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     The nuclear industry has enjoyed a great deal of financial support from federal and state governments over the years. Contracts were cut for the long term with guarantees of set prices for electricity regardless of the energy market. However, the low price of natural gas, the falling prices of renewables and the rising cost of maintaining aging reactors along with changes in the energy market have made nuclear power plants less and less attractive to investors.
     Jigar Shah is the director of the Loans Program Office (LPO) at the US Department of Energy. He participated in the World Nuclear Association’s Annual Symposium recently. He said that the private sector had to be prepared to provide the funds that would be needed to take new and innovative reactor technologies from the first deployment stage to wide-scale commercial operation. He added that the LPO is in the process of developing new business models that will be needed to deploy new nuclear reactors.
     Shah pointed out that the Biden Administration has committed to decarbonizing the U.S. electric power sector by 2035. As part o this effort, the U.S. must rely on all available sources of clear energy, including nuclear power. He said, “The nuclear sector in the USA enjoys a robust track record in terms of annual operations, as measured by reliability, safety and zero-carbon generation.” Shah remarked that nuclear power currently accounts for fifty percent of U.S. carbon-free electricity generation. It supplies almost twenty percent of the country’s total electricity generation.
     However, the pace of new builds has slowed considerably when compared to other clean energy sources. “Some of this slowdown over the past decade is attributable to the great recession and the attendant loss of electricity demand growth, the rise of fracking and the increased supply of cheap natural gas. And lastly, the unfortunate accident at Fukushima. For the nuclear sector taken together, this really amounts to a near-perfect storm.”
     Shah said that the current commercial nuclear reactors options are seen as “too large for the market, too costly on an overnight basis per kilowatt or too expensive on a levelized cost of energy basis compared to alternatives, too long to construct and, taken collectively altogether, as too risky by the capital markets. However, I think we all recognize an expansion of nuclear power will be critical to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and there is an urgent need to bring new clean energy technologies to market.”
     Shah remarked that the Biden Administration has put a focus on scaling up commercial deployment of the next generation of nuclear power technology. This new generation of nuclear power reactors includes some smaller and more flexible advanced reactor designs as well as the new advanced fuels that will be required to operate them. “With these new innovative technologies (such as small modular reactors (SMRs) and microreactors), when combined with innovations in manufacturing, product delivery models and innovations in financing led by the LPO, utilities and other potential buyers of nuclear power plants can once again begin to order new units for deployment.”
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