After 52 Years, Democrats’ Red Tape Unravels
After 52 Years, Democrats’ Red Tape Unravels
For the first time in its roughly 52-year history, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued a construction permit for an advanced nuclear reactor design, despite Democrats’ best efforts to kill similar reactors.
The approval, granted this month to TerraPower’s Natrium advanced reactor project in Kemmerer, Wyo., marks a historic milestone and significant triumph over the long-standing bureaucratic and political hurdles that stifled innovation and deployment of advanced nuclear technologies in the U.S. The NRC completed the safety review in just under 18 months, ahead of schedule and 11 percent under budget — accomplishments that would have been previously unthinkable for the agency’s infamously awful bureaucracy.
“The advantage of a sodium fast reactor is that it’s cheaper to build because it’s not pressurized, so you don’t have to worry about loss of pressure,” Jeff Terry, vice provost for research at the Illinois Institute of Technology, told National Review. “If you have an accident, the sodium fuel will harden and solidify. It’s a nice, stable, passively safe design. We know how to handle liquid sodium.”
America previously operated a similar sodium-cooled fast reactor, designed by the Department of Energy, in 1984 and even built a prototype, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR 2). In April 1986, two tests demonstrated the concept’s safety by simulating accidents. With its normal shutdown devices disabled, the reactor still managed to shut itself down safely without overheating anywhere in the system. However, the Clinton administration and Democrats in Congress defunded the program in 1994.
“The U.S. had a lot of experience with sodium fast reactors, until President Clinton and Al Gore, the big climate change people, killed the sodium fast reactor. Not for regulatory reasons but for sheer stupidity,” Terry said. “It was a reactor demonstrated to be passively safe, and it had a beautiful design. In an accident scenario it shut itself down. But, according to those Democrats, we didn’t need nuclear power. And now we’re bringing it back, 30-some-odd years later.”
Democrats have a long history of opposing innovation in the nuclear realm. Democratic politicians, including former presidential nominee John Kerry, killed America’s previous liquid metal reactor program, citing concerns about cost.
“Democrats killed it, because it was nuclear and they were going to have to come up with any excuse to kill nuclear power, so they went to cost, which is funny to me. Having a good energy policy, we ain’t paying for that,” Terry continued. “And the NRC really didn’t like any advanced reactors; the NRC experience is almost predominantly with light-water reactors. EBR 2 ran really well with fuel recycling until the 1990s when it was shut down.”
When Frank N. von Hippel, Clinton’s science adviser, was told that ending the program and destroying the reactor would cost more than finishing it, he replied, “I know; it’s a symbol. It has to go.”
Terry is hopeful that TerraPower’s Natrium advanced reactor will not meet a similar fate, in large part due to technological improvements.
“We’ll be running a passively safe reactor with no 1970s technologies, but with 2020s technologies. We have much better materials now, far more computing power, and sensor development,” Terry said. “All that helps the safety of a reactor which was incredibly safe 30 years ago.”
For decades, the NRC has effectively banned any nuclear reactor that wasn’t a very specific light-water design, the dominant reactor since the 1960s that uses ordinary water as a coolant. The weakness of such light-water designs is that they require massive investment; additionally, their larger sizes mean that construction is slower. Whereas advanced designs offer advantages such as improved fuel efficiency, reduced waste, inherent safety features, and higher temperatures, they previously faced near-total regulatory stasis due to uncertainty caused by Democrats’ cancellation of the project.
Other than safety, advanced nuclear’s biggest advantage might be more rapid construction. The reactor is expected to be complete by 2030, which will allow the U.S. to move advanced nuclear from concepts and prototypes to actual commercial deployment.
The newly approved Natrium reactor will be a 345-megawatt electric sodium-cooled fast reactor, a type of advanced “Generation IV” design, paired with a molten salt energy storage system capable of temporarily boosting its output to 500 megawatt-electric.
“The advantage of using the molten salt for peaking is that it’s a great storage medium, and you can use it to smooth out the grid and prevent blackouts because you have extra stored power,” Terry noted. “The extra storage with the molten salt lets you peak up to 500 MW. If there’s ever a high demand, that’s not a problem. For other systems, you’d have to fire up another system, like a natural gas peaker. And those don’t come up from zero easily, so you have to keep that idling.”
America’s projected nuclear renaissance is the direct result of soaring demand for clean and reliable power for data centers, where any interruption in energy flow can lead to disaster. These centers consume massive amounts of electricity — often 100 megawatts or more — to supply power servers, cooling systems, and networking equipment. These are demands that only nuclear power can meet without risking devastating blackouts.
Terry continued, “Nuclear is basically always on; you can always meet the demand and sell excess power.”
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