Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Steve Shepherd is the executive director of the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative, which is promoting economic redevelopment of the site. According to Shepard, Oklo’s plan to construct the two reactors is “one of the biggest things that’s happened in decades.”
     Shepard said that the PGDP site is one of the best locations in the country for building nuclear power plants. The uranium enrichment operations consumed massive amounts of electricity. The old connections to the power grid are still in place. They will be needed to distribute the electricity generated by the new reactors.
     The southeast Ohio region also offers a trained workforce, according to Shepard. Many people who live in the area worked at the PGDP when it was enriching uranium. Many of them are now working on the cleanup of the site. They are familiar and comfortable working with nuclear materials.
     Oklo plans to purchase forty to fifty acres at the site, Shepard added. The two rectors it plans to build on the PGDP site will provide up to thirty megawatts of electricity, according to the company. At full capacity, this would be enough wattage to supply the annual electricity needs of almost twenty-five thousand homes. This estimation is based on average household energy consumption data provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
     The Oklo reactors will be much smaller than traditional nuclear power plants. Because of this, they will be cheaper, easier and faster to construct, according to Oklo. An architectural rendering on the Oklo’s website shows that Aurora reactors will be housed in a modular structure composed of triangular panels with an A-frame entrance.
     Another feature of the Aurora reactors is that they will be able to use nuclear waste from other reactors as fuel, according to Oklo. The company says that this recycling of nuclear waste has significant environmental benefits. This includes a significant reduction of the time that the nuclear waste continues to emit harmful amounts of radiation.
     Oklo’s announcement comes just a few months after Centrus Energy Corporation announced that it had signed a contract with the U.S. DoE to enrich uranium at the Piketon site. Centrus will produce a different type of enriched uranium than was previously produced at the site and will use a different method.
     The enriched uranium that Centrus produces will be the kind needed for the next generation of nuclear reactor designs currently under development by Oklo and other companies. Centrus announced that its Piketon facility is the only one licensed by the NRC to produce this kind of uranium.
     The uranium Centrus enriches under the DoE contract will be owned by the U.S. federal government. Centrus said that it would be able to scale up the facility within a few years to meet the demands of commercial nuclear power reactors.
     Chester, the spokesperson for Oklo, said that partnerships with fuel enrichers such as Centrus “will be key to ensuring fuel is available for our plants.”