 And think tech Hawaii on a beautiful Hawaiian summer day, February 14, 2021, and a completely non-controversial topic we have today is small nuclear appropriate for Hawaii. Our honored guest is going to say yes, and before anybody jumps up and says, it's illegal in Hawaii. No, it's not illegal. If two-thirds of the Senate, two-thirds of the House approve the concept of nuclear for Hawaii, discussion can begin. And if it's approved by the appropriate bodies, it will take place little bit of background on Hawaii's clean energy initiative and nuclear is clean energy. We were the first state in the nation to declare for 100% clean energy by the year 2045. Other states soon joined in, and I believe are up to 30 states or municipalities that have similar goals now, and we keep competing with one another to get more and more aggressive. Now, in addition to that, a major portion of our electricity currently comes from a coal burning plant out in Campbell Industrial Park. Guess what? The legislature says that it must close by August of this year. So no problem, we just put in more and more solar farms, right? We just get acreage and acreage and just blanket it with solar panels plus storage, no. Every time my colleague in the energy office makes an application for another solar farm or the company he's working with does, boom, now it's supposed can't do it here, can't do it here. And so our progress towards clean energy is slowing down. Now, there's nothing quick about nuclear energy. It's going to take a long time if it bears fruit. But to help us on our way is the honorable Jessica Lovering, CEO, no, the executive director of Good Energy Collective. Then she joins us from beautiful Santa Barbara, California. And welcome to the program, Ms. Lovering. Thank you and thank you for having me. And if you could first give us a little bit of background about good energy collective, and then we can get into discussions about what you did in Puerto Rico and so forth. Yeah, so really quick summary of Good Energy Collective. Co-founded the organization just a little over a year ago, and the motivation was really we saw a lot of really exciting momentum building around aggressive action on climate change coming from particularly younger progressive climate groups. And we were really excited about that, but we also weren't seeing sort of discussion or any mention of nuclear, whereas in at least in the federal government, there's been a lot of bipartisan support for nuclear for the last kind of five to ten years. And we've seen a lot of exciting stuff happening with new designs and innovation and new startups and entrepreneurs working in the nuclear space. So we as more progressive folks were interested in developing, researching and developing nuclear policy that really aligned with this broader climate change agenda. And so that's why we found a good energy collective is to help develop those sorts of policies. And just to caveat, you know, before we get into it too much, we are a non-profit. We don't take any money from industry. We're interested. Our main sort of motivation is climate change and also environmental justice. So that's the framework that we're looking at these policies in. Well, you know, before we launch in, you raise a very good point about climate change. And we have shifted our words from clean energy to decarbonization. Can you discuss first the relationship between nuclear energy and the road to decarbonization? Yeah, I mean, that actually might be answered by my first couple of comments. So maybe I can I just get into the point that I was going to make? Because there's definitely a strong connection. So I did want to kind of contrast really quick. So I'm based in California. I know Hawaii has this 100% renewable portfolio standard at the target of 2045 and they're on track. That's great. But it's kind of been the easy stuff so far. And the deeper penetration you get of renewables, the harder it gets. And so I wanted to compare with what's going on in California, which is very similar in that, you know, Hawaii was really the leader. But California recently has instituted a 100% zero carbon electricity goal by 2045. So similar goal, but California is explicitly zero carbon technologies, whereas Hawaii is more focused on renewables. In California, at least 60% needs to come from renewables, but the rest, the 40% can come from anything low carbon. And so low carbon can include things like natural gas with carbon capture. And it can include large hydro and it can include nuclear. And so that makes it a little bit different. But why this is important and why it matters is that historically countries that have done big decarbonizations or big reductions in their carbon emissions have relied on nuclear. So it's, you know, renewables and sort of scalable renewables are much newer, but we haven't seen sort of a big decarbonization effort focused on renewables, even though there's a lot of targets and goals in place right now. So, to talk about why it's so challenging to do with just renewables, I wanted to focus on sort of, because California is bigger. There's been a lot more studies of California's grid and how to get to 100% zero carbon electricity by 2045, which seems far in the future, but could actually come up on us pretty close. So there was a big study commissioned by Environmental Defense Fund and Clean Air Task Force. And what they did is they had three different groups do the modeling independently and then compare the results. There was Princeton, Stanford, and this group E3. And the big conclusion was that solar and wind can't do it by themselves. And the main reason is, is this intermittency or variability. So, you know, it's a cliche, but the sun's not always shining the wind's not always blowing and that can be really challenging for a grid, even a very, you know, modernized smart grid. Now grid scale storage like batteries can really help, but they are more helpful on sort of the hourly intermittency basis so they can kind of extend your energy into the evenings maybe overnight, but they are. It's harder to do sort of day or week long variability with batteries to handle those longer, very longer variations. And that's what I'll show you really need to have over build of your capacity significantly so in California what this looks like is right now. California are peak demand is about 50 gigawatts. By 2050 it's going to look more like 100 gigawatts because we're electrifying transportation we're going to be electrifying home heating and industry, because we're also trying to decarbonize outside of the power sector. So peak demand is going to be 100 gigawatts. And if we were to meet that with entirely solar wind we'd need to build out at least 500 gigawatts of solar capacity to be able to cover all those those peaks. And that's about how much capacity there is sort of peak capacity in the US as a whole so that's a huge amount of power stations that you need to build in a in a pretty short amount of time. And so the different models that did this estimated that it would raise rates by at least 60%. It also just might not be realistic and that you know the amount of solar you need to deploy is about 10 times faster than we've ever deployed solar before. Are there enough workers are there enough panels are there enough minerals, you know a lot of these minerals we import a lot of panels we import to. So, there's a lot of challenges it's not to say it's impossible, and definitely innovations will help, but these models also found that if you include what they're calling clean firm power. So that's, you know dispatchable kind of on demand base load power that's also low carbon things like geothermal natural gas carbon capture or nuclear. It's a lower costs than today, and also help support a deeper penetration of wind and solar. And so that's kind of a conclusion I want people to take home from this is that it's not nuclear versus renewables, it's that nuclear or geothermal arch hydro can be a really good complement and actually help you deploy more wind and solar, because it can be this low carbon sort of backbone for the grid. These studies did find that, you know, maybe even 50% of electricity could come from wind and solar with no problems, but you do need to have these these sort of backup sources. Another challenge is that a new this. However, I mentioned this in the beginning renewables take up a lot of land, and you might not think that's a big problem because you know we've got lots of space you know we've covered things with parking lots. You know we can put things on rooftops but the problem is that if something takes up a lot of land, it also means there's more chances for local opposition because more people see it more people live next to it. And we are seeing that across the US growing opposition from from local groups against renewables projects. And the reason is that you know, even though they're clean energy a lot of people view these as big industrial infrastructure projects that are blighting the landscape. And they do have real impacts on the ecosystems we see this a lot in California with desert ecosystems and entrance to endangered species. So for all of those reasons, there's a growing discourse around how to include nuclear and these deep decarbonization scenarios and particularly what people are talking about is smaller nuclear, what are called small modular reactors. Okay, so what are those. How are they different. You know the, the big thing and this is in the name is they're much smaller. So a typical nuclear power plant operates in the US today is around 1000 megawatts so one gigawatts huge. They cost billions of dollars, but they also provide a ton of electricity so small modular reactors typically more in the range of 50 to 300 megawatts. And we're also now seeing what are called micro reactors starting licensing and those can be anything under 10 megawatts. And there's one that's going through licensing now that's 1.5 megawatts. So for those of you not in the electricity space, you don't know what these megawatts mean a large offshore wind turbine is about three megawatts. So this is smaller than a single wind turbine in terms of power output, although unlike a wind turbine a micro reactor is going to generate electricity 24 seven every day of the year for decades. So, it's not just the smaller size, you know, it's cheaper because they're smaller, but there's big innovations in making something that's modular, it allows for factory fabrication, which could be huge in terms of reducing costs but also, having much better understanding of timeline, you know you order it like a mass produced product you get it on a certain timescale there's not this much uncertainty around going over time. But big question, which I know this is the topic of this is are they safer. And so my first big caveat is that nuclear is already very safe. It's much safer than fossil fuels in terms of public health and mining impacts, but also on a lifecycle basis and if you include mining and contamination nuclear has a similar safety record to renew. But, you know, people are of course still worried about the safety from nuclear because we've seen these events like Fukushima three mile island and, you know, people are worried and so my second caveat is that we're not just going to trust these companies building SMRs who say they're safer. The designs go through a very rigorous process to be licensed that includes looking at all sorts of worst case scenarios really extreme events and making sure the safety is managed. But that being said, and there are a bunch of innovations in the designs that could make accidents like the one at Fukushima pretty much impossible. So I won't go into the technical details, because there's a lot I could say but I did want to give just a couple like easy to grasp examples so the main thing is that smaller designs can lead to radically simpler engineering. So if something simpler it can be safer and also easier to sort of mass produce so a lot of these designs rely on passive safety rather than active safety. So what that means I'm going to give you a concrete example. And so, if a reactor gets too hot. Right now, you need to pump more cooling water through it and that relies on these really big pumps that you also need to have, you know backup pumps and redundant pumps in case something goes wrong. So some of SMR designs rely on passive cooling, which you can think of as if you're boiling stew in a pot, you know the hot liquid rises to the top and when it cools it drops back down. So relying on that natural process is much more reliable, and you don't need sort of complicated human intervention and engineering systems. So some of the designs don't rely on water as a coolant. So it's very hard to have the coolant evaporate or go away. There's different kinds of coolants and you even have air cool designs. And so, a few other points I wanted to mention on safety. I'm going to try and wrap up pretty quick so some designs, especially micro reactors are designed with lifetime wars. The reactor comes to you fully fueled. You plug it in it generates electricity for kind of 10 to 30 years, and then the entire reactor is shipped back to a central processing facility for decommissioning and what that means is that you don't have fuel handling and fuel storage on site. So that reduces a lot of risks, especially for the local community that's hosting the plan. Now, we did mention Puerto Rico several times so there's a group out of Puerto Rico called Nuclear Alternatives Project. And they've gotten funding from Department of Energy to do a feasibility study and their motivation was really coming out of 2017 Hurricane Maria. They had big failures in their power grid and they were looking for ways to make it more resilient by creating a web of micro grids. So I wanted to explore the option of having small modules or reactors as a part of that. And especially they have a lot of their fossil generation is going to be shut down and sort of the next 10 years. So the first phase of their study found that yes small modular reactors are feasible for Puerto Rico they make sense. And the next phase is looking at citing so we would be good spots to put them in Puerto Rico. So a little bit in terms of citing and kind of status of SMRs there's several going through licensing right now looking for demonstrations kind of in the next five years. Other options that that could be particularly interesting for Hawaii are floating nuclear or offshore nuclear. The US has done that in the past it makes intuitive sense for a lot of people you know we have nuclear aircraft carrier nuclear submarines. It reduces a lot of the challenges yeah there's a great picture. It reduces a lot of the challenges of citing because you don't have to worry about you know earthquakes and flooding. It's very sort of stable location. And the reactors can also be built in shipyards which that's a picture of sort of an artist rendering of that which we have a lot of experience building big complex equipment in shipyards. They can also be cited on military bases. That could help and sort of those sites are very well characterized they have good security. There's some bureaucracy challenges around selling electricity that can be challenging. But there's a separate program through Department of Energy right now and Department of Defense looking at developing SMR specifically for military applications. So that's kind of a parallel track of innovation right now so that's where I'm going to stop and happy to answer more questions. Okay, well let me start. And thank you that very very coherent description thank you very much, Jessica. Next I want to introduce the concept of firm power. We all know as you said the sun rises and sets the wind blows and then stops from a utility standpoint firm power means that you are delivering x number of megawatts 24 seven. And for many power stations they have to shut them down once a year once every couple of years to clean them up. I don't think that the nuclear plants have to do that. So this would be firm power for I believe you said 10 to 15 years specifically the some of the micro reactor designs have these really long lifetimes and traditional nuclear power plants do need to shut down about every two years for refueling. And all the designs one of the benefits is that you can stagger those so if you have, you know, a 10 or 50 megawatt power plant you can stagger when you're when you're doing those refuelings and and plan for it rather than having sort of unplanned shutdowns. I mentioned the largest small or small nuclear plant might be 300 megawatts just for context in Honolulu. We've gone down from about 1200 to 1000 megawatts. And it seems to me, like, and we're have we're going to have trouble with the meeting that demand because even though if we get more efficient, we get more solar down there. And the LEDs electric vehicles are going to be coming on like gangbusters and we have all these micro grid plans for them but it's still going to raise the demand even while we're lowering in other ways. So let's just say hypothetically we say about 1000 megawatts demand seems to me like 300 megawatts firm power right under there, so that all these renewables need to worry only about 700 megawatts. It makes life a whole lot easier for the renewables and a lot more reliable also. Yeah, and right now a lot of places that have a lot of renewables not a growth in renewables like Hawaii but also places like Denmark and Germany. They have still a big reserve of fossil capacity so they've got oil plants or they've got coal plants that are serving as that backup. And that's working really well right now. But as they look towards you know full decarbonization of the power sector, you need something else and I think thinking about nuclear as a replacement for that fossil backup is sort of the best case for it and and we've done work specifically looking at coal to SMR. Repowering oftentimes you might even make sense to build at the same site, because you've already got those power lines you've already got sort of an industrial brownfield site might be easier to get approval for siding there. You maybe have cooling water and things like that so that might be a really good option in terms of public acceptance and feasibility to site an SMR at an old fossil site. And speaking of which one of our main industrial areas is a little unknown spot called Pearl Harbor, and you mentioned siding on right on the ocean because I'm assuming with the sea water become the operative coolant then it depends on the design but water cooled reactors yes being on the ocean would be probably preferable some of these newer designs don't use water as a coolant and don't use water for steam generations so those could be inland. But depends yeah on the design. As you and I were chatting about earlier, we know there would be protests out there, when we even start talking about this, but if we made an agreement with the military and incidentally here in Hawaii we have lots of agreements with the military including power siding and there is a power plant on one of our military bases here. So, very possibly, hypothetically 300 megawatts in Pearl Harbor, and maybe on land, and in the event of a total shutdown, where all the other power supplies are interrupted. It might be with nice high resolution grids that plant, powering the hospitals, the police, and so forth the absolutely essential emergency services, plus powering the military base. That could be a politically feasible solution there. Some places including military bases have a system of diesel generators for emergency supply in case you know the grid goes out something to power your emergency response system and more and more places are looking at doing micro grids to power their emergency services and I think small modular reactors micro reactors could be a good thing to have for resilience for disaster response. And the last thing I wanted to say was, you know, this is an extreme case but if you have your whole grid goes grid go out. It's actually a little hard to restart the grid with renewables. And so you need something to turn the grid back on. And this is called black star capability and nuclear can be good for that or fossil fuels can as well so something to sort of get the momentum up. Back to that 60 Hertz. You got me thinking about the military the military does have a rather large budget. That is the one area that the blue states and the red states all agree on big military budget so all the more argument for for setting it on on the military basis here. There might be benefits deciding on military I would, I would caveat that I would like to see costs come down. So they're competitive with grid power no matter what and also, even if it's easier to side on a military base, I would still think it's really important to get community consent and community support through a more genuine engagement process that's something I think, you know, everyone would be happier. We'll bring you down as chief testifier. Because we do get resistance here. And finally, you mentioned that entrepreneurs are interested in possibly backing ventures like this we have we've got about one minute left. Okay. Yeah, there are over 60 companies in the US working on advanced nuclear designs, a lot of them are venture funded a lot of them are small startups. So that's something very different than kind of a large incumbents like the Western houses of the world that were building nuclear before. And so just new companies there are lots of entrepreneurs in this space and a lot of venture capital money going into it so people see the promise. And finally, we have learned our lessons technology across the board is improving improving improving improving. And I would say, especially with regard to small nuclear. It's just a whole different ballgame from what it used to be 2030 years ago. We know your plans need to be safe. And when their end of life, ship them back to from where they came. And they, they're smaller. So they are shipable. Sounds good to me miss lover and thank you so much has been a very, very enlightening and livening conversation. I will give you sincere thanks. And to our beloved audience, I say fondage Howard, we code green. See you next time.