The path to market for new nuclear reactors

Latitude Media covering the new. The energy transition. I'm Shayl Khan, and this is Catalyst. I think the NRC is under great deal of pressure to move faster, but they also have a number of deadlines that they're facing that are likely taking up a great deal of staff time. Furthermore They have fewer staff than they did before this адміністраціон беган. Coming up, what to watch out for from the wave of new nuclear reactor designs pushing toward commercialization.

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Well, the new nuclear reactors are coming, or at least I I think they are. There's a whole host of private companies who are advancing these new reactor designs and hoping to push them through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the NRC. They're trying to do so generally in the next couple of years or at least this decade.

And the DOE seems to be on board. In fact, the Department of Energy launched a program last year where they picked eleven of the I'd say earlier stage companies in the space and gave them the challenge of getting at least three of them to reach quote criticality. by July fourth of this year, twenty twenty six. We're also seeing increasing cadence of announcements from companies on all sorts of different milestones they've hit or are targeting, whether technical or regulatory or commercial.

So you get this sense that the momentum is building in this space. But I'd say for anyone who's not steeped in nuclear world, I think it's also pretty hard to separate the signal from the noise and figure out the significance or lack thereof of each of these announcements. So let's see if we can untangle it. For this one, I brought on Katie Huff. Katie was the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy and is now an associate professor at the University of Illinois.

Here's Katie. Katie, welcome. Thanks. It's great to be here. I'm very excited for you to help me understand what's actually happening out there in the world of new nuclear reactors.

Let's start with actually just walking through the process. If I'm a company who wants to go commercialize a new nuclear reactor in the United States, just high-level, like what are the key milestones in my process? Yeah, well fundamentally you're gonna have to start with a design and a site and some pre-application engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And then

You're gonna do a lot of safety analysis and put together a site report and a safety analysis report for your reactor design. You're gonna have to put together plans for how to operate that reactor, how to train operators.

for that reactor, how to ensure its safety in certain design basis accidents, etc. All of those documents go into the NRC in different forms. And the NRC takes those documents and gives you first A construction permit, ideally, and then an operating license, though there is a pathway that does those two things in parallel.

Um, in the meantime, there's public meetings and hearings and, you know, a lot of back and forth with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the form of technical white papers, technical reports, you know. Uh reports that then get reviews by NRC and responses from NRC, and then responses to the responses will come out of your company and into the NRC.

And all of that is just in the context of light n licensing, because in addition to all that you also have to have a financial plan, which the NRC also reviews. Uh, but generally speaking, there's a couple of different pathways for licensing. One's called Part 50 of 10 CFR, the Federal Register Code. One's called Part 52 recently. There's now one called Part 53 that's for advanced reactors, but no one's really using it yet.

So that, you know, part fifty process is where you do the two steps, the construction permit and the operating license separately. Uh that part fifty-two process is where you combine these two things and do them in parallel. But that's that's more or less the process and it can take years. Yeah. Well, when you say it can take years, it does take years, right? Like it never doesn't. That's right. That's right.

Okay, one thing that I think is different about this process than what you might imagine on the outside is that it's much more iterative and it's like it seems to be uh done in conjunction with the NRC, more so than what you could imagine in some parallel universe. Which is like you prepare your application, you file it to the NRC, the NRC maybe comes back with some comments.

Or maybe says thumbs up or thumbs down. But it seems like actually the process is much more collaborative, mayor may not be the right word. Actually, you can tell me. But as an example, I mean a lot of what I want to help clarify. Is that there are all these new reactor companies who are trying to commercialize new reactor designs? And one of the things that you will see them announce.

sometimes is we had a really productive design review session with 50 people from the NRC and our company. And that is, you know, indicative of progress.

But but I have no idea whether that's indicative of progress, right? Like does does that happen every single time? Is it always positive? Do people get rejected somewhere in this process? Like what is it like in that murky That murky early ground where there's all this iteration and and work being done before you submit your formal construction permit.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I would say that while it is an indicator that things are happening in the company and an indicator that the NRC is not in the dark about what's happening in that company. At no point sort of in that process is NRC really issuing official decisions of any kind. In the pre-application activities, you do have to submit kind of a letter of intent.

You have to submit, you know, billing information so that the NRC can start billing you for their time. Uh and you you do things like a regulatory engagement plan gets put together and you tell the regulator how you wanna like go about the process of engaging with them. And then there's usually public kickoff meetings and readiness assessments as a part of that, including public outreach meetings. And all of that is before you submit your application. Once you submit your application, NRC then

Decides whether or not to accept that application and start actually doing the review. People do get rejected at the acceptance of application stage, for example. It just doesn't reflect the level of technical depth that NRC is going to need to do the review. That is certainly a thing that happens. And sometimes it's, you know, years after you've started your pre-ac application activities.

You mentioned this like two phase process of construction permit and then operations permit. Is there something before construction permit that's like design license? Yeah. So I as an example, I remember I know New Scale is the first SMR company to receive design license approval. Um, I think also there have been companies like Oaklo was rejected at some point. Was that for its design license application? Is that distinct from a construction permit?

Yeah, so the it's technically called a design certification, but yeah, it's it's it's a certification independent of the site. And so it is really hyper-focused. On the reactor. It's hyper-focused on making sure that everything within the boundary of the site. is gonna go well sort of regardless of what site you put it on. And then separate sort of site specific questions will be asked as part of the rest of the construction permit.

But what you can then take that design certification and not have to sort of re-review the reactor every time you have a new place you want to put it. So the idea there is you're sort of certifying the reactor as safe, assuming the rest of the questions about particular sites are safe, right? And that allows you then for your subsequent license applications. To be focused on site-specific questions about how safely that reactor behaves in the context of your.

like site. So new sites, etc. So um the thing that NRC denied is the combined license application. So they submitted an applic yeah, so Oaklo. So the thing that NRC denied for Oaklo was that they um They submitted a combined license application. So this is for that parallel step where you don't do a separate design certification. You sort of submit a combined operating license and construction permit application. And it was rejected um largely because it contained information gaps.

in terms of its potential accidents and classification of safety systems and components and stuff. Okay. Lots of steps and iteration and this kind of like messy process. I guess in principle, I would imagine that the first If I think of the three big steps as being getting your design certification, getting a construction permit, and getting an operating license, I guess I would intuitively think that the design permit is maybe the hardest and longest.

And then the construction permit is second to that. So you could imagine it being like a three years, two year, one year for the three. different steps or something like that. Just in terms of the order of time and complexity and difficulty, do I have it right? Or is it actually like harder to get a construction permit than a design certification?

The statistics are small here. Right. And there's great variation per reactor. And so it's very challenging to say specifically, like, oh yeah, it's always gonna be more time spent on the reactor. Actually, what we have seen, and there is some interesting statistics on, is the amount of environmental review time that also happens in parallel, because in terms of that site application, you all are sort of really highly focused on.

NEPA. And so the environmental impact assessment process can be a long pole in that tent. And it sort of has very little to do with the reactor design itself. And so actually you might see places where the site permit and construction permit sub you know are subject to environmental impact assessments and whatnot that aren't safety assessments and that those can rival both in length of the report. and in time that it takes to review it, um, the kind of reactor review.

What if anything has changed at the NRC in this new administration, which is uh, you know, pro nuclear pretty openly, at least rhetorically? Um, but then also we've had Doge during that period. So like is the NRC moving faster, moving slower, more equipped, less equipped? Like, is there any difference right now? Yeah, I think the NRC is under great deal of pressure to move faster, but they also have a number of deadlines that they're facing that are likely taking up a great deal of staff time.

Furthermore, they have fewer staff than they did before this administration began. And so the staffing issue certainly is one to keep in mind. They have had the support through the last, you know, in the Biden administration as well with things like the Advance Act. is sort of bi bipartisan. That bipartisan support has indicated ways in which the NRC can accelerate licensing, um, engage in international memoranda of understanding, for example, to, you know, share.

information about reactor designs that one country is licensing and use that information in our own licenses, for example. Um it's given some authorization to the NRC to consider, you know, what it looks like to site a reactor on a former fossil site, like a coal plant site. Many of those sites are already quite contaminated, even radioactively contaminated because the heavy metals in coal.

And so, you know, the way to approach those reviews in a in an accelerated way is sort of uh there's a nice open door for that. The Advance Act was passed in the Biden administration, and the NRC now is sort of taking some of those instructions and going forth with some of the recommended activities. from the Advance Act to accelerate licensing. They also now have a full commission uh for the first time.

many months of this administration, they did not. There were firings and a you know, a stepping down of major commissioners. There should be five commissioners at the head of the NRC. And now as of like a couple weeks ago, there are again, but for a while there weren't. A lot of those things, including the government shutdown.

have slowed things down at the NRC, frankly. Uh add to that some of the sort of external requirements that the administration has placed on the NRC. And you get a situation where They've been very busy with fewer staff and not as much leadership as they ordinarily ought to have. Those kinds of deadlines and timelines I've been a little vague about, but basically there were there were a fleet of executive orders associated with regulation. One in February of last year.

that applied to every independent regulatory commission in the country that said these these commissions shouldn't be independent. And they should, you know, align all of their decisions with the White House and et cetera. And it covered everything, the FEC, the FCC, et cetera, but also the NRC. And there was a lot of question whether anyone would execute.

you know, a desire to capture politically the nuclear regulatory commission. Um, it turns out in May a number of executive orders were issued indicating precisely how the uh Office of the President would like to see the NRC behave, and that includes some uh renovation of the way that they think about dose rates. Um, and there are deadlines with regard to rulemaking that NRC is facing. Just a month from now, February 23rd, they'll have to release.

ru like guidance, um rulemaking on how they have either changed or not changed those dose rates without any real new data, just because the administration has declared that they ought to. Okay, so my takeaway from all this is that there's pressure for the NRC to move faster. Mm-hmm. There's not evidence that the NRC is moving faster. And it may be difficult for the NRC to move faster given a bunch of other constraints that have been placed upon it.

Yeah, I think that's true. I think it is certainly the case that the NRC has made a couple of good moves recently. Certain applications are going really well and quickly with decisions kind of moving rapidly. The ones that were already in progress, like Xenergy's reactor and Kairos's reactor and stuff, have had some nice announcements recently associated with their, you know.

Um license progress. But yeah, I mean, one would expect that it's probably harder to move faster right now with fewer staff. Are you tired of overpaying for big name PR firms but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks?

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You mentioned good announcements recently on progress from Xenergy in Kairos. What are the potential forthcoming big decisions. Are there it could X Energy and Kairos get construction permits shortly? What it should be looking like Terra Power, the all the names that have sort of further along in this process, like what could be coming soon? Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be construction permits that you want to look out for. Kairos has test reactors ahead of their final commercial design.

Those have already received some construction permits from the NRC in the 2023-2024 timeframe. And they're continuing to see kind of rapid progress with NRC on, you know, um continued, you know, final safety evaluations for those. reactors. Um so that's great. And we'll see, you know, construction permit applications. Like either being submitted or approved for a lot of the other reactors. And that's where you really start to get excited. Some such reactors have received construction permits.

Uh early early construction permission, even before they have technically a construction permit, they can start working on Digging out those sites without building anything nuclear. That's a nice feature that the NRC allows folks to sort of start laying the land if at their own risk.

without promising that the construction permit will be approved. They can say, ah yeah, well, we know enough to say you can probably start doing the non-nuclear construction. That's happened. Um yeah, so those are really great signs.

Okay, so I want to talk about this. DOE pilot program. So this is last year the DOE announced this nuclear pile reactor pilot program. They picked eleven companies who have new reactor designs and they set a goal. They're working with all of them and they set a goal for at least three of them.

To achieve criticality on test reactors by July 4th of this year, not a coincidence that it's July 4th. What does it mean for a test reactor to achieve criticality? And like how important a milestone is that? So I think it depends on what kind of criticality we're talking about. For example, there's something called a zero power criticality test, which means that you are multiplying neutrons, even if it's

three or four neutrons, right? This is happening this happens easily without making real s necessarily engineering progress on either the fuels or the reactor design. And so I would be careful to sort of keep an eye out for some of the caveats about how those were really accomplished. For example, Valor Atomics announced that they had reached criticality at Les Alamos, but you know, it's an experiment that Los Alamos already had running. It is with a fuel similar to to Valor Atomics fuel.

But it was a zero power criticality test. So it's basically sort of at what we call cold zero power, which is to say they're not taking this. fuel up to the kinds of power densities that we would actually see in the reactor. They're simply checking whether or not you can multiply neutrons inside that fuel, which generally speaking we know from

lots of experience in simulation for most reactor fuels. So I would be careful not to sort of buy into the hype of any kind of criticality tests that sort of are caveated by things like zero power or cold zero power. I wanna see myself criticality at what c what's called hot full power. Um, and that kind of thing takes time. In fact. in the history of building research reactors, the kind of median time for how long it takes from pouring concrete to getting to that hot hot full power criticality.

Is much longer. It's two years or so, right? And there's a nice report out of Oak Ridge by Gail Hawk and others. that kind of goes through that history. But, you know, even if you include the Wild West days when there you know, the pre NRC when everything was Atomic Energy Commission, you know, it took years from concrete to criticality when you're thinking about things in terms of that real criticality. So I would be careful about that. And I don't think a lot of reactors really are on

pays for that July fourth milestone because it's an extremely aggressive milestone. Uh and I I think it's a little unfair to the nuclear industry actually to sort of set these very aggressive milestones when the reality is that it's a these are extremely high precision machines. They don't happen overnight. So

Actually I'm not clear on whether the DOE's stated intention is for three reactors to reach zero power criticality or full power criticality or something in between. Were they specific enough to be prescriptive on that or is it left open-ended? They were not. And I think that allows these, you know, companies probably to declare victory, even if it's not as meaningful as we would like to see, right?

Okay. So that's like criticality as one milestone that has various meanings. This is reminding me of like uh of infusion world, right? Read reaching Q equals one, reaching energy break even. There's a you know, there's a another level of detail you need to understand to determine how important it is when somebody says that they've done that. Sounds similar with achieving criticality on a test reactor.

It is precisely similar. The question of Q equals one in physics world is very different from Q equals one in engineering world, like whether or not you can actually capture energy of it. It's very much exactly the same sort of question.

What about just in terms of other milestones that I see? Startups announcing, um, as an example, Radiant, which is doing micro reactors, which by the way, I want to ask you about micro reactors in the context of the NRC pathway. Is there any difference in terms of the NRC licensing process for? A new light water reactor versus an SMR versus a micro reactor, are they all exactly?

So right now they're the options before them are pretty much the same. There is a new licensing pathway called 10 CFR Part 53. that was intended to be more supportive of advanced reactors, including micro reactors. But right now it's not obvious that it would be that much faster for most companies. So a lot of them are still choosing 10 CFR Part 50 or 52.

And what you do instead is just have certain waivers for uh changed guidance that is specific to your reactor type, right? You you'd uh just have a different way to evaluate that. same requirement that's in the regulation. And so it it may go faster. And in fact, NRC has done a really good job of looking into certain things that are very unique to micoreactors.

like whether or not the emergency planning zone needs to be any larger than the fence line is a question that NRC, you know, uh wrangled with for a little while and came out with a really I think reasonable sort of idea about how to approach that and it will be totally reasonable if NRC decides that some of those micro reactors have, you know, emergency planning zones that don't go any further than the reactor site itself, which is great.

Got it. Okay. So then back to the milestones. So Radian as an example has uh, I think on their website that they say in twenty twenty six Kaleidos, which is the name of their reactor. Will be the first new commercial reactor designed to achieve a fueled test in over fifty years. What does it mean to achieve a fueled test? And how does that relate to criticality, for example? Yeah, so that would be that kind of hot, full power test.

That I was describing earlier. It's in a long set of tests that we call ITAC. But the there's a whole bunch of things you need to do before you start up a reactor to make sure that everything's working, all the pressures are right, all the temperatures are right, and the fuel is working. And Things of this nature. It means you put fuel in that reactor core vessel, you close it up.

And you turn it on, you at least get up through some of these like multiplication levels that we are talking about that are sort of at real power. Um fueled tests are critical before you can start. Uh well they're critical in the criticality sense, but they are also really important uh because you have to st Mm.

working on figuring out, you know, whether or not all of your simulations and modeling match precisely the kind of approach to criticality with fuel inside the reactor that you were expecting.

Any other milestones that you see companies announce or haven't announced yet? But like what what are the things, what's the what is what is the phrasing that we should be looking out for that we should take to mean something substantial? I find that Because this is so complex and because there's so many steps in the process.

You get a lot of announcements. And because all these companies are raising a lot of money and need to raise a lot of money, they make a lot of announcements about various things. And it's like hard to separate signal from noise. So like what would what would uh be signal to you? Yeah, I think uh the lightest signal is we've submitted a letter of intent to the NRC.

That's a company that actually intends to engage the NRC and nothing more. We've submitted a construction permit application to the NRC. Now that's a company that has engaged with the NRC, gotten sort of good feedback on their regulatory engagement plan. and have a plan for like a construction permit. They

Uh they might submit a safety analysis report to the NRC that is sort of associated with the safety of the reactor. Um that's serious. And submitting those things to the NRC is the bulk of the work that you're looking at. When the NRC accepts those applications, that's also a good sign, but it is not quite as good as when the NRC actually approves the construction permit or approves the design certification or approves the operating license.

The operating license is last or in the process that's parallel, it is together with the last step. That operating license requires that folks put together their like operating license plan and training plan and everything else. Once that's submitted, that's again a real step where like real documents have been submitted and they're about to be reviewed. And so I would say there's certain documents, the construction permit application, the safety analysis report.

the operating uh license application, those things, once they're submitted, those are really big signs. Once they're approved, obviously those are really big, big signs, right? Um

And then I would also say on the utility side, there's a sort of question about like where you're putting these plants. And if a utility is really partnered with an early site permit application for a reactor that has process underway with the NRC, then that's also worth considering in seriousness, much more than like say an MOU with a community where the utility is saying, Oh, we think we're gonna cite a reactor in your particular location.

It's much different once you've submitted an early site permit application like on behalf of that utility vendor partnership. Um that is a much more serious indicator that something will eventually be built on that site. Though it's certainly not a guarantee. There are many early site permits that have been supported that still don't have a reactor built on them that that were sort of decades old. So um one other thing that I would say just from a like microreactor standpoint is

I I'm waiting for the reactor factory, right? Um ri micro reactors in particular do not make sense economically until you're building them in a factory with a plan. for shipping those reactors fueled and receiving those reactors. defueling them, those sorts of things. A company that has a big physical footprint factory with a laydown in their plant for how that process is going to work, that that company is ahead of the game in the micoreactor world.

Right now in the small modular reactor space, you know, Holtec is a good example. They have had a factory for a very long time building other things, but nuclear fuel casks in particular. And so they're a little bit ahead of the game there, but you know I'd be looking carefully at which companies have a fab a factory to fabricate their fuel and which companies have a factory to fabricate their reactors.

matter. I mean, we we we never built Yucca Mountain, so we're still doing lots of on-site storage for all the spent nuclear waste from all the existing reactors. Like, how much do all these new companies with new reactors have to contend with what are we going to do with the waste? Yeah, part of the NRC's licensing process is something called waste confidence. They have to in the licensing that says you can turn this reactor on and start operating it.

There has to be some level of confidence that there will eventually be a plan for the waste. Historically, there's been some Litigation back and forth about whether this waste confidence can simply rely on the federal process if we aren't successfully pursuing a Yucca Mountain type activity. Um all of that. is to say that at the moment, companies do need to include some plan for how they're going to manage in the interim their spent nuclear fuel.

On site until the federal government takes ownership of it. And so that has to be a part of their application to the regulator. And for a lot of companies, that means, you know, spent nuclear fuel is cooled either in pools or in, you know, small containers uh in the sort of circulated air and ideally eventually put into dry cask storage while

It waits. For some companies, this may mean an active recycling facility right there on site with the reactor or at the reactor factory. Um, all of that kind of needs to be considered if that's in fact part of the plan. And I think a lot of companies maybe are leaving that to that second phase of the operating license application. But I would love to see them being a little clearer about, you know, precisely what their plan is for interim storage.

In the meantime, before the federal government has a consolidated interim storage facility or a final repository plan.

All right. So putting this all together, do you have a bet or a guess as to when we will see the first new reactor built, I guess operating in the United States. Like and and will we see one get through that gauntlet? five years before the next, or are we gonna see a wave of them all around the same time? Yeah, well I think right now um a lot of companies are sort of neck and neck for construction permit decisions for real commercial reactors, you know.

Late this year, 2027, right? If NRC is is able to follow some of their really short turnaround hopes for construction permit review, a few companies like Terra Power and X Energy and Kairos. are really close to that. Here at Illinois, we have a research and test reactor application going in for a micro reactor on site. That goes through a slightly different process intended for things that contribute to the public good, like research reactors.

But it'll produce real power for our campus once it's built. And it'll probably be on a similar timeline, you know, and I think those first reactors will take a while to be constructed. That's part of the challenge is that once you have that construction permit, now the real work of constructing it and fueling it begins. And so Um, I'm pretty bad at making predictions, but I would be surprised if by twenty thirty-two we haven't seen.

real new advanced reactor electrons on the grid. There may not be many and it'll probably be just one reactor, um, but it'll shortly thereafter be followed by, you know, a second or third. And then that reactor that's first onto the grid, I expect will have

nth of a kind reactors sort of coming in right behind it. There could be a serious gap if there's a lot of delay in construction, which will reduce confidence from the investors that want to buy more reactors and probably slow down the whole process. All right, Katie, this was very informative and I feel substantially better at uh being able to interpret all the announcements that I see in this space. So thank you so much for the time. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Katie Huff is an associate professor at the University of Illinois. She formerly served as the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy in the United States. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Adventures. This episode was produced by Max Savage Levinson, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquon. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

I'm Shao Kahn, and this is Catalyst.