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The Energy Department is spending heavily to keep America’s aging nuclear reactors online while laying the foundations for the nuclear power industry of the future.
The investment in America’s long-slumping nuclear industry — which includes tens of millions in funding announced this week — builds on a far broader package of federal subsidies invested in the nuclear sector, which remains America’s leading single source of carbon-free electricity.
One program — a $6 billion fund established under the bipartisan 2021 infrastructure plan — will help keep otherwise uneconomic nuclear plants from closing.
But other programs announced by the Energy Department look beyond the current generation of nuclear power plants to build the foundation for the next generation of nuclear power.
Here are five nuclear targets the Department of Energy is putting money into.
Advanced and theoretical research
One grant announced Wednesday will pay $12 million to fund scientists across U.S. national laboratories as they work on advanced research on problems at the edges of our understanding of nuclear physics.
The five projects funded “wide-ranging topics such as the three-dimensional internal structure of nucleons, exotic states of quarks and gluons, microscopic properties of quark-gluon plasmas and neutrinos, and nuclear interactions,” according to a statement from the Department of Energy.
Although this research is advanced and largely theoretical, it has the potential to open up broad practical applications.
“Advances in nuclear physics provide important new insights into the nature of our world, as well as new applications in the fields of national security, energy, health and space exploration,” said Timothy Holman, associate director of science for nuclear physics. statement.
Any such progress requires “rigorous theoretical frameworks” to help scientists drive the next generation of research with practical benefits. Hallman added.
This would include “exploring more clean energy options and new applications in nuclear medicine and industry.”
Training of nuclear-electrical engineers
The Department of Energy also funds universities to educate “the next generation of the nuclear safety workforce.”
The department announced Wednesday that $5 million will go to three state universities to help them create curriculum to train electrical engineers to work on nuclear reactors.
The joint program — which brings together the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of New Mexico and North Carolina State Agricultural and Technical University — will train students to design components that can function in the extreme environments found inside nuclear reactors.
“We are at a certain point where there is recognition among industry and government leaders of the urgent need to increase the electrical engineering workforce,” University of Texas electrical engineering professor Miguel Velez-Reyes said in a statement.
Expanding job training is needed “to spur domestic growth in areas such as chip manufacturing, transportation electrification, air systems and advanced electronics packaging,” Vélez-Reyes added.
Keep old plants online
The infrastructure bill passed earlier this year included $6 billion in civilian nuclear credits to help keep nuclear power plants online that would otherwise be replaced by fossil fuel infrastructure.
The Energy Department made its first payment last month, sending $1.1 billion to maintain the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in Southern California.
The plant — which has become the focus of a public battle over the fate of nuclear power in the carbon-conscious age — was to be phased out by 2025.
Local officials praised the move.
“In the face of record heat waves and a deepening climate crisis, the stakes are too high to back down in the fight to fully transition California away from polluting fossil fuels,” Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) said in a statement.
If it were to close, it would join 13 other nuclear plants still in operation that would have shut down early in the past decade, according to the DOE.
The Department of Energy will begin accepting the next round of civil nuclear loan applications in January 2023.
Build nuclear fuel supply chains
The Energy Department is investing $150 million to produce the nuclear fuel needed for advanced reactors, officials announced in November.
So-called high-enriched, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) is uranium that is far more enriched than the nuclear fuel used in current reactors. It is only low-enriched unlike the types of enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons.
Because it is necessary for smaller, more efficient nuclear reactors, the Department of Energy estimates that the U.S. will need about 40 metric tons of HALEU per year by the end of the decade.
“Reducing our reliance on hostile nations for HALEU fuel and building our domestic supply chain will allow the United States to grow our advanced reactor fleet and provide Americans with cleaner, more affordable energy,” said US Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm in a statement.
The funding — a cost share with Maryland-based American Centrifuge Operating — would help pay for the development of 6 centrifuges capable of producing about a ton of HALEU a year — enough to meet current US needs.
But the Energy Department framed it as part of a larger drive to create a domestic HALEU industry.
“This demonstration demonstrates DOE’s commitment to working with industry partners to launch commercial-scale production of HALEU to create more clean energy jobs and ensure the benefits of nuclear power are available to all Americans,” Granholm said.
Catching up on fusion
In October, the Department of Energy announced $47 million to research fusion — the process by which stars like our sun create energy.
Unlike fission, fusion energy is created by fusing atoms together, rather than splitting them apart—a process that does not release radioactive pollution.
But the extreme temperatures and pressures needed to coax atoms to fuse have so far kept fusion a theoretical source of energy rather than a practical one.
At the superheated temperatures and pressures required for fusion, the gas turns into plasma—which is extremely difficult to control.
“We can’t just put it in a container because it will melt everything it touches,” said Eugenio Schuster of Lehigh University, who received $1.75 million to work with the researchers on the problem.
The money helps pay for collaborative experiments between US and international scientists in tokamak research at sites in China, the European Union and South Korea.
The most promising solution to that problem is a donut-shaped reactor where rotating magnetic fields contain the growing fusion reaction.
These fields “create what’s essentially an invisible bottle that holds it in and prevents those charged particles from escaping,” Schuster added.
Schuster is stationed at ITER — Europe’s international test reactor where scientists aim to “produce 10 times more energy than is needed to operate,” he said. “Everyone in the fusion community is directly or indirectly working on ITER.”
Other fusion funding disbursements will support U.S. researchers conducting experiments in the East and Korea’s KSTAR — both “long-pulse devices” more advanced than alternatives available in the U.S.
Working at these overseas research institutions “will help us learn from these superconducting tokamak machines so that we can eventually build a long-pulse reactor-grade device in this country,” Schuster said.
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