Eielson Air Force Base is shown in this screen grab from a video hosted on the base’s website. (Image: DOD)
Eielson Air Force Base in central Alaska has been the preferred location to demonstrate the benefits of microreactors to the U.S. Air Force—and by extension the Defense Department—since 2018. Now, a protracted solicitation process is nearing an end, and the Air Force and the Defense Logistics Agency Energy (DLA Energy) expect to announce a final procurement decision by the end of the summer—or about one year after Oklo Inc. announced that it had been tentatively selected to supply a microreactor under a 30-year power purchase agreement.
Nuclear was the only energy source to show a boost in public opinion over the past decade. (Graph: Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis, Climate Insights 2024: American Understanding of Climate Change; Washington, DC: Resources for the Future; 2024.)
A new report based on what its authors call “the definitive American public opinion surveys on climate change and the environment” has found a statistically significant increase in the percentage of survey respondents who think nuclear power is a good way to generate electricity, relative to a survey that asked the same question in 2013. That’s despite evidence that “Americans’ views on climate change have remained remarkably steady.” The new report, Climate Insights 2024: American Understanding of Climate Change, is the product of a 27-year polling partnership led by the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University and Resources for the Future (RFF), and it was released July 15.
Applause at the conclusion of COP28. (Photo: Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change)
The United Nations' Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, closed on December 13 after debate on a “global stocktake” pushed negotiations a full day past the scheduled end date. Though advocates hoping for a phaseout of fossil fuels were ultimately disappointed and must settle for “transitioning away,” another first—after 30 years of global climate conferences—is the inclusion of nuclear energy among the zero-emissions and low-emissions technologies that still could, if deployment is accelerated, support deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
U.S.-endorsed declaration commits to tripling the world’s nuclear energy capacity by 2050
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — Statement from American Nuclear Society (ANS) Executive Director and CEO Craig Piercy on the launching of the “Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy” by the United States and twenty-one other countries during the World Climate Action Summit of the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC):
DOE assistant secretary for nuclear energy Kathryn Huff and NEA director general William D. Magwood IV affirmed U.S. membership in the NEA Data Bank at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Photo: OECD NEA)
The United States has joined the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Data Bank, a decision that marks “a significant stride in international collaboration for nuclear energy research, safety, and knowledge exchange,” according to the August 16 NEA announcement. “As a country renowned for its scientific and technological excellence, the United States will undoubtedly enrich the Data Bank's repository of data, software, and benchmarks and enhance its role in fostering responsible nuclear development.”
A still from a video posted by MIT that illustrates the air pollution that would be generated over one year by a grid with no nuclear power. (Credit: MIT)
Nuclear power is the single largest source of clean energy in the United States, but how can the value of “clean” be measured? Two recent reports by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, respectively, measured the clean energy benefits of nuclear energy in different ways: the benefits to human health from the air pollution avoided and the future economic value of avoided carbon emissions.
This slide on the right from the consensus committee’s public briefing identifies 10 core variables that are important to the success of advanced reactor deployments. (Image: NASEM, Laying the Foundation for New and Advanced Nuclear Reactors in the United States)
These graphs illustrate how rapidly scaling the nuclear industrial base would enable nearer-term decarbonization and increase capital efficiency, versus a five-year delay to reach the same 200 GW deployment by 2050. (Source: DOE, Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear, Fig. 1)
The Department of Energy released Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear earlier this month. It is one of the first in a series of reports on clean energy technologies and the private and public investments needed to overcome hurdles to full-scale deployment. The report makes a clear case for investment in nuclear power and challenges potential investors and operators to move beyond the current “wait and see” stalemate and generate “a committed orderbook . . . for 5–10 deployments of at least one reactor design by 2025.”
Artist’s rendering of an Xe-100 plant. (Image: X-energy)
Dow and X-energy announced today that they have signed a joint development agreement (JDA) to demonstrate the first grid-scale advanced nuclear reactor at an industrial site in North America within a decade. As part of the agreement, Dow is now a subawardee under X-energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) Cooperative Agreement with the Department of Energy.