Abstract

We need to get our electricity house in order. We’re adding heat pumps, electric cars, and data centers. We’re using more air conditioning than ever. Consumer electronics companies keep coming up with more plug-in gadgets. What are we on now, the iPhone 17? I’ll take bets on the year that we reach the iPhone 100. And we’ve got people tearing their hair out over the threat of climate change. And we’ve got millions of people who want to do their part.

So, what are they doing? The latest idea is something called “balcony solar,” or using zip ties to attach a solar panel to your balcony railing, so you can make maybe 100 kilowatt-hours a year. This is energy policy without regard to the decimal point. It’s artisanal energy policy. It won’t do the job. We’re going to need some major new power plants, and a lot of them should be nuclear.

But lately it seems like the kind of people who used to build and operate nuclear power plants aren’t so interested any more. The utilities are on the sidelines, at least so far. Look who is planning to build the Xe-100 gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear reactor: X-energy, a nuclear start-up.  with help from Dow, which wants it for carbon-free steam at a chemical plant. Or Natrium, the sodium-cooled fast reactor married to a molten salt storage system. That’s TerraPower, a nuclear innovation company founded by Bill Gates. Or the Hermes demonstration reactor series, here in your backyard. That’s Kairos Power, a start-up reactor company that has agreements to produce electricity for TVA to deliver to Google AI data centers. Or the Oklo nuclear fuel recycling powerhouse, another start-up wanting to buy property in Oak Ridge.

TVA, which produces over 40% of the electricity it delivers using nuclear power, may be an exception, but it has challenges of its own, including a debt ceiling problem and the lack of a quorum on its board. The White House could fix this if it could pay attention long enough.

So, while we’re racing for new technologies, we’re also reaching a point where our business model for making power is changing, too. It must change. In most of the country, we’ve gone to a market system that worked more-or-less okay in static circumstances, but doesn’t allow utility construction of durable, capital-intensive, clean power plants. In theory, the market system—MISO, PJM, California, New England, Texas and New York—is a level playing field. But it’s like building a new high school, telling the kids they can play any sport they want, and when they get out on the field, they’re told to try to play baseball on a soccer field. 

The challenge to building affordable, advanced nuclear power plants isn’t just getting the technology right, it’s also correcting misguided policy. 

Biographical Sketch

Matt began his career at The New York Times, where he was a reporter for 37 years; he was based in New York, New England, and Washington, D.C., and wrote extensively about electricity markets, electric technologies, and nuclear energy. He has toured and written about 14 nuclear power plants, two research reactors, two military production reactors, the nuclear waste repository proposed for Yucca Mountain, several nuclear weapons plants, two uranium enrichment plants, and three major electric grid control centers. In addition, he has reported on factories that make solar panels, wind turbine blades, and fuel cells, as well as on a variety of coal mines, oil refineries, drilling and fracking operations, and other energy-related laboratories.

Matt worked for six years in the policy department and the communications department at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association of the nuclear energy utilities. For the last three years, he has been an energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, an NGO concerned with energy, economy, and environment. He has written articles for the American Nuclear Society and other nuclear-related organizations.

He has a B.A. degree in urban studies from Brown University and a certificate in auto mechanics from the Providence Vocational Technical Facility, where he learned to rebuild carburetors.