Part 2 of 2 Parts
Wald discussed the need for economic production of reactors with novel designs. Triggering a nuclear renaissance, he said, will necessitate making “new products like we stamp out Boeing 737s or we used to stamp out Liberty ships. In serial production, if not mass production, economics must be key. We’ve got to design the better mousetrap and figure out how to build it and how to deliver it at competitive cost. Carbon reduction pledges will help in the market, but in the end, future nuclear power plants will rise or fall on the economics.”
Wald said that the politics must change too. Commenting on the not-in-my-backyard cliché, or NIMBY, as a common objection to proposals to build nuclear reactors near particularly neighborhoods, Wald pointed out that “some of the new reactor designs will occupy literally about as much space as a backyard. Some of the designs will have plug-and-play reactor cores with the old nuclear core going back to the manufacturer every few years” to get its spent fuel replaced with fresh fuel.
Wald mentioned a scenario in which the staff of a reactor manufacturing company’s headquarters were welcomed to a large neighborhood in a big city. A few years later residents noticed a truck had just delivered an old reactor core to the headquarters!
Wald said, “The other problem with artisanal energy policy is it doesn’t work as part of a system. Solar and wind tribalists say their costs are going down. But we’d be much better off if we put our money into collective solutions. We should invest in the electric grid. If all the money used to purchase 11-kilowatt emergency generators, like I and others have in my neighborhood, had went into the grid instead, we’d all be better off. “I think that solar and wind farms have their place, but only to the extent that they benefit the system. Adding solar panels in a place where noontime electricity prices on the grid are negative is not a good idea, although federal and state incentives may make that happen.”
Wald was asked if many more nuclear power plants were built to meet increasing demands for electricity by AI data centers, would the existing grid be able to handle the load?
He answered that “This is actually something in nuclear power’s favor,” noting that little high-voltage transmission is being built in the U.S. because of successful lawsuits based on environmental rules. “The amount of electricity transmission you need to support a new reactor is lower than what you need for wind or solar or hydro energy sources. Nuclear plants have reasonably flexible siting requirements.”
Wald may have surprised a few people in his audience because he said that he’s not sure that commercial fusion power reactors envisioned for mid-century will be needed. He said that “I think fusion seeks to solve two problems that fission does not, in fact, have. One is a shortage of fuel, and the other is radioactive waste. We don’t have a shortage of uranium, and we don’t have any shortage of plutonium if we want it. The problem of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is manageable.”
Before he left, Wald made one statement everyone agreed with. “Life is going to change!”