Latest / Clean Power Hour / Promises and Peril - Small Modular Nuclear Reactors with David Kraft, NEIS |Ep149

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Promises and Peril - Small Modular Nuclear Reactors with David Kraft, NEIS |Ep149 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  David Kraft: So I want to get across the idea that even though we're talking about SMM cars, they are fairytales. They don't exist. So we can't use language that kind of reinforces the fact that they do, which is what you hear when you hear all of these wonderful reports about what small modules are doing are supposed to be doing. They're not doing it because they don't exist. These are theoretical concepts. They are designs. They are PowerPoints, they are slick marketing brochures, and none of those contribute to our electrical grid.
• 1:27
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• 1:42
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• 1:56
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power, our nuclear energy, I'm Tim Montague, your host check out all of our content at clean power. hour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. As our listeners know, the nuclear industry is on ice in the in the United States we haven't commissioned, but one nuclear power plant in something like the last 30 years. There's not a lot of action in nuclear, the end, the nuclear engineers that I know are fleeing the industry and joining wind and solar because that's where the growth opportunity lies. And yet, our government is promoting SM N RS Small Modular nuclear reactors. And so my guest today is David Kraft. He is the executive director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service. And he's here to set the record straight about SNN Rs, and the state of nuclear power in my home state, and his home state, the state of Illinois. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, Dave,
• 2:55
  David Kraft: thank you very much. Good to see you again, Tim.
• 2:57
  Tim Montague: This is a homecoming. I've known you for several decades. You're a well known activist in energy and the environment and social justice arenas in the Chicago area. I'm grateful for your work. And I'm excited to finally do an episode on nuclear power. It's long overdue. So tell us Dave, how did you get interested in the nuclear industry and come to any is?
• 3:26
  David Kraft: Well, to start with nuclear energy Information Service turns 42 on June 7, of 2023. So we've been around a number of decades, and our purpose really was twofold. We wanted to watch dog the nuclear industry, which when we started was Commonwealth Edison, it's morphed over time into other companies, but also to translate a difficult arcane scientific issue into language that Joe and Josephine couchpotato could understand. There are a lot of complex issues that, frankly, we all have to have some level of understanding about, if we're going to make any kind of competent decisions about them.
• 4:09
  David Kraft: Genetic engineering, you know, GMO foods, AI, and certainly nuclear is one of those. So that was our intent when we started, you know, many, many decades ago. Over the years, we morphed into that more, but adopted as many activist responses as we thought was appropriate. You know, at first we thought we would just be educational. But we realised that education without action is useless. So we did various activism, things called demonstrations. We did a lot of public presentations.
• 4:42
  David Kraft: Eventually, we started working with legislators, trying to inform them on the complexity, the issues, both at the federal level and state level. So over the years, we've pretty much done it all. And in all capacities. You asked me how did I come to this? Well, I would say by accident, it's called Three Mile Island. I was actually pronuclear, like many 20 Somethings were back in the day. You know, it was something positive that America could offer the world, you know, we had a benefits instead of blowing something up. But in 1975, there was a huge fire down at a nuclear plant in Alabama.
• 5:21
  David Kraft: And it turned out that an idiot doing a leak test, using a lit candle ignited the insulation between the walls in a section of the reactor building, which ultimately resulted in a $200 million fire. And I'm thinking whoa, you know, is this the sophisticated technology that we're all supposed to be waiting with bated breath for? It turns out to that all the experts who are advising what to do on site were wrong and it took a local Fire chief's to come in and say, we're going to hose the thing to put the fire what's. So it really broke through this myth that nuclear is some magical, high tech, you know invulnerable process of technology that we've invented, and really started to show the true vulnerabilities of the technology. With Three Mile Island here, I think that pretty much said it all. Folks don't remember that Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer, by the way in the nuclear navy. So he was on call when TMI hit. And he made some decisions, which are controversial. He not only got us through the Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island accident, but he got into permanent into permanence, a ban on what is called reprocessing of the spent nuclear fuel, which would take the fuel and try and reuse it in some way. That was originally instituted by President Ford temporarily. When Carter took over, he made it permanent because of the proliferation potential that he has worldwide to make nuclear weapons. So all of these things started happening. And as my girlfriend and I were leaving the theatre watching. Around the time of the Three Mile Island accident, The China Syndrome was the name of the movie, we were given a brochure to have come to a meeting at the end of the week, someplace else. And since then, I've been involved with the anti nuclear community and the safe energy advocacy communities to get terminate nuclear power and replace it with appropriate renewables energy efficiency. And now you can add to that energy storage and better transmission. So it's a long road, but here we are 42 years later doing the same message.
• 7:45
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Dena watts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Dina Watts digital twin benchmarking technology, you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results.
• 8:01
  Tim Montague: The fourth generation Dino recently completed a technical review by DNV, you can download the report at Dena watts.com.
• 8:08
  Tim Montague: That's D no wa t t s.com. Now back to the show. Yeah, I to remember Three Mile Island. My parents were very involved in energy in the environment issues in the Four Corners area of New Mexico, fighting coal, but also uranium mining, major environmental hazard and environmental justice issue.
• 8:33
  Tim Montague: Because uranium dust is radioactive and causes cancer among the miners who are doing that, that work. And so, and then, in 1986, Chernobyl happened in the spring of 1986, I was signed up to go to Norway as an exchange student, and did so in June of 1986. And of course, Norway and Sweden and Finland were, were impacted directly by the fallout from Chernobyl. The fallout fell onto the ground and contaminated the vegetation that was consumed by the reindeer and the sheep, which are major livestock resources in those countries.
• 9:17
  Tim Montague: And so it was, it was an active conversation at the University of Oslo where I was a summer school student learning to speak Norwegian. That radioactivity had contaminated the food web and, and they had to call the, you know, the herds that summer and dispose of that meat because it was not safe for human consumption.
• 9:44
  David Kraft: Sadly, term that accident, if you want to call it an accident, we don't. We call it an unintentional is still going on. Because there are portions in Scotland, portions of Scotland where you can't eat the sheep in Central Europe, they still advise you do not eat mushrooms, and eat wild boar meat because there's still enough residual radiation in the soils. And of course, bio concentrates as it works its way up the food chain. I spent a number of years in Hamburg, Germany, and they have an annual event where they make this special mushroom dish called differnece. Now that's fine.
• 11:16
  David Kraft: That's a cooking sorry, definitely. And it's a cute little orange mushroom. But after Chernobyl, they stopped doing it because they couldn't guarantee that these mushrooms would be safe for consumption.
• 11:27
  David Kraft: And so that disaster is still ongoing in that respect. And I think we just found out with the Russian occupation of Chernobyl earlier last year. There's the report was that those soldiers had to be taken Anabella rooms for treatment because of the radiation exposure because they were camping in the soils in the forests around the Chernobyl reactor.
• 11:52
  Tim Montague: So the Chernobyl reactor is in what is now Ukraine. Yeah. So the other context is that as my listeners know, Illinois, is the most nuclearized state in the United States, we have approximately 40% of our grid power coming from nuclear power. I myself live 50 miles from a nuclear power plant, the Clinton power station, which has a lovely Lake around it, which I sail on. And I appreciate that resource. It is a wonderful natural resource now, since they built the lake in the late 70s. But most most Americans have no idea that Illinois is so nuclearized How did Illinois become so nuclearized? Dave?
• 12:35
  David Kraft: Well, it's a an interesting history, post World War Two, where the Eisenhower administration is the one most well known for Atoms for Peace, wanting to take the power and the destructive power of the bomb, transform it into something positive. And as many people know, the Nuclear Age began in Chicago, December 2 1942, at the University of Chicago steak field, squash courts, first chain reaction that we controlled took place there. Later that was moved to the suburbs of Chicago, which then were forested areas Aragon laboratory, and then Oregon had to move second time where it's presently located now. So there was a national laboratory connection. We had a utility at the time Commonwealth Edison, which was very interested in the technology. But when we actually got a hold of a couple of annual reports from back in the day, where the company is talking to its shareholders about this wonderful new energy resource, which not only would it give unlimited power, cheaply, but it would create a situation where the government would buy back the nuclear waste to get the plutonium to manufacture nuclear weapons out there in black and white, they weren't even trying to hide it then. So this is the the seedy side of nuclear, which gets swept under the carpet, except on what episodes of The Simpsons at nuclear power and nuclear weapons are still intricately bound together. So back in the day, that was the push here in Illinois, we had argon, we had a willing utility, we had a very eager government to push this forward. And so the first privately invested commercial nuclear reactor was opened at Dresden, Illinois, just in one, the reactor is now closed, because it was inefficient and actually started exposing its workers to high levels of radiation. But ultimately, what it did, was it over the years enabled Illinois to build 14 reactors total, of which 11 are still operating. If we were a nation, we would be the 11th largest nuclear power in the world, just behind Ukraine, which is not an enviable place, no matter how you describe it right now.
• 14:57
  Tim Montague: So Illinois has more nuclear power plants than France.
• 15:01
  David Kraft: Now, France is
• 15:03
  Tim Montague: number one, you're number.
• 15:07
  David Kraft: Us is number one, we have 92 operating reactors.
• 15:11
  David Kraft: And, you know, after that, you know, Russia, Japan, France, those are the biggies, the big four, and then a sprinkling much countries England and South America as a few. Interestingly enough, the fourth largest economy in the world, Germany, turned off its last nuclear reactor three weeks ago, and they will no longer do nuclear and they are going full bore into the Renewable Energy Future, which is what we believe the United States needs to do as well.
• 15:42
  Tim Montague: Yeah, you know, in 2011, when Fukushima happened, which was a very serious major natural disaster or manmade disaster, that's that's when there was a major thrust in in Germany, right to phase out nuclear. And, and Europe is Europe is very interesting place. I like to say if you want to see the future of energy go to Northern Europe, because they don't have fossil resources the way we do in the United States.
• 16:13
  Tim Montague: With the exception of the North Sea, the Norwegians have a lot of oil. But, but in general, energy is very expensive, relatively speaking, and solar and wind are much further along.
• 16:27
  Tim Montague: And so and then the other the other backdrop here is that, once you have built a nuclear power plant, it is a relatively low carbon source of electricity and so on. On some level, I'm a proponent of keeping those facilities running. If they are running safely, we still haven't solved the long term problem, right for the waste, these plants produced, produce used radioactive waste, which has to be stored for a very long time.
• 17:01
  Tim Montague: Some of it can be processed and used in military applications, which is a hazard in and of itself. But nonetheless, there is this there is a waste stream, which America has not dealt with. I don't know if you want to make any comments about that.
• 17:16
  Tim Montague: And then I'd love to get into this current wave of, of, okay, we're keeping what we have alive, there are major initiatives in Illinois and other places, and then a wave to drive a next generation of what they are now referring to as small modular nuclear reactors,
• 17:37
  David Kraft: right. And actually, both the waist and the small modular issue are intertwined. And I'll get to that in a minute when we go discuss that in more detail. But I want to back up a step. I understand your and others.
• 17:53
  David Kraft: analysis that yes, nuclear plants are lower carbon in terms of an energy resource at the sight of generations, then certainly any fossil fuel resource you could pick, but our organisation back in 1999, and then back in 2007, adopted a carbon free nuclear free approach to energy. And, you know, it sounds like a great slogan, can it be done? Well, yes, it can. And there are a lot of people who have already crunched numbers to show how it can be done, how long it will take how much it will cost, going all the way back to 2007.
• 18:28
  David Kraft: So it's not that we can't do it.
• 18:28
  David Kraft: There's absolutely no technological reason why not.
• 18:31
  David Kraft: And that's what I wanted to come back to in your statement. I've spoken with legislatures, legislators who feel the same way you do that, oh, because the climate crisis is so urgent right now. And nuclear plants are lower carbon, we should keep the ones we have running. Even Greta Sundberg, has made public statements in that direction.
• 18:55
  David Kraft: What fails to get appreciated, though, is two major issues that never get brought up in discussion of nuclear, I touched on one a minute ago. And that is the connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. But the second one is, how much of our situation is technological barriers as opposed to self fulfilling prophecies. And what I mean by that is, if you look back over the last 30 years, or 40 years of energy production, where we're trying to head with renewables, and you line that up with who controls the energy decision making. It's the fossil fuel and nuclear industry, people and their allies in government. So they have very adeptly engineered circumstances where they create the self fulfilling prophecy conclusion that, oh, we don't have enough renewables. Now. Therefore, we need to keep, you know, gas plants running, we need to keep cold carbon capture running, we need to keep nuclear running until we build enough renewables. What doesn't get stated, though, is, again, all those political decisions and what made that happen and who controls those decisions? I'll give you an example. Must be about five or six years ago, I guess. There was a community in Northwest Illinois, which was municipally owned utility, they own their own stuff regenerated their own power, but they also owned a segment of transmission line, which extended to the Iowa borders about 20 miles long, it wasn't very long. And they decided they didn't want to have that anymore as part of their portfolio. So they were going to put it up for market sale. They did a close bid, up and up bidding process. And at the end of the day, the bid went to a company called next era energy, which used to be Florida Power and Light. It's probably I believe, it's the largest renewables generator in terms of utilities in the country today.
• 20:56
  David Kraft: So next year, I won the bid. But at the 11th hour and 59th minutes, Commonwealth Edison and Exelon intervened and requested that the Illinois Commerce Commission halt the sale because somehow they felt they had they were supposed to get first right of bidding in this process. Now there was no law that guaranteed that there was no precedent even if guaranteed that but the Commerce Commission went along with it for some reason. It was still the Madigan Reign of Error ongoing. Who knows. But what happened was when when they open the proceeding, it was 11. All commerce commission proceedings are about 11 months long. Well NextEra didn't want to Wait around 11 minutes. So they withdrew their bid eventually and went to Indiana to do business. And Commonwealth Edison Exelon bought the 20 miles of power line. The problem there was that power line was going to wheel in renewable generated electricity from Iowa, which would have, I don't know if it would have completely solved the issue, but it's gonna put a dent in does Illinois have enough renewable generated power to carbon or nuclear. So that's what I mean by self fulfilling prophecy. If you can control the outcomes, either politically, technologically whatever, then you can make these statements of oh, we don't have enough renewables or renewables aren't ready, or they won't be ready until and in the meantime, we need this. That's been the pattern. And that's what needs to be confronted moving forward, whether we need more nuclear, whether we need gas or anything else. So I want to really make that point because it's never made in the halls of Springfield.
• 22:44
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• 24:42
  Tim Montague: They're not faster to build than traditional nuclear power stations, and they still have all the potential hazards that these you know existing power plants have so set the record straight for us what our SM had ours. Is there a there there?
• 24:59
  Tim Montague: And and why is the US government so excited about SM N RS? Well,
• 25:09
  David Kraft: I'm gonna take a little credit, I can't say I'm the only one who has done this.
• 25:12
  David Kraft: But we have snuck that in into the into the alphabet soup.
• 25:15
  David Kraft: They're small modular nuclear reactors, we lost radioactive waste because the industry it's part of the marketing aim of the industry, to anaesthetise the public into the radiation hazards associated with nuclear.
• 25:32
  David Kraft: So they'll never talk about low level radioactive waste or high level radioactive waste. They take the r out in all of their official documents and all the federal definitions it's it's LR W or excuse me. LL W or a HL though it takes weight. Same with with the nuclear reactors here. SMR small modular reactors nuclear? Yeah, don't bring up the word. So there are words that they will deny the public as sort of a, you know, an anaesthetic so you don't have to worry about the hazard of nuclear or radiation. Alright, so what are they let's back up a step. You're right. The technology has been around a long time, technically, since we've had a new as long as we've had a nuclear Navy, because those reactors are small. And they are aboard ship. And they are of a certain design, which got scaled up in the 1950s to the big reactors that we have today with all of its problems.
• 26:29
  David Kraft: But this next wave is qualitatively different. I'd say over the last decade or so there have been a plethora of designs put forward, I believe it's up to 70. Now, internationally different design proposals for the so called Small Modular nuclear reactors. It's important to put out some definitions and some characteristics at this point. Even though there's no legal definition for small modular, it's generally understood that a small modular nuclear reactor will be less than 300 megawatts in power output, electrical power output, putting it on par with what maybe a gas plant or a small coal plants and output. within that category, though, there's a further breakdown of three types. There's just the, what we call micro nukes, which are 10 megawatts or less. These are more for research and testing and proof of concept kinds of things. They're not designed as power plants, you know, to put on the grid. So below 10 megawatts, you're talking micro news, and the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana at this point is pursuing a test licence for research, not for power output at the university campus. The next level up goes up to about 100 megawatts. And these are characterised as mini news. Here, you're bouncing between Yeah, they're big enough where they can produce electricity at a local level.
• 28:11
  David Kraft: But a lot of interest has been put into these reactors being able to create process steam, which can be used for industrial processes. Finally, everything up to 300 megawatts are just generally the Small Modular nuclear reactors we talk about as the ones that would be hooked up online to produce electricity. There's another category that we need to be aware of called advanced nuclear reactors, and all s seminars are advanced nuclear reactors, but not all advanced nuclear reactors are SN ours, because some of them can be as large as today's power plants, you know, hundreds of megawatts in size, and be hooked up to the electric grid, they have different characteristics to but these are enshrined in federal law, they have to meet these various traits, or they're not considered advanced reactors.
• 29:05
  David Kraft: And I'll get to the importance of that a little bit later in our discussion,
• 29:08
  Tim Montague: there is a nice Wikipedia page on us MNR. So if you just go to Wikipedia, and search on SMR, you'll find that page with all the different companies and countries that are in the game, so to speak. So what's going on in the US around SM? Nr stave.
• 29:26
  David Kraft: So what's happening here? We would probably say, the flurry of activity about small modular nuclear reactors began with the Biden administration.
• 29:37
  David Kraft: This is one of the more pro nuclear administrations we have seen in decades, they are going full tilt to vitalize revitalise the nuclear industry at almost all levels. And one of the big levels, of course, is to promote small modular nuclear reactors.
• 29:53
  David Kraft: We saw that with the infrastructure act. And with the IRA legislation that passed over the last couple of years, some of our colleagues have calculated out that if some of those loans are our loan guarantees and things are all cumulatively added up, we're talking on the order of $200 billion worth of investment going towards nuclear power from the various legislation that's out there. You layer on to that the Department of Energy grants which are are being led right now to various institutions like University of Illinois, Purdue, Texas, Christian Abilene, who wants to do the micro nukes for research. And what we see going on here is, you know, a huge money trough where everybody wants to get in on the feeding frenzy. So this is one of the big drivers for small nuclear right now is the fact that there's so much money being thrown at it. The second is, there has been a an extremely well orchestrated, and I mean, professionally orchestrated public relations campaign going on for the last two years, involving both the nuclear industry and allies in government like the Secretary of Energy grant home, going around the country doing this pro nuclear Spiel everywhere she she goes, it is really a solid effort. They have been working with some of the pro nuclear grassroots organisations like Michael Shellenberger his group, to get into every state that has a moratorium on building new reactors, like Illinois does, and get those moratoriums repealed as soon as possible to open the door for the floodgates no have expected Small Modular nuclear reactors. So these guys are putting out the full court press at every level, you can imagine public relations, government law, and certainly finance. There is another investigation ongoing. This is privately done. We don't have any details yet on it. But who's the big money behind this and why. And when you take a look at some of the big mouth investors like Bill Gates, and some of that ilk, you'll see that not only are they putting some of their money up on it, and for it, but they're more than happy to feed it the federal trough for the research grants at DOD and elsewhere. Whether the project works or not, they're still going to get paid. So that is another driving force on the nuclear front. And of course, they're all hanging their hat on the climate crisis is the reason why we should do this. So that's the push. That's how things are moving. And in Illinois, over the last two years, we've had legislation introduced both in the House and the Senate, which would repeal the Illinois nuclear construction moratorium.
• 32:45
  David Kraft: And we have testified at every hearing regarding that. And what we found is that in every case, the the moratorium, the law itself, which is very simple, it says Illinois will not build any nuclear plants until the federal government has a place to dispose of the high level radioactive waste. Now, how long did that take me to say? That's the law. That's it? That's the moratorium. It's kind of common sense. We joked about it many times saying, you know, what, if in Chicago, we built the SIL Sears tower without bathrooms?
• 33:23
  David Kraft: Where would we be today be a qualitatively different building. That's exactly what the nuclear industry has been allowed to do. And apparently will be continued to allow to be allowed to do with small modulars are built. So at every hearing, no talk about radioactive waste, or very little. And it all shifted over to expert witnesses about how great small modulars are. Now, what's the problem swamp heifers, we listed about eight or 10. Of these, and we hope that your listeners will appreciate this. You know, it just boggle the mind, the willingness to not believe your lying eyes and ears on the part of legislators to push this legislation forward. The first thing, you know, we have been talking about small modulars is if they really exist, they don't at least not in the United States. Worldwide. I think there are only two in operation. One is in Russia, I forget I think China might have the other one.
• 34:26
  David Kraft: And even though there are about a dozen outfits that are putting licence applications in with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for their designs, only one of those designs has been approved by a company called New Scale.
• 34:43
  David Kraft: And a new scales website. They say that the first and only demonstrator won't be ready until December of 2029. So I want to get across the idea that even though we're talking about SMS cars, they are fairy tales.
• 34:58
  David Kraft: They don't exist. So we can't use language that kind of reinforces the fact that they do, which is what you hear when you hear all these wonderful reports about what small buy dealers are doing or supposed to be doing. They're not doing it because they don't exist. These are theoretical concepts. They are designs, they are PowerPoints. They are slick marketing brochures, and none of those contribute to our electrical grid. They are the fevered imaginations of a very earnest engineers. That's it.
• 35:36
  David Kraft: And they won't exist as demonstrators until the end of this decade. Which means if you add another five to 10 years for commercialization to that they won't even be able to address anything on the climate issue until the 2030s or 2040s, when it'll be too late, according to the IPCC. So let's take the climate issue completely off the table. Small modules don't exist, they will not contribute in any meaningful way to the climate crisis. Dave craft isn't saying so. Gregory artscow, physicist, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says so. Dr. Allison McFarland, geologist, former chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says so, and a host of other energy analysts from Germany, Great Britain, France, internationally have said, small modulars are not suited to deal in any meaningful way with the climate crisis. So that's the first thing they're fairy tales. In fact, we had a joke about this.
• 36:36
  David Kraft: How are small modulars and unicorns are like They don't exist. How are they different?
• 36:46
  David Kraft: unicorn poop doesn't last for 250,000 years. So we really got to get across the people. We're talking fantasyland right now.
• 36:57
  David Kraft: And we're hitching an energy policy to a product that might not even work. So let's move on.
• 37:00
  David Kraft: What are some of the other problems you actually already said a few of them from what you've read. The Small Modular proposals as designed, already had been shown to be more expensive per unit of energy produced, even compared to today's nuclear plants, which required bailouts to keep operating. You might remember, in Illinois, ratepayers are on the hook for over $3 billion worth of bailout guarantees to constellation power for the nuclear plants we have in Illinois, because he couldn't cut it in the market. They can't compete. Now we're going to add more nuclear reactors to that mix, they won't be able to compete either. So guess what's going to happen? The companies will go to the legislature and say, oh, we need jobs. Oh, we need energy bail us out. A National Academy of Sciences report for last year. One of the participants was the former chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Alison McFarlane, they concluded that again, per unit of energy, small modulars could produce up to 18 times more radioactive waste than today's nuclear reactors, which have no place to dispose of the waste that we have. We have 11,000 tonnes of radioactive waste in Illinois now. The industry wants to extend their operating licences, which will almost double that amount.
• 38:25
  Tim Montague: So let's let's summarise the challenges that we face with SM N RS. They include the basic cost of a technology which can be upwards of $15 a watt, build a solar or wind facility at utility scale for three to six cents. And so the cost is up is front and centre.
• 38:51
  Tim Montague: But there's the waste issue.
• 38:56
  Tim Montague: There's the proliferation issues, and of course, the potential of nuclear disasters.
• 38:59
  Tim Montague: So why don't you just run through those four things in a timely manner? Dave, if you would? Sure.
• 39:12
  David Kraft: So as we've already been discussing, economically, they're not as, as good as they proposed to be with their modularity. It's been calculated that on a per kilowatt hour basis, they'll be more expensive than today's nukes, which means, of course, that there'll be more expensive than renewables that are available today as well, in terms of radioactive waste, National Academy of Sciences report of 2022 indicates that on again, on a per unit of energy basis, these reactors could produce as much as 18 times more radioactive waste than today's generation of reactors. So from the waste standpoint, if you repeal the moratorium in Illinois, it's a wide open, you know, barn door to keep reducing waste in perpetuity, with no place to go. And it will just end up storing it forever here in the state. So waste is a definite issue on that. One of the ways they claim they're going to try and be more economical, though, are two of the ways I should say, these reactors are being proposed without containment buildings, they claim their designs are so safe, nothing could go wrong.
• 40:23
  David Kraft: Like with the Titanic, I suppose. So there there are not any of these very robust is the term the industry uses buildings built around them. In some cases, they actually intend to build the reactors underground, or below grade, at the very least, whatever we juxtapose those designs, with the craters that we got off of YouTube, in the industrial district of Mariupol, Ukraine, just to show the equivalence of depth, you know, had had Ukraine gotten small modulars, 10 years ago and put them in Mariupol. There wouldn't be anybody able to get near Mario pool because of the radiation contamination, because of being in a war zone, and no containment. Another way they claim they're going to reduce costs is by reducing staff. You don't need as many staff members to run these reactors. And because they're so safe, you don't even need a security force anymore. So there are literally some designs that are being put out there without any kind of security, you know, other than whatever you have locally, and with fewer operators manning the manning the ship, this is absurd to us. We just, we just don't understand how they can get away with a straight face making He's claims without having any designs to show that it's true or not. So you were trading away safety. For a legend reduced costs, you don't know, we would point out that there are environmental justice considerations, because again, you're going to continue to need uranium in some form. And uranium mining is done internationally on largely indigenous lands, which already have not been cleaned up from the previous generation of nuclear power. But one other aspect of the fuel that hasn't been discussed as at least currently, the reactor designs that they're proposed to use require a very special fuel call hallouwe High assay low enriched uranium, this is not the same kind of fuel that you put in today's reactors, which maybe have an enrichment value of 4%, meaning that the fuel in there had to be juiced up by certain technical processes before it can be used as reactor fuel.
• 42:44
  David Kraft: hallouwe can go up to 20%, almost five times as much, which puts it just on the borderline between what would be used commercially for power plants, and what could begin to be used for nuclear weapons. And these people want to shop these reactors around the world and put them in Walmart's and large facilities around the world as if nothing could go wrong using this fuel. And the last joke on us is that the only source of Hallelu fuel right now in the United States is Russia. And I thought we were supposed to be having an embargo on their products. So the whole chain from fuel manufacturer from promises for reactors that don't risk is so imaginary and so Orwellian, as to almost be laughable except the Biden administration is willing to pour 10s of billions of dollars into making it happen. And the nuclear industry is willing to go around to places like Illinois to get the moratoriums repealed, so that these people can go ahead with their designs.
• 43:50
  David Kraft: So clearly, it's a it's a monster with no leash that is being proposed here.
• 43:58
  Tim Montague: The moratoriums So my understanding is Illinois passed a moratorium on new nuclear construction in 1987.
• 44:07
  Tim Montague: And that was an important watermark, because it literally prevents new facilities from being designed and developed in Illinois. Now that moratorium has been repealed or is in the process of being repealed.
• 44:24
  David Kraft: It's in the process and both in 2022. And in this legislative session, the pro nuclear folks that put the hardcore push to get the moratorium repealed. As of our taping today, we're winding down the legislative session, it'll end on this Friday, May 19. They have not been able to get the bill and move forward. It did sail through every committee hearing that they had, and they have four of them. But they're all in the Public Utilities committees of the House and Senate, and not the Energy and Environment committees. So these not only that, but half of the members of both of those energy of the Public Utilities committees, were co sponsors of the bill to get the moratorium repealed. So you can see that the deck was already politically stacked. When we went into these hearings. There were some legitimate concerns that some people raised like the reliability of and the availability of power in downstate Illinois, and the miso region, which is much different than northern Illinois, where we have most of the nuclear plants now, which is in a region called PJM. That was a legitimate concern, and we tried to address it. The other issue that came up was the issue of jobs. You know, with the coal fields drying up the coal plants shutting down, this could be a source for jobs.
• 45:40
  David Kraft: When we pointed out to the legislators in response that first of all, because these are imaginary reactors, you're not going to see any jobs till 2035.
• 45:52
  David Kraft: They just shrugged and moved on is nothing. One of the great ironies is the day the Senate passed the bill to go over to the house. A solar farm started construction in Sangamon County, which would be 800 megawatts in capacity. It will be ready next fall to be going online. We create 450 construction jobs, all union working with the unions down there to continue jobs beyond construction for the operation of the plant. And we said look, by the time you get the first demonstrator of small modulars built, you could build five more of these farms.
• 46:33
  David Kraft: Wouldn't 4000 megawatts of power make a difference in my soul?
• 46:37
  David Kraft: Wouldn't all those jobs make a difference in the communities that will have coal plants shut down? crickets, he didn't touch it.
• 46:45
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing how the math really just does not add up around SM N RS, the speed at which you can develop a nuclear facility is on the order of decades. You know, large scale solar does take some time that double black diamond is the project you're referring to by swiftcurrent energy, which is a virtual PPA or a asleep through PPA, feeding the city of Chicago facility. So it is a very important project for Illinois.
• 47:16
  Tim Montague: It's a very unique project because it crosses some boundaries, right, the projects in miso, the off taker, the city is in PJM. And that is a constellation project, you mentioned constellation being in the nuclear industry as well, which is which is true of many, you know, parts of the of the renewables industry, right. Many of these companies have their feet in both worlds in nuclear in coal in oil, and natural gas as as well as wind and solar.
• 47:51
  Tim Montague: But anyway, you could build four of these double black diamonds in the same period that you could build a single seminar.
• 48:01
  Tim Montague: And we
• 48:01
  David Kraft: could point to the legislators and it just did not register at all they had their minds made up. Yeah, fact heard the word in the hallway after this hearing was over. The word grease was used to explain the 17 did nothing vote to move the bill forward?
• 48:17
  Tim Montague: Yeah. I mean, here we are. We're trying to decarbonize the economy, the Biden ministration, has set goals of decarbonizing the economy basically, by 2050. And that's the best case scenario.
• 48:28
  Tim Montague: And so that's 27 years away now.
• 48:33
  Tim Montague: And, you know, it's just the writing is on the wall, but you can't you can't solve this problem with new nuclear power, it's not economical. It's not timely enough. And then there's all these other problems, the waste, and the proliferation issues that come along with it.
• 48:50
  Tim Montague: So the what my take away though, Dave, here today is that SM N RS. There are some new aspects to them, there are some new technologies, but the problems remain the same, right? The cost of this technology is is relatively very high. The pace of development is very slow, compared to competing technologies, and the the long term problems of nuclear do not go away with SM NRS, you still have a major waste problem. And most Illinois are completely and other states that house nuclear power plants are completely ignorant of this reality, because it's not in the news on a regular basis that what's happening is the waste is piling up on site. Because there are no acceptable long term facilities.
• 49:46
  Tim Montague: There's been attempts to develop long, long term facilities in New Mexico and Nevada. But they're not active. They're not open, they're not receiving waste. And so the waste is piling up in our backyards.
• 50:00
  David Kraft: And I would err, that's one more environmental justice injustice, is the fact that wherever the government wanted to try and put a waste facility, usually it was on some poor Indian tribes land, who needed the money. That's what happened in Nevada, happened in Utah. And now they're trying to force it down the throats of the Mexicans and the West Texans.
• 50:20
  David Kraft: Both states governors have opposed it. Both State Senator James have opposed it. And many of the environmental justice activists in both states are opposing it. Yet the Biden administration is going around the country talking about, oh, we're going to look for consent based siting for these nuclear waste facilities. I'm sorry, where's the consent? They already gave you their their answer go away. Yeah, there's one last topic we did not touch on, Tim, and I think it's important. The other point we made to the legislators is that if you go down the route of small modulars, you will be delaying if not outright sabotaging the renewables goals that you enacted and Seija and 2021 and fija in 2016. These were the bills that really did a lot so advance more renewables, more efficiency, more equity and energy. But the fact remains is the energy pie is finite, both in terms of access to the grid, and in terms of dollars available to spend. If you're going to spend money on small modulars you are going to cut into the money you have available to implement Seija and you will then make them competitors to get on an already constrained transmission grid.
• 51:38
  David Kraft: As many of your listeners know It's hard now to get renewables projects hooked into the grid.
• 51:46
  David Kraft: And that's one of the big problems we're having. You pour more small modulars into the mix, that competition is gonna get more fierce and your whole fight procedure is going to go down the toilet.
• 51:58
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Dena watts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Dina Watts digital twin benchmarking technology you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results.
• 52:14
  Tim Montague: The fourth generation Dino recently completed a technical review by DNV you can download the report Adina watts.com, that's D No w@ts.com. Now back to the show. Point well taken.
• 52:29
  Tim Montague: Well please check out all of our content at clean power hour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. That is the best way you can help the show and spread the word about the energy transition. And please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Reach out to me, I love connecting with my listeners on LinkedIn. You can also connect with me at clean power.
• 52:52
  Tim Montague: hour.com. Dave, how can our listeners reach out to you?
• 52:57
  David Kraft: We're online at very simple WWW dot and e i s NC Edward Island sam.org. Our website has a lot of the documents that are pertinent to today's discussion in our resources section. And folks can just send us an email if they have questions. And EIS at an E i s.org.
• 53:20
  Tim Montague: Thank you very much. I want to thank Dave craft the director of NCIS for being on the show today. Wonderful discussion. I'm Tim Montague.
• 53:27
  Tim Montague: Let's grow solar and storage.
• 53:30
  Tim Montague: Take care Dave.
• 53:32
  David Kraft: Thank you stay well.