Prof. Katy Huff, former US DOE Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, on the US Nuclear Renaissance

What could a nuclear renaissance look like? Listen to Jason Mitchell discuss with Professor Katy Huff, former US DOE Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, about how to frame nuclear energy in a net zero context where nuclear fits into the US energy mix over the next several decades and why US nuclear innovation today is different from the false starts of the past.

Recording date: 21 July 2025

Dr. Katy Huff

Dr. Katy Huff is Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she focuses on robust modelling and simulation of advanced reactors and fuel cycles. From 2021 to 2024, she took a leave of absence to hold a number of positions in the US Department of Energy including the role of Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy at the US Department of Energy. As Assistant Secretary, Katy led national efforts to advance nuclear technologies as part of America's clean energy transition. She also oversaw strategic initiatives to modernize the U.S. nuclear fleet, scale up advanced reactor development, and secure supply chains for nuclear fuel—all while emphasizing safety, innovation, and global leadership.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcription was generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and may contain errors. As a part of this process, this transcript has also been edited for clarity.

Jason Mitchell:

Welcome to the podcast Professor Katy Huff. It's great to have you here, and thank you for taking the time today.

Katy Huff:

Thanks for having me.

Jason Mitchell:

Excellent. I'm really looking forward to this. Katy, let's start with some scene setting and a little bit of historical context. I'm thinking of a previous guest on the podcast, Vaclav Smil, who's called nuclear energy a, "Successful failure." The success part is it's about the quick early rollout of nuclear, its global share of power generation and its relatively high capacity factor. The failure part is about unfulfilled expectations and the fact that nuclear never really lived up to the hope that it would be too cheap to metre according to the Atomic Energy Commission. How do you weigh in on this? How do you think about that characterization and whether it's fair or not?

Katy Huff:

Well, first of all, I'm really jealous of really clever people like Vaclav Smil who can think up something so catchy as successful failure. I do think it's an interesting characterization and I think in many ways it's quite fair. But I would flag, the history of that too cheap to metre phrasing, it's tough, because we've been saddled with this expectation when the reality is that phrase was uttered in 1954. Lewis Strauss, the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time said those words in 1954 before any nuclear fission power plant had ever been deployed commercially. The context of that speech, which was quite an interesting one, included his very statement that the Commission doesn't engage in predictions because it is a serious government body, but that Strauss himself would continue to provide his own opinions in that speech because he himself didn't suffer these inhibitions.

Now I'm paraphrasing, but indeed that quote comes from the part of the speech in which he does indulge in a number of various personal hopes and opinions and comments, and it was still a very quite new atomic energy universe at the time. The Commission itself was less than 10 years old, and it is my understanding that many historians, and even his own son and biographer, have suggested that Lewis Strauss was actually referring to the fusion programme, which he was not allowed to talk about explicitly at the time.

Jason Mitchell:

Oh, interesting.

Katy Huff:

But, regardless, whether he was referring to fission or fusion, the public did grab upon this as the promise from the Atomic Energy Commission. And then when the industry failed to soften that expectation, it makes sense that the public would be disappointed that nuclear energy failed to compete with the free cost of water, that energy wasn't too cheap to metre. I think we can all agree that's a pretty high bar and I don't think any energy source needs to meet that requirement in order to be truly marketable, but I do think it's a utopia we should continue to strive for. I think it is true that nuclear energy's expansion in the '70s and '80s was really remarkable. New construction was hitting more than 10 gigawatts a year in the '70s, it peaked in 1974, but a lot of things like variation in fossil prices and challenged project management and limited standardisation really plagued the industry and have created some prolonged stagnation.

Jason Mitchell:

Got it. Where do you see nuclear realistically fit into the US energy mix over the next several decades? What would failure to scale it mean for particularly the net-zero goals, which I recognise at a national level, at least right now are no longer a priority. I'm trying to of put my head around the context of nuclear relative to the IAEA, which has written about the need to double nuclear capacity by 2050 to hit net-zero.

Katy Huff:

That IAEA report was extremely helpful in the context of developing goals in the Biden administration for what it would look like to work backwards from net-zero and figure out how much of each energy technology we would want to include in an ideal energy mix. And so that's what we did. And I have to say, I stand behind those calculations still. The assumption that we would get to net-zero by 2050 is a hard one, but if you work backwards from that assumption and figure out how much nuclear you need, we determine that you would need at least one to 200 new gigawatts of nuclear, so you would need to double or triple nuclear in the United States. A lot of other nations, at the same time, well over two dozen other nations, agreed that this was the same calculation for them as well, that many would have to triple nuclear energy by 2050 in order to get to net-zero for their own nations. And frankly, the current administration in the United States, regardless of their ambitions and reasons for it, their motivations, has stated that they want to quadruple nuclear energy.

Now, I would say all of this and just remind everyone that at least in our calculations, the idea was not to project what would be likely in terms of nuclear deployment, what would even be possible with the incentives that were in place at the time or incentives we could put in place during the administration. It was simply a backwards calculation of what it would take to get to net-zero, and whether our policy domestically continues to stand behind net-zero or not, the globe needs to get there. It doesn't change the science of climate change as you know.

Jason Mitchell:

It's actually worth backing up for maybe just a second or a minute. How do you tend to frame nuclear in a net-zero context? It's, I think, often described as a bridging fuel for decarbonization, but I do wonder if that language shortchanges nuclear's potential utility where it can actively support renewables first through load balancing and ultimately through flexible load following.

Katy Huff:

I couldn't agree with you more. I think it does shortchange nuclear's base load 24/7 always on capability. That weather insensitive power generation is the power generation we currently largely only get from nuclear and fossils. Until we get to grid scale storage solutions that are really comprehensive and capable, we're going to need that base load power and we are also going to need to replace those fossil sources of base load power if we intend to get to net-zero.

And so I think fundamentally for me, what I would love to see nuclear do in the next 10 to 20, 30 years is start replacing coal plants in the United States where those plants need to retire, but the communities have the skills and capabilities to support any thermal power generation capability, a nuclear plant and a coal plant hire very similar types of workers, and the grid expects a constant supply of a few hundred megawatts in those locations. And when you take that coal plant off the grid, you leave a hole in the grid where generation, ideally firm generation, should go and nuclear is the ideal carbon-free replacement for those coal plants. I would really love to see that coal to nuclear transition.

Jason Mitchell:

Can you maybe for a second talk about the politics around nuclear, i.e. the fact that I think when you came in as assistant secretary you received a lot of bipartisan support. It feels like around the noise of net-zero nuclear has been a long-running consistent bipartisan issue and it's all about capacity building for AI data centre related demand.

Katy Huff:

I was extremely lucky to enter the political sphere at a time when nuclear was especially bipartisan, more bipartisan perhaps than it had been in quite a while. And I certainly attribute that to the work of administrations before me maybe starting in the Obama era, but potentially you could credit a number of folks even before that. It was a long time coming and generally speaking, yes, what had previously been a strong Republican support for nuclear and a very hesitant democratic support for nuclear is now a full-throated support on both sides.

In the case of on the right, the Republicans, you see a great deal of support for that energy security, national security contribution that nuclear energy can play. Whereas on the left, in my politics, you see this support due to the need to support the environment, combat climate change and things like that have gotten more and more important for our society. And so I was very lucky to come in at a time when both parties felt very strongly positively about nuclear, and I think that will continue in this administration, but obviously for more of those national security data centre type reasons. And if we see future administrations flip back and forth, I think the argument for nuclear has legs on both sides of the aisle.

Jason Mitchell:

Would you say the US still has the industrial capability to deliver nuclear projects at scale? There's this narrative that nuclear in the US is particularly expensive, time-consuming and wrapped in red tape, which has led the EIA to forecast a share of electricity powered by nuclear default to, I think, as low as 12% from 18% currently.

Katy Huff:

The United States has demonstrated that the workforce is a challenge. The most recent builds in Waynesboro, Georgia, the Vogtle 3 and 4 plants had serious workforce challenges that contributed to delays and cost overruns specifically in the space of the skilled craft and trade workers like nuclear welders and electricians and folks really capable of constructing these plants.

It hadn't been needed for so long that there wasn't a robust and steady available supply of nuclear certified welders and trained electricians. And it takes quite a large number of these folks on site to build a nuclear power plant at the gigawatt scale and so those builds did run into a number of workforce issues, and I think we are going to continue to see that. And the longer we wait between the end of those Vogtle units final construction time and the beginning of real serious construction for the next units, the more likely it is that a lot of those trained workers, 10,000 at peak at that Waynesboro site, they're going to go to other fields, other sectors, and we may have trouble bringing back that workforce to build the scale we need, so I do think that's a key challenge.

We do have the capability for this expansion. We've done it before we can do it again. I feel confident that the United States has the capability, but early delays are likely and later acceleration is certainly possible, but only with consistent national policy. I think one of the biggest problems is that if we delay in the coming few years, it's going to really significantly inflate the capital requirements and that's going to jeopardise decarbonization as well as the supply chain efficiency. Overbuilding the supply chain in order to get to these goals of 2050 tripling, it's just going to be a problem.

Jason Mitchell:

How do you think about the US nuclear innovation today? I'm thinking areas like SMRs, HALEU fuel and advanced reactors. Is it different from the false starts of the past?

Katy Huff:

I do think it is different from the false starts in the past. First of all, the energy demand is there. Energy demand is growing in the United States for the first time consistently in a while, and frankly, it's electricity prices that cause project abandonment in nuclear more than really anything else. And so if we can trust that in the next decade we won't see rapid drops in electricity prices, then predictions on how much profitability and marketability those plants I think will be more trustworthy. Now, also, the learning curve for small modular reactors does differ from the gigawatt skill plants that we had been deploying in the past. Ideally, if built and assembled in a factory's, assembled on site on skids, modular construction should help small modular reactors to achieve significant cost reductions. By standardising designs, you avoid some of the failures of the past. If you can repeat deployments instead of redesigning your reactor in between deployments, that should help because then ideally you should be able to move the same design to lots of different locations without engineering complications. Simple engineering problems tend to cause the most delays, next to, of course, these workforce issues.

Jason Mitchell:

Really interesting. During your time at the DOE, a lot of, I'd say important steps were taken in the nuclear space, existing reactors like Diablo Canyon, which were expected to shut down had their lives extended. That's a great thing. New reactors came online. We saw record investments into establishing domestic nuclear fuel supply chains, not to mention the big leaps in commercialisation of advanced reactor designs. I'd also add the ADVANCE Act, which smoothed out US nuclear energy regulation. And as you mentioned, Vogtle coming online, which I think is the first new nuclear plant since the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was formed in the mid-1970s, which says a lot, I think. But how did all of these ambitions and achievements depart from the nuclear policies of previous administrations or maybe not, and how do you see them progressing or even accelerating under the new administration?

Katy Huff:

I think I was well positioned, it was good timing. A lot of work was being done already to make sure that the pieces were in place for nuclear to grow. But I think for the first time we shifted towards sustaining existing plants, considering the possibility of restarting recently shut down plants, that was completely new with Palisades, for example, leveraging all of our resources in the Loan Programmes Office, which was run by my friend and colleague and peer Jigar Shah at the time. All of that combined with really large scale energy legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law actually had catalyzation in the market. It created momentum through those incentives, including really significant tax credits for investment, and of course the favourable financing from the Loan Programmes Office. These things all together created a real energy policy for the first time that allowed a clear path to be seen by the industry. We're seeing, of course, some changes in this administration for how much funding is going to be available. The nuclear energy office that I used to run has been cut significantly in the upcoming budget despite this being a claimed priority of the current administration, but preservation of some of those loan programmes authorities for nuclear has been done by this US administration. While of course, some of the authorities for using those same dollars for renewables has been reduced, nuclear has been retained in those loan programmes authorities somewhat, so there's hope there. And there certainly are a lot of executive orders portraying a great deal of enthusiasm about new nuclear in this administration.

But right now, actually, I think there's a concern that there's a bit of a mismatch between the actual budget proposal and budget legislation from the OBBB, the One Big Beautiful Bill as they call it. There's a disconnect between the stated ambitions and the actual dollars on the table in the federal government. I think it remains to be seen how much of that enthusiasm translates to actual market support and actual financial support for real builds. I think this administration does seem to have an emphasis on lowering regulations and regulatory constraints, and I think the way that they're going about it by explicitly stating that they'll intentionally undermine the independence of the regulator, those sorts of things are very problematic for the nuclear industry, even though they may on face appear to be positive. I think nuclear safety is paramount above all once you're inside the industry, that's quite clear, but it remains to be seen the extent to which they'll lean into that.

Jason Mitchell:

You mentioned this a little bit earlier, but how do you think about the costs or how have you framed the cost of nuclear relative to other technologies? I think about the levelized cost of energy and the analyses around that which consistently portray nuclear as the highest cost solution, roughly around two, three times the cost of solar PV and offshore wind. But I do wonder if this, again, doesn't mischaracterize the effectiveness of nuclear. It doesn't seem to give credit to nuclear's grid stability, its base load capacity and resilience. Effectively, it's higher energy return on investment. How do you think about it?

Katy Huff:

I completely agree with you. I think it's really important to compare energy systems on an apples to apples basis. When compared, you have one less reliable or variable source and you compare it to a more reliable always on source, these are not apples to apples. Instead, a more fair and reasonable comparison that actually respects and reflects the motivations of customers and the market and the grid would be a comparison between systems, clean firm sources. Hydropower is one. You could compare new nuclear to hydropower. Now, hydropower is somewhat constrained. You could compare new nuclear to geothermal. Again, somewhat constrained geographically.

But when you start to talk about renewables, you also have to include storage. A fair comparison might compare new nuclear to the kinds of 24/7 power purchase agreements that combine renewables and high capacity storage that guarantee an hour on hour matching. That is actually quite comparable to new nuclear in terms of dollars per megawatt hour. You'll see ranges in the $100 a megawatt hour range for 24/7 PPAs that combine renewables with appropriate amounts of storage. Natural gas with carbon capture is another good example. The cost of natural gas is obviously quite low, but in order to get to carbon free power you have to carbon capture, and that's quite expensive. Combine these two things in a single system, and now you're right back up there to the cost of new nuclear. And so I think a lot of entities have done analysis like this, IEA, IAEA, OECD NEA, et cetera, international bodies with governmental boards and whatnot, and they all come out with the same conclusion, which is that in many cases, including nuclear in your energy system lowers the total cost of that system.

Jason Mitchell:

That's really interesting. I totally agree that often the renewables don't really capture those transmission upgrades, storage requirements and grid balancing services, all those costs. But how do you think around this long-running question that I've asked a number of people, which is this old energy aphorism, the cure to high prices is high prices as in high energy prices. And traditionally that meant do high prices end up driving investment in fossil fuels or diversification away from it, namely to renewable? But within that question, what does that mean for nuclear investment? Does that make sense?

Katy Huff:

It absolutely makes sense. I think this comes back to my observation earlier that the thing that is most likely to cause a midstream project abandonment in nuclear, you start building your nuclear power plant and you abandon it mid-construction. Why? The most likely cause of this is usually a precipitous drop in grid electricity prices. We've seen this in the United States in the mid-80s, and arguably that's the most likely cause of the stagnation that we saw. You really have to have this balance between the long-term profitability of this very high capital cost plant and that cost itself in order to make the decision that you're going to borrow billions of dollars and spend a decade building a reactor. If you think that there's any real variability such that the cost of electricity will go down, then you're just much less likely to make that financial bet. You're in an investment universe much more than I am, so I'm sure you could explain it in a clearer way, but nuclear energy economics come down to capital cost constraints as they relate to compared short-term and long-term pricing predictions on the grid.

Jason Mitchell:

It's a really interesting question. I was going to ask how nuclear energy can compete in markets that tend to reward short-term pricing rather than long-term resilience and carbon avoidance?

Katy Huff:

Well, it's tough, because if you excessively rely on renewables without that clean firm capacity, it's going to increase system costs like we talked about. And so nuclear may make sense for long-term decarbonization efforts, but utilities may not be really playing that game, that's more of a government engagement. Market reforms in the United States and incentives from the federal government have to drive those long-term decarbonization efforts or long-term grid reliability efforts. Utilities have some incentive to ensure grid reliability, but it largely trickles down from federal government policy. And so that balanced growth that looks at short-term versus long-term pricing and resilience and carbon avoidance and all of those things, it has to come partially from the federal government and partially from the owner-operator utility. And the owner-operator utility is usually going to look at those short-term benefits in pricing more than anything else, largely because of the lifetime of a CEO.

Jason Mitchell:

It's a really interesting question given your policy oversight around nuclear, but to what degree did you have to take into consideration the growth that Jigar Shah's group, the LPO, was driving on the renewable energy side, in the context of whether it should be curbed to safeguard the viability of other critical energy sources, namely nuclear. It just seems like there are increasing anecdotes of renewable output overwhelming regional grids, even sending power prices into negative territory. And in France, for example, and this is recent, it's forced nuclear operators like EDF to make some pretty costly adjustments. How do you think about the balance and grid pressures between long-term nuclear power capacity building relative to shorter-term renewable capacity coming online?

Katy Huff:

In the last administration, I learned so much from working with Jigar and colleagues in the Department of Energy at the time, and one of the critical components was to have a very clear goal, and our goal was twofold. One, we wanted to get to net-zero by 2050 and meet our climate obligations as a nation, but two, we wanted Americans to be prosperous and to be able to afford their electric bills. We didn't want to handicap American manufacturing or the spread of electric vehicles by constraining the grid in such a way that it would be insufficiently performant, but we also didn't want it to grow so dramatically that it be unaffordable. And that balance drove all of our decisions. It was never a question of which technology folks preferred. We always brought things back to the kinds of environmental metrics and technology-agnostic cost and net-zero metrics that we were striving for.

And so in development of a regulatory balance between renewables and nuclear, I know that FERC, which I wasn't in charge of, thinks really hard mostly about customer cost, but DOE was able to provision research and development dollars to bring some technologies down the cost curve to the extent that they might someday in the future contribute to a more ideal grid with better performance on those environmental land use, like cost and net-zero metrics. And by being pretty technology-agnostic, we didn't really put our thumbs on the scale technologically. We largely worked really well together on figuring out where everything was going to fit to get to the optimal system outcome.

Jason Mitchell:

That's interesting. I'm thinking back to Wright's Law, which talks about how solar and wind costs have dropped exponentially with each doubling of production volume, but nuclear on the other hand, can't really iterate fast and break things. Basically every reactor needs to be perfect from day one. How do you think about SMRs benefiting from learning curves when safety requirements prevent the rapid iteration that drives cost reductions and other technologies, or are we applying Silicon Valley logic to a fundamentally different kind of engineering challenge?

Katy Huff:

Gosh, I think it's such an insightful question, and the way you've tied it to this Silicon Valley question I think is extremely insightful. Ultimately, I think with nuclear, especially the hope for the deployment of SMRs is that we will see those learnings down the cost curve in the construction and manufacturing of these devices where we see the worst failures of capital cost growth. The construction and, yes, engineering design contributes to this a great deal so by replication of these SMRs in hopefully a factory that produces skids that are assembled on site, hopefully you see that SMRs will achieve some significant cost reductions, but that standardisation of design, as you say, may not bring you down the design cost curve because changes in the design after you build the first or second or third one actually will slow things down.

And I think we need to, in the nuclear universe, try to resist the urge to be very clever nuclear engineers and instead try to think about how to build repeatedly the same sufficiently excellent reactor over and over and over and over and over again. And then you get down the cost curve and the learning curve of construction without trying to go so far down the cost curve of design optimization, which is the failure mode that we've always driven ourselves down. And as a nuclear engineering professor, I have to say my entire job is creating clever nuclear engineers, and so I am part of the problem.

Jason Mitchell:

That's funny. When it comes to the nuclear Renaissance, it seems like we're seeing the beginning of a new business model where private companies directly invest in or contract for nuclear capacity to secure clean base load power. I'm thinking of examples like Microsoft's 20-year deal to purchase power from Three Mile Island, its nuclear plant among others, but what do you see the private sector contributing to US nuclear development?

Katy Huff:

In this part of the podcast, I should reveal that I am on the side. I am an Amazon scholar, which allows me to engage with Amazon's data centre deployment team and help them make decisions around nuclear energy and supporting the power for their data centres. And one of the things I would highlight from that engagement is that there are a lot of different models from these hyperscaler companies, some of which like Microsoft's investment in the former Three Mile Island plant now Crane Clean Energy Centre has a certain shape, whereas there's also a lot of other ways to invest. Amazon has recently invested $500 million in an advanced nuclear energy company directly not as a power purchase agreement for energy in the future, but through partial ownership of this company and commitment to help with the construction of one of their first plants, actually their second plant. They're in Washington with a promise to buy power for sure later, but it creates a certain money on the table right now that nuclear energy needs to reliably build.

One of the biggest problems is cost of patient capital, and these hyperscaler companies have that capital. It's not particularly patient. A lot of them really desire really quick turnaround and really would build data centres faster if they could build energy faster, I think, just based on their public comments. But I think there's a lot of interesting models everywhere from promises to buy power as long as you deliver it in the right place at the right time, three years from now, all the way up to a real commitment to a certain technology getting off the ground and deploying gigawatts worth of that SMR.

In the case of Amazon, that's X energy and Amazon's on that investment end, whereas you look at some other companies where they've simply signed power purchase agreements with a fusion company and the likelihood of that power ever arriving on the timelines that their power purchase agreement requires is pretty low. But if it happens, then it was a really good bet. And so we're seeing a whole bunch of different structures for these investments. It's a new and interesting thing largely because of the incredible wealth in those companies, which I think is unprecedented.

Jason Mitchell:

I definitely want to come back to Amazon in a second, but it seems like data companies are increasingly realising that there are big savings if they can connect directly to nuclear power plants. In this argument that if they bypass the public transmission grid, they shouldn't really have to pay regulated tariffs. What does that mean from a public policy perspective? Could it raise the costs for other electricity consumers? Could it jeopardise the public supply of power? I realise this is less about nuclear and more about interconnection to the grid, but in the effort to build more nuclear power, how do data companies, hyperscalers, address this electricity grids aren't free issue.

Katy Huff:

There has been a lot of back and forth between the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Amazon on this talent deal. We can come back to it if you like, but I think the reality is a front of the metre framework is much more egalitarian with regard to community costs rather than a behind the metre framework. The behind the metre framework would be just directly connecting to that power plan and skipping all these grid costs, et cetera, et cetera, whereas a front of the metre one would incorporate those grid costs. And ultimately after a great deal of back and forth with the Susquehanna Power Plant and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Talon, this Houston based company, that is in fact what Amazon has arrived at, and I think it is probably the model for power purchase agreements moving forward is to have front of the metre engagements and those front of the metre contracts would incorporate those kinds of grid costs and whatnot, and therefore don't even require the FERC to approve because they're paying just like any other customer.

I agree with you. I think it is certainly the case that you have to see communities respected in these engagements. It's really unfair to the public to allow large corporate entities to benefit off of public infrastructure. Even if it is somewhat inherently private in the United States, it's ultimately regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission because it has a certain requirement for the public good.

Jason Mitchell:

It really is interesting. It's a huge deal, it's an 18 year deal worth $20 billion. And I was going to ask, how do you think about the ability to privatise decisions like this energy commitment that will obviously endure multiple gubernatorial and congressional cycles? In other words, are we privatising decisions that should be more democratic among the community? How do these energy projects in a way earn public trust given their chequered history?

Katy Huff:

I think you've really hit the nail on the head, and I think that's what a lot of this deal has settled out to be. One has to involve the community and every decision. And in nuclear it's so much more important. We see this with nuclear spent fuel and the need to approach finding a location for the spent nuclear fuel through direct community engagement. You can't do it any other way. We showed in the United States with the Elka Mountain Project that you can't just shove some nuclear facility down the throats of a uninterested community. You have to have community buy-in. In fact, community enthusiasm. And so a lot of these data centres do have a lot to offer economically in terms of incentives to those communities. But some communities are going to be more interested in those offerings than others, and I think the most successful companies will be the ones that really take as much account of that as possible.

Jason Mitchell:

Interesting. What does that mean in an SMR context? SMR has promised to democratise nuclear by putting smaller reactors in more places. But that could mean more communities exposed to nuclear risk, more targets for terrorism or natural disasters, more insurance challenges and more regulatory oversight needed. Are we trading concentrated risk in certain respects for distributed risk? In other words, in a world where extreme weather is increasing, does spreading nuclear infrastructure geographically make us more resilient or more vulnerable?

Katy Huff:

I actually do think spreading it out a bit will make us more resilient. If you look for example, at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a lot of the attacks were on a variety of different energy sources, including a nuclear power plant. But the most destruction to availability of power in Ukraine was to the grid. And having more distributed sources on the grid enable a more resilient long-term grid with regard to a lot of those weather-related, or as you mentioned, potential terrorism-related attacks. Nuclear power plants themselves are extremely hard targets, but the grid around them may be less hardened, or at least that's what we've seen so far. And I should just note here that nuclear power plants are designed to withstand jet impacts. These are built very intentionally with regard to security and continued sustainability in the context of fairly extreme circumstances. Another example too is that a lot of communities, let's take a coal community, for example. If you were to replace a coal plant, one that generates electricity by burning coal and replace it with a nuclear power plant, you actually reduce the radiological impact to the community on a day-to-day basis. Because the regulatory environment for a nuclear power plant is much more stringent with regard to radioactive releases than for a coal plant, which tends to release heavy metals in the form of particulate matter into the air, which itself increases background radiation for the surrounding public. Whereas a nuclear power plant is kept really, really low and has extremely highly regulated emissions, and nothing really comes out. We don't really have time to go into the radiological implications of living next to a power plant. But basically the dose of living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant is less over the course of an entire year than the banana I ate this morning in terms of radiological dose.

Jason Mitchell:

Really? I did not know.

Katy Huff:

Yeah, it's less than 0.1 microsieverts.

Jason Mitchell:

Interesting. I've got two other questions. The first one is more technical. And so technologically speaking, what's more promising for rapid decarbonization? Is it perfecting existing light water reactor technology? You're betting on next generation designs like molten salts or high temperature gas reactors, MSRs, and I think with respect to MSRs coming up, the learning curve there, what's the potential for them at scale? And I'm thinking of startups like Copenhagen Atomics, and I think Flibe Energy or marketed as the solution to the energy trilemma, which is a constant theme that we talk about on this podcast in terms of addressing clean, cheap, abundant energy.

Katy Huff:

As the Atomic Energy Commission tried to be, as a serious person I try not to make too many predictions, because I am so often wrong. I think the prediction of which technology is most likely to succeed is less tied to the technology, at least in the United States, than it is to management of their first few projects and the business case for those reactors to be deployed. In some cases, like for molten salt liquid fueled reactors, those molten salt reactors do have a supply chain challenge that's a little distinct from other technologies. There really haven't been examples of commercial molten salt reactors and therefore fuel fabrication for those reactors, the safety and regulatory environment for those reactors. A lot of the fuel cycle and supply chain challenges that have been solved, even for high temperature gas reactors, which have had a couple, if not quite a lot examples of commercial deployments, MSRs really haven't.

There have been pilot scale experiments and they are an extremely compelling technology. But there are some downsides to having a liquid-fueled core that is seen in a molten salt reactor that I think is going to take a bit longer than for say, a high-temperature gas reactor, which can rely on some of the supply chain advancements that have been made by having a couple of example commercial reactors across the world. So in the case of high-temperature gas reactors, the Peach Bottom Nuclear Power plant was TRISO-fueled, it had a very similar fuel. Well, it was similar to TRISO fuel's high-temperature gas reactor in the United States, the AVR in Germany, also very similar design in terms of fuel type and coolant type, whereas molten salt reactors really haven't existed commercially yet.

And I think, not to go on and on about this, but a great deal of my research is focused on molten salt reactor modelling and simulation. My research group builds a lot of tools really focused on successfully and correctly modelling the kinetics and dynamics and multi-physics inside liquid-fueled molten salt reactors, because not necessarily that I'm optimistic about them, but rather because there are so many open questions with regard to their likely behaviour that there are interesting academic questions and lots of papers to be written and questions to be answered by dissertations in my department. I think it's maybe just an important note that I find it an interesting open area of research because it is not yet fully commercializable.

Jason Mitchell:

Interesting. Really interesting. Final question. Your background is really unique. You're a bit of a unicorn in that you're both a nuclear engineer and a senior policymaker. And what surprised you most about the policy side that your technical background didn't prepare you for, and given the chance would you want to find your way back on the policy side at some point?

Katy Huff:

I think the most surprising piece was very unique to the US federal government. I was quite surprised at the extent to which the Office of Management and Budget was able to interface between the agencies and the White House. This office is not primarily political appointees, it's very much primarily career federal staff. And they had a great deal of power over what my office inside the Department of Energy was able to release, and the extent to which my budgetary requests made it into the president's budget. And that's not to say I think it's good or bad, I just really was not taught the extent of their power in civics as a young person.

And I think many different countries have their own version of the Office of Management and Budget, and anyone entering naively into the space of policy might not realise the extent to which those folks can really move the needle. And so before I took my job, I might've thought that maybe the most important person in energy policy was the highest ranking officials in the Department of Energy. I would actually say the director of the Office of Management and Budget might be the most important person in that area.

Jason Mitchell:

Really interesting. It's been fascinating to discuss how to frame nuclear energy in a net-zero context, where nuclear fits into the US energy mix over the next several decades, and what a nuclear Renaissance could look like. I'd like to thank you for your time and insights. I'm Jason Mitchell, head of Responsible Investment Research at Man Group here today with Professor Katy Huff, former assistant secretary for Nuclear Energy at the US Department of Energy. Many thanks for joining us on A Sustainable Future, and I hope you'll join us on our next podcast episode. Katy, thanks so much for your time today, this has been great.

Katy Huff:

Thanks so much for having me.