2026 and the Case for Co-location of Biorefineries with Advanced Nuclear

April 1, 2020 | Jim Lane

By Ross Mazur and Joel Braden of Sustainable Fuels Consulting LLC, and graciously edited by Nick Touran

Special to The Digest

Advanced nuclear has made significant inroads over the past decade. Nearly 50 startups now occupy the space. Advanced nuclear is no longer a dream for the future, this sector has already broken ground. According to the most recent round of press releases, many advanced nuclear technology hopefuls portend that zero-carbon electricity, hydrogen, and copious quantities of heat will be on the global grid as soon as 2026. As a creative and dynamic industry always looking for the next best way to reduce pathway CI, we in the advanced biofuel space might benefit from extending a hand. Here we explore the state of the advanced nuclear industry and why you might consider developing partnerships with these startups over the next few years.

The Nuclear Backstory

In the U.S., Nuclear power is a contentious topic. The concept of a nuclear renaissance (referring to the hopeful revival of the industry driven by rising climate change concerns and the increasing value of low-CI technologies) has been kicking around since the early 2000’s. Some factors inhibiting a successful revival have included: high MW-capacity costs (relative to natural gas following the advent of horizontal drilling and fracking), long permitting timelines, requirements for large capital campaigns, skilled labor shortages, and public opposition or concerns following Fukushima. Prior to the excitement of the past few years, only one facility successfully made it through the permitting process in the past 25 years, Vogtle in Georgia. The project is years behind schedule and billions over budget. This specific project has made the industry look like high-speed rail in this country; “incompletable” with today’s labor costs, regulations, setbacks, and NIMBY vocalization. It is projects like this which have made small modular reactor (SMR) designs so attractive to technology providers. Because the energy and excitement of this industry appears to be cooled, calmed, and silenced in a pool of molasses when it comes to domestic projects, we will focus this article on domestic technology providers and international projects.

This decade is all about Generation IV reactors. If you are unfamiliar, nuclear reactor designs have been grouped into generations. Generation I designs were the art of the 50’s and 60’s, including reactors such as the Shippingport, Fermi I, and MAGNOX. Generation II was all about light water reactors such as pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors; deployed from the 70’s through the 90’s. This was the era of commercial nuclear power deployment. Generation III and III+ technologies were developed in the 2000’s and deployed more recently. The focus of Gen III was on advancements in light water reactor safety and economic efficiency¹. And now we are in the era of Gen IV, or Advanced Nuclear, comprising six main reactor types. What sets Gen IV technologies apart are their advanced capabilities (including for example: advanced safety systems, waste reduction and management solutions, and ability to reach higher temperatures). These reactors can also be classified by neutron speed. Neutron speeds are often classified as thermal (utilizing a neutron moderator to slow the neutrons into thermal equilibrium with their surroundings), fast (no neutron moderator, faster neutrons, allowing for “complete” depletion before being considered “spent fuel”, thus reducing post-processing requirements), or epithermal (in-between thermal and fast) reactor categories². Gen IV reactor designs (as defined by the Gen-IV International Forum) include^3,44,49:

Very High Temperature Reactors (VHTR)/High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactors (HTGCR) – not new concept, the Pebble-Bed Reactor (a design first conceived in the 1940’s, called “The Daniels Pile”) applies the same concept. New tech applies SMR designs, and allows thermal electrolysis to occur in a controlled fashion (think hydrogen).
Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors (SFR) – SFR’s have been on-line as early as 1951 (the EBR-1). New designs build upon learnings from earlier designs to improve breeder efficiency and reduction of byproduct transuranic isotopes requiring disposal. Gen IV SFR designs reduce the possibility of proliferation (which was a major concern for early breeder reactors).
Supercritical Water Reactors (SCWR) – Simply a LWR operating at higher temperatures and pressures (in the supercritical phase regime)
Gas-cooled Fast Reactors (GFR) – Not a new concept: the MAGNOX design was a GFR, more than 40 which operated for decades have been decommissioned, more than a dozen still operate today. New tech incorporates SMR design.
Lead-cooled Fast Reactors (LFR) – General class of liquid metal-cooled fast reactors (think hydrogen again)
Molten Salt Reactors (MSR) – Fuel is liquid, dissolved in a salt solution, still utilizing graphitic moderators. Although there were two experiments in the 1950’s and 60’s (the Aircraft Reactor Experiment (1954)⁴⁵, and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (1965-69)⁴⁶), these are relatively new, none have been recently deployed.

Even with struggling projects like Vogtle, GA, the US NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is currently reviewing numerous technologies and will tentatively issue NuScale Power a Combined Construction and Operating License next year, for their SMR technology⁴. The Third Way (a think tank focusing on American values of opportunity, freedom, and security) shared four trends of the industry⁵:

The industry isn’t region-specific, these startups are spread across the US. See a map of them here.
No longer are the days of 1000MW+ or die (or should I say and die), reactor design varies from tens of kW to what we think of today as full commercial scale. Aside from not needing to run massive capital fundraising campaigns, newer designs allow smaller reactors to be competitive with Gen III reactors on a $/MW capacity basis. This is theoretically possible because of Henry Ford-style factory serialization and mass production.
Pressurized water isn’t the only coolant; reactors utilizing molten metals, salts, and high temperature gases are also being actively developed.
It’s not all about fission and thermal reactors, the technology also focuses on fast reactors and oddly enough, more than 10 startups in the space are developing fusion reactors… although deployment is not yet on the horizon.