Upstream Upper Intermediate Unit 4
Andree Vandestreek
However, forging a promising future for the domestic advanced nuclear sector will require increasing investment and policy support. Such efforts will generate far-reaching national benefits in both the near-term and long-term.
This report uses a high-resolution nationwide model of the United States electricity sector to demonstrate how advanced nuclear reactors might play a major role in a least-cost plan to transition the power grid entirely to clean energy sources by 2050, assuming that the first advanced reactors are available for deployment by 2030. A range of input assumptions were developed to encompass uncertainty in cost and learning rates to estimate the outer bounds of potential future deployment. Across these scenarios, the model chooses to deploy a large quantity of advanced nuclear power plants (Figure ES-1). Even in the case that first-of-a-kind advanced reactors are deployed at the high end of current cost estimates and benefit from very little technological learning as additional units are deployed, advanced nuclear captures a significant share of future electricity generation. This finding indicates that advanced nuclear energy technology provides important and extremely valuable benefits to the electricity system.
In particular, advanced nuclear reactors efficiently complement other clean energy technologies like wind and solar power, balancing out variations in generation over time to reliably meet US electricity demand. The flexibility of advanced nuclear power can produce long-term cost savings as America transitions to a clean energy system.
This modeling study shows that a US clean energy transition incorporating advanced nuclear energy could require cumulative capital investment for advanced nuclear power plant construction on the order of $150 to $220 billion by 2035, growing to a total of $830 billion to $1.1 trillion by 2050 (Figure ES-2). Early capital investment and learning-by-doing lead to substantial reductions in project costs and levelized electricity costs for advanced nuclear technologies, resulting in the large-scale nationwide deployment of new reactors.
Advanced nuclear reactors can play a key role in cost-effective decarbonization of the national power sector, reliably supporting a high-renewables energy system. Updated, realistic cost assumptions and accurate operational characteristics reveal that advanced nuclear technologies provide high value for a clean electricity grid and possess significant market potential. Emerging advanced nuclear technologies will ultimately compete in the marketplace based on cost, operating parameters, and the ability to meet diverse customer needs, shifting the balance among which technologies become dominant. Early advanced nuclear deployments may be most competitive or efficient for specific target markets and customers, including existing nuclear power sites, sites with retiring fossil fuel plants, remote or island communities, and military installations. As advanced reactor deployment expands, however, cost improvements over time, and the need for firm energy that provides the required operational characteristics can drive large-scale nationwide adoption in support of a wider affordable clean energy strategy.
We currently live in an era of rapid technological innovation across all domains of the global energy sector. A vast wave of reinvention is transforming every part of the modern energy system, from long-distance transmission to energy storage, from residential heating to power grid control. The remarkable recent progress in advanced nuclear reactor designs is one of the most exciting ongoing developments in the energy world, given their potential to not only generate heat and power safely, reliably, and flexibly but also produce this energy without emitting carbon pollution.
While numerous forms of clean electricity generation like solar, wind, and hydroelectricity are already widely deployable today, nuclear power offers a number of unique advantages that help complement and support the deployment of other zero-carbon emissions technologies, thereby strongly incentivizing future advanced nuclear projects.
First, nuclear reactors produce substantially more energy relative to their land footprint than solar and wind projects, which require over 30x and 100x the land area for the same nameplate generating capacity. With nationwide land requirements for renewable energy sources under some modeled future scenarios exceeding the area of West Virginia, land use and siting constraints may increasingly favor nuclear projects. Nuclear facilities can also be located more flexibly than renewable projects that depend on sun and wind conditions. Combined with the potential ability of new microreactors and small reactors to match the needs of a range of customers from rural and island communities to remote industrial sites like mines, advanced reactors have the potential to serve a more diverse set of markets than previous generations of large, centralized nuclear power stations. Nuclear deployments, if proactively planned, could thus help reduce system-wide costs for a clean energy transition by limiting excess transmission and new grid infrastructure that extensive wind and solar installations would otherwise require.
Furthermore, many advanced reactors under development are being designed for high compatibility with variable renewable generation, with desirable operating characteristics such as accelerated ramping of generation to balance fluctuations in renewable output and even thermal energy storage capabilities. Academic research suggests that pairing reliable, clean, firm electricity from sources like nuclear power with variable renewable generation makes planned transitions to clean energy systems more affordable.
As an additional utility beyond that provided by solar and wind resources, nuclear reactors also generate useful heat and steam that can be utilized in industrial processes like desalination and hydrogen electrolysis. In comparison to traditional nuclear reactors, some advanced reactor designs can produce hotter outlet steam that can enable higher-efficiency hydrogen production from high-temperature water splitting and replace fossil fuel combustion in a wider range of industrial activities like petrochemical and cement manufacturing. Advanced reactors thus possess versatile nonelectric applications in industries well beyond the power sector.
There are no advanced nuclear energy projects currently in operation or under construction in the United States, but several reactor designs are at various stages of licensing and regulatory approval. A growing number of initial planned projects have already been announced, including but not limited to the BWRX-300 project near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Natrium project in Kemmerer, Wyoming. Estimated project completion dates typically lie in the late 2020s and early 2030s, with plans to expand deployment further upon successful demonstration.
Successful demonstrations and deployments of new advanced designs will rapidly accelerate progress towards widespread commercialization. Building a vibrant advanced nuclear industry in the United States will require sharp strategic planning. Industry stakeholders will need to proactively navigate policy obstacles, cultivate adequate fuel supply and manufacturing capacity, ensure sufficient capital investment, skillfully manage financial risks, and more. The process of recruiting, training, retaining, and growing the talent pool necessary to license, fabricate, assemble, operate and maintain next-generation reactors is both a challenge and opportunity for the advanced reactor sector.
This report seeks to describe, for policymakers and financiers, the key components that any successful advanced nuclear deployment plan will have to include. Using updated assumptions for advanced nuclear costs and cost improvements over time, this study modeled the evolution of the US power grid over the next three decades using the Weather-Informed energy Systems: for design, operations and markets-Planning Version (WIS:dom-P) optimization model, developed by Vibrant Clean Energy, LLC (VCE). The model evaluates the full energy system and designs a future net-zero CO2 power sector that meets demand at minimal cost.
This analysis finds considerable potential for advanced reactors to support future US electricity needs and climate progress. Inclusion of advanced nuclear designs among the available technology options for a clean energy transition leads to large-scale advanced reactor deployment as part of a least-cost pathway to a clean electricity future. However, the degree to which the United States can successfully develop an advanced nuclear energy sector over the next 15 years will crucially depend upon mobilizing sufficient capital investment and public policy support starting immediately from the present day.
The following chapters explain the high potential importance of advanced nuclear power to the future US energy sector and propose key investments, strategies, and policies that will help unlock the full potential of this emerging, promising, and powerful set of clean energy technologies.
New technologies are often expensive when first introduced, becoming increasingly cheaper, more affordable, and more competitive with time as more capacity is deployed. Indeed, one of the most encouraging clean energy triumphs of the past decade has been the rapid and dramatic reduction in the price of solar photovoltaic modules, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries. The cost of 1 megawatt-hour (MWh) of solar electricity or lithium-ion battery storage capacity has fallen by around 85 percent from 2010 to 2022. These shifts are already catalyzing fundamental changes in the electricity sector in many parts of the world. Worldwide solar capacity reached 707.5 gigawatts (GW) in 2020, growing 18 times relative to installed capacity at the start of the decade, while global wind capacity quadrupled over the same period.
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