TITANS OF NUCLEAR

Q - Early Research Reactor Experience

Bret Kugelmass: How did you get into the nuclear space?

Rachel Slaybaugh: Rachel Slaybaugh knew she wanted to be an engineer while she was in school at Penn State and applied for a research opportunity as a freshman. She got matched up with a research reactor on-campus and learned all about nuclear energy. Slaybaugh attended an American Nuclear Society (ANS) student conference at UC-Berkeley, where she learned about the existing, baseload, large-scale, emissions free electricity source: nuclear energy. Research reactors are real reactors that are smaller, usually on a scale of 1 MW of thermal energy. The purpose of these reactors is to produce neutrons for research purposes. Neutrons are small particles that are neutral and are strategically useful for investigating a lot of things, but are not easy to produce. Undergraduate and graduate students run the 25 research reactors in the U.S. alongside university staff. Research reactors are designed in a way that is less complex and more safe. Slaybaugh started at educational outreach at Penn State’s reactor and went on to be a reactor operator.

5:23 Q - Numerical Methods in Nuclear

Bret Kugelmass: How did you end up becoming a professor at UC-Berkeley?

Rachel Slaybaugh: As an undergraduate, Rachel Slaybaugh became interested in numerical methods and computational science. She went on a couple of internships to Oak Ridge National Lab to work on computational science. Slaybaugh went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where she spent five years working on numerical methods. She had the Rickover Fellowship, allowing Slaybaugh to spend a summer at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory and Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, leading to an full-time position after graduation. In any nuclear system, you need to know where all the neutrons are. Neutrons interact with materials in special ways, since there is no electromagnetic interaction. Neutrons cause fission and can also cause materials change by making atoms into different atoms. The Boltzmann transport equation generically describes neutral particle interactions combined with the probabilities of neutrons interacting with materials.

9:21 Q - Nuclear Innovation Boot Camp

Bret Kugelmass: Who uses the model that shows how neutrons behave?

Rachel Slaybaugh: Rachel Slaybaugh’s work as a university professor at UC-Berkeley mostly looks at the software and algorithms at a research level. These may be picked up by laboratories doing other research, which eventually may get picked up by industry. The Nuclear Innovation Boot Camp is a two week program which brings students from around the world together to learn about entrepreneurship topics combined with nuclear. These students do group design projects over a two week period. Students get paired with mentors and at the end, there is a pitch competition in which students have five minutes to tell everyone about their project. Projects have included data analytics management, educational tools, a licensing consultancy agency, and reprocessing ideas. Slaybaugh got involved with the startup of Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN), working with colleagues at UC-Berkeley to help nuclear innovation succeed. She researched how to make a nuclear incubator, leading her to create a boot camp to start training the workforce and shifting the mindset of people so they would be ready for an incubator.

15:50 Q - ARPA-E’s MEITNER Program

Bret Kugelmass: How did you get so many people to sign up for the Nuclear Innovation Boot Camp?

Rachel Slaybaugh: The Nuclear Innovation Boot Camp was a need the market didn’t know it had and people were thrilled to hear about it and curious to learn about innovation in nuclear. The program just finished its second year and Slaybaugh is now working to hire someone full-time to run the program. Rachel Slaybaugh is currently a professor at UC-Berkeley and recently became a program director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E). This energy program is a small office inside of the Department of Energy (DOE) whose mission is making the U.S. a leader in energy technology with a focus on economics and energy security. Moonshots are wacky ideas that might fundamentally shift a market or shift the learning curve of a technology space. Because it is so high risk, there is no incentive for industry to invest it in because it is too technically or financially uncertain. ARPA-E has invested around $1.5 billion over eight years and generated nearly $2 billion in follow-on investment in approximately 50 companies. Some ideas turn out to be super useful, but a lot of them aren’t. There is no one else who can invest in them to find out which ones are amazing and which ones shouldn’t be pursued further. ARPA-E has not yet had a nuclear program, in part because their programs are small and focused. ARPA-E’s MEITNER (Modeling-Enhanced Innovations Trailblazing Nuclear Energy Reinvigoration) program was recently introduced. The focus is on enabling technologies. ARPA-E’s MEITNER (Moedling-Enhanced Innovations Trailblazing Nuclear Energy Reinvigoration) program focuses on how to make advanced reactors a reality. People have looked a lot at the core and neutronics, but the question is how to make those things exist in reality by building them quickly, predictably, cheaply and operated with very low staffing. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is starting to ask questions internally about barriers to innovation in nuclear and some regulations are in place to support that. If the nuclear industry can be proactive in setting the technology standards thoughtfully, so people can do development into a thoughtful regime instead of trying to backfit and manage these technologies. There is so much room in the computation and analytics space and nuclear doesn’t know how it will handle itself yet. The NRC doesn’t have a model or regulatory framework for predictive simulation or confirmatory simulation as a mechanism for proving things. Data analytics are farther out and thoughtfully supplementing experiments with modeling and simulation is more near-term.

26:34 Q - Innovation in Nuclear

Bret Kugelmass: What are some things you’d like to see brought forth as applications for the ARPA-E nuclear directive?

Rachel Slaybaugh: ARPA-E is enabling technology, such as data analytics, sensors, robotics, high temperature materials, and corrosion, among others. The focus of the program is putting each of these technologies in the context of an entire plant in a way that is meaningful and impactful. ARPA-E has a big market that isn’t nuclear, typically engineers, and there are opportunities to get people who haven’t been thinking about these questions for a long time, bringing new perspectives and a diversity of thought. The continued success and growth of the GAIN (Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear) program has been tremendously impactful and is a very valuable program. It is difficult for private companies to access resources inside a national laboratory that have been developed by the government for the public good. In an industry in which there are market distortions or there are reasons why it is hard to do research independently, it allows resources that have been developed for the public good to be able to do good. Private companies can apply for vouchers through GAIN to get access to competing resources, experimental facilities, and expert time. This program makes all the expertise that has been cultivated inside the government available to create more in the private sector.

Q – Intro to Nuclear

Bret Kugelmass: Tell us how you got here.

Eric Loewen: Eric Loewen was originally a math and chemistry major at Western State College in Colorado. He worked as a summer chemist intern at an oil shale company, but was recruited into the Navy nuclear power program. This allowed Loewen to take a big jump as a liberal arts major with the Navy’s training. Loewen liked the technology and wanted to see it progress in the United States, leading him to leave the Navy pursue higher education at the University of Wisconsin. He received his master’s and started work on his PhD when he got an opportunity to work for a startup, Molten Metal Technology, as they started to get into the nuclear waste sector. The company went bankrupt after five years, leading Loewen back to the University of Wisconsin to finish his PhD, taking him to the Idaho National Laboratory as a scientist for seven years. He completed one year as a Congressional fellow as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which is the umbrella for all the professional societies and scientific organizations. Loewen served as the legislative assistant on climate change to Senator Hagel. Like a lot of authorization language that gets passed, the U.S. climate policy was not implemented because it’s not backed up by the appropriations and priorities shift. The framework works on the metric of greenhouse gas intensity, specifically CO2 emissions divided by economic output. This allows countries, industrial segments, and cities to compare themselves to each other.

7:13 Q – Fast Spectrum Reactors

Bret Kugelmass: How did you combine your climate path and your nuclear background?

Eric Loewen: When Eric Loewen worked in D.C. as a fellow, he wanted to work in nuclear issues and chose to work with Senator Hagel on climate change. After finishing his fellowship, Loewen returned to Idaho National Lab and an opportunity came up to work for General Electric. In 2005, the Department of Energy changed their approach and called it the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. This program was developed to get back to a fast spectrum reactor, with high energy neutrons, and use it to recycle used fuel. A country that wants the benefits of a no-carbon nuclear power plant doesn’t need the front end of enrichment or the back end of reprocessing. The United States or other nations would supply the fuel and take it back. When Loewen interviewed with General Electric (GE), they wanted him to bring Power Reactor Inherently Safe Module (PRISM) back off the shelf. PRISM was initially invented by GE in 1981 and was under the umbrella of the program that included the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. While Clinch River was trying to get a bigger sodium-cooled reactor, PRISM was trying to go smaller and able to be manufactured with inherent feedbacks in the reactor. Inherent feedbacks means a reliability on physics. When power goes up, temperature goes up and causes the reactor core to expand, makes more neutrons leak out, and makes power drop. While Eric Loewen was at the University of Wisconsin, he was a senior reactor operator at the small reactor on campus. The reactor could be brought to a certain power, an operator would eject a control rod to make the power spike by a factor of 100, and the power would turn back around because the fuel is uranium hydride and it had inherent feedbacks. In the design process, inherent feedbacks must be validated and re-validated when the reactor is operating so people feel comfortable.

11:25 Q – General Electric’s Nuclear History

Bret Kugelmass: What is General Electric’s role in America’s nuclear history?

Eric Loewen: GE started looking at the fission process when a famous paper got published by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, which also included research by Lise Meitner. These three people discovered the process called fission around 1938-1939. In 1939, GE’s research center near Schenectady, New York decided to look into the technology. GE is a technology company always looking for the next big thing. During the early 1940’s, GE was looking at how to harness fission, initially looking at a sodium cooled reactor concept. After World War II, Captain Rickover was sent to Oak Ridge National Lab to learn about technology and get a steam plant inside a submarine. The first contact went to GE to develop a sodium-cooled plant and the second contract went to Westinghouse to develop a pressurized water reactor. President Eisenhower, when he gave his Atoms for Peace speech in 1952, wanted a technology that wasn’t militarily derived. At the National Reactor Test Station in Idaho this same year, Sam Untermeyer thought to boil the water in the core, which became the boiling water reactor. The very first reactor that made electricity for a town was a boiling water reactor and the technology was pushed to General Electric by the federal government to commercialize and show the U.S. had a peaceful path forward. The U.S. has about 70% pressurized water reactors and 30% boiling water reactors. Humans were chemists for 3,000 years. The first thing they learned how to do was oxidation, which was fire, and fermentation, which was alcohol. This uses the binding energy of electrons. About 75 years ago, humans discovered there was a binding energy that holds the inner nucleus together, which produces 200 billion times more energy when those bonds are broken. The first attempt to do this is with water-cooled reactors and it used only 1% of available energy in the uranium. Eric Loewen thinks technology needs to move toward better physics, in a fast spectrum or high energy neutron reactor system.

Q – Development of Nuclear Technologies

Bret Kugelmass: Conceptually, what are the pros and cons of thermal spectrum reactors and fast spectrum reactors?

Eric Loewen: Conceptually, airplanes had propellers out front, but then a jet engine was invented and allowed humans to travel faster and carry more passengers. The fundamentals of flight are still the same. Water-cooled reactor experience can be leveraged into fast spectrum reactors. The quality programs and reactor control directly overlap. Changes in fast spectrum reactors include coolant, no moderator, and a different fuel type and fuel enclosure. Water reactors operate at 300 degress Celsius; a typical sodium-cooled reactor operates at 500 degrees Celsius, creating more steam cycle efficiency. Gas-cooled reactors get up from 700-1000 degrees Celsius, bringing an even better thermaodynamic efficiency. When Eric Loewen was working in Senator Hagel’s office in 2005, he became aware of the technology readiness levels because he was keeping up on different energy projects. The Department of Energy (DOE) environmental management was missing on milestones and having huge cost overruns on their cleanup activities. The report said technologies are being picked that are immature or the scaling laws are not understood, causing cost overruns. NASA was already using technology readiness levels. When Loewen took his job with General Electric (GE) in 2006, part of the deliverables were to rate their technologies to the technology readiness levels, copied over from NASA readiness levels. GE reordered the levels and submitted them to the DOE, who proceeded to update their readiness levels. Loewen doesn’t like tech readiness levels because it provides an excuse to get to another level, requiring a large roadmap or developing problem. If a company is ready to start the licensing process, that should be the metric, rather than the quantitative, qualitative, and rather subjective tech readiness level. The previous chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Chairman Burns, announced the NRC is open for business for advanced reactors. The different advanced reactor companies starting the formal engagement is the way to move forward. The NRC has a good learning culture and will get faster and faster as they explore these other technologies.

22:34 Q – Nuclear Market, Policy, and Perception

Bret Kugelmass: Are there any other policy changes that need to fundamentally be overcome in order to get the public on board with nuclear technology?

Eric Loewen: The concept of radiation and what is a safe level got biased very early to take a very simplistic approach, the linear no-threshold theory (LNT). Everything in life has a hermetic effect, meaning dose is everything. Our bodies adapted to radiation exposure, from the sun and the ground, and didn’t get a “sick sensor” for radiation detecting because it wasn’t a threat to our survival, like temperature sensors in our fingers. As President of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), Eric Loewen looked at low dose radiation and addressed some of the data and misconceptions. He has also spoken on getting rid of the approach in the nuclear industry for radiation workers called As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA), where every year you need to get less and less dose. Instead, Loewen advocates for operating to the safe limits in the regulations and moving forward. The nuclear industry is one of several different ways to generate electricity. When there was a large increase in nuclear in the 1970’s, the electricity growth rate was 7-10% a year. When Three Mile Island happened in 1979, people point out that 100 nuclear power plants got cancelled. What they don’t realize is that 200 coal plants on the books also got cancelled because the load growth went to 5%. Today’s load growth is 1% or flat. If you’re a utility that sells electrons to your customers, you don’t need more power plants because your product doesn’t have demand in the marketplace. In 2008, before the collapse of the stock market, there were 23 new build projects, but were cancelled because of capital dried up and the load growth was not there. PRISM started in 2006 when General Electric brought it off the shelf with the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. The program stopped when President Obama was elected office, but there was a lot of activity in the U.K. to look at plutonium disposition. The U.S. showed up to talk about a PRISM solution, which was one of three solutions considered. GE participated in some of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) advanced reactor grants to improve their electromagnetic pump and update their probabilistic risk assessment tools.

28:52 Q – Evolution of Nuclear

Bret Kugelmass: Where do you see some of the most advanced work being done in the nuclear industry?

Eric Loewen: There is some activity in Congress of the versatile neutron source, as they realized nuclear needed to make a jet engine equivalent in the industry to begin testing. PRISM should be that tool because it’s been through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) review from 1987-1994. GE is ready to go into that licensing process and support different technologies with a test reactor. This facility should be a private-public partnership close to something that would be done commercially and would be able to help advance a lot of different materials. The human society has evolved as great chemists. The three scientists that decided to shoot a neutron inside a neutron to see what happened in 1939 gave a gift to human society. This new energy source needs to be safely and economically explored. Nuclear is at the early stage of the technology and later generations will look back, wondering why there was so much fear about a great, abundant energy source that could be used to help save the world.

Q – Intro to Nuclear

Bret Kugelmass: How did you enter the nuclear space?

Todd Allen: Todd Allen received his undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering at Northwestern University. After graduation, Allen spent seven years as a Navy nuke submarine officer. During his last two years, he taught physics at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and decided he did not want to stay in active duty. Allen went to the University of Michigan to pursue his PhD as a nuclear engineering material scientist and, on a parallel track, stayed in the Navy for another 17 years upon which he retired as a reserve captain. Commercials plants are much larger in size and are designed to slowly start up and make electricity for longer periods of time. Navy plants are smaller and are designed to be flexible. A submarine must be able to go from slow to fast very quickly, leading to different design requirements on the reactor. After receiving his PhD, Todd Allen got a job as a research scientist at Argonne National Lab’s West facility, which has since become part of Idaho National Labs, where he spent seven years. Allen got an offer to join the faculty at the University of Wisconsin and spent 10 years on that staff. In 2008, Idaho National Labs turned their test reactor, which had primarily been used by the Navy, into a user facility open to universities and others across the country. Allen joined as their first director in 2009.

5:32 Q – Nuclear National Labs

Bret Kugelmass: What had been the function of these labs up until that point?

Todd Allen: In the early days, the Idaho National Lab was designated the national reactor testing station and was a place where anyone could go build their prototype reactor. There was a lot of interest from the Atomic Energy Commission, which is now the Department of Energy (DOE), as well as commercial companies and the military. Once light water reactors started being commercialized, a lot of the other commercial interests were faded away and most of the nation’s nuclear knowledge was left with the national labs and the universities. In the early days, uranium was thought to be a very scarce resource and being able to optimize the use of it was a big deal. The cladding, which is the tube that contains the fuel, is the factor that limits the life of the fuel. Over the years, the national lab system has done development on sodium-cooled reactors and high temperature gas-cooled reactors. There is a huge amount knowledge and capability that sits at the national labs and universities that are enabling to today’s commercial actors. A lot of fundamental physics can’t be changed. The labs looked at combinations of what is a good coolant relative to removing heat and not interfering with the neutrons. Decisions about what they focused on were based on which combination appears on the shortest technical path to get a new system to deployment. The fastest mover was the U.S. Navy and Rickover had to decide which direction he wanted to go, eventually deciding on water-cooled. An infrastructure was established that is building a supply chain for water-cooled reactor. President Eisenhower opened up nuclear technology for commercial application through Atoms for Peace and the fastest technology to be built was water-cooled reactors. Because it there was believed to be a uranium shortage, it was thought for a long time that the follow on technology would be sodium-cooled fast reactors to recycle the fuel from light water reactors. After uranium was determined not as much of a driver, there was not as much of a need for sodium-cooled reactors. In light water reactors, pellets of fuel are inside a metal tube called cladding. Triso fuel are tiny kernels of uranium oxide or uranium carbon oxide oxygen mix and the kernels are surrounded with layers of carbon silicon carbide.

12:43 Q – Generation IV Nuclear

Bret Kugelmass: What other technologies have the national labs experimented with over the years?

Todd Allen: One novel thing that came out of the early 2000’s was the idea that, instead of dissolving the fuel into a salt, the salt could be used as a coolant. This idea came from collaboration between San Dia National Lab, MIT, and UC-Berkeley. The tribal knowledge of salt reactors was that it was a 40 year development problem because salt is very aggressive, corrosion wise, and materials must be developed to last 40 years. Some companies think that it is easier to engineer out of the corrosion problem by designing modules that are good for 7-10 years. During his last couple years at Argonne, the Generation IV roadmap was in development. In 1998, the federal government had gotten to a point where they had zero dollars funding research in advanced reactors. At the time, climate change was not a strong a discussion point, a Republican Congress wanted to cut programs and spending, and a Democratic political rotation didn’t like nuclear and felt like current reactors were doing fine. Later on, people started realizing there was still a lot of hope in nuclear engineering and a need for development. In international commerce, you would like to sell products to the global civil sector to set the standards. Allen worked his way into being on the leadership team for the Gen IV roadmap and got involved in advanced reactors. In the early 2000’s, there was a big boom in the number of young professionals that wanted to go into nuclear by a factor of four. Some of the things considered seminal moments for people that were anti-nuclear were history book stuff, but people began to look at it from a climate perspective and they were not burdened by past discussions. Idaho National Lab helped start the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) into a national use facility. Todd Allen spent three years there as the deputy director and was invited to spend a year in D.C. with Third Way. This gave Allen a chance to get embedded in the D.C. policy space.

21:01 Q – Third Way’s Nuclear Advocacy

Bret Kugelmass: What is Third Way’s mission?

Todd Allen: Third Way has been around 10-11 years and is meant to be a centrist, more moderate approach to politics. The clean energy group in Third Way supports the philosophies that climate change is real, it needs to be addressed, and all the tools in your tool belt should be considered. There are plenty of advocates for solar and wind, but not enough advocacy for big technology such as nuclear and carbon capture utilization. They wanted to be able to make an argument in policy space that we should be doing things to make sure we don’t close those options. Third Way is not anti-renewables, but instead supports all things that are low-carbon solutions. Third Way is a policy group and didn’t know a lot of technology, so they wanted to partner with a lab and started discussions about what would become the first Third Way Summit in D.C. Allen knew about some technical areas to help them out and was brought an understanding of the Department of Energy (DOE) and how the administration spent research money. Todd Allen and Third Way did an article on opening up the innovation pipeline and trying to get the university programs to be less directed and instead presenting a goal and asking programs how to fix it. Third Way continues to push the Department of Energy (DOE) to be less descriptive in their tasks. They also wrote a piece on what young entrepreneurs wanted the federal system to do to take their idea to commercialization, which won a think tank award. Third Way also wrote pieces on how they wish the DOE’s research portfolios were constructed differently to get a better value out of it. Allen also started a program called The Nuclear Futures dialogues, which invited non-engineers to a targeted discussion on a specific topic, such as markets. Years ago, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) used to do an R&D summit. Third Way also did a policy-based summit. There are two separate events that are planned together within a week upcoming this spring. The next Nuclear Futures discussion will be in the summer. For the original discussion, the market experts came in not believing in a future for nuclear due to their view of nuclear as large, gigawatt scale generation plants and didn’t see the U.S. building more of those. They had little knowledge of the advanced nuclear discussion and new companies trying to build different sizes and fitting into markets. The market experts left the meeting thinking there may be a different future for nuclear.

28:14 Q – How to Foster Nuclear Innovation

Bret Kugelmass: What other ways could the DOE structure their dollars or efforts to foster the nuclear industry growth?

Todd Allen: The federal government spends on the order of a billion dollars a year on research and development (R&D). It has never been as driven by an aim to commercialization as a commercial company would. Projects were getting done in different categories, but were very disconnected. Todd Allen believes that if the Department of Energy (DOE) is going to define R&D programs or do private-public partnerships, the number one factor of deciding who to work with should be how much private money that can be brought to the partnership. This partnership would respond to the amount of interest in a technology, instead of letting government money be the chooser. This set up is commercially driven and recognizes that a huge amount of knowledge and expertise exists in the national lab and university systems. Private-public partnerships can be done with R&D, task incentives, production tax credits, investment tax credits, and licensing support. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) commissioned a local consulting company to look at 65 years’ worth of federal incentives categorized by energy sources. Oil and gas, coal, and renewables had a much larger fraction of money in incentives, such as tax credits, that keep it in the commercial space. All the nuclear money went to R&D. People who live in the research world are less interested in developing a commercial product, but instead want to solve a 65 year molten salt corrosion problem instead of trying to design around it. Third Way also works in the regulatory space. The funding structure for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was set up in a way that makes it difficult to spend money on advanced reactors, since a majority of funding comes from the current operating fleet. Congress’ last budget allocated $5 million to give the NRC time to start training staff to do things. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) must have a funding stream that allows it to pay staff. The NRC is very good at bringing in technically savvy people that learn the technology and think about it well. Because so many of these things are not in a single space, but are spread out across commerce, DOE, and NRC, someone is needed at the White House level to coordinate across these groups. There needs to be a good interagency approach. Without the right incentives, each business line will go off and do their own thing to optimize themselves, which might not optimize the system.

Q – Incentivizing Nuclear

40:08 Bret Kugelmass: What are your thoughts on incentive prizes in nuclear?

Todd Allen: Incentive prizes are something needed in the energy space. The most famous incentive prize is the Orteig prize, which gave money to the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. The prize was less than people spent trying to get the prize, but it became an ego thing. If someone can define the right technology goal that has an awesome public story behind it, it incentivizes people to want to win the prizes and drives innovation around it and sets up a competitive structure. The bigger you make the prize, the easier it is to tell the public story, but sometimes it takes multiple years for someone to win the prize. Gen IV made a mistake by approaching the story like technologists and defined better as safer and cheaper with less weapons proliferation and less waste. This made people view current technology as being not safe. There must be a community that steps up and says they want to buy that product. Third Way tries to be very neutral and not supportive of a specific company. Whoever it is must figure out how to build fast and build many, which may mean smaller. Modularity, in the sense of the ability to upgrade, is also important. These folks will also look at different markets where they can make money and recognize how quickly markets change.

Q1 - Entrance into Nuclear

Bret Kugelmass: How did you get into the nuclear field?

Per Peterson: Per Peterson’s background is in mechanical engineering, but he has always had a strong interest in energy and the environment. Looking at the most important problems for humanity to solve, the big coupling between what humans can do and the environment involves energy and agriculture. Peterson became interested in solving problems that are difficult to solve and realized that nuclear energy has enormous potential. The costs for the quantities of material required to build nuclear power plants don’t make sense, so there are significant problems around how we design and build these technologies. However, the cost of raw materials doesn’t matter for nuclear power because it is a small fraction of the total cost; the highest cost is the salaries of the workforce. The quantities of uranium that are available are enormous and the ability to use it more efficiently can be implemented. Thorium can also be used. It’s difficult to conceive a world in which uranium prices would be significant enough to matter in the generation of nuclear energy.

4:23 Q2 - Civil Nuclear Energy and Nonproliferation

Bret Kugelmass: What attracted you to the nuclear space and how did you come to your conclusions about material cost and energy?

Per Peterson: Per Peterson completed his graduate studies in mechanical engineering at UC-Berkeley and minored in energy and resources. During his Energy and Resources 200 class taught by John Holdren and Mark Christensen, Peterson was impressed by Holdren’s view on nuclear technology and how he ranked the different issues associated with it. Waste was ranked at the lowest point, safety of reactors and reprocessing facilities midway up, and nuclear nonproliferation was at the top of his list. This convinced Petersen that working in the nuclear field was very important. Regardless of whether we use nuclear power for civil purposes, humans need to remain competent about how we manage the military dimensions of the technology. International institutions have been developed to do that, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency are impressive accomplishments in the global nuclear field. When you look at civil nuclear energy from the perspective of nonproliferation, the ability to have strong incentives to work in good faith and have peaceful use has brought broad compliance. Within the civil sector, materials can be segregated and handled in forms that are not directly usable in nuclear weapons, such as enriched uranium. In South Africa, which had a clandestine nuclear weapons program based on highly enriched uranium, the government decided divest itself and transfer materials to the civil sector when the apartheid was going to collapse. For about 25 years in the United States, half of the electricity in nuclear power plants was begin generated with uranium that had formerly been in Russian nuclear weapons. Nonproliferation safeguards, physical security, and cybersecurity and infrastructure can be designed to have synergies between these objectives.

9:21 Q3 – Spent Fuel Comparisons of Nuclear and Coal

Bret Kugelmass: Why is nuclear waste at the top of the public’s minds?

Per Peterson: Properly managed nuclear waste is easy to isolate from the environment. For the people that understand nuclear technology and have studied it, many do not consider spent fuel from reactors a waste. It is feasible to recycle, even though it is not economic right now. The current technology with water-cooled reactors is extremely expensive. Fuels for advanced reactors that use coolants other than water are much easier to fabricate from recycled materials. It is better for us to store spent fuel in the interim and wait to see significant deployment of these advanced reactors. Some people are opposed to nuclear energy for a variety of reasons and believe that nuclear waste disposal is dangerous. In 2015, nuclear power provided 11% of worldwide power generation, which offset combustion of a billion tons of coal. The total amount of spent fuel generated that year would fill an American football field to a depth of 1.3 meters. One billion tons of coal would have filled the same field to a depth of 230 kilometers. There is no practical way to burn a billion tons of coal and not discharge all of the waste into the atmosphere. A very small number of repositories would be needed for deep geologic isolation and the worst case is isolated contamination of groundwater, which has already been done pervasively with chemicals to a magnitude larger amount. The incremental public health impact would be very small.

15:13 Q4 - Geologic Disposal Capability in the U.S.

Bret Kugelmass: What is the industry consensus on the way to explain spent fuel disposal to the public?

Per Peterson: There is an obligation to move forward and develop geologic disposal capability. Of the different legacies passed on to the next children, nuclear waste has scientifically valid technical solutions and the amount of work to manage that waste is modest, while there is no plausible approach to get the carbon dioxide out of the air and the oceans. When you look at what is being done with fossil fuels, there are large scale risks of ecological disruption and it is difficult to rationalize worries about nuclear waste disposal. Nuclear waste is not preventing us from building nuclear plants. The Department of Energy (DOE) is required by law to write out a contract for any utility that wants to build a nuclear power plant to take full responsibility to manage the spent fuel that is generated. The amount of money that has already been paid for disposal may be sufficient that there may be no need to ever charge utilities again in the future for managing spent fuel. Utilities are also required to have decommissioning funds and put into highly secure investments. Price-Anderson caps the total private liability to $10 billion if there is an accident and the U.S. federal government picks up the rest of the cost.

19:35 Q5 – Merging Old and New Reactor Technologies

Bret Kugelmass: Do we continue with the old technology with incremental improvements or do we start developing a new, advanced technology?

Per Peterson: Per Peterson supports both incremental improvements of existing technology and development of new, advanced technology. Governments generally are not great at making technology selection decisions. There is a lot of logic supporting keeping existing plants running, since they are fully depreciated and they have low production costs, unless there are markets with large amounts of overproduction on an intermittent basis which costs the plants money on negative electricity prices. Renewables will continue to deliver electricity to the grid, even when the losses are negative, because they can still collect a subsidy. In Germany, the decision has been to continue running coal plants and shut down nuclear plants. One of the options to replace coal plants is advanced water-cooled reactors, which have seen substantial improvements in design, such as passive safety. This is the capability of a reactor when you shut it down and cease the fission reactions that are generating heat, there continues to be decay of the fission products left over and there is residual heat created in the reactor core. If you don’t provide a mechanism for removing heat after it’s been shut down, the fuel can overheat. Active cooling safety systems have increased risks because they require an external source of power. As shown at Fukushima, there can be common mode failures of that emergency infrastructure, especially if preparation has not taken place.

24:35 Q6 – Nuclear Reactor Passive Safety

Bret Kugelmass: How does passive safety in nuclear reactors work?

Per Peterson: Experiments in the 1960’s showed that, if the fuel was not cooled, a lot of radioactive material could be mobilized. In water-cooled reactors that have zirconium tubes with uranium oxide pellets inside, overheating the tubes in a steam environment causes the zirconium to oxide, generating hydrogen. When the fuel overheats and melts, the fission products are cesium and iodine and take chemical forms in the steam environment, forming small particles that condense. This combination of high pressure and hydrogen mobilizes the fission products. The response was to increase a focus on the safety of infrastructure and high reliability emergency cooling systems. Back in the day, the best way to guarantee high reliability was to use redundant active components, such as pumps, which increases complexity and cost. Event trees allow calculations for a reliability number and adding redundancy to the system can increase that number. This creates a basis to assess the reliability and license the technology, but requires more power, increasing the size, power outlet, cost, and construction time. There are diseconomies of scale in nuclear reactor design. The new designs, like AP-1000, ESPWR, and NuScale, have a key change which was developing approaches to be able to quantify uncertainty in the performance of more complicated, passive safety systems. Integrated experiments were built to replicate the gravity-driven flows at a system scale and models were validated across a wide range of different transients. Oregon State University was the first university to use improved scaling methods and built integral effects test facilities that provided the data used in licensing of the AP-1000 and another test facility which produced the data used for NuScale. UC-Berkley has developed approaches to design and build similar integral effects test for molten salt cooled high temperature reactors in the Compact Integral Effects Test Facility. Virtually all of the advanced reactor designs implement passive safety and don’t require a supply of electrical power for cooling after a shutdown. The general approach to activating these shutdown cooling systems is to remove electrical power. Staff on the site must still have the ability to monitor the system and confirm it is in a safe state.

31:27 Q7 – Advanced Reactor Development

Bret Kugelmass: Is passive safety technologies being merged with current designs or are there fundamentally new designs that need to be brought forward?

Per Peterson: From the perspective of public policy, government has not been good at technology decisions. There are a number of market failures that make it challenging to develop new reactor technologies. NuScale recently submitted a $500 million license application, the cost of developing the application to request permission to build a reactor, shows that the industry has some challenges. NuScale has multiple reactor modules and developed a control room that has a total staff of six people. Their time motion studies show that they could respond to all contingencies, but the current Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulations require that the control room have 48 operators in it. NuScale took risk in its application. When the NRC review the application and addresses the question, there is no way for NuScale to patent that regulatory decision and it is easy for competitors in small modular reactor (SMR) configurations to freeride. Freeriding is a market failure; first movers take on a lot of risk and can only capture a small portion of the rewards. Over the last decade, UC-Berkley has been working extensively looking at molten salt technologies for advanced fission reactors. Early work in molten salt came from aircraft nuclear propulsion program. Molten salt has high chemical stability and intrinsic low pressure because of high boiling temperatures, creating an ability to drive gas brayton cycle. Nuclear submarines were able to utilize existing technology, steam turbines and heat exchangers. When there was a strong interest in accelerating the development of commercial technology, the easiest thing at the time was to scale up water-cooled reactors, bringing disadvantages to light. Advanced high temperature fuels for helium-cooled reactors can be cooled by the same molten salts. The Department of Energy (DOE) has funded applied energy research, allowing UC-Berkley to establish a scientific and technical base for licensing molten salt reactors. A startup company founded by Per Peterson, Kairos Power, spun out and is pursuing molten salt technology.

39:22 Q8 – Parallels Between the Space and Nuclear Industries

Bret Kugelmass: What are key decisions and questions that Kairos Power needs to answer and how does it compare to the other three dozen technologies being developed?

Per Peterson: Some non-governmental organizations, like Third Way, Breakthrough Institute, and Nuclear Innovation Alliance, have been created to identify and solve generic policy and political problems that would benefit all of the advanced reactor developers. There has been a lot of support working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to develop advanced reactor design criteria. The current Part 50 requirements were established for light water reactors and the design criteria is logical, but the way to accomplish that purpose may be different if it is a different reactor technology. The NRC has been working to update and develop specific design criteria for advanced reactors, which reduces risk for developers of advanced reactors. The Department of Energy (DOE) Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) program gives a path for advanced nuclear developers to get access to federal and national lab resources. NASA had a similar program, Commercial Orbital Specialization Services, which gave birth to SpaceX. Nuclear technology is ripe for disruptive improvement. The question becomes how to innovate in a space in which, historically, very little innovation has taken place. For NASA’s program, the federal government was not telling startup companies how to do other technical work, nor were they picking which ones were the winner. This is very different than cost-plus procurement, which is the conventional way the federal government has developed new reactor technologies. Cost-plus procurement pays companies to do work and the longer it takes and the more you spend, the more you earn. In 2006, the United States knew the Space Shuttle was a failed technology and they had no alternative except to use Russian launch services. The conventional procurement program, Constellation, was spending billions of dollars and accomplished almost nothing. The strategic question for nuclear of what should be picked in terms of fuels, coolants, and technical approaches if you want to innovate more rapidly and develop new technologies which are disruptively better in terms of economic performance while having high intrinsic safety. Kaiser Power has its own thoughts about how to achieve that goal. The potential is very high, but there is also a potential for failure. SpaceX built three Falcon One rockets. The first, second, and third launches failed and SpaceX was out of money. They had enough spare parts to assemble one more rocket, which made it to orbit. Two weeks after their successful launch, NASA issued a multi-billion dollar contract to SpaceX for space station resupply missions.

49:02 Q9 – How to Support Nuclear Startups

Bret Kugelmass: Is there a lesson we can pull from the space industry to communicate to the nuclear startups, the public, and the government to make sure nuclear is given its fair shot forward as we continue to innovate?

Per Peterson: SpaceX could have never been successful if NASA had not had the capability to provide a procurement contract. SpaceX had to be able to perform. The Department of Energy (DOE) and the federal government have not figured out a similar way to do the same thing for advanced nuclear vendors. Absent those sorts of mechanisms, it could be very difficult for startup companies in the United States to demonstrate advanced reactors. The government needs to be an equal partner in terms of providing access to resources that U.S. startup companies can’t reasonably develop themselves, such as high enriched uranium. Terrapower, Bill Gates’ company, is developing advanced reactors and demonstrating them in China. The United States would be very proud of ourselves as a country if we are able to radically change nuclear energy as a technology at a faster pace and in a shorter timescale than most people believe is possible given the history of the industry.

Q1 - Early Perceptions of Nuclear

Bret Kugelmass: How did you get involved in the nuclear space and what drew you to environmental activism?

Michael Shellenberger: Michael Shellenberger comes from a Mennonite family, went to a Quaker school, was a peace activist, and got his degree in peace and global studies. As a Gen Xer in the 1970’s, Shellenberger was bombarded with terrifying stories about nuclear war. In 1983, ABC showed a television miniseries called “The Day After” and showed nuclear war in unbelievable, graphic conditions and Shellenberger was encouraged to watch it. He didn’t know the difference between nuclear power and nuclear bombs. After college, Shellenberger worked on bringing peace delegations to Central America during the wars and started consulting to different groups, including environmentalists. In the early 2000’s, it became very clear that the environmentalist solutions were not anywhere close to adequate to solving the problem of replacing fossil fuel. Shellenberger created a group called the Apollo Alliance that was endorsed by labor unions and other groups, but influential environmentalist groups in policy didn’t like it because it was focused around technology rather than regulations. Shellenberger pushed his solar energy solution to Obama in his run for presidency. Obama spent a ton of money on solar, wind, and electric cars when he came into office. Shellenberger wrote a book on solar power called “Breakthrough” which was published in 2007 and sent a copy to Stewart Brand, who wrote the Whole Earth Catalog and started the New Games festival. Stewart Brand wondered why Shellenberger didn’t pursue nuclear energy, leading Shellenberger to investigate and clear out his childhood perception. Even if solar power was free, it would still be limited because it has a problem with intermittency. Stewart Brand comes out with a new book, “Whole Earth Discipline”, in 2009 and does a big TED talk that has a lot of the basic pieces of eco-modernist manifesto. Michael Shellenberger wanted to support Stewart Brand in nuclear, and shortly after Fukushima happened. Michael Shellenberger interviewed people in Germany after Fukushima and found that most people thought both Chernobyl and Fukushima caused about 100,000 deaths. A very small percentage accurately responded with the correct number of deaths at Chernobyl, but zero respondents accurately guessed the death toll at Fukushima. After Fukushima, George Monbiot, a left-wing columnist at The Guardian, wrote a column defending nuclear and went on Democracy Now in the U.S. He took a call from Dr. Helen Caldicott, an anti-nuclear activist, who beats Monbiot on the call and caused Monbiot to reconsider the anti-nuclear argument and radiation. Radiation is very well studied and understood and has been for a hundred years.

Q2 - Environmental Progress

15:44 Bret Kugelmass: What is the origin story of environmental progress and your activities?

Michael Shellenberger: After Fukushima, Michael Shellenberger defended nuclear and was scared that Fukushima was the end of nuclear. The perception of nuclear had never fully recovered after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima. Shellenberger didn’t believe that wind and solar could save the day, so he felt he had to defend nuclear and worked on the movie “Pandora’s Promise”. Nuclear is an incredibly important technology for the environment, human progress and prosperity, and equality. For nuclear to survive as a significant source of energy, the human consciousness has to evolve and people must understand what nuclear is and what it’s not. Shellenberger had to leave behind his technocentrism. Technocentrism is the idea that there will be some technological change that will resolve the social or political disagreements over nuclear. Energy has continued to transition and uranium is a better fuel. So little uranium is needed to produce nuclear energy, and one Coke can will power your entire life. Uranium has a high energy density, which is a high amount of energy in relationship to the matter. Nuclear power is breaking a chemical bond that releases energy with combustion. The atomic break is a huge leap in energy transition. Going from wood to coal is a 2:1 increase in energy, but the transition from oil to uranium is at least a 1,000,000:1 increase in energy. When nuclear comes under attack, such as the late 60’s and early 70’s, the guardians of nuclear go underground and the utilities that own the plants say nuclear is a good part of the mix along with coal and nuclear loses its specialness. There is an astonishing public backlash and public misunderstanding that is unparalleled. Nuclear needs advocacy and a champion. The tradition of nuclear, especially after the 60’s, was for industry to pay people to go forward on nuclear. Michael Shellenberger knew that he didn’t want to take any money from industry and found that people take you a lot more seriously.

Q3 - Nuclear Education and Marketing

25:25 Bret Kugelmass: What are some actions and strategies that Environmental Progress takes to launch your own education and marketing campaign?

Michael Shellenberger: Michael Shellenberger started Environmental Progress in January 2016. He first worked to figure out where nuclear was in trouble globally, starting out by counting the nuclear plants at risk of shutting down and calculating the environmental impacts of shutting them down. This research had never been done before, including Shellenberger’s first organization, Breakthrough Institute. He analyzed practical equivalents of shutting down nuclear plants. Shellenberger became close with Jim Hansen, a climate scientist, and they would team up on open letters to politicians explaining the impacts of closing nuclear plants. Nuclear plants have always talked about the jobs they create. What you want from your electricity is to be cheap, because they will use more and it drives more industries. The benefits of clean energy are large and the climate argument was the aspect of the nuclear story that got them on the front page of the New York Times. Robert Downey Jr. came out and gave a positive statement about the work Shellenberger was doing and Hilary Clinton spoke out supporting keeping nuclear plants open. To understand the challenges facing building new nuclear plants, one must understand some basics of nuclear technology and economics. Building nuclear plants is the outlier of extreme construction.

Q4 - Financial Challenges of Nuclear Development

32:28 Bret Kugelmass: What financial mechanisms do we have to support such nuclear plant construction as an outlier in the industry?

Michael Shellenberger: Usually the utility building the nuclear plant is allowed to charge some amount of money while the plant is getting built. In state-owned utilities like in France, they use government finance to build them and the cost to build, in terms of interest rates, is pretty low. If you want to get cost down, have the same people build the same kind of plant and reactors over and over again, preferably right next to each other. Michael Shellenberger serves on the MIT Future of Nuclear Advisory Board. A popular saying is, France has 500 kinds of cheese and one kind of nuclear reactor. The U.S. has 500 kinds of nuclear reactors and one kind of cheese. France kept costs stable and saw cost declines when they kept the same design standard. They also saw cost increase when they changed the design. Korea is the most conservative and has the least amount of design changes. During a recent visit to Korea, Shellenberger interviewed past executives about two reactors about the last ones. They admitted the reactors were bigger, but were basically the same. The technological innovations that are the closest to being realized are the most incremental and the least radical.

Q5 - Public Understanding of Nuclear Technology

Bret Kugelmass: If one of the big problems with nuclear is the marketing and people’s lack of understanding, should we invest in new designs to get people excited about it, even if the better technical solution is to go with the tried and true old design?

Michael Shellenberger: The public understanding has to be close to what’s reality. Other non-nuclear industries have promoted things that they don’t have the technology for and it harms the entire brand and industry. Fuel pebbles are great if they existed and worked, but they are complicated and hard to get to work, in part because the burnup is not even. In the near term, different fuels with a higher melting point are exciting because it might get you 8 to 72 hours before they melt, which could prevent Fukushima and Three Mile Island. On these accident tolerant fuels, there is a lot of bipartisan support. Even opponents of nuclear couldn’t oppose fuels that melt down slower. Shellenberger did a history of the fracking shale gas revolution. It was a combination of technologies, such as fracking, underground mapping, horizontal wells, and multiple wells. There was also an incremental improvement of each of those technologies. This is the opposite of a breakthrough. After Fukushima, Obama and industry put a lot of emphasis on new fuels. Shellenberger is interested in molten salt thorium reactors. What we miss when we get so design-focused is we don’t see the biggest part of the supply chain, which is the workforce. The old industry does not have to die for the new technology to emerge. In the history of technology, this has rarely or never happened. Today’s nuclear fleet can be kept and innovating so we can get more technology one day. The regulations for nuclear are excessive and all they know how to do is regulate light water reactors. For the near term advanced fuels that get you 8 hours before they melt, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) needs $80 million a year of additional people to build tests, labs, and teams. Everything goes slower because you don’t have the people needed.

47:03 Q6 - Global Nuclear Expansion

Bret Kugelmass: How does international nuclear build affect the overall health of the industry and the U.S. place in that?

Michael Shellenberger: There is less reality to the global expansion of nuclear than people realize. China is doing less nuclear than expected and will go from two to three percent of their electricity from nuclear from now to 2020. India didn’t revise their reliability law and both India and the U.K. are taking bids to get three or four different kinds of reactors, which is a recipe for cost escalation. When Westinghouse went bankrupt, who invented the pressurized water reactor, which is the dominant reactor globally, woke people up and reminded people of the importance of standardization and centralizations. The Chinese government is forcing its utilities to make a decision on a single reactor design going forward. Standardization has not been as widely embraced as it should be, given how clear the data is and how non-controversial the importance of this is among academics. Shellenberger hopes the crisis facing nuclear right now forces a rethinking among everybody. Public acceptance of nuclear is not optional; every technology must have social license.

50:19 Q7 - Future of Different Energy Options

Bret Kugelmass: What is the potential for solar and wind to actually fix the climate change problem?

Michael Shellenberger: Energy density allows you to understand the big picture really simply. The energy density of the primary energy fuel determines its environmental impact, as well as its health, safety, and economic impact. This has been masked in some ways for nuclear. The more land you have to cover or use to get a given amount of energy, the more expensive and damaging to the environment it will be. Solar takes, on average, 150 times more land than nuclear and wind takes 750 times more land, dependent on how you count land for wind. Rooftop space is much more expensive than solar farms, due to the installation cost. The space required and the intermittency of solar and wind are unsolvable problems. California has all the solar they can use, but does not have any backup. It may not even be physically possible to store as much energy as needed. Incremental changes, like better fuels, may be very close to what we hoped from advanced nuclear. There are many statewide campaigns to save nuclear in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut and California that require a lot of activity. There is important stuff happening in Asia, with a huge anti-nuclear backlash in Japan, South Korea trying to shut down their nukes, and Taiwan had a blackout that killed people, which would not have happened if they had been running a nuclear plant. Michael Shellenberger and Environmental Progress is coming out with a statement about atomic humanism and what that means. Nuclear is special and we have to stop treating it like it is just another way to make electricity. Nuclear has been victimized by misinformation and fear and needs defenders and advocates. A lot of this work is cultural before it can become political before it can become policy.