Introduction
The Advanced Reactor Roadmap outlines a path forward for advanced reactor technologies to help meet the market need for reliable, affordable, and zero-carbon emissions sources of energy. This early version will focus on North America and has five primary audiences:
For potential owner/operators of advanced reactors – to understand the industry plan to deliver on owner/ operator (e.g., owners and energy off-takers) needs and have more confidence when making decisions to pursue advanced reactors
For policymakers and regulators – to understand the impacts of federal, state/provincial/territorial, and local policies and the policies necessary to enable deployment of advanced reactors to achieve decarbonization and other objectives
For financial institutions – to understand how advanced reactors fit in the bigger picture to deliver on society’s decarbonization efforts and have more confidence in the value of and return on those investments
For public stakeholders including local communities, Indigenous Nations and communities – to understand the benefits and key attributes of advanced reactors and to have confidence that deployment and utilization of advanced reactors are done in a way that is protective of the public and the environment
For industry stakeholders – to understand the integrated path forward to create advanced reactors that deliver value to the market; to understand the opportunities and needs for developing and expanding capability and expertise; to know when those capabilities will be in demand; and to have more confidence in the return on those investments
The purpose of this roadmap is to support the successful commercialization of advanced reactors, spur the needed actions, and achieve the outcomes necessary to enable successful large-scale deployment.
The roadmap includes three sections to:
Describe the approach that the industry is taking to drive the value of advanced reactors to fulfill critical market needs
Discuss conditions that would further enable advanced reactors to meet the market needs
Identify actions that the industry plans to take to deliver advanced reactors into the market
The Advanced Reactor Roadmap is initially focused on North America, with the recognition that efforts to support the industry in the United States and Canada will also support deployment of advanced reactors around the globe.
The roadmap is framed around several key attributes to enhance its value and effectiveness, including being:
Integrated – The roadmap provides an approach to facilitate the successful commercialization of advanced reactors, taking individual areas needed for success (such as fuel availability) and integrating them into an overall plan to address all areas.
Recognized – The roadmap must be communicated within and outside the industry and recognized as a common plan for successful deployment of advanced reactors.
Stakeholder Supported – The roadmap must be driven collaboratively by the industry as a whole to ensure success.
Action Driven – The roadmap is more than concepts. It includes key targets to recognize success, drive down risk, and ensure timely completion of roadmap actions.
Suitable for Communication to a Wide Variety of Audiences – The roadmap is presented in a manner that can be understood by key stakeholders internal and external to the industry.
The Case for Nuclear Energy
The world depends on vast amounts of energy to run the economy, provide security, enjoy a high standard of living, and provide the basic necessities of food, water, and health. This energy comes in the form of electricity to power homes and businesses, steam and heat for industrial uses, and liquids to fuel ships, airplanes, and cars.
As the negative impacts of carbon emissions have been increasingly recognized by the public and policymakers, there has been a significant focus on decarbonizing the energy sector. As the energy sector is decarbonized and society becomes more dependent on intermittent sources of carbon-free generation, the reliability of supply can be challenged. Nuclear power can play an important role in enhancing the reliability of energy supply while enabling deployment of greater shares of intermittent sources.
Nuclear energy has been a cornerstone of the North American electricity system since the 1970s, producing roughly 20% of the electricity in the United States and about 15% in Canada. In these countries, nuclear has a history as a reliable, resilient and affordable type of energy, available 24/7 year-round and resulting in some of the lowest-cost electricity systems over its lifetime. Nuclear energy has also been environmentally friendly, avoiding emissions of toxins and producing carbon-free energy.
The public and policymakers are beginning to understand more clearly that the transition to a zero-carbon energy system must emphasize clean, reliable, and affordable energy, not just zero-carbon emissions.
Recent passage of clean energy standards in Canada and states like Washington, as well as new federal incentives in both countries to deploy zero-carbon-emitting sources, have provided new incentives for nuclear energy.
Although most attention is on the electricity system, there is growing awareness among policymakers and the public that decarbonization of the other energy-consuming sectors is also important. The carbon emissions of the transportation and industrial heat sectors are, each, nearly the same (in the United States) or greater than (in Canada) as those of the electricity sector, meaning that even if the electric sector’s carbon emissions were reduced to zero, only one-third of the carbon emissions from the energy industry will have been addressed. Although some transportation modes might be converted to electricity, many others, such as airplanes and ships, have no viable option to use electricity. Nuclear energy can be used directly for industrial uses or production of liquid fuels, including hydrogen, and can do it more efficiently than electricity to produce the heat.
Nuclear energy can be used directly for industrial uses or production of liquid fuels, including hydrogen, and can do it more efficiently than electricity to produce the heat.
Increased capacity for nuclear energy production could be key to helping the United States and Canada meet national energy, economic, climate, environmental, and security goals. The market also now recognizes the need for more nuclear energy capacity in North America to provide a reliable and affordable path forward to meet goals for reducing carbon emissions.
Recent assessments of the energy system outlook suggest that over the next 10-20 years, the need to deploy advanced reactors in the United States and Canada will rival, and likely exceed, the scale of the entire existing operating nuclear energy capacity in North America. In Canada, Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator’s 2022 “Pathways to Decarbonization” report predicts that a doubling of the nuclear capacity by 2050 is needed to ensure the reliability of a low-carbon electricity system.
A study in the United States by Vibrant Clean Energy (VCE) found that the lowest-cost electricity system for reducing carbon would need to more than triple the nuclear capacity by 2050. 1 In another scenario involving constraints preventing large-scale deployment of new nuclear energy, the report concluded that total system costs increased by nearly a half a trillion dollars.
Figure 2, from the VCE study, shows the cumulative scale of potential advanced reactor electricity generation deployments—on the order of about 300 GWe by 2050. This lowest-cost system to provide reliable electricity and meet carbon reduction goals would need nuclear energy to increase to about 43% of the electricity generation, up from just under 20% today. The system also would need renewable sources to increase to about 50% of the electricity generation, up from roughly 10% today. Further, many energy industry leaders foresee increased demand for advanced reactors in industrial heat applications. Even with the uncertainties in these predictions, the scale of demand for advanced reactors is extremely large.
Several important conditions have combined to create an unprecedented market need and opportunity for nuclear energy:
- Continuing, expanding, and accelerating efforts to decarbonize the energy sector, while increasing its reliability, resilience and affordability, create the need for more carbon-free technology options
- A growing understanding that an electricity system must have a diverse set of technologies, including nuclear energy, renewable energy, and storage technologies
- An emerging demand for zero-carbon-emission energy in transportation and industrial uses that will be significantly greater than the demand in the electricity system
- The growing diversity of energy applications that must be decarbonized which necessitates energy solutions tailored to the nature and size of the application
This market need creates an imperative for nuclear energy to be a significant component of a clean, reliable, resilient and affordable energy system.
Driving Value to Meet the Market Need
The industry is taking actions to ensure that nuclear energy can meet the market needs for this clean, reliable, affordable technology.
These actions are:
- Continue to operate the existing reactors for 80 years or more
- Commercialize a new set of nuclear energy technologies
The continued operation of existing nuclear energy facilities, which account for roughly 50% of today’s carbon-free power generation in the United States and 12% in Canada, is essential not only for the plants’ significant benefits to the energy system, but also because using existing plants mitigate the overwhelming challenges involved in decarbonizing the energy sector.
This roadmap focuses on the commercialization of a new set of nuclear energy technologies called advanced reactors. The industry’s approach to driving the value of advanced reactors to fulfill critical market needs is as follows:
PROVIDE DESIRED VALUE
Develop advanced reactors that safely deliver the cost-effective features and benefits that the market needs from zero-carbon emissions energy sources. Most significantly, the market needs firm-clean sources (also known as baseload) that are available 24/7, 365 days a year and can withstand and/or quickly recover from disruptive events, such as extreme weather. This provides a foundation of reliable, resilient, and dispatchable power that is essential to a functional electricity grid and heat users. Furthermore, advanced reactors will ultimately enable greater deployment of renewable energy sources and storage technologies. Additional benefits of advanced reactors are their energy density, resilience, low land use, dispatchability, and contribution to energy security. Advanced reactor features for enabling flexibility to further improve the efficiency of integrating renewable energy sources into the grid will increase the reliability of the electricity system while decreasing the costs.
Advanced reactors must be cost-effective. It is important to note that, when looking at the total system cost or the cost of energy to the customer, the market does not require that advanced reactors have the absolute lowest levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). Because the LCOE does not fully consider the benefits of the energy source, the most accurate method of evaluating the cost impacts of different energy technology choices is a detailed integrated systems cost analysis that accounts for the value of each source’s benefits. Analysis of costs at the system level match energy supply and demand geographically and hour-by-hour, and includes costs not included in some LCOE comparisons, such as transmission, grid stability, and intermittency.
PORTFOLIO OF PRODUCTS
Develop a portfolio of products to meet a diverse set of market and customer needs. The existing nuclear energy facilities are essentially one type of product in the market—a large energy facility most suitable to powering a large electrical grid. There will still be value in these products in the future, but the scale and diversity that the market needs to decarbonize the energy sector requires a diverse set of advanced reactor technologies with varying capabilities. There will be a need for large, medium, small, and very small (also called micro) nuclear energy facilities to meet varying sizes of the grid and customer demand. Non-electric markets, such as transportation and industrial heat, will need a wide range of temperatures and sizes. In many cases, the market will need technologies to produce both electricity and heat. Because no one design can meet all of the market need, a portfolio of products is essential.
Nuclear energy has historically been used in large, baseload electric generating stations. However, demand for advanced reactors is expected to expand significantly and to include a diversity of attributes and uses, including:
- Application: electricity generation, industrial heat, hydrogen production, steam, and other potential energy needs
- Size: micro-reactors (under 50 MWe), small modular reactors (50–300 MWe), medium scale (300-600 MWe) and large-scale reactors (>600 MWe)
- Utilization: always on, load/demand following, or intermittent
- Siting: fixed or mobile
- Technology: light water, gas-cooled, liquid sodium cooled, lead-cooled, molten salt and potentially others
- Energy Products: electricity, steam, heat, hydrogen
TIMELINESS
The goal is to successfully commercialize advanced nuclear technologies through early deployments, thereby building the foundation for expanding to large-scale deployment before the mid-2030s. The market need for decarbonization, partially driven by policies, is urgent. Some policies have set decarbonization goals for as early as 2035, and nearly all have goals for zero-carbon emissions by 2050. As noted above, the VCE study concludes that if advanced nuclear energy commercialization is delayed by as little as five years (as compared to the timeline shown in Figure 2), it impacts energy system costs.
The approach to drive value to meet market demand informs the discussion on conditions that would further enable advanced reactors to meet the market needs. Planned actions to deliver advanced reactors into the market are identified in the following sections.
Successful commercialization of advanced reactors that enable the United States and Canada to meet their energy, climate, environmental, economic, and national security goals is reasonably achievable through collaborative efforts by the industry and external stakeholders.