US sets targets to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050
13 November 2024
The United States announced new nuclear energy deployment targets at the UN climate summit (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. As outlined in the framework, the aim is to deploy 200 GW of net new nuclear energy capacity by 2050, at least tripling current US capacity. The net new capacity gains are anticipated to come from multiple sources, including building new nuclear power plants, uprating existing reactors, and restarting reactors that have retired for economic reasons.
Achieving this long-term target will be enabled by achieving the following nearer term targets:
Jumpstarting the nuclear energy deployment ecosystemwith 35 GW of new capacity by 2035 that will be operating or under construction in the United States.
Accelerating the capability of the nuclear energy deployment ecosystem by ramping to a sustained pace of producing 15 GW per year in the United States by 2040, in support of both US and global project deployments.
The framework for expanding nuclear energy builds on existing efforts across the Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of Defense, and other agencies by outlining actions that the US government can take, within existing statutory authorities to expand nuclear energy, in collaboration with the private sector and power customers. This framework outlines more than 30 specific actions across nine key pillars:
Building new large, gigawatt-scale reactors
Building small modular reactors (SMRs)
Building microreactors
Extending and expanding existing reactors, through license renewals, power uprates, and restarting recently retired reactors
Improving licensing and permitting
Developing the workforce
Developing component supply chains
Developing fuel cycle supply chains
Managing spent nuclear fuel
The targets aim to restore and exceed the US nuclear energy industry’s deployment capacity decades ago. Achieving these targets into a new era of nuclear energy deployment will require active collaboration among all public and private stakeholders in the domestic and international nuclear power sector, according to the Biden Administration.
1. Cost?
2. Dead letter anyway with the change of administration, who intend to 'drill baby, drill' ?
Posted by: Davemart | 13 November 2024 at 01:44 AM
Very welcome.
With a likely reduced NIMBYism; defanged EPA; rich and motivated and connected AI/chip/datacentre industry now very intolerant of red tape and weaponized land-use-/rare ecosystem-/ indigenous culture-delay tactics; an energy-from-anywhere-domestic mindset; a dig for fossil-fuel or geologic hydrogen or lithium or a whole wide range of strategic minerals mentality; -- this is the culture of a build/ work/ grow/ risk/ prosper that was seriously undermined by an anti-civilization movement bent on 'onus to prove perfectly clean and safe' which meant 'nothing' was good enough -- which of course meant that these 'crusaders' for green and ethical could sit on their pensions, puff-jobs, and grants with no risk to them while society became poor, inefficient, and demoralized. The high-risk/high-benefit growth and success mentality is back in the US, UK and less-so EU - to lead the World.
Posted by: Jer | 13 November 2024 at 04:14 AM
Yay! Faith in vaporware! How did they leave out the breakthroughs in fusion? PV is under a $1/W to build and wind is getting there. The only problem with storage is that it kills the gravy business for the generators, peak power arbitrage. Rent seeking, the heart and soul of the free market.
Posted by: Albert E Short | 13 November 2024 at 10:10 AM
This is a very ambitious projection, triple the capacity over the next 25 years is huge. I would prefer that they add to the mix fast reactor development so that by 2050 we have plenty of those online.
Posted by: SJC | 13 November 2024 at 11:47 AM
So, I live in Denmark where we are rapidly approaching 70% of our electricity from wind and solar. Underpinned, of course, by interconnectors to neighboring countries with higher capacity than our average power consumption.
Just getting out of about a week of 'Dunkelflaute', i.e. overcast and nearly no wind, causing very high power prices.
We are almost paying as much in tarifs for power transport as for the power itself due to required investments in increased transmission capacity to transport all of this wind and solar (I have seen at one point wind+solar generation at 160% of total national power consumption). Then comes all the required green hydrogen plants, which I work with professionally, btw, and much more.
The cost of the individual kWh is only part of the total cost of Renewable+transmission+storage+conversion, etc. I am not saying it cannot work. I believe completely that it can, but I also think it will be almost as expensive as nuclear is today to reach zero CO2 emission via that route, and I believe there is great potential to make nuclear cheaper again.
PS: there is mounting opposition to solar fields in Denmark, because the neighbors hate them. Individual lots are quite small in Denmark - a remnant from the ownership structure 200+ years ago.
I just see nuclear as a much more attractive and forward-looking way to get electricity. In some places, such as US South-West or the Middle East, nuclear+solar is perfect, producing the daytime A/C peak with solar and base load with 'nucular'.
Posted by: Thomas Pedersen | 13 November 2024 at 01:47 PM
"Drill baby drill' is for transportation fuel. There is still a huge appetite for electricity to feed the rapid growth in AI and in digital currency mining that nuclear energy will be ideal vs the intermittency of solar and wind, and Big Techs are investing heavily in nuclear to provide reliable and steady electricity on 24/7 basis.
Solar and Wind would best be used to make Green Hydrogen using grid-surplus electricity, and the green hydrogen is very valuable as industrial feed stock, including the production of fertilizer and steel and myriad of chemical synthetic processes.
Green hydrogen can one day replace natural gas in the natural distribution network when the gas wells will be tapped dry.
Posted by: Roger Pham | 13 November 2024 at 01:55 PM
LOL, the must expensive electricity there is
Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy
Posted by: dursun | 13 November 2024 at 04:53 PM
The best news of the past week and, in my opinion, the best chance of reaching low emission electrical power. The new administration may be more favorable to nuclear power than some of the renewable power, especially off-shore wind but who knows as Trump is largely inept and never got much done before other than a tax cut for the wealthy.
@dursan, before laughing out loud, you should more carefully read and understand your link on Levelized Cost of Energy. The lowest cost is for existing gas combined cycle at $30/MWhr followed closely by existing nuclear at $32/MWhr . The cost for new nuclear represents the cost of the recently commissioned Vogtle 3 and 4 which were a disaster in terms of delays, etc. Even then, the costs fall within the range of
utility solar plus storage and is less than roof top solar is close to off-shore wind without storage. Also, none of renewables include the cost added transmission lines. Hopefully, the costs for nuclear power will fall with factory manufactured small modular reactors.
Also the title for the chart is: "Selected renewable energy generation technologies remain cost-competitive with conventional generation technologies under certain circumstances" Note the qualifying words "Selected" and "under some circumstances".
Posted by: sd | 13 November 2024 at 07:21 PM
@ sd:
I'm sure that the price of $32/MWhr you mentioned does not include the safe storage of radioactive wastes for the next time period of ad infinitum.
I'm all for fusion but as far as fission is concerned, Trump can take it all and shove it.
Posted by: yoatmon | 14 November 2024 at 07:46 AM
"How did they leave out the breakthroughs in fusion?"
Science published an interesting article about the difficulties of deuterium/tritium (DT) fusion development (https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started).
Tritium is extremely rare. Most of it comes from CANDU heavy water reactors half of which are due to be retired at the end of this decade. When ITER starts doing DT shots it will consume most of the worlds supply of tritium making if difficult for other developers to get the supply they need. We may need to build a new fleet of CANDU reactors just to get through the DT fusion development stage.
A working DT fusion reactor is supposed to breed its own supply of tritium from lithium included in the reactor blanket. It is estimated that at DT reactor will produce only slightly more tritium it consumes. The margin is tight and until we have a working fusion reactor with high neutron flux we do not know for sure that the supply loop will close.
Also as far as I know the problem of neutron hardening of reactor components has not yet been solved.
Of course there are other fusion options that do not depend on tritium such hydrogen/boron (HB) fusion and deuterium/helium3 (DH3) fusion. Both of these forms of fusion have the advantage producing very low neutron fluxes, thus avoiding the neutron hardening issue.
Boron is relatively plentiful, but the required temperature is a billion degrees compared to 150 million degrees for DT fusion so that the engineering challenges are very substantial.
DH3 fusion only requires 200 million degrees. However H3 is attained from the decay of tritium and is therefore just as rare. The company Helion (https://www.helionenergy.com/) which is pursuing DH3 fusion is planning to breed H3 inside the reactor by including an extra supply of deuterium. However, the problem of getting enough fuel to get through the development phase is still present and may require a new fleet of fission reactors.
My feeling is that if you think that we need serious reduction GHG emissions over the next several decades counting on fusion for a significant portion of those reductions is probably not wise.
Posted by: Roger Brown | 14 November 2024 at 08:51 AM
@Roger Brown - I was being facetious - in high school in 1978 in read Amasa Bishop's "Project Sherwood - the US Program in Controlled Fusion" written ~ 1957. Quite a long history of being 20 years away.
Posted by: Albert E Short | 14 November 2024 at 09:30 AM
yoatmon, It is time to quit thinking of spent nuclear fuel as waste. It is a valuable resource that can be used as fuel for fast reactors. Currently we have enough depleted uranium (U-238) that along with our spent nuclear fuel that would provide all of our energy for something like 700 years. Maybe by that time, we will have figured out fusion energy. Even if we get fusion energy that is feasible and might promise low enough costs in the next 10 years, it will still take another 10 or so years to build out a few commercial power plants.
Posted by: sd | 15 November 2024 at 08:18 AM
yoatman, I am not against fusion but we are not had a demonstration of practical fusion yet other than thermal nuclear weapons. But there was a review of where things stand in today's NY Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/15/climate/fusion-energy.html
I think that you can look at a few articles without paying.
Also, I have nothing against Trump showing some fission waste up you know where.
Posted by: sd | 15 November 2024 at 10:11 AM
@ sd:
They have successfully demonstrated in Australia that the H2 / Boron fusion process is a practical way to perform fusion. Presently, however, the power gain factor is too low to make it economically viable. But I'm confident that where there is a will there is also a way.
https://hb11.energy/
Posted by: yoatmon | 16 November 2024 at 05:01 AM
Fast reactors use long-term nuclear waste as fuel,
they are the answer, but first you have to know what question to ask.
Posted by: SJC | 16 November 2024 at 01:20 PM