America's coal communities could help the United States triple its nuclear power

A bulldozer moves coal that will be burned to generate electricity at American Electric Power's coal-fired power plant in Winfield, West Virginia.

Luc Sharrett | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Three Mile Island's planned restart is a step forward for nuclear power, but the United States must deploy new plants to meet growing demand for electricity, one of the top nuclear officials said this week of the country.

The United States must at least triple its nuclear fleet to meet demand, reduce carbon dioxide emissions and ensure the country's energy security, said Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary of the department's Office of Nuclear Energy. of Energy.

The United States currently has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 94 operational reactors totaling approximately 100 gigawatts of power. The park provided more than 18% of the country's electricity consumption in 2023.

The United States needs to add 200 gigawatts of nuclear power, Goff told CNBC in an interview. That's roughly equivalent to building 200 new plants, based on the current average size of reactors in the U.S. fleet, or about one gigawatt.

“It’s a huge project,” Goff said. The United States led a global coalition in December that formally committed to achieving this goal by 2050. Financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, endorsed the goal at a climate conference in New York this week.

Constellation Energy's plan to restart Three Mile Island by 2028 is a step in the right direction, Goff said. The plant operated safely and efficiently, and only closed in 2019 for economic reasons, he said.

The reactor that Constellation plans to reopen, Unit 1, is not the one that partially melted in 1979.

Microsoft will purchase electricity from the plant to power its data centers. Goff said the advent of large data centers consuming up to a gigawatt of electricity only reinforces the need for new reactors.

“A lot of data centers are coming in and saying they need basic, 24/7 clean electricity,” Goff said. “Nuclear is obviously the ideal solution for this,” he said.

But restarting reactors in the United States will provide only a small fraction of the nuclear power needed, he said. There are only a handful of shuttered factories that could potentially restart, according to Goff.

“It’s not a huge number,” Goff said of the potential restarts. “We also need to move forward on factory deployment,” he said.

From coal to nuclear

Coal communities across the United States could provide an avenue for building large numbers of new nuclear power plants. In many parts of the United States, utilities are phasing out coal as part of the clean energy transition, creating a supply gap in some areas because new generation is not built fast enough.

Recently shuttered coal plants, those expected to be retired, and plants currently operating without an estimated shutdown date could provide space for up to 174 gigawatts of new nuclear power in 36 states, study finds of the Department of Energy released earlier this month.

Coal plants already have transmission lines, allowing reactors at those sites to avoid the lengthy process of locating new grid connections, Goff said. The plants also have people with experience in the energy sector who could work in a nuclear facility, he said.

“We can actually get a significant cost reduction by building a coal plant,” Goff said. “We can maybe get a 30% cost reduction compared to just a greenfield site.”

Cost overruns and long lead times are major obstacles to the construction of new nuclear power plants. Expanding the Vogtle plant in Georgia with two new reactors, for example, cost more than $30 billion and took about seven years longer than expected.

According to the DOE study, the expansion of operational nuclear power plants and the construction of brownfield sites in the United States could pave the way for new reactors worth up to 95 gigawatts. Between coal and nuclear sites, the United States potentially has space to produce up to 269 gigawatts of additional nuclear power.

Potential capacity would depend on whether smaller, advanced reactors are built at the sites, or larger reactors with a power output of a gigawatt or more.

According to the DOE study, more electricity could be produced if the small reactors were deployed on a large scale, because there is room to accommodate more of them. However, some of these smaller advanced designs are still years away from being commercialized.

But growing demand for electricity from data centers, manufacturing and the electrification of the economy could also serve as a catalyst for building larger factories, according to Goff. Rebooting Three Mile Island, for example, would yield just under a gigawatt of energy to meet Microsoft's needs.

“This increased demand for energy will also result in an additional push toward these gigawatt-sized reactors,” he said.

Reboots likely to get the green light

Although restarting the reactors is not a silver bullet, strengthening and maintaining the existing fleet is crucial, Goff said. The United States went through a decade-long period in which reactors were shut down because they could not compete with abundant and cheap natural gas.

The economic picture is changing, however, with fiscal support from the Inflation Reduction Act and nuclear power increasingly valued for its carbon-free attributes, Goff said.

“One of the economic problems, particularly in unregulated utilities, was that there wasn't necessarily a value for clean baseload electricity,” he said. “There is growing recognition of the need for a clean, strong and reliable base load for nuclear power.”

Constellation's decision to restart Three Mile Island follows in the footsteps of the nuclear power plant in Palisades, Michigan. The private owner, Holtec International, plans to restart Palisades in 2025. Both restarts are subject to review and approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“It's an independent agency, but I would hope that if the safety records come forward they would approve it,” Goff said of these potential reboots.

“Constellation has obviously operated the Three Mile Island plant for years and has a very large fleet of reactors that it has operated safely and efficiently,” he said. “They will continue to have great expertise in moving these plants to continue their safe operation.”

But finding additional plants to restart could prove difficult, said Doug True, nuclear director at the Nuclear Energy Institute.

“It’s getting harder and harder,” True told CNBC. “Many of these plants have already begun the deconstruction process that accompanies decommissioning and the facility has not been as completely set up to be able to restart in one way or another.”

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