Features

Some people are born leaders, and some people make themselves leaders. Take Natalie Cannon, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Nuclear and Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been driven to succeed since she was a teenager in Southern California, when she was inspired by NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

In a bid to tackle the primary obstacle in nuclear deployment—construction costs—those in industry and government are moving away from traditional methods and embracing innovative construction technologies.

In the late 1950s, the Swedish government decided to undertake a large-scale nuclear energy project. Situated about 75 miles southwest of Stockholm on the Baltic coast, Marviken was located on a peninsula, allowing for the cooling water intake and outlet to be located on either side of the peninsula. The coastal location also allowed the large reactor pressure vessel to be delivered by ship.

. . . and today.

Steve Rae in 1980 . . .

There I was at the promising age of 16 years old in 1973, standing before an audience of about 100 adults in Goldsboro, N.C., explaining what BWRs, breeder reactors, and PWRs were. The Goldsboro High Advanced Chemistry class teacher, Dr. Joseph Mitchener, had introduced his class of eight students to the topic of nuclear energy. I found the topic fascinating. So, when Dr. Mitchener looked for class volunteers to make public presentations like to the Goldsboro audience, I grabbed the topic of nuclear energy and ran with it. Little did I know that one action would lead to my future career.

Next up was North Carolina State University, starting in 1975, where seven out of the eight students from Dr. Mitchener’s class matriculated to the Wolfpack College of Engineering. There, I focused my interest on utility energy systems including nuclear energy.

Lisa Marshall
president@ans.org

There is much I could have written about for this month’s issue of Nuclear News, and I have decided to reflect on conversations with our greatest asset: students. When we consider what the industry needs, I think about what students need to thrive. The educational ecosystem requires both enthusiasm and resources in and out of the classroom.

To attract and retain students, we must pay attention to cocurricular programming. Scholarships, fellowships, travel grants, internships, and co-ops—as well as our time and efforts—make a difference. Whether at schools, meetups and student conferences, or national and international meetings, we must continue to pour into our students at all levels. We also need to create an environment that pays attention to external factors that impact academic performance. This lift is a mightier one but just as important.

Nuclear generation has inertia. Massive spinning turbines keep electricity flowing during grid disturbances. But nuclear generation also has a kind of inertia that isn’t governed by the laws of motion.

Starting—and then finishing—a power reactor construction project requires significant upfront effort and money, but once built a reactor can run for decades. Capacity factors of U.S. reactors have remained near 90 percent since the turn of the century, but it took more than a decade of improvements to reach that steady state. The payoff for nuclear investments is long-term and reliable.

Mike Rinehart

The nuclear industry is entering a period of renewed urgency, driven by the need for stable baseload power, heightened energy security concerns, and expanded defense infrastructure. Now more than ever, we must deliver new nuclear projects on time and on budget to maintain public trust and industry momentum.

The importance of execution certainty cannot be overstated—public trust, industry investment, and future deployment all hinge on our ability to deliver these projects successfully. However, history has shown that cost overruns and schedule delays have eroded confidence in the industry’s ability to deliver nuclear construction. As we embark on many first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactor builds, fuel cycle infrastructure projects, and extensive defense-related nuclear projects, we must ensure that execution certainty is no longer an aspiration—it is an expectation.

Nuclear energy produces about 9 percent of the world’s electricity and 19 percent of the electricity in the United States, which has 94 operating commercial nuclear reactors with a capacity of just under 97 gigawatts-electric. Each reactor replaces a portion of its nuclear fuel every 18 to 24 months. Once removed from the reactor, this spent (or used) nuclear fuel (SNF or UNF) is stored in a spent fuel pool (SFP) for a few years then transferred to dry storage.

James Conca

Nuclear is—period. But don’t take my word for it: ask the United Nations. The 2021 report Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options, by the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), shows that nuclear has the lowest overall impacts on human health and the environment, by any measure and from any perspective.

In his 1938 article “Economics in Eight Words,” Walter Morrow really hit the nail on the head when he quipped, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Although he was referring to the olden days when saloons offered free lunches only if you bought alcoholic drinks, it is perfectly suited to the energy industry.

For over a decade, the DOE’s Hanford Field Office (HFO) has been working with national laboratories, universities, and glass industry experts to establish capabilities and generate data to increase the confidence in a successful startup and transition to full-time operations at the WTP.

The Optimized Segmentation process patented by Orano Decommissioning Services was successfully implemented for the first time at the Crystal River Unit 3 (CR-3) decommissioning project in Florida [1]. Using this approach, Orano was able to avoid the time- and resource-intensive process of packaging components into numerous standardized waste containers and significantly reduced the required segmentation activities.

Mike Mlynarek believes in this expression: “In the end it will be OK; and if it’s not OK, it’s not the end.”

As the site vice president at Palisades nuclear power plant in Covert Township, Mich., Mlynarek is overseeing one of the most exciting projects in the United States nuclear power industry. If all goes according to plan, Holtec’s Palisades plant will be splitting atoms once again by the end of 2025 and become the first U.S. nuclear facility to restart after being slated for decommissioning.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

This month’s Nuclear News pays tribute to the people and projects that keep our nuclear power plants running.

In the nuclear industry, “life extension” is a venerable term that broadly describes the care required to sustain the safe and efficient operation of large, complex energy generation facilities for decades to come, some of which you will read about in these pages.

Of late, however, the general concept of life extension has also taken a firmer hold in our societal consciousness.

Whether we absorb it from Instagram videos about some Silicon Valley techie’s quest for immortality or sense it in one of the thousands of dryly written journal articles documenting our increasing ability to control and change life at the molecular level, the promise of extended life and health has universal appeal—and it’s never seemed more within reach than it does right now.

Lisa Marshall
president@ans.org

Global partnerships advance the nuclear enterprise, demonstrating commitment to energy security, supply chain buildout, and economic and human development. Collaborations remain imperative, keeping these things in mind:

Approximately half of the 400-GW reactor fleet will be retiring by 2040.¹

The forecasted need for new nuclear is 300–600 GW by 2050.

There is a need to counter the build-own-operate model.²

Appropriate funding and financing mechanisms are needed.

Host country regulatory oversight is paramount.

By 2050, there will be 4 million nuclear professionals supporting the industry.³

Savannah River National Laboratory researchers are building on the laboratory’s legacy of using cutting-edge science to effectively immobilize nuclear waste in innovative ways. As part of the Center for Hierarchical Waste Form Materials, SRNL is leveraging its depth of experience in radiological waste management to explore new frontiers in the industry.

James Conca

I think so. The near future for nuclear depends on both the cabinet picks for Energy, Defense, Interior, and Commerce, and how well the new secretaries stick to the Project 2025 plan, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative blueprint for the future.

Those who want to read the entire 900-­page Mandate for Leadership can find it easily online. The section relating to nuclear power and waste begins on page 363: “Department of Energy and Related Commissions,” by Bernard L. McNamee. The nuclear weapons–related portions are scattered throughout.

It is obvious from the beginning of the chapter that McNamee doesn’t really understand the Department of Energy. He can be forgiven, since most people don’t. For the several months following their appointments, new energy secretaries generally fail to understand what the DOE does—except for real nuclear folks like Ernest Moniz, who held the position from 2013 to 2017. Most think that the DOE is all about energy, when really it is mostly about weapons and waste.

In 2022, El Salvador’s leadership decided to expand its modest, mostly hydro- and geothermal-based electricity system, which is supported by expensive imported natural gas and diesel generation. They chose to use advanced nuclear reactors, preferably fueled by thorium-based fuels, to power their civilian efforts. The choice of thorium was made to inform the world that the reactor program was for civilian purposes only, and so they chose a fuel that was plentiful, easy to source and work with, and not a proliferation risk.

For many of us, the height of our accomplishments with Lego blocks might have been constructing little square houses as children. For others, these versatile building blocks are a medium for creating complex models of sophisticated machinery—models that have practical and educational applications. One such individual is ANS member Vincent Lamirand, a reactor physicist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Systems Behavior (LRS) in Switzerland.

Meirzhan Yussupov

As Western countries accelerate their decarbonization efforts, nuclear power is set to play a key role in achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. For instance, the United Kingdom’s goal of expanding nuclear capacity to 24 gigawatts by mid-century, meeting 25 percent of projected electricity demand, highlights the need for reliable, low-carbon energy sources. As the world’s top uranium producer, Kazakhstan is poised to be a vital partner in this transition, supplying the fuel that powers nuclear reactors and supports the U.K.’s and other Western countries’ clean energy goals.

At COP28 in 2023, the International Atomic Energy Agency emphasized the urgent need to accelerate deployment of nuclear power to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. This sentiment was reinforced the following year at COP29, where 31 countries committed to tripling nuclear capacity by 2050 to meet global climate goals. These developments highlight the growing recognition of nuclear energy’s role in providing reliable, low-carbon power essential for a sustainable future.

As nations look to nuclear energy as a source of reliable electricity and heat, researchers and industry are developing a new generation of nuclear reactors to fill the need. These advanced nuclear reactors will provide safe, efficient, and economical power that go beyond what the current large light water reactors can do.

But before large-scale deployment of advanced reactors, researchers need to understand and test the safety and performance of the technologies—especially the coolants and materials—that make them possible.

Now, the United States and the United Kingdom have teamed up to test hundreds of advanced nuclear materials.