From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Advanced Nuclear Reactors

Description: Audio Interview by GAO staff with Tim Persons, GAO’s Chief
Scientist

Related GAO-15-652: Technology Assessment: Nuclear Reactors:  Status and
challenges in development and deployment of new commercial concepts

Released: July 2015


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[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's July
2015. The demand for energy in the United States is expected to keep
growing in the coming decades. The Department of Energy considers
nuclear energy to be an option to help meet this increased demand
without producing air pollution. A team led by Tim Persons, GAO's Chief
Scientist, recently conducted a technology assessment of some new
classes of nuclear reactors under development. GAO's Jacques Arsenault
sat down with Tim to talk about what they found.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Can you talk a bit about the current state of
nuclear energy in the U.S. and where it's projected to go?

[ Tim Persons: ] The current U.S. fleet of nuclear reactors that are
operational are just under 100, and they provide about 20 percent of our
electricity currently. Projecting out in the years like 2030, they're
projected to decrease to about 16 percent on that. Their licensing and
the age of the fleet, I think, is one of the key issues. They're set to
expire in the early 2030's, which sounds like a long way out, and even
more so they're possibly able to be extended by another two decades. But
even so, that's still, because of the time it takes to license and work
reactors through safety and operational testing and things like that, it
does take many decades. And so it still is in some sense a critical time
to be considering these questions.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then, how are these new reactors different?
And what are some of their potential benefits?

[ Tim Persons: ] So, we looked at two classes of these reactors. One
were called the small modular reactors. They were based upon Navy
nuclear technology, you know, the reactors that run the Navy nuclear
fleet. And so, they're important because of their size and modularity.
In the advanced reactor space, the second class we looked at, there were
a group that work at higher temperatures. So, they actually have,
they're more efficient at converting heat into electricity. And then
there's even a third class where it's a different type of neutrons that
are used called fast neutrons. They don't use moderators in their
reactors. But they're important because they can more efficiently use
fuel and then have less nuclear waste, presumably. And that's, of
course, an important issue as always in nuclear energy conversations.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Now, when people think about nuclear energy, I
know people may think about disasters like Three Mile Island or
Fukushima. Are there concerns about the safety of these new types of
reactors?

[ Tim Persons: ] Yeah. Reactor design engineering, the licensing,
construction, and operation always invoke a concern about safety. It's
nuclear after all. But the good news is we have a strong and capable
regulator in terms of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it’s a
very good institution. And the good news from the Three Mile Island case
is that we've learned a lot about reactor safety and engineered those
things to not make those mistakes again. That was from the late '70s,
that event. And then even more recently in the Fukushima event, there
already have been systems that exert what are called passive safety
systems that, had they been in place in Fukushima, would not have been
the crisis that it became. So, those are, that's a technology here in
the now. It's being deployed in the now, and that's a good news story.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Can you talk a bit about what other challenges
the Department of Energy, as well as reactor engineers, will face in
developing these new reactors?

[ Tim Persons: ] Right. So, for both SMRs and advanced systems,
approving out the safety basis and the expected cost savings are the key
two things that they need to address. It's just the extent to which that
needs to be done. In the case of small modular reactors, they operate
on, they're really what our evolutionary concept. They're growing based
upon the current reactor designs albeit with these newer, passive safety
systems and proposed to reduce costs. And so they're just in one sense
incremental. And that's important because they don't hold the same risk
as the advanced reactors do. So, there's a lot more work I think in the
advanced systems. But, again, proving out safety, cost and operational
performance are all the same. It's just a greater or lesser extent.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Finally, what would you say is the bottom line of
this report?

[ Tim Persons: ] The bottom line is that SMRs and advanced reactors,
although they indeed face remaining challenges in proving out their
performance, their safety, their economics, they do hold particular
promise in the context of increasing energy demand here in the U.S. as
well as the need for a diversified energy mix to satisfy the need for
energy security and certainly there are environmental considerations
that are at play in this case. So, the key question is, as a nation do
we want to have a non-nuclear future with just renewables and fossil or
do we want this in our energy mix to potentially take risk out of just
being too dependent on any one of those remaining two areas.

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