Matt Wald on nuclear power

Matt Wald, an independent energy analyst and a writer who contributes to the Breakthrough Institute and has written feature articles for Nuclear News, recently shared his nuclear perspectives in a Zoom talk with Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering ORNL's scientific goals.

Missed opportunity: Wald, a former reporter for The New York Times and a former policy analyst for the Nuclear Energy Institute, feels that the nuclear industry and community "have committed industrial sin. Nuclear suffered through a long drought, and now it sees terrific demand for its product, and it's not ready to deliver the needed electricity."

He added that start-up companies that are focusing on small modular reactors and other advanced reactors-such as Kairos Power, Oklo, and X-energy-have missed out on the construction activities that are currently being undertaken by builders of natural gas-fired power plants.

Licensing: Wald emphasized that U.S. energy policies regarding nuclear reactors must change, as the demand for electricity soars because of the energy requirements of AI data centers and other expected power needs. Among the policies that must be revised are the licensing actions of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, because the procedures that needed for 30- to 300-megawatt advanced reactors are different from those required for 1,000-megawatt pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors.

He stressed that the licensing process for new nuclear needs to be speeded up, as also is noted in an executive order from President Trump. "Regulators must supply human intelligence to each license application, but their process must run many times faster than it does now, especially for licensing reactors that produce just 300 megawatts or 30 megawatts or 10 megawatts or 1 megawatt," Wald said. "These are just one-by-one individual licenses. If we're going to think big, we've got to rethink regulation."

Wald opined that "what the NRC does is not very productive. It has a bureaucracy that is resistant to change and that's now dealing with new technologies. . . . I am open to the idea that they'll make errors [in an accelerated regulatory process], they'll approve things they shouldn't, and we're going to learn from experience. [But] the NRC has this habit of approving things they've approved before and of not approving anything nobody's ever done before. That's not a recipe for successful innovation and industrial progress."

Collective solutions: Wald pointed out that artisanal energy policies do not work well within the overall energy system. "Solar and wind tribalists say their costs are going down. But we'd be much better off if we put our money into collective solutions. We should invest in the electric grid. If all the money used to purchase 11-kilowatt emergency generators [solar panels], like I and others have in my neighborhood, had went into the grid instead, we'd all be better off.

"I think that solar and wind farms have their place, but only to the extent that they benefit the system," he said. "Adding solar panels in a place where noontime electricity prices on the grid are negative is not a good idea, although federal and state incentives may make that happen."

Wald added that the "amount of electricity transmission you need to support a new reactor is lower than what you need for wind or solar or hydro energy sources. Nuclear plants have reasonably flexible siting requirements."

No problem: "I think fusion seeks to solve two problems that fission does not, in fact, have," he said. "One is a shortage of fuel, and the other is radioactive waste. We don't have a shortage of uranium, and we don't have any shortage of plutonium if we want it. The problem of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is manageable."