Adding nuclear to the mix with Jacopo Buongiorno

Kara Miller: From the MIT Energy Initiative, this is What if it works? A podcast looking at the energy solutions for climate change. I’m Kara Miller.

Robert Stoner: And I’m Rob Stoner.

KM: Today, we’re talking with Jacopo Buongiorno about a source of energy that’s drawn a lot of fashion and a lot of controversy: nuclear.

Jacopo Buongiorno: If an individual were to use only nuclear energy for his or her energy needs throughout a lifetime, you would produce an amount of spent fuel or waste that would fit within a coffee cup.

KM: Jacopo is the director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems and a professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

JB: The United States, where we consume a lot of electricity, a gigawatt reactor, a gigawatt plant, basically would be enough to power a city the size of Boston—750,000 people/household. It’s a big chunk of power.

KM: He argues you can’t get to a robust clean energy portfolio without nuclear. But that doesn’t mean the road ahead is going to be easy for those who advocate for nuclear, at least not in the U.S.

JB: What it has to do with is the way in which the process to select, license, and eventually operate a final repository. The way in which that process has evolved in the United States has been characteristically dysfunctional—if I can put it that way.

KM: Here’s Jacopo in conversation with me and Rob.

I’ll start off with a little bit of a funny question, maybe, but do people ever meet you, hear what you do, and say, really, you go around the world supporting more nuclear power? Do you ever get that kind of shocked reaction?

JB: No, I actually don’t think I get shock. I get curiosity and interest. I think people find the general topic of energy, in particular nuclear energy, intriguing. And so sometimes they ask questions. Sometimes they say, wow, sounds really challenging, sounds really difficult. And it sort of makes sense with being a professor of MIT. People immediately give you credit. And then you need to sort of confirm that you know what you’re talking about. That’s the reaction.

RS: Now, that’s not the reaction you get in Italy or New Zealand, where I was last week. They’re strongly anti-nuclear.

JB: Well, I can’t comment on New Zealand because the situation that I don’t know well. Growing up in Italy, of course, I was exposed to a lot of opposition to nuclear. But my understanding is that the current government, the current administration in Italy actually has made a significant overture for nuclear. And we’ll see where it goes.

I am generally skeptical about things getting done in Italy just because the country tends to be a little bit dysfunctional and decisions are made, and when the political landscape changes, those decisions are reversed. That’s all. But at the moment, even in Italy, which is usually hopeless, the wind seems to have changed.

RS: Do you want us to edit any of this out?

JB: No, not at all. I feel comfortable bad mouthing. It’s my own country. I can say whatever I want.

KM: What’s the toughest country you can remember ever sort of trying to make the case to or where people were the most resistant to what you had to say about nuclear?

JB: Yeah, I think that’s an easy question. It has been for the past 15 years, maybe even longer than that, has been Germany.

KM: Okay, and why?

JB: Well, they have a long history of nuclear opposition, which goes back to the Cold War. In fact, I’m told right after World War II, they sort of they conflated the opposition to nuclear weapons with opposition to nuclear energy, and that persisted. Certainly the general population, maybe in the political arena a little bit less. There were ups and downs. The administration of Prime Minister Schröder in the 90s actually passed a nuclear phase out policy, which then was put on pause by Angela Merkel during her first term, but then Fukushima happened, and then the country just decided they wanted to phase out, and they finally did it. Last year, they shut down their last nuclear power plant, and predictably their emissions have gone up. They had to restart some coal fire plants. It’s been a complete mess, but they no longer have nuclear energy in Germany, so that’s always been sort of a tough audience.

RS: Of course, they’ve got a wonderful neighbor with nuclear in France that supplies some of the electricity to the European grid.

JB: A lot of the electricity to the European grid, and I think by far the lion’s share of the carbon-free electricity. So it’s interesting to see two countries that they’re very different, but in many ways they have such strong ties that really go in two different directions, and it’s been that way for a long time.

KM: So let’s just step back, because in the back of everybody’s mind is some sort of nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. What is the essence of the case that you make to a politician or regular person who’s trying to think, like, hmm, would we want nuclear around here?

JB: Well, the first thing I will say that there are risks associated with all technologies, not just energy technologies. Everything we do as human beings entails a risk, and we just have to weigh what the benefits are and what the risks are, and then decide is it acceptable or not. But having said that, the value proposition for nuclear in the current context is, in my opinion, threefold. First, obviously we’re all concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and how we’re going to address climate change mitigation as well as adaptation, and needless to say, all low-carbon energy technologies can potentially play a role. The specific role that nuclear can play is not only being low-carbon, carbon-free, if you will, during operation, but it’s also dispatchable, stable, reliable. So it’s not subject to intermittency.

RS: Dispatchable meaning you can make it come on when you want and you can make it go off when you don’t want it, at least to some extent.

JB: Correct. You can control basically the energy output of your system to some extent, right? Because these are not systems that are designed to go up and down in power very, very rapidly. There are both economic and technical reasons for why you don’t want to do that, but pretty much you can get the output that you want within reasonable limits.

KM: And are you contrasting that with kind of like solar and wind?

JB: And wind, which are great. They’re cheap, as we know. They’re also low-carbon, but you’re subject to intermittency. And so all the studies that we’ve done at this point, many other groups have done around the world, show that the generation mix that gets you to deeply decarbonized scenarios at the lowest cost and highest reliability is not 100% nuclear, is not 100% renewables, is actually a mix of both with a little bit of storage and to deal with what we just mentioned a minute ago, sort of the fast changes in demand and generation that a nuclear reactor does not handle very well. A thousand-megawatt reactor.

RS: By the way, there’s only one solar field on the planet, I think, that’s of a scale that’s comparable to the output of a nuclear power plant.

JB: That is capable of generating a gigawatt of electricity. And I don’t know where that is, but I suspect that’s probably the capacity is not what you get on average, probably.

RS: Well, of course, it’s off at night, every single night. So just for scale, a gigawatt nuclear power plant is going to provide enough electricity for what, 100,000 homes or something like that?

JB: No, a lot more than that. So a gigawatt, of course, it depends on which country it is because we all consume electricity at different rates. But in the United States, where we consume a lot of electricity, a gigawatt reactor, a gigawatt plant, basically would be enough to power a city the size of Boston, 750,000 people slash houses.

RS: Homes.

JB: Homes, right. So it’s a big chunk of power.

KM: If you were like, you know, king of the world, and you were thinking about the energy mix of countries, and you were saying, here’s what I think is optimal. Now, clearly, you’re a nuclear guy, but I don’t know, would you say the ideal for the U.S. would be like 100% nuclear? What would you say?

JB: I would say, first of all, that it’s highly country-dependent, Okay? So there are countries that have natural resources, either in the form of hydro or exceptionally good renewables or plentiful domestic uranium. And so it really is no one-size-fits-all, right? I mean, if you look, for example, East Asia, countries with very, very strong industry, but zero natural resources. And they tend to be very densely populated. And so, you know, lots of energy needs, but not a lot of options. And so what do they do?

KM: You talked about this. Japan being like this classic case.

RS: Japan…Taiwan…Korea…

JB: I was in Taiwan just last week, right? They had no options. It’s a very, very dense island. They have very strong economy with energy-hungry industries. And they have no natural resource. So what are they left with? Well, they import 98% of their energy at the moment is imported, OK? And so it’s natural gas, oil, coal, of course. And so what options do they have? Well, you can carpet cover the whole island with solar and wind. You won’t even get you to where you need. But they’re doing what they can with renewables. But at one point, you’ve got to sort of say, OK, well, nuclear is pretty dense. And it makes sense.

RS: Having nuclear, in a sense, makes them more energy independent than they are now, because they have to rely on LNG from the United States, coal from other neighbors, Australia. But of course, it doesn’t make them completely energy independent, because they don’t have any uranium. They have to import.

JB: No, they don’t have any uranium. And they actually have a domestic nuclear industry in the sense that they have a nuclear operator. They have a utility that operates nuclear power plants. But they don’t build their own nuclear plants. And they don’t even make their own fuel. So even nuclear is now, obviously, doesn’t give you 100% energy security. But the energy density of uranium fuel is so high that if you buy a significant amount, you have a lot of energy for a long period of time without having to go back to the market and getting a continuous supply of fuel. So in that sense, it’s good. The other factor that, of course, has to be weighted, and it’s highly country dependent, is where you’re going to get your fuel, right?

RS: And this has become very evident as a problem even in the United States with the recent Russian embargo.

JB: With the Russian embargo, exactly.

RS: Because we don’t make our own fuel.

JB: You’re talking about nuclear fuel.

RS: Nuclear fuel.

JB: Yeah, so the uranium market is very mature as a commodity market. And so the way it has evolved is that the countries that produce at the lowest cost are the countries that produce the most, right? That’s commodity, right? At least for uranium. Now, uranium is not what you put straight in the core in the reactor. You got to first enrich it, and then you got to fabricate a fuel assembly, which is a highly engineered system. So there are several different steps, but let’s just stay with the raw material. With uranium, if you just look from a geological point of view, the countries that have the highest reserves are Australia, Canada, the United States, actually, Kazakhstan, Namibia, a bunch of other countries.

KM: Of uranium, this is the, okay, they naturally have it.

JB: But that doesn’t mean that Australia, Canada, and the U.S. are the ones that are producing the most, because the countries that produce the most are the ones that have the cheapest uranium, right? So you may have a lot of uranium, but it doesn’t matter if it takes a lot of money to extract it, okay? So at the moment, if you look at the pie chart of who is making uranium, Kazakhstan is actually the highest. Australia is big. Canada is big. You have Russia, you have Namibia.

But Russia is not a dominant producer of uranium, but it’s big enough that post February 2022, when a lot of countries don’t wanna deal with Russia anymore, if you push them out of that market, that creates a problem. And that’s where the United States is at the moment, because we were relying partially, not entirely, but partially, for I think the percentage is something like 20% or so of our uranium on Russia. And so it’s not like you snap your fingers and all of a sudden you get that 20% replaced overnight, it takes a certain amount of time. I don’t think it’s certainly not insurmountable problem, it’s just a matter of making the investment and developing a little bit more resilient supply chain of uranium for our own reactor.

RS: So let’s, can we stay on this topic of fuel for a bit? Come back to what I said, if you wanna, sorry I’m all over the place.

KM: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JB: But we were starting, so we were going with Taiwan and so on, and it’s true. So nuclear is no silver bullet in terms of energy independent, right? I didn’t wanna dodge your question of what is the ideal mix.

KM: Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot.

JB: So, you know, because that’s fascinating, right? So indeed, first of all, let me say, it’s not one-size-fits-all, right? So each country is gonna have its own. But I want to go back to what I said earlier in the interview here, and that is, let’s just stay on the power sector, on the electric markets. All the studies that have been done, serious studies, show that, because of the issue of intermittency on one end and because of the issue of relatively high cost of nuclear on the other end, the ideal mix is neither all intermittent renewables nor all nuclear.

So, I would not recommend 100% nuclear or close to 100%. I would absolutely not recommend close to 100% renewables. It’s really the combination of the two, plus the storage that helps you handle the very rapid variability of renewables that gives you basically the decarbonization, the desired decarbonization, deep decarbonization, at the lowest cost and most likely at the highest reliability. So then we can, not debate, but then we have to analyze country-by-country is it, in one case, 30% nuclear and 70% renewables, or in other case, might be more nuclear and less renewables? That’s gonna be country dependent.

KM: I’m guessing you think in the U.S., we could have a lot more nuclear.

JB: We could certainly have a lot more nuclear. On the grid, maybe? We’ll see? Certainly, I think in other sectors of the economy, jacking up nuclear would make a ton of sense. We already talk about, for example, heat for industry. Very, very difficult to use renewables for heat from a technical point of view, in a sense that these are industries that require heat all the time. Again, you’re bumping against the issue of intermittency. But also, because from a thermodynamic point of view, if you will, if you’re generating electricity, which is what PV and wind do, then downgrading it to heat is very, very inefficient. Whereas if you have a heat source to begin with, it’s more efficient. So again, it’s a well-balanced mix that usually wins the game. And we haven’t even talked about, well, I just alluded to reliability, but that’s a big deal. Not just reliability of the system on a database, but also resilience to disruptions, right? Whether they are natural disasters or man-made events, terrorism, et cetera. So, I think it’s not wise to put all your eggs in one basket.

RS: Jacopo, you mentioned that you were in Taiwan last week and thinking about this great problem they have of trying to establish a domestic energy supply. And when you get into those conversations, I find you end up talking about this idea of energy independence as a virtue and something we should all be striving for, which I’m not so convinced about. I mean, to me, it seems like we should be thinking about energy security. How does that play out in the nuclear realm?

KM: When you talk about energy independence, are we meaning here that the U.S. can just provide its own energy and whatever? We can have fights with a lot of people, but it’s okay, we don’t need them.

RS: Yeah, the idea sort of originates in the area of oil and gas. We don’t have to import oil and gas because we’ve got our own and it’s forever and we’re stockpiling it. Here, we’re talking about the supply of reliable energy for industry and the economy, but it doesn’t have to come from within your own borders. It can come from outside. It can come from friends. It can even come from not friends. You mentioned Russia being a big supplier, provided there are enough friends out there to fill the gap if they fall off in their production. What are the options in the emerging plants for making us more energy secure in the supply of uranium for those plants that we should be thinking about?

JB: Okay, so first of all, I agree with the way you have set up the question and the problem here. I think the goal realistically should not be energy independence. There are probably a half a dozen countries that might theoretically achieve energy independence. U.S. being blessed as one of them. A question I may ask is, do we really want to? What’s the big benefit? So I agree with you, it’s energy security. And given that a lot of these energy technologies have a global supply chain, then the question as you correctly posed it is, do I have enough friendly suppliers out there so that given a potential scenario, I can get the energy that I need at the cost that I want. And so, in that sense, nuclear is not dissimilar from fossil fuels because you do have a fairly large number of uranium producers. You have a fairly large number of uranium enrichers. We’d like to see a few more. We’d like to see the U.S. actually rebuild that capability.

RS: Yeah, it’s not so easy for any one supplier to ramp up production.

JB: It isn’t, it isn’t. It entails a cost and time. All feasible and the U.S. government is taking steps so that the U.S. is gonna become again, capable of enriching uranium for its commercial sector. And then there is a very well established and capable supply chain for fuel fabrication in Europe, in Asia, and in the United States. So in that sense, I’m confident that the U.S. or any other countries that we would help to build reactors for, they will have the fuel that they need in the longer term. Natural uranium is what is mined. It’s 99+ percent is uranium 238. That’s the isotope 238 of uranium, which for the purpose of generating energy in traditional reactor designs is not very useful. And 0.7 % is uranium 235, is the isotope 235 of uranium. And that’s sort of the juicy part of uranium. That’s what we actually use to sustain the chain reaction within the core. So at the moment, we use less than 1% of the natural uranium in our current reactors. If we were able to use also the remaining 99%, of course, the uranium resources would immediately multiply quite dramatically.

So, in the current designs, you cannot do that. There are just the laws of physics prevent it, but there is a whole class of reactors that are called fast breeder reactors in which the neutrons are not slowed down intentionally. And you have an excess of neutrons and you allow for some of these neutrons to be absorbed by uranium 238. And that uranium 238 turns into plutonium 239, which is also good fuel. In fact, this seems incredible, but in these systems, you can actually make more fuel than you consume. That’s why they’re called breeders. And so you multiply the amount of fuel quite dramatically. We’re not at a point where this is needed. It certainly adds cost and complexity to the fuel cycle. So at the moment for the foreseeable future, essentially all countries around the world are gonna stay with the traditional fuel cycle approach, which means we continue to use about 1% of the natural uranium we mined.

RS: So you used the P word, plutonium there, which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up quickly, because that makes for very efficient bombs and making more plutonium than you’re burning up sort of sends you in the direction of the breeder reactor of making fissile material that could be used in weapons. Is that a problem? And is that preventing the proliferation of breeder reactors?

JB: It’s always been a concern, right? The way it works is that you make plutonium 239 in the fuel that is in the core, but then in order to do the breeding, or to use that plutonium, you gotta reprocess the fuel. Once the fuel comes out of the core, you essentially separate that plutonium 239 from the rest of the fuel. And depending on how long it has been in the reactor, that plutonium could be weapons-grade, as you said. And so that’s always been a concern that if you go down that path and you separate plutonium, then in principle, you have weapons-grade material. And so then it becomes a proliferation concern. The U.S. decided in the late 70s that we’re not gonna reprocess our fuel for those reasons, to show sort of, to set the bright example and say, we don’t wanna go down that path because that could open up the possibility of proliferation now.

RS: But the French do.

JB: The French have been doing it for 40 years and it’s all done under the inspections and monitoring of the IEA. So I think it’s reasonably well controlled. But they don’t use fast breeders really in France, but they do extract the plutonium, the little amount of plutonium that comes out of their traditional reactors, thermal reactors, and they reuse it in the same reactors. It’s called MOX fuel, mixed-oxide fuel.

KM: How much pushback do you get in different countries when it comes to, where do we put this stuff? We’ve heard a lot of controversy here, like, is this gonna go deep, deep inside of a mountain? And that seems tricky in trying to get people to build more nuclear.

JB: So it comes up in every conversation. So you have to make a few points here. The first, what do we mean by waste is the spent fuel, right? So forget about barrels, oozing out green glowing fluids, radioactive fluids. So the waste for nuclear reactor really looks like the same fuel assemblies that go into the reactor when it’s fresh fuel that you can literally hold in your hand, and with basically zero radiation. But what has happened when it has spent the time in the reactor is that some of that uranium, that uranium-35 that we were talking about, has fission. And as a result of that fission process, a lot of radioactivity has been generated. So it looks the same. If I take a picture, it looks exactly the same as it went in. So it’s a highly engineered, solid, very robust piece of technology, but it’s now highly radioactive. And it stays radioactive for a long period of time. So the first order of business is to put those fuel assemblies into a spent fuel pool, which is co-located with the reactor, and it stays there for a couple of years.

RS: And that’s just normal water.

JB: That’s just water. Just water, right, so water happens to be very good at shielding radiation. So you can literally take a tour of these spent fuel pools and you have your highly radioactive fuel assemblies just a few meters under water. You can look down. They have a nice glow, blue, the Cherenkov light. So they look characteristically radioactive, but it’s perfectly safe. And now radioactivity naturally decays off. And so after a couple of years, the radioactivity level is low enough that you can pull these fuel assemblies out of the spent fuel pool and put them into what we call dry casks, which are basically cylindrical canisters made of steel and concrete. And the radioactivity is sufficiently low that basically the shielding provided by the steel and the concrete is sufficient so that if you were to bend enough, turn moon outside in contact with this dry cask, you would get a very, very small amount of radiation, minimum. And the volumes and masses are very small, right? For all these reactors. Why? Because the energy density of uranium is extraordinarily high. So you don’t need a lot of uranium to produce a lot of energy to begin with. And because the waste is the spent fuel, is the residual material that comes out of the reactor, you don’t have a lot of it.

RS: So how, help us visualize how much there is, say, from the U.S. feed.

JB: So you can use a lot of different analogies. The one that I think is gonna stick the most, I think with a lay audience, if an individual were to use only nuclear energy for his or her energy needs throughout the lifetime, that you would produce an amount of spent fuel or waste that would fit within a coffee cup. That’s it. That would be the amount…

KM: For a single person.

JB: For a single person is a coffee cup. Now, of course, if you start producing that energy for millions or billions, it adds up, but how much does it add up? So in the United States, we have had nuclear reactors, the nuclear industry for close to maybe 60 years now. At the moment, and for the past 20 plus years, has been generating 20% of our electricity. Incidentally, that translates to roughly 50% of our low-carbon electricity. So it’s a big impact on our low-carbon energy infrastructure. And the accumulated waste for 20% of the electricity in the United States from the past 40 or 50 years or whatever it is, would basically fit within a football field, about 10 meters tall. That’s it. For the whole country, that’s the amount of high-level waste or spent fuel that we’ve generated. So again, not a lot of material.

KM: But even though, as you say, it’s not that big, maybe it’s not that dangerous, there still seem to be fights over people being like, yeah, but I don’t want it near me.

JB: Oh, absolutely. And I think what it has to do with is the way in which the process to select license and eventually operate a final repository, the way in which that process has evolved in the United States has been characteristically dysfunctional, if I can put it that way. And I would say the story of Yucca Mountain and the geological repository for high-level nuclear waste is one of the brightest examples of how dysfunctional our politics are.

RS: Now, the Finns have found a way, right?

JB: Yes, so I was gonna get to that, right? So this is the U.S., right? And there are other countries that have followed an equally inefficient and dysfunctional process, but there are also countries that have gotten this right. And yeah, you mentioned Finland is one.

RS: These high-functioning Northern European countries.

KM: What do they do with that?

JB: The Nordics are doing well in that department. France also, which of course uses so much nuclear energy in their energy mix, is not that far behind. And so in the three countries that I just mentioned, Finland, I don’t think I mentioned Sweden, but Sweden is the second. And then the third is France. The process of site identification, analysis, licensing, et cetera, has been a lot healthier in the United States. And so Finland is gonna be the first country to cross the finish line. They have excavated and it’s now built a final repository. It happens to be co-located with an existing nuclear power plant, which I think helps dramatically also with acceptance and comfort, because these are communities that have been living with a nuclear power plant for decades. So their neighbor works at a nuclear power plant. They themselves work at a nuclear power plant. So they have developed a level of comfort and confidence in the technology. And so it’s expected to open and start to accept that waste next year or the year after. I think it’s next year, actually.

RS: Are there any indications that that will lead to… Can I use the word renaissance of nuclear power in those countries?

JB: Well, in Finland, I don’t use the word renaissance because it was bad luck when we started using it 15, 16 years ago. But in Finland, it never stopped in a sense that it’s a country that has been growing its reliance on nuclear constantly in spite of being the host of one of the least successful new build projects on the Olkiluoto 3, which really took at least twice as long as it was supposed to and cost a lot of money. So Finland is another one of those countries where they made the decision earlier on that nuclear would be part of their mix. And they very deliberately went through a rational process of approval and public acceptance and all of that. And as well coming up in power with a solution for the waste, et cetera, et cetera. And so now I forgot what the percentage is, but it’s over, I think, 30% of their electricity accounts for nuclear, and they have appetite for more.

RS: And a lot of heat they need too.

JB: And they need heat for the winter as well as for the industries. It’s a small country in terms of population, but they’re pretty industry heavy and energy hungry in that sense. And so nuclear will grow there. Sweden’s similar, right? They went from relying a lot on nuclear to actually having at one point a nuclear phase out policy. And then a couple of years ago, I think the new government came in and says, no, no, no, we’re not gonna phase it out. In fact, we wanna rebuild again. And any power with all of this, they had this process of identifying a site for their final repository of the waste. And it was wonderful because they actually had multiple communities that competed to be the host of this site. And that speaks volume about their trust, I think, that people have in their government and the health of the decision-making process opposed to…

KM: It’s like an Amazon second headquarters, but functional.

RS: So you used that word or that phrase “public trust.” I mean, how do we get it back in the U.S. to enable that sort of progress to occur?

JB: I’m not sure that I’m… This is a question that goes so far beyond nuclear.

KM: You need like a couple more degrees and sociology…

JB: Well, but I guess what I mean is that it’s not just nuclear. I mean, everything, our public debate is so broken at the moment on everything. In fact, I would

almost say nuclear is miraculously one of the few topics on which at least the two parties seem to agree that they both want more. They disagree on everything. But when it comes to tough decisions like where to put a repository, et cetera, at the moment to me seems pretty hopeless in the United States. And again, nuclear is not the only example.

RS: I was intrigued looking at the designs of these Northern European repositories that unlike Yucca, where they made a huge effort to find a mountain that enabled you to put the waste underground, but a mountain whose water table was so far below the mountain that you were almost guaranteed that over a very long period of time, water would never enter the repository. But the Finns put it below the water table.

JB: Well, geology matters, right? So the geology in Scandinavia is also very conducive to this type of repositories because it’s granite, it has very low porosity, very low mobility. But we don’t have a shortage of great sites.

RS: It doesn’t take a Yucca mountain.

JB: No, it doesn’t take a Yucca mountain. But you know the history of Yucca mountain? It was chosen not because of its good geology, it was chosen for political reasons. At that time, in the Senate, the state of Nevada was not well, was not represented very seniorly, so to speak. And so they pulled the shortest straw, I suppose. It doesn’t help that Nevada is one of several states that doesn’t actually benefit from nuclear energy because they don’t have nuclear reactors, right? So in a sense, you can see why the initial conditions were bad. We make a lot of sense to find a site in Illinois or Tennessee or North Carolina, because those are states that rely heavily on nuclear. So they would also see the point of taking care of the waste.

KM: I think for many people, when you talk about nuclear, the sort of elephant in the room is always Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island. How do you talk to people or to politicians who are trying to talk to their own constituents about like, we’re gonna be able to build a nuclear power plant but avoid these mistakes. How do you sort of deal with people’s knowledge and fear?

JB: Well, the first point I usually make is that the technology evolves, right? So it’s a little bit like cars, right? They’ve been around for the longest time, but if you’re buying a car now, you’re not buying a German Trabant from the 1970s, you’re probably buying a Mercedes latest model and it has safety belts, it’s got a whole bunch of sensors, and safety features that make it a lot more reliable and safe than the old model. So the same is true for nuclear.

The difference though is that a lot of our reactor is in operation now were built back in the 70s and the 80s, but they’ve been retrofitted, they’ve been upgraded. I mean, the fact that the machine or the plant has been there for several decades doesn’t mean that it’s the same plant than when it was built. And not to put a positive spin on accidents, accidents were painful, certainly damaged the reputation and economically the industry a big deal, but each accident objectively has been also a learning experience, and the reliability and safety of the plants around the world, not just in the countries that experienced the accidents have improved as a result of the accidents. So lots of lessons learned.

For all three of them, you mentioned Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, I would say the one that is maybe least interesting but at the same time most spectacular is Chernobyl. And I say least interesting because it happened for a technology and for a cultural context that are so in many ways irrelevant to our own, that it’s hard to draw a lot of lessons other than very high level about the arrogance of human beings thinking that they can do whatever they want and not pay any price for them. But the two accidents have been a lot more interesting and consequential for the industry on a world scale were Three Mile Island, which was a serious accident because they had a partial meltdown of the core and that particular reactor never operated again. But at the same time, also show that the safety structures that are built into these reactors are very robust because that was a serious accident but there was essentially no release or activity of the containment structure functioned perfectly well. And then Fukushima, which is a lot more recent.

KM: …again, technology from 2011.

JB: In that case also good lessons learned about the importance of what we call external events, things like earthquake and tsunami beyond design basis. This is all jargon, but what that means is that you thought that the maximum credible accident that you can have at this site would be X, but in fact, mother nature gave you X plus 20%. How do you cope with that? Because you can over-engineer and over-build, et cetera, et cetera, but at one point you got to draw a line. Otherwise, you’re never gonna use these machines because they become too expensive. So then you have to be more clever. You have to have a way to assess what is the probability that these things happen. But also if they do happen, you have to have more robust mitigation measures in place. So all of this has been good learning experience. And particularly after Fukushima, I would say because it’s so recent and the industry on a global scale is so well integrated, the lessons learned have percolated really across the whole fleet worldwide.

KM: So like Fukushima made every nuclear plant get better.

JB: Absolutely, absolutely.

RS: So indications are, as far as I know, young people are more positive about nuclear energy than older people like say us, me, who experienced Fukushima and TMI and Chernobyl. Is that something you’re seeing and does it make you feel optimistic about the future of nuclear power here?

JB: Yeah, we see it. I think it’s, again, very much country dependent. There are some interesting studies here that look at the demographics within different countries. They look even at political orientation, gender, everything matters and in different ways, et cetera. But if you look at sort of averages in the U.S., at the moment, it’s the support for nuclear, let me call it generic support for nuclear, is at an all-time high. I mean, you’re looking at mid-70%, which is really, really stellar. Now, you think, okay, well, I’m here and let’s open a bottle of champagne, right? That’s great. People love nuclear. I tend to be not skeptical, but I tend not to overestimate that because there is a difference in my opinion between generic support and specific support. And I’m gonna elaborate on that. Generic support is at a time of crisis, particularly when energy prices are high or there is a perception that energy supply may not be as secure, all energy technologies sound good. Like, hey, energy costs a lot of money and I don’t know if I have enough. Can nuclear provide it? Why not? You know, like so. So it’s good. And that’s great. And the same is true for renewables, skyrocket, you know, 90 % plus. We love solar, wind. But there is a difference between that kind of support and then, hey, in your town, in your county, next door, we’re gonna put a nuclear reactor or a wind farm.

KM: I was gonna say same with windmills, right? I think people are generically for it but against it in their town.

JB: I mean, look at all the issues we’re having here in New England, right? Be lovely to bring in some hydropower from Quebec. But you gotta put those transmission lines through New Hampshire and Vermont. They don’t want it. So then NIMBYism comes in, right? Not in my backyard. And that’s an issue.

KM: And is that a huge problem, you think, in the U.S.?

JB: So for nuclear greenfield, possibly, although not a lot of people are proposing greenfield. For brownfield, which means adding nuclear reactors to sites that already have nuclear power plants has not been an issue at all.

KM: And greenfield, I guess, would just mean like putting it in a field somewhere.

JB: No, it simply means a site that has no history of nuclear energy.

KM: A new place.

JB: A new place. If you try to put it at existing nuclear power plant sites, we have not seen any real opposition. In fact, typically the locals will love it. They want more. Because again, I think you develop a comfort and confidence in the technology by simply living in those areas. And it’s not just that. It’s also the economic benefit, which are very substantial. They pay, the plant pays a lot of local taxes. It pays for a lot of well-paid jobs, right? It creates a lot of well-paid jobs. So there are a few plants that were shut down, like you said at the beginning, the fleet is shrinking. In the U.S., for a while, it was slowly shrinking. Maybe a dozen reactors there, maybe less than a dozen, that were shut down. Some for economic reasons, others because of botched component replacement, et cetera. But they shut down. And we saw two clear effects every time. One, environmentally, emissions always went up in that state. You shut down a nuclear power plant. There is this naive expectation, oh, we’re gonna replace it with solar, wind. Well, yes, in principle, you could replace it with solar and wind. In practice, you’re replacing it with a little bit of solar, wind and a lot of natural gas. And so the emissions go up. But number two, importantly, the counties and towns where these reactors or this power plant were operating, they went through very, very rough times, economically speaking. Because again, these are big sort of engines, economic engines for the local economy.

RS: So we’ve got tremendous operating record. We’ve got new designs coming online, different scales of reactors that can fit into different applications, reactors that might not require these external infrastructures, make them easier to install. I’m even beginning to feel optimistic about nuclear. I mean, when you look out 10, 20 years, are you seeing a lot of nuclear power globally and in the United States in particular?

JB: At the moment, in terms of general support and policies at the government level, in media, NGOs, environmental organizations, that is probably an all-time high. I’ve never seen so much support for nuclear. So that’s all good, right?

Is that automatically gonna translate into a, impetuous growth of nuclear in the U.S. or on a global scale? Not necessarily. And the reason for that is twofold. We talked a lot about economics and a lot about cost. Unless the industry, particularly in the U.S. and Western Europe, can bring down the cost of new construction, I don’t see this technology being adopted widely. And number two, unless they diversify a little bit their mindset, it’s not just about the power grid. The grid is fundamentally a commodity market. There is not a lot of money to be made there. If they, on the other end, they go more decisively for markets in which nuclear energy is valued more because of its attributes, because it produces, as we said over and over again, not just electricity, but heating and electricity. So you got cogeneration because it’s carbon free, because it’s reliable, et cetera. Unless you can monetize a little bit more of those features, I also don’t see it growing much. So, we’ll see.

And a lot of this is in the hands, frankly, of the industry. They got to sort of pull their act together. Very good, as we said in Asia, nuclear industry, very good there. In the U.S., very, very good at running the plants, right? The industry here runs the existing plants exceptionally well. The capacity factors are through the roof, very efficient, very safe, very reliable. But building new ones, the record doesn’t show that they’re very good. And they got to become good because growth means you got to build new plants. So at the moment, we’re in sort of that potential inflection point. It could go up, it could go down, it could stay the same, very hard to tell. I’m also optimistic because I’m by nature optimistic, but there are still big, big uncertainties there.

KM: Jacopo Buongiorno is a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT. Thanks for being here.

JB: Yeah, thanks.

RS: Thanks, Jacopo. Interesting conversation.

KM: What if it works? is a production of the MIT Energy Initiative. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes and a lot more at energy.mit.edu/podcasts and you can learn more about the work of the Energy initiative and the energy transition at energy.mit.edu. Our original podcast artwork is by Zeitler Design. Special thanks to all the people at MITEI and MIT who make this show possible. I’m Kara Miller.

RS: And I’m Rob Stoner.

KM: Thanks for listening.