is refreshing… and sometimes a little frustrating. So let's start at grid level. Our grid operates at a specific frequency, and so all of our generators need to work together, on the supply side as well as on the demand side, to ensure that our grid stays balanced. If we do not maintain that frequency balance, what happens is you can end up with cascading outages. What base load power brings is physical spinning reserves. As our generators are sitting there spinning 24/7, that gives us physical inertia in the system.

What that means, and the way I want you to think about it, is like the giant shock absorbers for the grid, like your shock absorbers on your car. By having the right amount of baseload power, it allows us to have flexibility. And as we look at data centers and other large loads that might drop off our system quickly. We need to make sure that we have enough shock absorbers to keep our grid at that frequency level. So that's one advantage of nuclear power.

It's not the only way to provide base load or to back up our grid in a positive way. What I have learned in this job is that we are operating an electricity system that was built by the last generation, and we have the opportunity to build the electricity system and the energy system for the next generation. And every technology comes with its pros and cons. So I'm really a big proponent for us not advocating for the technology that we love the most, but starting to understand how these technologies play off of one another, and making the most of the pros and cons, and ensuring that in situations going forward, that we have the resiliency and the reliability that we need. I think those are the components that I'm looking forward to in the system.

MAX: Can you say a little bit more about how nuclear complements renewables or competes with natural gas? How does it fit in with those two power sources?

CHRISTINE: Natural gas typically is what we are relying on for peaking power across the United States. In the United States, nuclear power provides 20% of our electricity and we operate 24/7. Most of our plants run for two years, and then we shut down and replace the core, or replace a portion of the core, in a refueling outage, and then we start back up. So nuclear is that kind of constant “on.” And then we have all of these other resources that are available to us. When there's solar and wind available, we should be using that. And then on top of that, you have your natural gas that helps us with any peaks, whether that's peaks due to weather conditions or maybe congestion or things like that. I'm going to defer to Jessica to fill out the rest of it.

JESSICA: I was just going to add that when you get down into these modeling future energy systems and how to optimize it for affordability and reliability, there are a lot of great studies that show that having some amount of this clean firm power, so things like nuclear hydroelectric, geothermal, actually helps you have more renewables on the grid, because you need that base load power to kind of keep the system going and balance those intermittent sources. And so, I really don't like to see when people talk about nuclear versus renewables; it's really that they help each other out. Because renewables, wind and solar in particular, are very cheap on the per-kilowatt-hour level, but system-wide, it can be quite expensive if you don't have a good, clean firm source to provide that base load power. So, they play well together, and having some amount of nuclear in your system can really help you reach those deeper levels of a fully decarbonized system.

Small Modular Reactors

MAX: I have a couple more questions for you, but I want to work in an audience question. We've had a couple comments in the chat about Small Modular Reactors. I think there's a lot of interest in these. There was a proposal that lasted a couple days at most at the Denver International Airport to have a Small Modular Reactor before they backed down. The promise of these is that they're prefabricated and that they're modular. You touched on this a little bit before, and that process will bring down costs and shorten the timeline. Are we there yet? And are they being considered for data centers?

CHRISTINE: The short answer to are we there yet is no. As Jessica mentioned before, we are in the stages of building first-of-a-kind and early-of-a-kind plans, and we're grateful for those companies that are able to come forward and partner with the government and build those projects. However, there is a significant amount of interest across the United States in being in that next batch of builders. There is a lot of interest from the tech companies in having nuclear support the energy that they need for data centers. And there's a lot of crosstalk between the two industries to make sure that what they need and what we have or will have is a good match, and that varies based on the kind of data center. We're not there yet, but there are a lot of demonstration projects that are underway that will lead us to having standardized designs. It will take us through operating the first units, and a lot of positive things. And this is not very different from how the first fleet came on board. Again, I'm going to defer to Jessica to fill out some thoughts on that.

JESSICA: I think the concept of modular fabrication for energy technologies is really standard outside of nuclear. So almost everything else in the power sector is built in a factory setting. So obviously wind turbines, solar panels, but also combined cycle natural gas turbines, which are quite large, are also largely fabricated. You think of cars, you think of wide-body aircraft; very large things can be built in a factory setting. I saw someone in the chat mentioned economies of scale. We do see economies of scale in nuclear historically, but we also see the large projects have a very high likelihood of going over budget and over time, and it's just the difficulty in managing those projects. And so, there's a lot of hope that economies of volume, which is the term for factory fabrication, will outweigh economies of scale. And I dropped a link to a report that I had come out in January that looked at those trade-offs between scale and volume for bringing costs down for nuclear.

There's a lot of focus now on the smaller size. And then there are the unique advantages of the small size beyond just potential factory fabrication. A big one is co-location. With smaller reactors, you can site the nuclear very close to where you need it. And so that's of a lot of interest to data centers, but also industrial applications that might want to use that heat or other services. They want to have it very close.

Just Transition and Workforce

MAX: Another angle that proponents of nuclear point to is around just transition. So Kemmerer, Wyoming was chosen as a site for the new TerraPower plant in part because it has a coal power plant that is shutting down. In Colorado, we have similar situations in several communities in our state. To what extent is nuclear a viable option to replace coal in communities like Craig, Colorado or Pueblo, Colorado? And what are the workforce implications of a transition like that?

JESSICA: I wanted to just add to the question a little bit. I think you said Kemmerer was “chosen,” and they were chosen by TerraPower, but they also were chosen because they really wanted the plant. They made a bid of why they'd be a good host and why they wanted to have that project in their community. So I think that's really important when we're talking about environmental justice and how you site these plants. There are places that really want a project like this. And the reason is, for Kemmerer, they had a coal plant that already retired, and there are a lot of places in the U.S. that have coal plants that have already closed or are closing soon. And while that's really good from a climate perspective, it can be devastating in these communities from an economic and quality of life perspective, and the survival of the community can be at risk when these major employers leave.

Christine already mentioned earlier some of the reasons that using a brownfield site like a coal power plant has some advantages in terms of infrastructure. A big one that's at a lot of coal sites is transmission lines. If you've been following the permitting discourse in the U.S., it's very difficult to build new transmission lines. And so having those large-scale transmission lines already coming into an area is really valuable, and that's a huge asset that these communities have. And a nuclear plant can somewhat match the capacity of those transmission lines. There are other things like water rights and rail network or road network to be able to handle large equipment.

But then, a really valuable asset that these communities have is their workforce. A lot of the jobs at a coal power plant are actually quite similar to those at a nuclear power plant, and can be transferred with very minimal retraining. And so, already some of the nuclear companies are looking at how to leverage and take advantage of that very skilled workforce that you already have in some of these communities.

Water Usage

MAX: You mentioned water, and water is top of mind here in Colorado, particularly after our very dry winter. Nuclear power plants require a significant amount of water, which from what I understand is one of the reasons Colorado hasn't had an operating nuclear plant since St. Vrain closed in 1989. How much water does this next generation of nuclear plants require? Is it less than the traditional conventional light-water reactors? Is the water equation different now that we have new technology?

CHRISTINE: So we're going to go back to Kemmerer and start with that as an example. One of the things that excited the utility about having the Natrium project is they will use only 2/3 of the water that the coal station used. So that opens up a third of water use in that area for something else.

The other thing that's being explored, especially in the West, not just for nuclear generation, but for all power generation, is looking at air-cooled technology. Air-cooled technology is not something that we needed to do in the past and did not pursue because it's a parasitic load. So you need to produce more power to operate an air-cooled unit. However, if you're building a new unit, you can take that into account based on how much you need and then how much you need to operate your air-cooled technology. That does not mean that the station does not need water; it just means that you're not using that water on that secondary side.

And then, as you start to look at some of these technologies that are using other coolants, we won't be using water inside the reactor as a coolant as well. So there's a number of different things that reduce the water load. But generally at these smaller scales, you're going to be looking at the same water usage or less than we see with coal stations.

Spent Nuclear Fuel Disposal and Storage

MAX: A reminder to the audience that we do have some time for questions. As you're thinking of your questions, I want to turn to one that came up earlier around decommissioning and the other side of the nuclear fuel cycle. The federal government abandoned its plans for Yucca Mountain in Nevada several years ago. But there remains this persistent concern from the public about long-term storage, disposal, and decommissioning. Right now, most nuclear waste - or spent nuclear fuel - is sitting in storage pools at existing nuclear facilities. Is this an acceptable short-term solution for nuclear waste? And what will it take to responsibly manage nuclear waste over the long term? And because it's nuclear, the very, very, very long term?

JESSICA: It's acceptable in the short term in the sense that it's very safe where it is and very stable. You can go and visit the spent nuclear fuel at a lot of these plants. It's stored in pools, but also in these concrete dry casts outside on the sites. But the important thing is that at these power plants around the U.S., the communities that host them and the utilities that operate them didn't plan on having the spent fuel there long-term. And they didn't really consent to it in advance. And the plan was that the Department of Energy was going to take control of it physically at some point. That point has long passed. So, there's a sense that the responsibility has not been lived up to, or the promise has not been kept. There definitely needs to be something done with that material just because these communities didn't agree to have it in the first place. But it is quite safe where it is.

Part of the challenge with Yucca was that the process was unjust in how that site was selected. And what we're learning now and understanding from what other countries have done is that there are better processes for siting interim storage facilities and long-term geological repositories for nuclear fuel. I won't go into too much detail, but because I do live in Sweden, Sweden is a great example, also Finland, of looking for a process like a reverse auction or actually taking bids from communities that want to host a facility rather than picking a spot and sort of forcing it to go there. And ways in which you can put forward bids from your community of what you want in return for hosting. And what we find is that when you do a process like this, you get communities that really want it because they're very familiar. It tends to be places that have nuclear power plants, and they understand the technology, they understand the risk, and they are willing to host it because of the economic benefits. And so there's been a process started to develop what's called a consent-based siting process in the U.S. to host interim storage. And it's been slow, but I think we're moving in the right direction for finding a site like that in the U.S.

CHRISTINE: So Max, let's just talk about what's required in a license. Before you get your license to operate a new nuclear power plant, you will have a waste plan that's agreed to not only by the owner operator, but also by the Department of Energy. And so, you don't get keys to drive the car until you have a waste plan. That also goes for decommissioning. On day one, you are required to substantially fund the decommissioning of your plant, and those funds are protected. Typically, you cannot start to use the decommissioning fund until you have relinquished the license for the plan. And I say typically because we did do Palisades in Michigan as being restarted after they started their decommissioning work. So, you do see some number of plants that are being restarted where some of that decommissioning fund had been touched. But it is a requirement that we fully fund our own decommissioning, and we fund our waste processing, which is different from other technologies.

Looking Forward

MAX: Great. I've tried to work in a bunch of audience questions, and I think I've gotten to most of them. I wanted to turn to just one final question for both of you before we end. This is a fast-moving industry right now. There's a lot going on. What should we be watching for over the next few years around Gen IV nuclear?

JESSICA: I think the main thing to look for is the orders for the second-of-a-kind and third-of-a-kind project, particularly seeing more groundbreaking of new projects and demonstrations, but that's just the first step. So I think something that I'm going to be watching, and I think a lot of other folks should keep an eye on too, is just how long it takes for these projects to get built and to be completed. And once they get up and running, do they have good community support and good transparency on the operations? And then, do you see more orders coming in, more utilities getting interested, once they can come and see the plant come and kick the tires? We're seeing a lot more projects get announced. There are so many projects happening in the U.S. now that it can be difficult to keep track, but NIA has a really good tracker that you can go and see what's going on with all the different companies and projects.

CHRISTINE: So, what I think we're going to see is two things. One, right now there are many, many, many developers in this space. I think we're going to start to see that number, over the next five years, consolidate and decrease as technologies get built and projects get firmed up and people choose their partners.

The other thing that I'm hoping to see, and I actually spend a fair amount of my own time working on, is coordination around a region. As we think about building these projects, how we have the workforce in a particular region to support multiple builds at one time. If we're looking at potentially 400 gigawatts of nuclear in the United States by 2050, we are probably going to at some point be building 15 gigawatts a year. And so, I think where we're headed is thinking about not only what you want to build in your state or your community, but what might be going on in a region and how you coordinate and support one another.

We also need to think about where some of this workforce is today. If we're talking about plants that are going to be built 15 years from now, those students are in kindergarten. So, that's what I'm looking forward to: maybe teaching some little nuclear power experiments in kindergarten.

MAX: Fantastic. Second and third-of-a-kind and the next generation of workforce. We'll keep an eye on those for sure. Thank you all for being here so much, and thank you particularly to our panelists, Christine King and Jessica Lovering, for joining us. We look forward to seeing you at another ISP event. Have a nice day.

Additional Resources

Nuclear Energy Primer video

GAIN Community Engagement resources

State laws passed and proposed related to nuclear energy.

The Northwest Colorado Energy Initiative (NCEI). This includes the Colorado-specific study on the Craig coal station transition.

Communities Local Energy Action Program Study: Colorado, Montana, and Utah Nuclear and Data Center Feasibility Study and Business Case. GAIN partnered with communities to assess the feasibility of leveraging data centers to support and enable nuclear deployment. Each community has operating coal power generation assets and residents that support coal plant operations. 

Exploring Advanced Energy Solutions or Rural Colorado study by the Colorado Energy Office required under House Bill 23-1247. The study assesses the potential for developing new advanced firm dispatchable energy technologies (such as advanced nuclear, clean hydrogen combustion, geothermal, long-duration energy storage, natural gas power plants paired with carbon capture and storage, and wind or solar coupled with storage) in rural locations in Colorado.