Lea Booth

It's real: Indian Point nuclear plant can run again. Call it a Rebuild rather than a Restart. Containment dome cuts might be the easiest thing. No tensioning so just patch the hole and you're good to go. Turbines are ready to go. Hardest may be the reactor heads and internals. Need to order new heads from Korea or Japan. In total: as short as four years and in the best case a few billion dollars each. Call it $10b for as much as $20 billion in market value of electricity over the next twenty years of plant life post rebuild. Indian Point could then run for decades longer than that. I'm convinced. This needs to happen.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides a powerful legal barrier against antinuclear forces in the USA who seek to delay and destroy nuclear energy through legal uncertainty. But now the NRC is under full-scale attack from a bunch of folks who don't seem to understand the crucial role the NRC plays in protecting nuclear energy from endless, arbitrary legal attack and investment-killing uncertainty. Just a few minutes ago Republican Annie Caputo, perhaps the most pro-industry NRC commissioner of them all, resigned. @AlexCKaufman has the scoop. Caputo apparently resigned rather than be compromised by politics of NRC independence destruction. The NRC helps ensure that there is only a tiny, extremely tough attack surface for antinuclear legal efforts to target. Running a reactor for 60 years? 80 years? There is very little that antinukes can do to stop it when the NRC says yes (and the NRC has agreed with its engineers and has said yes over and over). Balkanizing nuclear regulation by handing it over to overworked and unqualified national or state-level bureaucrats and politicians radically expands nuclear's legal attack surface while making it thin and penetrable. If I were at the Sierra Club or another antinuclear lobbying organization, I'd be delighted by the openings to attack nuclear energy this creates. You don't have to win your lawsuit against nuclear, you only have to delay it and add uncertainty to kill off a nuclear plant project. This was the playbook that the NRC killed off over time. Does the NRC need to be reformed? Yes! Can it move faster? Yes! And this reform was happening and so is the speed-up. I've not met any serious, seasoned pro-nuclear expert who doesn't agree. But not a single one thinks the Commission itself should be politized or eliminated. The NRC in the past has sharply limited the influence of antinuclear politicians from hurting nuclear. Texas, for example, is attacking the NRC both from a "pro-nuclear" AND an antinuclear position! And we want to trust Texas non-technical lawyers and politicians to not abuse their nuclear power to hurt nuclear if it's politically expedient, as is happening now by trying to block a spent fuel storage facility? And the vast majority of delays in developing and deploying new nuclear reactors have causes OTHER than the NRC. Developing nuclear reactors that function well is really hard! Building nuclear plants is hard! Blaming the NRC from the outside is easier than learning nuclear engineering or deployment history! I hate seeing the current nuclear renaissance be jeopardized by ill-considered attacks on perhaps the most nuclear-friendly major regulator in the world. I work on nuclear energy around the world and though the NRC isn't perfect, for those of us who love nuclear energy and want to expand it, it's better than pretty much any other regulator in a democracy. I will be speaking out more publicly about this attack on nuclear energy's legal basis in the USA and I ask those who know the truth about this issue but who have not spoken out publicly to make your voices heard.

PROJECT STARGATE ENERGY ANALYSIS Project Stargate is going to need an enormous amount of power: each of the five Stargates needs about 5 gigawatts (about five million people's worth) of constant electricity for each ~$100b supercomputer project. Let's break it down. Each center will want at least 6 GW of firm capacity available, minimum, at all times. I expect total power costs to run (very roughly) $4 billion per year per Stargate, or about $100 per MWh. For reference, Microsoft is paying a bit more than $100/MWh to get 17% of one Stargate's-worth from restarting Three Mile Island. This price will allow for building new power plants and securing power from old ones. This is going to start as a natural gas and coal play. New natural gas turbines from GE-Vernova and others will be the backbone of this effort for the short and medium term. Combined cycle natural gas plants use a natural gas-burning turbine (much like what powers jetliners), but with the hot turbine exhaust directed onto pipes filled with water, which boils into steam and runs a steam turbine. Combining the gas turbine and the steam turbine gets you above 60% efficiency converting fossil heat into electrical power. Five GW of efficient gas turbines will need about 0.7 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/day) or 7 billion cubic meters (7 bcm) per year, just under 1% of the USA's current daily production of natural gas. Five of these 5GW centers would require about 4% of America's current natural gas production, if totally fueled by gas. America currently exports about 10% of its natural gas production. If you are wondering why the "Energy Emergency" Executive Order, here it is: we can't increase gas exports to Europe and Asia while powering Project Stargate without natural gas price increases for Americans, unless we also increase and maintain that increase of natural gas production. Which in turn means we need to expand exploration and drilling straight away, to have the gas in a few years. A number of coal plants will get a new lease on life, to provide replacement power for the grid, because power from nuclear, gas, and coal plants located close to a new Stargate cluster will be redirected to these centers instead of their existing customers. Because Stargate will require ultra-firm power at highly concentrated locations, renewables will probably not play a major role in directly powering Stargate except as an accounting fiction to "offset" emissions from the steady fossil power built for each center. So these companies may pay for some solar somewhere to be built to "lower the carbon" but it'll be even faker than it's been up until now. NUCLEAR STARGATE? Nuclear is 4 to 5 years behind where it should be for this exact moment. We can partially blame the companies behind Stargate because until very recently they had superwoke "100% Renewables" policies driven by their marketing/investor relations/ESG teams. China can build America's best large reactor design in 5 years, plus a few years before that setting up the power plant location. We have lots of locations more or less ready to roll for these exact reactors. Each Stargate would require 6, or three pairs of 2 GW reactors linked together by transmission lines. Existing nuclear can get small capacity uprates, and we can restart a few reactors in different states. That's not enough, though it will help a bit. Can we use small reactors? Well, the designs aren't ready yet, so even in an optimistic case we won't get the first tiny prototypes turning on before 2028, and as late as 2031. It would take 500 little 10 MW reactors running constantly to power a Stargate. It would take 5 large reactors. China will be building ten of these per year, year after year, by 2030. I expect Stargate participants to make bets on one or more microreactor and small reactor plays just in case. If we can get ready to build large reactors straight away, and if the US government supports with loans, we can aim to replace natural gas plants and retire the old coal plants ten years from now with new large reactors. To make this "gas first, then uranium" policy work, Stargates and their new gas plants will have to be sited near transmission corridors connecting them to nuclear plants ready to host new reactors. Each Stargate would require 5% of America's current nuclear fleet to run, but there are only a few clusters of reactors close enough together to power a full center today. More later.

We will build these reactors again in America. It's not magic. It took China nearly as long to build their first ones as it did for us. Now there is a completed design. We didn't have that the first time, and yes, it really, really matters. We have it now. Watch us build.