Nuclear Power

Galen Nelson
Great, wonderful. Welcome, everyone! I would like to welcome you to our speaker series and welcome to my guest, Sukesh Aghara from UMass Lowell, and everyone joining today at MassCEC and beyond. This is our fifth edition of this speaker series, where we are highlighting experts, pioneers, and practitioners from a variety of existing and emerging climate tech sectors, as well as subject matter experts who can provide insights into broader economic, social, and technological dynamics shaping the industry. Today, we are going to talk about nuclear power. To be clear, we are talking primarily about fission today, not fusion; that is splitting atoms to produce energy versus combining them.

Galen Nelson
But before we jump to Sukesh, I am going to set the table for our discussion today rather suddenly and for a number of reasons. Nuclear is getting a lot of attention. Load growth driven by reshoring, new large loads like data centers, and of course, the push for economy-wide electrification in many states is driving interest in resources that can provide clean baseload power, particularly to complement variable renewable generation.

Galen Nelson
Many are likely aware that Meta is slowly moving forward with a PPA with Constellation to reactivate one of the reactors at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, in a deal that is getting a lot of attention and is intended to meet the increased energy demand triggered by AI. Nuclear generating facilities comprise about 25% of our generating capacity here in ISO New England, and that figure is about 20% nationally. Of course, siting new generation facilities, both fossil and renewable, is difficult, but there are opportunities to increase power generating capacity at existing nuclear facilities known as uprating. That opportunity exists at many of the existing 54 nuclear facilities around the country, as noted in DOE\'s Advanced Nuclear Liftoff study. In 2022, utilities were shutting down nuclear reactors. In 2024, they were extending nuclear reactor operations to 80 years, planning to upgrade capacity, and restarting formally closed reactors. To accelerate this progress, US DOE and industry are investing in a new generation of so-called advanced nuclear reactors, including SMRs or small modular reactors, which proponents claim are safer and more versatile, including reactors that produce high grade heat for nearby tough-to-decarbonize industrial applications. Struggles to build out new clean energy resources have many US climate policymakers thinking twice about nuclear. With the completion of two new advanced nuclear reactors at the Vogtle facility in Georgia, those are the first reactors to go online, I believe, in 30 years in the country, the supply chain and workforce have been revitalized somewhat. That said, the cost of nuclear energy remains high, and while the three cent per kilowatt hour, IRA investment tax credit is expected to survive, permitting new nuclear, even at smaller scale, is daunting. However, while there remains some resistance to nuclear power, that opposition is diminished. Polling indicates that support for expansion of nuclear power in the US has strengthened over the last decade, though that support is a relatively slim majority. It is also worth noting briefly that the only SMRs operating globally right now are in Russia, China, and India, although many more are in development.

Galen Nelson
Here in Massachusetts, I will note that our colleagues at the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection shared with me that DEP has been a leader in acknowledging nuclear power as clean under our Clean Energy Standard policy since 2018. New nuclear is fully eligible, including if located in New York or Eastern Canada. Seabrook and Millstone, the generating facilities in New Hampshire and Connecticut, are both acknowledged by the state as clean energy sources.

Galen Nelson
I hope that helps set the table before we pivot to Sukesh. Just a bit of housekeeping for those listening in, as usual, please feel free to drop questions in the Q&A. We will reserve some time near the end of our dialogue with Sukesh and do our best to address those. Once again, Sukesh, welcome. You have been a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. You serve as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Francis College of Engineering. How long have you been at UMass Lowell, Sukesh?

Sukesh Aghara
Galen and MassCEC, thank you for having me and for having this dialogue around energy and how important it is. It has always been important for us, so thank you again for having the opportunity to get into the dialogue. To answer your question, I came to UMass Lowell in 2012, and that was after about 15 years of an academic career in the state of Texas. As you mentioned with Vogtle, the two units that were built recently were the first new units built in 30 years. I was also the first new nuclear engineering professor hired at the only state university with an ABET nuclear engineering program in New England after 28 years. We have had a nuclear engineering program at UMass since the 1960s and 70s, and it has continued, but they had not hired any new people. That was a sign in terms of the commitment to maintain that nuclear program and then the revitalization.

Galen Nelson
That is great, thanks for that history. That is indeed symbolic, first hire in that practice in many years. Why don\'t we just start with some basics? I know I tried to do a little bit of that with the table setting. Can you just talk about first, legacy nuclear generating facilities, the so-called large water reactors, the technology, the scale of those reactors, basically our existing fleet at a high level, and how that differs from advanced nuclear in terms of technology and scale.

Sukesh Aghara
The short statement that you provided there was compacted with so much, just like nuclear energy, which is a high-density energy, right? There are so many things that are really exciting about what is going on right now, and also for what we have done as a country and our impact as nuclear energy globally in the past 60 years. Nuclear energy is a relatively maturing technology of energy compared to other energy technologies. Wind energy as we use it today and build is also relatively young, but we have done windmills for decades, for centuries, right? Whereas nuclear technology was literally understood in terms of science in the 1930s, and then we designed and engineered systems in the 40s and started building them in the 60s and 70s. Approximately 437 reactors currently operate in the world, of which 93 of them are in the United States. We still have about a quarter of all operating nuclear reactors in the world. Hence, by far the largest fleet of nuclear reactors in the world, which as you mentioned, about 20%. So, one in five days of your electrical power in the United States comes from a nuclear power station. These reactors were all basically designed back in the 60s and 70s with what is shorthand for light water reactors. Light water reactor is the coolant that is used inside the reactor. It is the regular water that you and I drink, just basically deionized, and that is about it. The only difference. If you wear one of those sleep apnea machines, you also put deionized water in there. It is about the same, nothing fancy about that water. The simplicity of the design is that not only do you use the light water, which is abundantly available, as a coolant, but it is also used as a moderator. I am introducing some fundamental terminologies which will be important for us to maybe explore as we go into the advanced reactors and what that means.

Sukesh Aghara
Because we know how to use water as a thermal cycle which we have done in other energy systems, it was a convenient use of light water for moderation, which means we slow down the neutrons from where they are born to how do we cause fission. It also is what we use for cooling, wwhichessentially takes about 360 degrees of temperature, remove that, and convertsss that into mechanical energy in turbines, and then eventually convertsss that into electricity. That was all the majority of all the builds that were there, and that is the legacy reactors. The average design size of these reactors started out earlier in the 500 to 600 megawatt electric. The Vogtle plants that you just talked about are called the AP1000, designed by Westinghouse, are about 1,000 megawatt electric. That is where the delineation line is. We call these gigawatt reactors. These are essentially all the ones that we have currently in the US that connect to the grid for mainly baseload power supply.

Galen Nelson
The Vogtle reactors, the Westinghouse reactors, are built in the US.

Sukesh Aghara
The Westinghouse design originally, the pressurized water reactor design. Within the light water category of all the reactors that we run, there are two different categories, one which is the boiling water reactor. It is basically the most simple of energy design systems, like boiling water for pasta. There is, and I do not want to discount the fact that there are some experts in the audience, but I do not want to get into the weeds. When you increase the pressure, you can basically also increase the temperature before the water will boil. With the pressurized water, we increase the pressure from atmospheric pressure to about 1,000 to 1,200 psi, and that allows us to increase the operating temperature. What you gain by that is thermal efficiency. You can essentially get a little more higher energy steam that gives you a little more power.

Galen Nelson
Makes sense. A little bit of the capital cost. So both designs have validity in terms of economics. Both designs are technologically sound. It just depends on where you optimize. Great. The difference, then, between the legacy reactors and the AP1000, I believe, at Vogtle, what are two or three of the key attributes that differentiate this new generation of reactors from the legacy reactors?

Sukesh Aghara
Again, a fantastic question for us to sort of re-engage in the conversations or continue to increase awareness around what is going on with nuclear reactors. I think oftentimes, depending on how far or close you are to the technology, you think nuclear, you may consider fission and fusion to be the same. Thank you for differentiating that. Likewise, when you think nuclear fission reactors, the Model T Ford, if you ask somebody to describe the attributes of that design, it actually has an internal combustion engine and has four tires and a gear. If you ask somebody to describe a modern hybrid car in a most fundamental way, it also has an internal combustion engine and four tires and brakes and gears, but they are completely different and not comparable in terms of what it is. Where are the changes? When we started to design these first-generation reactors, the majority of the reactors that we built are the generation 2 reactors. These are the reactors that are currently operating in the United States. None of them are in the state in which they were originally designed, because with our own operational history of learning, engineering, as most of you who own a car or a home or any other system that is designed, you make improvements to them as you learn when you are operating them. They continue to evolve, adding additional safety features.

Sukesh Aghara
You referenced this idea of operating, essentially as you try to squeeze out more energy from them. The majority of these reactors have gone through that improvement in efficiency of recovering more energy through the thermal cycle. For every accident, whether it has the legacy like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, any minor incidents also leads to the awareness of where we need to improve things. Those improvements are continuing and required by the NRC, the Regulatory Commission. These reactors have to demonstrate that they continue to operate under the safety conditions, and the NRC has those license auditors that continue to review the audits, the safety operation. We want to call them not the legacy reactors, but the generation 3 and 3 plus reactors. As you get into the generation 3 and 3 plus reactors, which are the majority of all the reactors built outside of the OECD countries, as you start to build new reactors in the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of them, all reactors built in China, for instance, a lot of the reactors, the new builds in Japan, South Korea, and other countries, they essentially took a lot of the lessons learned. For instance, you may have some kind of a harness that will protect you from going into an impact accident in a car. That is basically a Volvo made that, and that is their symbol, the car seat. But if you buy any new modern car, it automatically has it in there. Similarly, MMercedes haas ananautomatic braking system to avoid collision. Now, the majority of modern cars have that as a required feature.

Galen Nelson
The passive cooling, for example, at Vogtle will likely become, or perhaps become, a feature.

Sukesh Aghara
This is a great place to introduce the fundamental concepts that were the drivers for what was, lessons learned broadly as a reactor design concepts, and those were lumped under the generation 4 reactor designs. Passive safety is something that you mentioned. There are four major attributes to this improvements in design, sustainability, which means you improve your efficiency of utilization of fuel, economics, make it efficient to run in an economic scale, safety and reliability, how do you reliably operate the reactors and how do you do them safely, and also the overall proliferation resistance. These are the four major categories that were the drivers for generation 4 reactors. The generation 3 plus reactors take some of these things that we have learned. For instance, passive safety is one of the key features of the AP1000 operability and less number of alarms. If you look at the accident report from Three Mile Island, there were way too many alarms in the control room. It was overwhelming. Everything is trying, what do I do? You simplify that to saying, what is safety critical, what is critical, and what is good to know that could lead into further accident analysis, but do not want to have to pay attention to all of them. That is the kind of things that we have been doing to improve the operability of those reactors by design and making them safer.

Galen Nelson
Great. Thank you. It is a little bit in the weeds, but I think this is interesting, because we are very interested in better leveraging waste heat in the commonwealth as part of a much broader effort to improve efficiency, potentially look at district energy systems, recapture heat in buildings, and so on from industrial processes. That was also another feature that kind of leapt out at me with regard to these advanced reactors, that there might be more or greater opportunities to harvest higher grade heat for nearby industrial processes. Is there a reason why that was not done in the past, or is there something about these new designs that enables that functionality?

Sukesh Aghara
Again, I think it is a really great question to sort of peel the onion a little bit. When we design the light water reactors, the generation 3, and then the improvements to the inherent safety features, which is the passive safety systems that we just alluded to, and the operability and the reduced radiation release factors through improvements in fuel design and other things. The fundamental aspect of the design did not change. I will again use the car example. From internal combustion engine we went to a hybrid engine. You are still using internal combustion engine, but you are improving tthe fuel efficiency. But fundamentally, the EVs, the electric vehicles, are completely different, fundamentally different. The engine is completely different. How do I relate that to nuclear technology? All the generation 3 plus reactors are still light water reactor\--based technologies. But we know that if you really wanted to amplify our ability to truly hit on that fuel efficiency, the way that we totally are accountable on the total energy utilization, if we wanted to minimize the spent fuel that comes off the reactor, how do I reduce that? I want to be more economically competitive, and I want to be more versatile. These designs that we have just built in the past, they all did one thing, and that was baseload power as a replacement to coal power stations. They produce steam, and then that steam converted into electricity. But that is not the only thing that nuclear can do. If you take the nuclear energy in itself and then start to think about, what else can I do? I can provide you with steam if you need it, instead of producing electrons. Now you do away with this tremendous inefficiency in the thermal cycle. There is no way I can beat the Rankine cycle. It has nothing to do with nuclear power power. I am stuck with 40% efficiency.

Galen Nelson
Same thing that brought CHP back in. Yes, the reason why that makes sense combined heat and power, sorry. Yes, correct acronyms.

Sukesh Aghara
We can geek out a little bit. I am sure the audience is ready to go. Let us say we want to produce steam. I can provide that using a nuclear system. I know I can do it. I just have to change the design. There are several of these advanced reactors that are specifically designed to provide you with process heat. Now some of them may not want steam. They just want heat in some kind of a chiller system. Dow Chemicals is one of them that is looking at this. That means you may actually now get away from light water reactor coolant and moderator system to a gas cooled system. I do not want to go into a monologue, but I wanted to kind of start to think about what does advanced reactors mean. Advanced reactors fundamentally are now going to step away from being stuck with light water and being stuck with producing electricity, to sort of opening up and fanning out all that nuclear can offer. Do you want steam? Do you want direct district heating capabilities, where I am going to provide you with heat at a certain amount of temperature in a form that you want, whether it is hot water, steam, or whatever? Are you interested in not baseload, but load following systems? I am a proponent of renewable energy. I have solar panels on my roof. I have solar batteries in my garage, because I think that it is a fantastic way to take advantage of the energy that is available to us in a meaningful way. But as you start to build that renewable into the grid, you need to have the grid to be more responsive and dynamic. The new energy systems that are designed for grid connection need to be responsive, and nuclear can play an important role there. In the past, it was considered that renewable and nuclear are at odds with each other. Honestly, with the advanced reactor technology and the designs, we are in fact the perfect tango partners. We can tango together, and we can actually dance the floor because renewable is fantastic when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and nuclear can be a great backbone when it is in a responsive mode when it is built so that it actually can modulate up and down in the energy demand. There are some really exciting things there. I want to avoid being a monologue, but I think the advanced reactors really are opening that opportunity for nuclear to play in a broader sense with district heating, industrial heating. That is where some of the major carbon loads are. Once you start moving away from electricity, which is a significant transportation sector industry, those are your other major carbon sources. For us to truly decarbonize, we have to start thinking about those.

Galen Nelson
Of course, it would also improve, when you can find those applications, the project economics for developers if they have additional off-take agreements regardinginghigh temp water, steam. That might be a good pivot to the economics. I think that is one thing that perhaps all Americans have heard over and over again, that nuclear, yes, it is this wonderful, clean baseload power. I think we should talk about waste, responsible waste disposal, in a bit. Leaving that aside for the moment, the economics have been challenging. I am wondering if you could talk about energy market dynamics and design. There are some nuclear advocates that contend that existing wholesale energy markets fail to adequately value nuclear\'s reliability. I was wondering if you could just talk about the project economics and what might need to change with regard to energy markets to facilitate the growth in the space.

Sukesh Aghara
Especially in New England, and also in any deregulated markets, any energy that is put on the grid, electricity generation on the grid, has to be market competitive. If you think about renewable energy and nuclear again, there is this partnership. Both renewable energy and nuclear are infrastructure. When we are deploying a massive scale of renewable energy, we really have to build out that transmission lines. Renewable energy deployment at scale is going to require infrastructure planning because it is not something that you can build overnight, and it is not something that you are building for short term return. Natural gas, on the other hand, because the majority of the costs involved in a combined gas cycle plant is the fuel, and when fuel became abundantly available in natural gas, the cost went down, and it does not take that long to build a combined gas cycle plant. Now in the fuel ship, you can really tactically make it available to provide you with very good electricity. But if you are going to build up renewable or nuclear, you really have to be mindful about how you are going to do this in a meaningful way. Nuclear has learned that the past designs were for baseload power replacing coal. But if you are going to be competitive today, you need to find that economic way to do this. On the electricity side for electricity generation, one of the two things that actually kills nuclear on the short term is when you build a gigawatt reactor, it takes a long time to build, and it takes a tremendous amount of capital investment. When you are trying to build something like this in mature economies like in the OECD countries, your CapEx is high, your regulation requirements are higher, your time to connect to the grid is longer. You have what is called the cost overruns and time delays. Let us take the example of Vogtle. When you do anything that is a first of its kind, you are kind of straddled with things that you discover as you start to do them, and those have nothing to do with the design themselves. It could be something that has to do with the building codes. It could be something that has to do with some new regulatory requirements on environmental impact or ASTM standard, for example. Those are the kinds of things that the generation 3 plus reactors and the legacy reactors, these were built to custom at site. How do you address this problem? Because you have a huge capital investment because you are building this one gigawatt of power on grid, and it takes you eight years, and you have all these significant delays.

Sukesh Aghara
Industry learned from it. They said, if you do anything of a kind, you definitely get the economics of scale and the learned workforce that builds it, and the learned regulators that know what they are licensing. We do this in construction all the time. When you have a large development that comes in, you are able to build seven different designs that get built very quickly. But when you want to do a custom home on the coastline of New England, you have to deal with everything. How does the bedrock look like? It is going to be very expensive to build, and you are going to build one of a kind. You have to hire all the guys who may not get a second job, so they want to build in their costs on the first one. But when you have a large development coming up building 150 of these homes in six standardized designs, you can do things. That is one thing that the modular part comes in. When you modularize things, this is more of a construction technology development, more so than nuclear, but nuclear is embracing it today. Everything that I can do that does not have to be done at site, I can do things that are in the factory or in modular fashion. I can get there quickly. We see this in bridge building. Bridges were built in earlier days. Now you bring sections, and then you can get them done.

Galen Nelson
You are building them in a controlled environment as well, whether or not subject to other outside.

Sukesh Aghara
Exactly. Now, you can actually take your Six Sigma technology implementation that we do in other places and impose quality assurance and quality control. QA, QC becomes a factor which is very difficult to do at site on a custom build. That is going to drive cost competitiveness. To close the loop on this, on the first of a kind to the nth of a kind, just at Vogtle, same site two units, the time to build and the cost of construction was reduced by 40% on the second unit as compared to the first. There is no substitute for actual experience of the workers that build the plants, actual experience of the engineers that are site managers and project managers. You cannot replace actual experience with books. That is very evident in that build at Vogtle. I think that in itself is one example where we have become cost competitive. The other one is as you start to really penetrate into the modularization, and then you shrink the size. Let us talk about small modular reactors. Small, by definition, is something that is about 300 megawatts of electric power and less. When you reduce the size, your capital cost is reduced, your ability to build something is faster, and the ability for affordability among customers is wider. When you are trying to get a thousand-megawatt electric front, your customers are limited. It is the utilities. Whereas when you are looking at a 300-megawatt electric, now you become a viable; you have a whole viable customer base of industry. There are two specific examples I want to call out right now that are currently funded under the US Department of Energy\'s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Project. This program specifically was put up, we do not want to keep designing another reactor. We want to build something because building is believing. There are two of these projects that are specifically ARDP, so advanced modular reactors, with very specific partners. One is the company X-energy that is actually building their first of a kind in Seadrift, Texas, in partnership with Dow Chemicals. The intention there is for them to use process heat. Now you are demonstrating the versatility of nuclear energy beyond electricity generation. The second one that is actually in the mix is the Natrium reactor. This was backed by, the company is TerraPower, and it made a big splash because Bill Gates is the initial investor in TerraPower. The Natrium reactor is the other one that is actually building in Wyoming for a data center. I do not know if you alluded to that in the beginning of the conversation. Now we have a whole range of client base that has a demand in a very different way. I think there are now reactor designs that support that demand. I think that is the exciting part of this, the ARDPs, the advanced modular reactors and the ability to modularize them and build them in factory so that we can reduce the cost and time to build.

Galen Nelson
Just in terms of scale, those two projects you just mentioned, are those, as you noted, in the low hundreds of megawatts as far as capacity goes?

Sukesh Aghara
X-energy essentially has a design. It is called the Xe-100, which basically builds these modules or packs of 80 megawatts each. You can sort of build as you go. That is the other thing. I am a nuclear engineer by training. I did not understand economics and finance, and I had to learn it to understand it, which is important because now that design drives your design decisions. If I am going to build a 300. X-energy has this design concept that can give you a package at the end of 320 megawatts of electricity at site, but they do them in increments of 80 megawatts of electricity. Why is that important? That is important for multiple reasons. One, as soon as I get building that 80 megawatt electric, I put it to use. That is a big challenge. When you are building something, you are not generating revenue, and it is basically a cost burden on your balance sheet until the day you start to put it to use. It is like buying a car that you are not using for five years. That is just basically payments going out every day without it being useful to you. That is a very fundamental way in which these designers have sort of approached this. Let us do this in increments so that I can start to provide value proposition right away. The other thing it also does is reduce the source term. Source term is one of the drivers that talk about the EPZ, the evacuation zone. Maybe we will talk a little bit about safety later on. That is an important attribution here. An accident in Fukushima is an accident at a thousand megawatts of electric power. An accident, even if there is no core meltdown, there is a fundamental difference in the safety and the design. But let us say I am only, even if I was building a light water reactor, if I had an 80-megawatt light water reactor, and it is an exact design of the Fukushima, I only now am contained, and each one has its own unique containment. That just completely changes the way in which you are going to respond to that accident. It changes the way your response times go. It changes the way your radiological source term gets defined and everything else in between. I do not want to go into a monologue because I want this to be a dialogue.

Sukesh Aghara
I hope I kind of answered your question with X-energy. The TerraPower Natrium reactor uses a different kind of fuel. I will throw out a couple of these terms. X-energy uses a fuel type called TRISO fuel. These are little Bucky balls. The Natrium reactor uses metallic fuel. Clearly, when you use metallic fuel, you have different thermal conductivity and some benefits there in fabrication of the fuel itself. Both have what is called HALEU fuel. This is high assay low enriched uranium fuel. It is very important to understand why HALEU is there, and that speaks to the sustainability part. Nuclear fuel, the one that we use today, is capable of producing much more energy than what we extract from it. The reason we have to pull it out every 18 months, or one third of it every 18 months, is because the design specs and the expectations of how much juice we can keep getting out of that fuel design. That is a limitation based on the design of the reactor. It is not just the fuel design, but the reactor design drives the fuel design. These fuels are designed in a reactor with the expectation that you are going to do HALEU, which means you are going to run this fuel for a very long time. That gives you two things. One, you get more juice out of the same apple, more cider out of the same apple, which means that you are going to have less waste coming out on the other end. Number two, your operations are going to reduce. The only time when the nuclear reactor is not producing energy for the legacy reactors that are there is when they are in the fuel outage, when they are replacing the fuel. If I now have to go from an 18 month cycle to a 24-month cycle, it actually translates into almost a 20% increase in your revenue generation. Imagine some of these designs that actually can do either real time fueling, which means that they do not have to shut down, or they have fuel cycles that are six, eight years in requirements. Very again makes them very economically competitive and sustainable, that you are trying to get more out of it with the same amount of material.

Galen Nelson
You are reminding me of the shutdowns necessary for refueling. If memory serves, there have been times, and I am sure this has happened at other facilities, where not many, but times when the now shuttered Pilgrim facility had to be shut down because the receiving waters were too warm. Somewhat ironically, trying to fight climate change with a clean energy source, but if the ocean waters were too warm to receive the waters coming off the reactor, then the plant had to be either turned down or shut off entirely. I believe that that has happened a few times over the last couple decades. This might be a good pivot then to the waste side, which, of course, is a safety consideration. It has come up a couple of times now. I think this is certainly, without any personal judgment, I think this is one of the more popular knocks on nuclear. Great, clean power, but what do you do with the waste? How do we handle it responsibly? No one wants it. You were just getting at a piece of this, one of the advantages of advanced nuclear, which is that it sounds as though the waste is slightly less problematic. But I will stop there, or I will get into trouble, and I would love to just turn it over to you, Sukesh, and hear your thoughts on safety, including waste issues, as they relate to advanced nuclear.

Sukesh Aghara
We could tackle both of those as some of the important things that nuclear needs to do, in addition to being economically viable and more versatile in its application. First of all, nuclear fuel, unlike anything else, we hate calling it waste, because honestly, it is a resource depending on what your design is. The spent fuel that we have of the past operations of reactors is in a way a resource for potential future designs that we could use. That is a national call. India has a four-phase nuclear fuel cycle where they essentially integrate the utilization of fuel that comes out of one type of reactor into the second type of reactor. That was their strategic decision that they made. We likewise have the understanding of light water reactors, epithermal reactors, and fast burner reactors. We understand the science; we understand the engineering. But because of the decisions that we made, we have what is called a once through cycle, which means that we really use it one time, and then we store it in place. At least in the nuclear world, we do not call it waste, because honestly, it is a resource that in the right context could be used.

Sukesh Aghara
The second thing is, as the US has always been, and we pride ourselves in pushing for higher excellence, demand more than what we can deliver and push that. It is important for us to say, not just for nuclear, but I think we, as responsible citizens, should ask for any form of human utilization of technology that we do that responsibly. Sustainability cycles are an important thing in everything that we do. Everything from the Coke can that we drink soda out of, to using water bottles and plastics, to any form of energy that we put out onto the grid and any form of energy that we utilize. New England has done a fantastic job in terms of improving efficiencies in our homes and how we can do. That is a sustainability aspect of that same thing. Overall, I think we have reduced 25 to 27% of the total energy consumed on the New England grid in the last 10 to 15 years. That in itself is reducing waste because the less energy that you need, the better that you are using it. How do we do that in context of nuclear energy? I sort of talked about how, when you do this HALEU fuel, you are able to get more juice out of the same apple in a way. But you have to do it by changing the design of the reactor that then drives the design of the fuel, and that allows you to do that. I talked about these two different types of fuel, the metallic fuel, but there are other versions of these reactors that are using different kinds of fuel. We have not really talked about that second quantum leap.

Sukesh Aghara
These reactors still use fuel in its solid state. The fuel that goes in the current reactor actually does not change physical form. It stays in the way that it went in and comes out exactly the same way. Everything that changes in the reactor fuel is the isotopics in the fuel, which is kind of unique to nuclear. No other burning fuel that we use, fossil fuels specifically, ever retains the physical form in which they have been in. That means now you have a bigger challenge in terms of building and sustainability, and which is why we need to replace fossil fuel. You take something that is in a bound state, and then you burn it, and now it is in an unbound state, and then some of it goes into the atmosphere, and you do not have a way to capture it all. In nuclear, that is one reason; another reason why we do not call it waste, because the fuel stays exactly the way it is. In the 18 months of burn cycle, it literally stays bound inside my fuel rods. I am fully responsible for that fuel. There is nothing that I put outside, that was a result of me using that fuel.

Sukesh Aghara
But now, if I wanted to do something even cooler and really push the boundaries of full utilization, what can I do? That is where you get into going into some of the more fascinating coolant systems. If you now take water to gas, you can kind of get some efficiencies there. There are these high temperature gas cooled reactors. X-energy is a design that uses that concept. The other way that you can do it is salt. If you have ever boiled pasta, it is advisable to put some salt in the beginning.

Galen Nelson
Lower the boiling temperature.

Sukesh Aghara
Lower the boiling temperature. Hallelujah. What did you just do? You just basically took that water and you made it into molten salt? What is molten salt? Molten salt is now really a salt which will essentially be in its solid state unless it reaches a certain amount of temperature. Once it hits that temperature, it is going to get into a molten state, and it is going to get. That is another very fundamental safety feature. The reactor will essentially not function unless you hit certain temperature conditions. Once you hit those temperature conditions, you are in a molten state, and that is when you are going to get into sustained fission. As soon as you lose off-site power, or you lose any of your operating conditions, you lose the heat, and the thing that makes your reactor go essentially becomes solid, and you do not have that function.

Galen Nelson
Phenomenal.

Sukesh Aghara
Which is the exact opposite of what you have to do now in an accident scenario. What you need is offsite power, because you need to keep cooling that fuel, and then you need the backup diesel generators. With the AP1000s, you have these passive cooling systems where you do not need an operating pump that is pumping the fuel in. You have ways in which you drive that passively like convective cooling systems. Here now, you are completely replacing the coolant, and you are really driving up the utilization of fuel.

Sukesh Aghara
Let us get even more excited and go into things that have really pushed the envelope. Not only do I want my fuel to be, what happens if I actually, my fuel is in a solid state and converted into liquid state? Now I have a molten fuel and coolant in a bath. There are these designs that are at least probably about 15 to 20 years away, but are being in some experimental states everywhere, where now you are really taking advantage of getting more and more juice out of that apple. You are going away from making what is called a cider to going into making a smoothie. What is the difference? A smoothie, there is no pulp that comes out. You drink all of it, whereas the best juicer will still have some pulp at the end. If you are responsible, and if you have a responsible governance system, you put that pulp to good use, and you do not throw it into a landfill site. It is biodegradable. You do something good with it.

Sukesh Aghara
Those are the kinds of things that are really going into that inherent safety by design, because you have the choices of what you are going to do with your coolant system, the choices with your fuel, choices with your moderator. That changes the conversation as we get further away from the light water-cooled solid state, non-flow fuel types, to something that is more advanced in true cases, going past what we can do now.

Galen Nelson
Got it. Thanks, Sukesh. I know we are looking at the clock, and I want to make sure that we get to some of the participant questions. But I did want to touch on a couple of things, so maybe we can do a little bit more rapid fire. I know that there were over 9,000 jobs associated with the Vogtle facility in Georgia. I wonder if you could just quickly touch on workforce. It occurs to me that there are a number of different categories. There is the construction of the facilities, there is fuel management, and ongoing operation and maintenance. If you could just talk briefly about the jobs associated with and whether there is transferability. These are, at the end of the day, steam power generating facilities in a sense. There is some transferability, I assume, from other fossil fuel generating assets.

Sukesh Aghara
There are lots of reasons why Massachusetts needs to lean forward in all forms of clean energy, and one of those is connected to workforce. Massachusetts is known for many things. My son actually is on a crew team, and I realize that rowing is also something that we pride ourselves in as a sport that comes out of Massachusetts. I recently learned that volleyball apparently also comes from Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, we pride ourselves to be first, and we want to be in the business of developing a workforce. We are globally known as some of the best academic institutions of higher education. We want to participate in this infrastructure. We want to provide those jobs to our New England residents in this meaningful way. The Department of Energy and the Department of Labor have, their jobs are to look at where the workforce demands are going to be. They anticipate that there are going to be about 300,000 new jobs in the nuclear field in the whole range of supply chain support and OEMs, construction management, specialized welders, to heavy industries. As we kind of reshore, there is already a tremendous emphasis on upskilling. We are going into advanced manufacturing. We are going into advanced instrumentation and control systems. We are looking at high tolerance welding systems. We want those jobs in New England. We have those jobs in New England. The shipping industry in New Hampshire and in Connecticut, in Massachusetts, are some of the highest paid trades, the trade crafts. We do not want to miss out on training that workforce for nuclear. MIT as a private university has a nuclear engineering department that does undergraduate, masters, and PhD, and so does UMass Lowell. There is a range of universities that participate in the fundamental drivers that would lead into construction engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and all of the community colleges and our trade schools, all of them are fueling that economics of workforce development. I think, as we start to embrace parts of nuclear power and our contribution to it in the grand scheme of national and international, and hopefully maybe even build some nuclear power stations of the advanced modular reactors or SMRs in New England, we would truly be taking advantage of that workforce, high paid jobs, both in the process of construction, operations, and also supply chain there. That is what we are looking at. About 300,000 jobs is going to come out of this demand to maintain the current fleet and to respond to the anticipated conservative scales of what we will be doing in terms of building.

Galen Nelson
Great, thanks. Maybe we will just hit on one more, and then we will turn to some of these questions. It is a way to close out. To be clear, there is a lot we have not addressed. We only had an hour. This is an enormous topic. I think there is a lot of promise. There is a lot of opportunity. People have a lot of legitimate concerns and questions given the history of nuclear. A lot needs to be done. But nuclear is increasingly coming up at the state level. To be clear, all states. I am involved with an organization that talks to clean energy leaders across the whole country, and nuclear is quietly coming up more and more, I think, because of this realization that we just need more options on the table to complement our substantial investments in renewable energy sources. What do you see are some key next steps that leading states need to take in order to begin to address existing challenges, to better understand advanced nuclear technology? Do we need to just begin to talk more about this in public forums and to educate decision makers, opinion leaders about how new nuclear is different than your father\'s nuclear, as they used to say, or your grandfather\'s nuclear?

Sukesh Aghara
I think the State of Massachusetts and New England in general always challenged the norm. We were the ones, that is why we challenged the Colonials by throwing the tea out there. We are natural leaders, and we naturally embrace technology. I think what I would love to see is a revitalization of honest conversations among citizens. I am not a believer that just because I do not have any other solution, I am going to have to accept this as a solution. There is a strong belief in Massachusetts that you know I can do better. Just because I do not have any other choices, I do not have to accept the choice that I am not convinced that it is the right choice. However, I think we also then have to be honest about saying I cannot judge and have a formed opinion that I rode in the Model T, and it was a fun ride, but it is an antique, and that is what my impression of what a car is.

Galen Nelson
Really unsafe.

Sukesh Aghara
It was really unsafe, but it was state of the art at the time that it was built. I think we are capable as citizens, and we are capable as policymakers to at least, just because I talk to you does not mean that I am going to agree, unless you convince me otherwise. But unless you come with an open mind to actually genuinely talk to me about it. If nuclear guys cannot answer your questions in a scientific way to prove to you that they have genuinely addressed the issues concerned with safety, operations, sustainability, what are you going to do with your spent fuel, how are you going to be market competitive, then you should not. I do not hire a guy to cut my lawn just because I do not have a choice. I want to be convinced that the guy is going to deliver. If he delivers, then sure, I eventually give him the entire landscaping job. Right now is the time. I think Governor Healey took a very significant step in that direction, and then the state legislature took a very important step in the climate bill. The climate bill prioritizes clean energy, but it now says, you can acknowledge that nuclear can provide clean energy, and that was a very significant step. I think it was naive for us to ignore the fact that our neighbors in New Hampshire and in Connecticut continue to provide a significant amount of clean energy from nuclear that we benefit from. We did not acknowledge that, and it did not allow our utilities that operated in Massachusetts to participate in those power purchase agreements on those nuclear power stations. I think that Governor Healey took a very bold step in a necessary step to acknowledge that nuclear is continuing to play an important role in the existing reactors. I think that shows the maturity of our legislature, our executive branch, and I think they represent the public. I feel that when I moved to Massachusetts from Texas, people said, what are you doing? This is an anti-nuclear state. I honestly am running into more and more people who are so informed and are so interested in learning. How do we take advantage of these? Are these real? They are real. We are building these things. I do not think Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI are going to step up and open up a \$1.6 to \$2 billion each if they did not think that this is a real solution. If one industry that has no commitment to anybody is the IT industry, they are the national disruptors. They question everything that is status quo, and they have a very short attention span. If they do not see a solution, they move on. When they are stuck with nuclear, that is another way. Looking at this as a reinforcement, I think it is a validation that these guys are now saying, listen, nuclear might be ready. It took us 50 years to get ready. We had to learn how to operate a little bit more responsibly. We had to learn how to regulate a little bit better. Like all engineering systems, there are some accidents that come along the way. We have to accept that there was no accident that led outside of Chernobyl, and that is a whole different thing that can be a two-hour conversation in itself. As you can see, I am passionate. I am raising kids that I want to leave something behind that is important. But I love being challenged. I think we should have an honest conversation. We continue to do these kinds of things and let us just be open to listening to the other side.

Galen Nelson
That is great, wonderful, Sukesh. Thanks for that. Agree. We need more hard conversations, particularly now, and we need to be reminded about keeping our eyes on the prize, which is the bigger fight against climate change and all of the negative impacts that that is already bringing and will continue to bring. There is one question about, and you raised this a bit, and we are certainly looking at it as we think about data centers, load flexibility, and how these smaller reactors are potentially better at following loads. Is the industry thinking about combining storage with nuclear? Is that a good fit, or is that somewhat redundant? Is it helpful?

Sukesh Aghara
We have not rehearsed this at all, so I did not know what we were going to be asking. I think these are the kinds of questions. I am actually very encouraged. There are 27 open questions on there. I am just browsing through, and we have been addressing some of these. There are about six or seven. If you consider some of the advanced 3 plus reactors like GE Hitachi, NuScale, there is probably about 10 to 12 different designs that really solve many of these different problems. Many of them specifically, and TerraPower actually has a built-in energy storage system in the form of thermal storage. When you go into molten salts, that is another way in which you can take advantage of that. Yes, there is a built-in storage system, and a lot of them actually are conducive to what is cogeneration. Now you can envision an energy island where you may have renewable energy sources, a 150 to 200 megawatt nuclear system, a thermal energy storage system, and possibly a hydrogen generation system. Now you are really taking advantage of all these different energy needs in one location in a scaled form.

Sukesh Aghara
The one thing we did not talk about, and I do not want to miss the opportunity, is just if we do not get to the table, and just because we know everything we do, and if we are willing to ask the hard questions on the global scale, we are going to miss the opportunity to drive safe, secure, and responsible build of nuclear power stations. The Chinese and the Russians are out there building these. Americans can talk about it. We discovered the technology. We built the first kind, and we still operate the largest fleet in the world. But if we do not step up and engage in a conversation, we will not be driving the conversations around how we get these reactors built. I think it is also something that we really have to think about.

Galen Nelson
Agreed. There is certainly an international competitiveness component to this discussion. I am sorry that we were not able to get to more of those questions, but I think that this is a good start to what will hopefully be an ongoing dialogue in this state in our region. I think it is about time we start talking about it. As you said, we are going to have to have a lot of conversations to move the ball forward and address a lot of serious concerns. But there is an opportunity for us to move on this clean energy source and keep pace with our competitors and complement our very ambitious renewable energy and electrify everything objectives. Thanks so much for your time, Sukesh. I really appreciate you and the dialogue. I appreciate everyone joining today. It has been a great conversation.

Sukesh Aghara
I appreciate MassCEC\'s leadership in keeping clean energy front and center for New England, and I appreciate your leadership in reaching out and starting this conversation. Honestly, there is so much information flowing into the Q&A session with a lot of people actually sharing some of the things that they know. I am really excited that we did this. I think that there is maybe a roadshow that we may take. I want to learn more from others, because there is so much there. Nuclear is a system. It is not one small part of it. It drove building fire stations and our emergency response. FEMA came out of new power station build. Nuclear power stations drive a larger economics, economy, and infrastructure. Very, very important that we keep talking about this. Thank you.

Galen Nelson
Great, wonderful! All right. Thanks, all. Thanks for joining today. Thanks again, Sukesh. Take care, all.