Less expensive, flexible nuclear power one option for backing up renewables: expert

Advanced nuclear generation costing less than a third of large projects per kilowatt of capacity can be part of the solution for heavily fossil-fuel dependent communities to provide clean, flexible power to back up renewables, an Idaho National Laboratory official said April 6 at a conference in Austin, Texas.

"The Inflation Reduction Act put out a production tax credit for clean energy," said Christine King, director of INL's Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear program, during a "fireside chat" titled, "Where Nuclear Stands in an Evolving Grid," during Zpryme's Energy Thought Summit.

"If you're building new, clean energy, there's a 10% production tax credit you can get at the end of your project," King said. "What was announced earlier this week from the White House is if you are building that clean energy in a coal community, you can have another 10% production tax credit. That is the closest I have seen for clean energy being on sale."

All-in target costs for an advanced nuclear reactor site are estimated at $3,600/kW, King said.

"That's the manufacturer delivered price," King said.

Lessons learned from Vogtle

The most recently added nuclear plants nearing completion are the third and fourth units of Georgia Power's Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, at a cost of more than $30 billion for 2,234 MW of capacity, equal to more than $13,400/kW.

"Probably the biggest learned" from the Vogtle expansion has been the need to avoid "starting construction when your design was not completed," King said.

"It leads to a lot of challenges for changing that along the way," she said.

King said getting beyond the demonstration stage remains a challenge.

"Unfortunately, nobody wants to be number two, number three," King said. "Everybody wants to buy the 10th unit, just like we saw with renewables, right? Where we are in nuclear to today is looking for what are our early adopters, right? ... There are 12 states that have initiated advanced nuclear feasibility studies. We're seeing more states that are diving into understanding how this might fit in to a regional plan. We've never seen this amount of momentum for nuclear. I believe we will be ready for scale and deployment in 10 years."

Demonstration projects

The US Department of Energy is working with TerraPower to develop a 345-MW Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor nuclear plant with a molten salt-based energy storage system that can boost the system's output to 500 MW near 357 MW of coal-fired generation at Pacificor's Naughton Power Plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

The nuclear facility "employs about two-thirds of the water that the coal station uses today to deliver the same amount of power."

"Now, the folks in Wyoming will tell you, whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting, right?" King joked. "That's the reality in the West, being water-constrained as we try to decarbonize."

The US Department of Energy said in a news release that it plans to invest almost $2 billion in the project, one of two competitive advanced reactor development program projects.

The other is at one of Dow's Gulf Coast chemical sites, where X-energy proposes to install four Xe-100 high-temperature gas reactors, each capable of producing 100 MW -- a first-of-its-kind behind-the-meter nuclear generation facility, to be operational by about 2030, "to decarbonize their industrial processes," King said.

Dow is studying how to use the reactors, she said, noting that for this multinational conglomerate, "this is not their biggest project."

"They have a decision to make, right?" King said. "Can they use the thermal energy from the unit directly? Do they use it to generate hydrogen with hydrogen as their input? That's what this project is about, figuring out how you do things differently from how it was always done."