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Nuclear energy may be seeing a renaissance

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Nuclear energy may be seeing a renaissance in the U.S. due to big tech companies with voracious appetites for electricity. But it's expensive. Darian Woods and Wailin Wong of the Indicator talked to the company working with Google to bring costs down.

WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: In October, Google announced it would buy a ton of nuclear energy from a company called Kairos Power starting in 2030.

DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Google's deal is for energy from what's called small modular reactors.

WONG: Now, to be clear, there are no modern small modular reactors producing energy commercially in the U.S. right now. But they are one proposed answer to a big issue with traditional nuclear power, which is that it's really expensive. Mike Laufer is the CEO of Kairos Power, the company that Google is working with.

MIKE LAUFER: Nuclear plants today, in the conventional way, is really expensive. And it's not obviously going to be economically better than alternative sources.

WOODS: Throughout the 1950s and '60s, nuclear engineers initially tried to drive down costs by harnessing economies of scale. So instead of building a few medium-sized reactors, you could build one really enormous one. And that did work in bringing down electricity costs in many cases. But the costs of building, starting, and eventually decommissioning a nuclear power plant are enormous.

WONG: Nuclear power plants are also susceptible to cost overruns. The average nuclear plant ends up at more than double the planned expense.

WOODS: There are two major reasons for these cost overruns. First, each plant is unique - different locations, different sizes. That makes it easier to mess something up when the new design doesn't account for all eventualities.

WONG: The second reason is that because it takes so long to build a plant, experience is hard to find.

WOODS: Small nuclear modular reactors aim to address both those problems. By building small and modular, they'll hopefully be simplified. And that'll allow more people to become experts at building them.

LAUFER: Actually building things and getting that experience and knowing where to invest time and energy is absolutely crucial. And what's very elusive in nuclear technology is being able to follow that learning curve.

WONG: A learning curve, meaning basically, each time something is built, developers get experience that leads to a more efficient process. And therefore, that thing gets cheaper to produce. Solar and wind are good examples with costs now a tiny fraction of what they were a couple of decades ago.

WOODS: Even if Mike's company Kairos does succeed in eventually building cheaper modular nuclear reactors, nuclear power still has its critics. One criticism is that given the need to decarbonize quickly, we just don't have the time to wait for small modular reactors to get developed, to get approved by the authorities and start producing energy on a commercial basis. This could be a decadeslong process.

WONG: We brought this to Mike Laufer, whose deal with Google is that they'll start producing energy in 2030.

LAUFER: 2030 is certainly an aggressive timeline. And Kairos and Google both share a strong sense of urgency that we need demonstrations, and we need them quickly. You know, it's not other technologies which are the enemy or the competition. It's carbon. Carbon is the enemy. So basically, any strategy or technology which allows us to really decarbonize, those are going to be highly valued. Those are going to be good things, in my view, for the system overall.

WOODS: Now, the small modular reactor experiment is bolstered by subsidies, the Inflation Reduction Act in particular. And the fate of those subsidies remains to be seen under President-elect Trump and the new Congress.

WONG: Wailin Wong.

WOODS: Darian Woods, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MARISA ANDERSON'S "HESITATION THEME AND VARIATION BLUES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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