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Can Safer Fuel Power A Nuclear Energy Boom?

adminAugust 31, 20265 Mins read1

Can Safer Fuel Power A Nuclear Energy Boom?

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(*Note: Current Climate will take Sept. 7 off for the Labor Day holiday, and return on Monday, Sept. 14).

Welcome back to Current Climate. In the portfolio of carbon-free energy options, nuclear power is compelling but hasn’t been as simple a choice as wind, solar, hydro and geothermal owing to unique challenges: a lengthy permitting process, safely managing radioactive waste and minimizing any risk of a meltdown.

Nuclear engineer Kurt Terrani, cofounder and CEO of Standard Nuclear, believes the key to making fission-generated electricity more appealing lies in eliminating a major risk associated with traditional reactor fuel: overheating when uranium-235 fuel rods aren’t kept sufficiently cool.

To do that, his Oak Ridge, Tennessee-based company, which went public in July, is making an advanced nuclear fuel called TRISO, in which the uranium is contained in a tiny, seed-like ceramic casing, rather than a fuel rod, doesn’t need constant water cooling and isn’t prone to overheating.

“When bad things happen to [traditional] reactors, they get hot and things can melt. We don’t want radioactivity to get out, so historically they went ahead and built big concrete containment buildings,” he told Forbes. “And then at some point somebody was like, ‘Hey, why don’t we just make a fuel that doesn’t melt, that doesn’t release radioactivity, so we don’t have to rely on the concrete and steel. Let’s have a fuel that keeps the radioactivity within.’”

And while the 100 or so light-water nuclear plants operating around the U.S. would need modifications to use TRISO, the rise of startups developing a new generation of smaller reactors ensures robust demand for Standard’s fuel. Last week, it announced plans to supply at least a metric ton of the material, and as much as eight metric tons by 2035, to Antora Energy for use in small reactors. That followed recent deals to provide fuel to Radiant Industries and the U.S. Army, for use in small reactors to power military bases. In the company’s first earnings call last week, Standard reported a contract backlog totaling $576.9 million.

That’s likely to keep growing as the Trump administration is aggressively promoting an expansion of nuclear power, particularly of the new small reactors that are much cheaper and faster to build than the conventional variety. Terrani believes Standard Nuclear is the only company in the world currently set up to produce TRISO at industrial scale and sees huge potential for the fuel over the next decade.

“We’re going to be the biggest supplier of TRISO anywhere in the world, and see markets for microreactors serving defense applications, behind the meter, and ultimately the grid,” Terrani said. “We see markets in space applications, and we also see markets in sea-based shipping to displace all the carbon that those emit. The applications are huge, and everybody’s honing in on it because they want to have a system that’s inherently safe.”

The Big Read

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Human-Caused Climate Change Is Making El Niño Stronger, Corals Show

With a so-called “Godzilla” El Niño already strengthening in the Pacific, scientists last week revealed that the ocean warming phenomenon is more powerful than at any point in the last 1,000 years—and human-caused climate change is the reason why.

El Niño is the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that reshapes weather patterns worldwide, fueling droughts in some regions and floods, storms and heatwaves in others. A new study of Pacific corals, published Thursday in the journal Science, shows that El Niño variability in the eastern Pacific is now 36.5% stronger than it was before the industrial era, a jump that the study’s authors say is too large to be explained by anything except planetary warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

The study, led by Professor Julia Cole, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Michigan, went to great lengths to rule out every natural explanation for the strengthening of the eastern Pacific El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.

Cole and her colleagues studied ocean coral chemistry which, much like tree rings can be used to count years, records changes in ocean temperatures to develop a data set spanning 1,000 years. They compared the resulting data against 12 climate models simulating the same period under natural forces alone, including volcanic eruptions, shifts in the sun’s output, and the climate system’s own internal noise—but none produced a swing as large as the one recorded in the coral. The team then checked whether the phenomenon lined up with two well-known natural climate episodes, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age. It didn’t.

Hot Topic

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Peter Davidson, CEO of Aligned Climate Capital, on strong demand for community solar projects

Demand for renewable energy, especially solar and battery systems, seems extremely high. Do you think that will change in the foreseeable future?

At the risk of being Pollyannaish, I think it just looks great. It’s been great. It’s continuing to be great. The federal government has tried everything they can to slow down the deployment of renewables, and it’s just completely failed. Before Trump got into office, since he’s been in office, the deployment of wind, solar and batteries, I think, was 93% of [new power] built last year. And that’s not just here in the U.S. It’s around the world. So it won.

And it won because it’s cheaper. It’s cheaper, and it’s faster to market. … Modules have come down in price and batteries.

Aligned Capital focuses on building smaller-scale systems, rather than massive solar farms. What’s the advantage of that approach?

People don’t really understand the grid interconnection issues. The reason solar and storage have really been winning, wherever it comes up to be competitive, is because you can get a project like what we do, a distributed energy project, done faster.

There are still problems with the queue if it’s a utility-scale project, but if it’s kind of that middle market where we function, anywhere from one megawatt to 20 megawatts, it’s just a much simpler regulatory process given the way the grid is configured. It’s easier and quicker to connect. And when there’s such rising demand for electricity, that’s why it’s winning. It’s lower cost, quicker to market.

Are you finding that the community solar projects you’re backing are in competition with data centers, in terms of costs for solar panels and batteries?

It’s really a whole different market over the last two years, even since we raised [our last fund], in that any form of energy that can be brought to the grid, someone’s going to pay for it and will pay much more than they were a year or two ago. That’s why it’s nice to be in the energy-producing business, the power-producing business.

Data centers need huge amounts of energy, so it’s a long time before they can get those interconnections on utility-scale solar. And it’s like five or six years to get a new turbine for a gas plant. What we really do is we’re just adding power to the grid. Data centers are just buying from the grid. Utilities are the ones who really like what we’re doing, and want more and more of what we’re doing. And then they sell it off.

Data centers are a big concept, but they’re not really that many of them up and running yet. It’s coming. Data centers are a driver, but it’s really the electrification of the economy. That’s the real driver.