Nuclear Energy Getting A Rebirth at Oak Ridge? Tennessee Tips Its Hat Toward the Industry.

Guest Post by Duggan Flanakin of CFact.

On September 3, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the city of Oak Ridge, birthplace of the U.S. nuclear energy industry, announced new details about “Project IKE,” a new nuclear energy development boosted by the new Tennessee Nuclear Energy Fund. Paris-based Orano USA has agreed to build a uranium enrichment centrifuge facility on the Roane County side of Oak Ridge. The project, said Lee, is the single largest investment in Tennessee history.

Lee explained that the fund, created by the Tennessee General Assembly with a $60 million 2023-24 budget, has been highly successful in recruiting nuclear energy projects. Orano is the second of four projects announced in the last six months, further strengthening Tennessee’s status as “the number one state for nuclear energy companies to invest and thrive,” said Lee.

Orano specializes in uranium mining/conversion/enrichment, used nuclear fuel management and recycling, decommissioning shutdown nuclear energy facilities, federal site cleanup and closure, and developing nuclear medicines to fight cancer. KNOX reporter Daniel Dassow says the Orano announcement “heralds a new historical development: the second Manhattan Project” in the “Secret City.”

Just days earlier, NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. announced its purchase of a 1.64-acre site in Oak Ridge’s historic Heritage Center Industrial Park for its headquarters.  NANO is a vertically integrated advanced nuclear energy and technology company that is developing portable micro reactors.

A month earlier, Kairos Power began construction of its next-generation salt-cooled demo reactor in Oak Ridge, and back in April, TRISO-X received a $148.5 million tax credit from the federal government for its advanced nuclear fuel plant in the city. Oak Ridge and nearby Knoxville together are home to 154 nuclear companies and the iconic Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In the words of Oak Ridge city council member Sean Gleason, “East Tennessee is becoming once again, after 80-plus years, the place the nation is looking for to lead the next nuclear race. Let Oak Ridge win another race,” he added. “We’ve done it before.” Unlike the weapons-grade first Manhattan Project, Orano will produce low-enriched uranium to be used in commercial reactors to generate electricity.

Kairos Power’s 35-megawatt iterative non-power demonstration molten salt nuclear reactor, dubbed Hermes, will be its first nuclear build. With completion expected in 2027, Hermes is part of the California-based firm’s “rapid iterative development approach” to developing and marketing nuclear power plant designs based on its fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor technology. The hope is to have a commercial-grade reactor operational in the early 2030s.

Even before Congress passed the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act in July, renewed interest in nuclear energy had stirred a movement across the U.S. Construction began in June for TerraPower’s Natrium reactor 1 demonstration project in Wyoming, the nation’s first advanced reactor project to move from design into construction. TerraPower chairman and founder Bill Gates that the company’s “innovative Natrium technology” will power America’s future – and the world’s.

Up in Michigan, the state in July reupped its support for the reopening of the closed 800-megawatt Palisades Nuclear Power Plant with a second $150 million investment. The U.S. Department of Energy earlier conditionally approved $1.5 billion to help restart the plant, which was closed in 2022, by 2025. The Michigan effort may be duplicated at mothballed nuclear reactors in Iowa and Pennsylvania.

NextEra Energy Inc., whose Duane Arnold plant on the Iowa prairie was damaged by a windstorm in 2020, and Constellation Energy Corp., whose Three Mile Island reactor 2, shuttered in 2019 after 45 incident-free years, are looking at restarting if it can be done safely and economically. These nuclear plants, if reopened, could provide nonstop baseload power needed to run high-energy-using data centers.

Florida, too, is taking a look at adding advanced nuclear technology reactors to its nuclear energy portfolio, which today includes the St. Lucie and Turkey Point plants owned by Florida Power & Light. The state’s public service commission has a legislative directive to submit a report by next April that would include the possibility of adding nuclear power at military bases.

The action parallels a Biden Administration working group seeking to deliver “an efficient and cost-effective deployment of clean, reliable nuclear energy.” The White House also said the U.S. Army wis pursuing using advanced reactors to power Army bases and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is working to streamline permitting for nuclear projects.

On another front, new efforts to recycle nuclear waste, held up for decades by legal and regulatory barriers, are also on the drawing boards. The nuclear waste disposal issue has been a major thorn in the side of any new nuclear power construction in the U.S., but a new bipartisan consensus has emerged in which even diehard former nuclear opponents now see nuclear energy as acceptably “clean.”

The original process for repurposing spent nuclear fuel, developed in the U.S. in the 1950s, has been in profitable use in other countries for decades – but not in the U.S., where anti-nuclear activists long prevailed. In 2020, a startup company called Curio developed its own innovative, environmentally sustainable nuclear fuel recycling technology.

Orano hopes to reprocess spent nuclear fuel at its new Oak Ridge facility, using the technology it has used to reprocess more than 40,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel since 1976, much of which was placed back into reactors at its facilities in France, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany. France thus has no need for interim dry storage of light water reactor used nuclear fuel.

President Carter essentially shut down spent nuclear fuel recycling in the U.S. in the 1970s, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today has identified 23 gaps in its regulations for reprocessing that it has never fully resolved even though the means for doing so have largely been identified. A full commitment to recycling nuclear waste may also require changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

A new report from the Institute for Energy Research notes the growing discussion about expanding nuclear power in the U.S. has under the Biden Administration focused on enormous taxpayer subsidies to help cover prices increases caused by onerous regulations and statutes. There has also been talk – but not much action – on streamlining regulations and reforming federal laws to make American nuclear power price competitive with that in other countries.

Former President Trump is campaigning on a platform that includes cutting energy bills by up to 70% by eliminating what he sees as needless, burdensome regulations. A second Trump Administration would likely cut subsidies for inefficient and habitat-damaging wind and solar projects and focus on regulatory and statutory reforms to cut the entry and operational costs for nuclear power.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle for a growing U.S. nuclear power industry is the fact that the U.S. has since 1992 been dependent on imports for most of the 40 million pounds of uranium needed to fuel the nation’s existing nuclear power plants. Domestic uranium production peaked in 1980, and today the nation relies on Canada and Australia for 36% of its uranium and on Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan for 48%.

This article originally published at Real Clear Energy.

Duggan Flanakin (duggan@duggansdugout.com) is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

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