a fresh npr investigation Found that the Trump administration had secretly rewritten nuclear rules, stripped away environmental protections and loosened safety and security measures. The government shared the new rules with companies that are part of the program building experimental nuclear reactors, but not with the public.
I’m reminded of a conversation we had during our MTech MIT event in November, where Koroush Shirvan, professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, touched on this issue. “I’ve seen some disturbing trends in recent days where terms like ‘rubber-stamping nuclear projects’ are being said,” Shirvan said during that event.
During the conversation, Shirvan shared statistics that show nuclear power has very low rates of injury and death. But this is not inherent in the technology, and is one reason why injuries and deaths are fewer for nuclear power, he said: “It is because of the tighter regulatory oversight.”
Will the next generation reactors be economically competitive?
Building a nuclear power plant is not cheap. Let us consider the upfront investment required to build a power plant.
Plant Vogtle in Georgia hosts the most recent additions to the U.S. nuclear fleet – Units 3 and 4 come online in 2023 and 2024. Together, their capital cost was $15,000 per kilowatt, adjusted for inflation, according to a recent report From the US Department of Energy. (The fancy unit I’m using divides the total cost of building the reactors by their expected power output, so we can compare reactors of different sizes.)
This number is quite high, partly because they were the first construction of their kind in America, and because there were some inefficiencies in the planning. It is noteworthy that China manufactures reactors excess As low as $2,000/kWh and $3,000/kWh, depending on the estimate.
Initial capital costs for advanced nuclear plants, the first of their kind, will likely range between $6,000 and $10,000 per kilowatt, according to the DOE report. With the development of technologies and mass production, this can be reduced by up to 40%.
So the new reactors will (hopefully) be cheaper than the ultra-over-budget and behind-schedule Vogtle project, but if you normalize their size, they won’t necessarily be significantly cheaper than efficiently built conventional plants.
