92nd General Meeting Presentation
Fission Vision: A Look at What's Next for Nuclear
Hilary Lane
The following remarks were delivered at the General Session of the 92nd General Meeting on May 13, 2024. It has been edited for content and phrasing.
INTRODUCTION: Hilary Lane is the senior director of strategic partnerships at the Nuclear Energy Institute where she focuses on forging alliances with new-to-nuclear investors and customers. Before joining NEI in 2017, Lane worked as an international safeguards analyst at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She began her career at the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, D.C., in both the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation and the Office of Defense Programs.
His slide presentation can be found here.
MS. LANE: It's quite an honor to be here. I'm going to break our topic into three sections. First, we will talk about the current fleet and some of the successes we've seen and will be building upon. Then, we're going to talk about the fleet of the future. We're thinking we're going to deploy these next models here in the next six years, so that's very exciting. Then we'll end with some advocacy and opportunities – the fun stuff.
I know we do have a very broad and diverse audience today. I wanted to take a moment to say the Nuclear Energy Institute is the trade association and lobbying arm for the commercial nuclear industry. We represent our members on anything that's of a generic nature, whether it's a generic policy issue, a technical issue, or a regulatory issue. We represent about 350 companies, so we're taking into consideration a lot of different voices. And if anyone is interested in membership or what that entails, please see me after the session.
We have nuclear utilities and, of course, EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) companies. Those are Bechtels, etc. We have all segments of the fuel cycle, ranging from uranium mining and milling. That's getting the uranium out of the ground right then converting the uranium, enriching the uranium, and fuel fabrication, which is getting the uranium into tiny pellets. We have all the segments of the fuel cycle. We have decommissioning companies, of course. National Labs, a DOE Office of Science National Labs, and NSA National Labs, as well.
Investment and financial firms are interesting ones. We have become extremely popular on Wall Street. And that wasn't necessarily the case even five years ago. Being popular on Wall Street now, we're getting investment and financial firms to join. We also have several dozen advanced reactor developer members. We've also got about 100 universities that are members of NEI. Of those 100 universities, about 25 have research reactors on campus. So, they're an NRC licensee. My university had a research reactor at the University of Maryland, which prompted me to join the industry. We've also got consulting firms, labor unions, NGOs, think tanks, etc. With the diverse audience that we represent, there are a lot of voices that we have to consider when making these policy decisions.
Our current fleet is 93 strong. I like to call these our clean energy workhorses. You can see we have a really large concentration in the Northeast, the Southeast, and across the Midwest, but don't count out these pockets of the country that don't have any marking. Don't count out parts of the Ohio River Valley; don't count out parts of Appalachia; and don't count out parts of the heartland and the West because those parts of the country certainly want to play ball when it comes to advanced reactors. I have another map that shows that landscape. I'll also point out that you see a little triplet on the Georgia/South Carolina border – that's Plant Vogtle. I'll also show another slide on Plant Vogtle since that certainly merits its own slide.
We just got our numbers in from 2023. Nuclear power is about 18% of the total electricity across the country, so we now surpass coal. If you look at just the clean sources of electricity – that's your bubble on the right – we are about half of the nation's clean electricity.
That's why our 93 units are those clean energy workhorses – half of our clean electricity. These numbers fluctuate a little bit every year, but as we move forward year to year, we will see that nuclear shares are increasing as we add more plants to the grid and as our current fleet looks to do what they call power upgrades.
This is our capacity factor. It measures how often we are on and how often we are running. We just got our numbers in, and you can see that in 2023, our capacity factor as a fleet was 93%. That is a huge capacity factor. Solar and wind are about 25% to 35% capacity factor. Wind doesn't always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine, but we're here at 93%. In the words of MC Hammer, "Can't touch this." This is nuclear's value proposition and what makes us special. Not only are we clean, but we're always on. That's why we say we are firm. That's why we say we are base load. This is really what makes nuclear special – that is 93%.
I want to get back to Plant Vogtle. We had unit 3, which is on the left. That's the one making the steam. They've been operational for almost a year, which is very exciting. When I had to submit these slides about three weeks ago, you can see that I said, "Unit 4 expected to enter commercial operation sometime in quarter 2.” Well, I have excellent news there. Unit 4 is now, as of two weeks ago, at 100% power and has entered commercial operations. The entire project is now complete. Let me get a big round of applause for Plant Vogtle.
A big congratulations goes out to Southern Company, Georgia Power, Oglethorpe Power, all their co-owners, Westinghouse, which is the designer of these fine machines, the AP-1000 design, and Bechtel, the construction contractor on site. I can tell you all at peak construction times, this site had 10,000 craft on site. It was the largest construction project in the country during that time. Even my own family members were down there working it. Everybody wanted a piece of that pie. So yes, this is just an incredible milestone.
This project is complete and is now the country's largest generating station. Ironically, it used to be Palo Verde, which we all know is right down the street in Phoenix. That baton has transferred to Plant Vogtle as the country's largest generating station.
We’re going to switch gears a little bit and talk about the fleet of the future. There's an incredible market opportunity here for advanced nuclear. There's a dark purple sliver that says “nuclear,” and that's our existing fleet. We anticipate that many of those units will live to be 80 years old. That's going out to about 2050, staying at about that 20% of electricity.
Above that is a lighter purple color that looks like a stretched-out triangle and says “advanced nuclear.” You can see that the starting point is about 2030, and then it just takes off. This is exactly what Wall Street investors want to see – steady growth.
Like many other projections, this one anticipates 300 additional gigawatts onto the grid. That’s massive. When you calculate that out, that's about 900 SMRs (small modular reactors) in the next 25 years. That number would be even higher if you were looking at microreactor numbers. There is just an incredible market opportunity for nuclear energy. This is just looking at the electricity sector; this isn't even looking at nuclear to decarbonize the entire economy.
What would that look like? When we think of advanced nuclear, I like to explain it as: Think of it as like a restaurant menu. You open a menu, and you've got a lot of choices – a lot of different pages. We've got a lot of different options in terms of size. The smallest offering is going to be your microreactors. Those will be a couple of megawatts to maybe tens of megawatts. Those will be good for your remote communities, island communities, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and military bases. You can put these units on the back of a truck. You fabricate them in a factory, put them on the truck, ship them off, and they're essentially like a plug and play. You just plug them in; they're fueled and ready to go. When they need to be refueled, you take them back to the factory. It’s a very different kind of business model, an operational model, than what we're used to.
As we move up in size, we're looking at our SMRs. These are like the new scales and are a couple hundred megawatts. And then, we get even larger; we're talking about the big boys –the Vogtles, the AP-1000s, what we have today. The beauty is these machines can do different things for us. They can produce electricity. We've been doing that for over 60 years. We know how to do that. They can also produce clean hydrogen. Other industries can also produce hydrogen, and they call it all colors of the rainbow. It's blue hydrogen; it's green hydrogen; it's gray; it's brown. But when hydrogen comes from a nuclear plant, it's completely clean. You can use electrolysis to separate the molecules, tank it up, and ship it off to the customer, where it needs to go to be used for industrial combustion elsewhere. So, we can produce clean hydrogen.
We can also produce heat at very high temperatures. Many of these industries need heat and incredibly high temperatures. We can do that, and it's essentially clean steam. Industries are very excited about that and very interested in it. And because we all know that heat and steam don't travel very far distances, this is where you would put the reactor close to a concrete factory, a steel mill, and a chemical factory. You put it right next to each other.
The first such example is Dow Chemical. They came to us and said, "We need clean electrons, clean electricity, and clean heat. What can you do for us?" Their technology partner is going to be X Energy. The first such example of this plant will be on the Gulf of Mexico in Texas in a small community called Seadrift. That will be the first such nuclear industrial partnership with Dow Chemical. That's going to be very interesting.
I also want to point out the little fashion icon. The fashion industry represents about 10% of global emissions. Can you believe that? I'd be remiss if I didn't mention oil and gas. You drive around in Texas, New Mexico, and parts of Oklahoma, and you'll see the nodding donkeys. Those are the machines that just go up, down, up, down all day. Typically, a nodding donkey is powered by a diesel generator. What if you replaced the diesel generator with little microreactors? Those sorts of discovery conversations are taking place among executives because all these companies – these S&P companies – have made these very aggressive decarbonization commitments. Even as early as 2035. Many of them now realize we can't meet those commitments with a windmill, so we might need something more powerful, so they're coming to nuclear. Again, this is how nuclear is looking at decarbonizing that entire economy.
Over 60 companies are involved in advanced reactor design and development. I can’t fit them all in a slide, but these are many of the very popular companies that I'm sure many of you have already heard of. There are already a lot of deployment plans in place for advanced nuclear. These are projects that are all slated to be online by around 2030. I typically like to look at the state that we're in, but unfortunately, there are no development plans here for Arizona, so we're going to have to work on that.
Instead, let’s look at Wyoming. That state is green, and the green label means states already have incentives in place to support advanced nuclear. Blue means they're working on it. These are not political colors. It's just the colors our marketing team decided to use. Blue means they're working on it, and gray means they're not looking at it at all. These are California and Oregon.
Going back to Wyoming, you can see a bold marking there, which is blue. That means it's a planned project. It's also a circle, meaning it is a small modular reactor. This is going to be a very interesting project. This is going to be the nation's first coal-to-nuclear plant. The company is called TerraPower, and Bill Gates owns it. He's very passionate about this. There is an incredible business case to be made when you're talking coal to nuclear. The first point is that nuclear pays about 30% more in salaries than coal plants. A typical coal plant employs maybe 100 people. Your typical SMR plant is going to employ about 250 people. We can transition the workers from the coal plant to the nuclear plant, which means nobody loses their job. There are also many synergies with the infrastructure already in place. We can use the grid connections and the rail lines to transport the heavy equipment that would need to come in. There's just an incredible business case to be made here.
The state of Wyoming put it up for bids from any coal community interested in this project. And let me tell you, these communities were clamoring for this opportunity. Ultimately, the community that won was the small coal town of Kemmerer, Wyoming, about three or four hours north of Salt Lake City. This was just an incredible opportunity for Kemmerer because we all know closing these plants in small towns can be devastating for their local economy.
You can look at other parts of the map and see a lot of development. We have some projects up in Canada that we've marked. They're also moving very aggressively. And you'll also notice some triangles. They represent either a university reactor, a research reactor, or a test reactor. Many of these universities are working to get their second research reactor on campus. That's very exciting, especially for the students as we look to grow that pipeline. That is a lot of good development across the country.
We've also been working with EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute), a research arm of the industry. We've created a joint North American advanced reactor roadmap. We used North America because we wanted to include our friends in Canada. This is a public roadmap, so you can Google it. It's intended to be a living document. We're going to update it every year. These are the seven pillars, categories, and buckets, things we are working on to make sure these deployment projects we discussed are ready to rock by 2030. That’s very important.
Bucket No. 1: First mover successes. This is making sure our first plants of a particular design are built on time and on budget and following those construction best practices. It's incredibly important for investors.
Bucket No. 2: Fast followers. What we mean by that is that we need plant Nos. 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the same design, not a different design, to be moving while project No. 1 is in place. We can't wait until project No. 1 is complete and then start No. 2 and then No. 3. We don't have time for that. We need to see that the purchase orders and the contracts are in place for 2, 3, 4, and 5 and ensure those projects are moving while No. 1 is moving.
Bucket No. 3: Regulatory efficiency: Our friends at the NRC are about to get a wave of applications. They're already looking at about 16 different designs, but you remember I mentioned that over 60 companies are looking at this and their different designs. They're looking at 16, and we're going to have to look at 60. We will have to get more efficient with what we've got because you always hire your way to the solution.
Buckets Nos. 4 and 5: Siting availability and public engagement. That's working at the local community level where the plants will be built.
Bucket No. 6: Supply chain ramp-up: This is an interesting one because a big part of the supply chain for advanced nuclear is the fuel, and many of these plants will look to use HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium) fuel. That will be an enrichment of about 19.75%, so under the 20% threshold. That’s HEU (highly enriched uranium) because we don't play in HEU space. That's nuclear reactors. If you've been watching the news, there's only one problem regarding HALEU fuel. Only one country in the world produces HALEU fuel – Russia. We don't want to buy that fuel, so what that means is that we're going to have to beef up our conversion capabilities and enrichment capabilities in the United States. And that's exactly what we're going to do. Congress has appropriated a big pot of money for us to do just that on the order of $2.7 billion. We will use that money to beef up those capabilities in this country.
Bucket No. 7: Workforce development: This one is near and dear to my heart because I work with the universities, but I will say it's not just four-year nuclear engineers that we need at these plants. Remember, I said it took 10,000 craft to build Vogtle. Even with a small reactor, it will still take about 10,000 craft to build an SMR. Our country has a skilled labor shortage, so we need more electricians, pipefitters, welders, and forgemasters. We need it all if we're going to make this a reality. That's why NEI worked to create a kindergarten through 12 curriculum. Of course, it’s tiered, and it's called Navigating Nuclear, Energizing Our World. We wrote about two years ago. We worked with the Department of Energy, Discovery Education, and the American Nuclear Society to create this to instill nuclear at a young age.
We've got to get back to what José Hernandéz (General Meeting keynote speaker) discussed this morning. We've got to get back in the classroom, back to the basics. We’ve got to get back to STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math. STEM needs to be the focus in the classroom because you can trust and believe the children in China are smart on STEM. We've got to get our kids smart on STEM.
I think some young people are also realizing that I can get my two-year trade certification and become a welder, and by the time I'm 20 years old, I can be making six figures. These are the young kids driving around the construction site on the King Ranch. Life is good for some of these guys.
Now, let's get to some fun stuff with advocacy. As I said, NEI is a trade association. We serve a lobbying function in Washington, D.C., and part of that role is to influence people. As part of that, the questions you've got to ask is: Who are we trying to influence? Who is our target audience? Who is on the fence about nuclear? We decided to go through some national polling data again, look at it again nationally, and see who's on the fence about nuclear and who we need to sway. All the polling data came back the same. It turns out the people on the fence about nuclear tend to be women of childbearing age pulling politically to the left. Then, we needed to ask ourselves, what are we going to do with this? If I were to influence a woman of childbearing age, what could I put in a video to influence her? Cute kids. We're going to put some cute kids in some videos. So here's what we put out.
That's marketing. Then, a miracle from God happened. A group sprouted up called Mothers For Nuclear – not Mothers Against Nuclear, but Mothers For Nuclear. Believe it or not, they are headquartered in California. This is amazing. We give them that national stage. We invite them to our events, podcasts, and blogs. We do all the things for mothers.
I was giving this presentation a couple of weeks ago, and someone from the audience shouted to me, "How much does NEI pay the mothers?" I said, "Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. We do not pay mothers." When you go to MothersForNuclear.org, it says in big letters, "Will not accept industry funds."
So that solves that. But this group did sprout out organically, naturally. That's what's so exciting about it. As I said, we do everything we can to give them that national stage and that national platform at our events because this is exactly the type of group we need to influence: those mothers who lean to the left, these California mothers. I told that gentleman, I said, "If you think I can actually influence what a California mother says, thinks, feels, and does, you're nuts."
This group is called Nuclear Matters, a local grassroots trade organization. This is a resource that you can show to your family and friends. It's kind of that kitchen table resource. It breaks nuclear down and makes it easy to digest. What I love about this site is if you scroll all the way down on your phone, there's a tab that says your state. You can select your state, and it gives you your state's nuclear breakdown. How many units are in your state? What is the tax revenue that goes back into your communities thanks to nuclear for roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, etc.? How many jobs are supported by nuclear in your state? It's that state profile, and it's easy-to-digest information. This is a great resource to share with family and friends looking to learn more about nuclear. We love Nuclear Matters; they do a great job.
Nuclear has become bipartisan and bicameral in the last couple of years, even in the last three years. Translation: We're popular on Capitol Hill now with Democrats and Republicans, the House, and the Senate. And we've been very lucky because we've had some great legislative victories in the last couple of years. We've got some great tax credits in the IRA, so this is free money. We love free money. The existing plants now get a tax credit of $15 per megawatt hour. We've been waiting for that for a long time. This is the first year they get to claim that. Then, new plants can choose between line item No. 2 and line item No. 3.
If I were a new plant, I would probably choose line item No. 3 because that's up to a 50% tax credit if you do the math. That's a 30% tax credit on my overall construction costs, which is huge because we know they're not cheap to build. And an extra 10% tax credit if I build an energy community, meaning if I build my nuclear plant next to a coal plant, I get an extra 10% tax credit. Coal to nuclear, it's a thing. I also get an additional 10% if I use components made in our country. So that's up to a 50% tax credit.
Similarly, with the states, we've seen some good momentum. In the first five years alone, over 100 pronuclear bills were introduced at the state level. It means that some states are submitting multiple pronuclear bills to their legislators. These bills are doing a couple of things. One is that they're looking to remove barriers. So many states had very draconian bans or moratoriums on nuclear. One of those states was West Virginia, which had a moratorium on nuclear for decades. And they just recently removed the moratorium. Wonder why they did that? What does West Virginia have a lot of? Coal. They were smart. They removed their moratorium because they're thinking along the lines of coal to nuclear. It's a thing. Mountaineers have a plan.
States are looking at studies and commissions and saying, what if I put an SMR in this community? What if I add another research reactor on the campus? What if we did a microreactor here for industrial application, so they're looking at things like that? They're looking at incentives. Just as the federal government can give tax credits, the state can also give tax credits. We're seeing incredible momentum at the state level.
Hopefully, you know by now we are very popular. So, who are these beautiful women on the slide? On the left, we have Isabelle Boemeke, a Brazilian supermodel who decided to start moonlighting as a nuclear influencer on TikTok, Instagram, and everything else. And now nuclear ads look like Gap commercials. Isn't that great?
On the right, we have Miss America from last year, Grace Stanke. She was a nuclear engineering major at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She now has been hired by Constellation, one of our members, so we've got Miss America on our side, which is awesome. While she was Miss America, her platform was not saving the dolphins; it was deploying nuclear. Again, we're sitting at NEI, thinking this is so amazing. You are in the right industry when you have beautiful women doing your bidding for you.
Similar to the mothers, we give these women that national stage, that national platform. We have had them at our events. We feature them on our blogs and podcasts just to get their voices out there. I mentioned the fashion industry earlier. Again, they're 10% of global emissions. One of the first fashion companies to come forward publicly to say we think we're going to need nuclear is Adidas. We decided to interview one of their executives on our podcast called Fissionary. He said we don't need more fashion brands. We need a way to make things more responsible and sustainable to help our planet. Nuclear is becoming so popular in the fashion world and the fashion industry that at Fashion Week this year in Paris and Milan, they will have a nuclear pavilion.
So yes, it's wonderful to see these industries coming forth publicly, saying we're going to need nuclear. A fantastic documentary called “Nuclear Now” was released about a year ago. It was created by award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone. I had the privilege of attending the premier, so I took that picture. You can see I'm clearly in the back row. That was because my co-workers neglected to tell me that this was a black-tie event. I showed up a little unprepared. I'm still bitter about that. But let's go ahead and look at the trailer.
I highly recommend that film. You can find it on most streaming platforms. I'll conclude with some of our events, which are open to anyone. And what I'll highlight, since we're short on time, is this week is our Nuclear Energy Policy Forum in D.C. One of the things that we do every year is we do an annual State of the Industry, so it's kind of like our annual State of the Union.
I know it's this week, and everyone is here, but we do record this speech, and it is online at NEI.org. If you're interested in looking at that afterward, you can Google NEI State of the Industry, and you'll be able to watch it. It's a great kind of temperature check and temperature pulse of where we are as an industry, where we've been, where we've come, and where we're going in the future. And with that, I want to thank you so much.