 Well, thank you everyone here in the room and also in our online audience for joining us today for our briefing, the State of Play for Nuclear Energy in the United States. I'm Dan Versette with the Environmental Energy Study Institute. I'd like to start our show today by thanking Senator Mike Crapo and his tremendous staff for their assistance pulling together today's briefing. We also have been working very closely with the team at the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy. So thanks very much to all of their assistance in the last little while to pull this together as well. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide policymaker educational resources to inform the debate about environmental energy and climate change topics. That is still the number one thing that we do. We also over the years have developed some expertise helping utilities in rural areas access federal resources and put them to use for inclusive financing. 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Today's briefing, though, will focus on understanding the work and role of the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy through provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, Inflation Reduction Act, and another $1.8 billion in FY23 funding for nuclear energy research, development, and demonstrations. The administration and Congress have made nuclear energy a priority, and they strongly support investments in next-generation technologies. And actually, nuclear energy is a major theme of hearings up here on the Hill this week. So again, timely, relevant, accessible, and practical, hopefully. Given these investments, we're going to learn about the Department's current approach to nuclear energy, the evolution of deployment of nuclear energy in the United States, and the path ahead for what comes next. We will have questions at the end of our panel. We have people in the room who will have a roving microphone, so if you have a question, you're welcome to ask it. We also will take questions from our online audience, and you can send it to us one of two ways. You can follow us on Twitter, or follow us on social media, at EESI online, and use the hashtag EESI talk. You can also send us an email, and the email address to use is ask, that's ASK at EESI.org. But before I introduce our tremendous panelists, we are joined via video by our host today, Senator Mike Crapo. Senator Crapo is a fourth generation Idahoan who has represented Idaho in the Senate since 1999, and in Congress since 1993. Today he's the ranking member of the Finance Committee, and he serves on the Banking Committee, Budget Committee, and Joint Committee on Taxation. In addition, and of special relevance to our briefing today, he founded and co-chairs the Senate Nuclear Cleanup Caucus. He co-chairs the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, and he participates in the Senate National Laboratory Caucus, and he's joining us today via video. Thank you. Thank you to EESI for inviting me to share some remarks with you all today as you discuss the Department of Energy's nuclear energy programs. In my home state of Idaho, the Idaho National Lab is a world leader in making clean energy innovation a reality through its investment, research, and development of nuclear energy strategies. Today you will have an opportunity to hear directly from numerous nuclear experts, including INL's own John C. Kandasami. John C. serves as the director of INL's Net Zero program, which is focused on ensuring the lab can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions with nuclear energy as a major focus. Nuclear energy is good for jobs, good for the economy, good for our air, and a great source of baseload clean energy. We cannot have a true all-of-the-above conversation about our nation's energy portfolio without nuclear. Since coming to Congress, I've worked with my colleagues to advance nuclear energy research and production across our country. Over the past few Congresses, I was successful in navigating the passage of the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act and the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act. Both of these bills served as a significant step toward eliminating some financial and technological barriers standing in the way of nuclear innovation. Building off those successes, I recently joined my colleagues to reintroduce the Advance Act to accelerate the deployment of nuclear reactors. This legislation would further improve the nation's nuclear infrastructure, secure the American uranium supply chain, reduce carbon emissions, and strengthen national security. When Congress prioritizes innovation, we all benefit. Thank you again for inviting me to speak, and thank you to everyone who is participating in today's panel. I relish the opportunity to promote the work being done in Idaho and to share the positive potential of nuclear power. Thank you, Daniel, Brian, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, to Senator Crapo and his great staff for helping us pull the briefing together today. Really, really looking forward to this. We have four really, really tremendous panelists, and it's my privilege to introduce them. I'll start with our first panelist, and that is Dr. Katherine Huff. Katie leads the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy as the Assistant Secretary. Prior to her current role, she served as a senior advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Energy. And before joining DOE, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Plasma and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Champaign, Urbana Champaign. It's right here. I should get it. And that's where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group. She's an active member of the American Nuclear Society and a past chair of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Policy Division, as well as the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division. Katie, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us. I'm really, really looking forward to your presentation. Welcome to the lectern. Well, thank you, Dan. And thank you ultimately. Oops, no, it's great. It's great. We're there. We're there. All right. Just seeing if you're awake. So yeah, thank you, Dan, for the kind introduction. Thank you, EESI, for letting me be here. This is precisely the kind of community that I would like to talk to more often. You know, nuclear folks have heard from me plenty. They know exactly what I'm going to say. And we stay in a real pretty tight bubble. And I would really like to continue engaging with folks like all of you because the Office of Nuclear Energy really does work to advance nuclear energy science and technology to meet U.S. energy, environmental and economic needs within our office. We focus on R&D activities focused on enabling the continued operation of our existing fleet of reactors, building new reactors, securing and sustaining the nuclear fuel cycle and expanding our international nuclear cooperation. So our mission, of course, supports all that primarily through R&D, including overseeing the Idaho National Laboratory, which Senator Krepo just mentioned. It is very important through our national laboratories, universities, through our industry, that we can support those nuclear energy science and technology missions through the R&D budget that my office executes. And as we look into these priorities, you know, to meet these goals, the first step in running quickly forward is to stop walking backwards, right? And to stop the premature closure due to economic reasons of existing nuclear power plants can save real gigawatts of clean, firm power on the grid. And so my first priority focuses on that 18% of all the electricity generated in the U.S., and that's nuclear power, right? 47% of all of the emissions-free electricity in this country is nuclear power. It is the single largest source of emissions-free electricity in the country. And we can enable the continued operation of these plants through R&D programs that enhance their performance, reduce the cost of their operations and maintenance, and develop advanced fuels that can enable them, again, to reduce the cost of their operations. By doing integrated energy systems research, including hydrogen production demonstrations at existing plants, and expanding the applications and markets for nuclear power, including the direct thermal power that they produce is at the core of the way that we intend to help keep those plants open and running. As we think about advanced nuclear reactors and enabling their deployment at the scale we're going to need to get to our 2050 net zero goals, to ensure our clean air and water, to reduce the amount of particulates in the air, regardless, we really see that decarbonizing the economy through expanded advanced nuclear power deployment is essential. So these systems hold enormous potential for meeting our climate goals, and they're very versatile. While historically conventional nuclear power plants commonly run at single power, at base load, and can't vary, we have a lot of opportunities to see advanced nuclear reactors that are easier either for that reactor to vary in power, to follow renewables, or to be associated with thermal storage capabilities that can allow the reactor to stay at high temperature, at steady power, but allow the electricity on the grid to vary. By developing small modular reactors, also as well as micro and other types of advanced reactors, we can offer more siting flexibility. With emergency planning zones closer to the fence of the plant itself, we can ensure that they're more suitable for environments like the repurposing of unabated and retiring fossil plants. We are developing a number of different technologies, including microreactors for off-grid communities, for backup power, and the kinds of things you usually see diesel generators deployed for, we can imagine megawatt scale microreactors and containers the size of a standard ISO shipping container, and these can also be used for relief missions. One of the critical components of our plan to deploy is certainly to recognize that there are a number of communities and assets across our country that we can't leave behind in the transition to 2050, and those include the nuclear worker, the coal plant workers that could easily be retrained to work in a nuclear power plant. Actually, Einstein once said nuclear power is a hell of a way to boil water, and in fact, that's true. It's simply a fancy way to boil water, and so a lot of the same workers can be retrained to work in a nuclear power plant, but many of them don't need to be, right? Boiler makers and welders and electricians and things like that are routinely capable of working in nuclear power plants. Repurposing those unabated fossil plants could deliver really place-based solutions. We have recently released a study that shows that energy communities could benefit from adding a lot of jobs, hundreds of jobs in the context of a small modular nuclear power plant, increase the economic activity in those regions, and we think that about 80% of the retiring and retired coal plants in the country are suitable for nuclear power, recognizing that there certainly are locations with specific seismic hazards that wouldn't be suitable, for example. It would also reduce the system costs of our total energy system to leverage those locations. We've recently released a report of DOE, actually three reports, one on long-duration energy storage, one on a hydrogen economy, and one on commercializing advanced nuclear. There's a number of really critical takeaways from those reports. I really do encourage you to take a look at them, but one, I would say, is the sum of the questions you might ask about nuclear and other power is, is it carbon-free? Is it firm and reliable? What's the land use? How about the kinds of transmission you'd have to build out? How concentrated are the economic benefits associated with this? And nuclear performs really nicely. So do renewables and storage. So does energy economy that incorporates natural gas plus CCS and things like this. So hydro power, of course, is great across the board, but there's a finite amount of hydro power we can leverage. And so we also have some really scary-looking graphs with regard to how much it's gonna take to get to our 2050 goals. And the build-out is really aggressive if you really do wanna get to net zero. You do need quite a lot of clean-firm power to support the amount of variable renewable we need to deploy. And it's a lot of variable renewable energy that we need to deploy. So nuclear needs to make a significant component of that. To secure and sustain the global nuclear fuel cycle, we need to expand the amount of conversion and enrichment capacity in the United States. We need to develop a strategy for integrated waste management. And in my office now, we are developing a consent-based approach for siting interim storage facilities. That consent-based siting approach intends to consolidate the 70 locations across the country where communities are currently hosting spent nuclear fuel but never agreed to host it in the long term. It's DOE's responsibility to take title of that fuel. We were supposed to begin taking title of that fuel in 1998. When many of you in the audience were barely teenagers. And the idea behind this consent-based approach is that it's the most likely approach to succeed. We've seen this approach succeed in even more complicated nuclear waste repository endeavors and we're gonna use it to site an interim storage facility. It prioritizes people in communities. It will seek willing informed consent. It's intended to be flexible and adaptive and engage communities where they are and be responsive to their concerns. It is heavily informed by public feedback. And next week, you should see some more news on that at thislink, energy.gov, slash consent-based siting. Critical to our ability to enable our allies and partners to be free of those that would use energy as a weapon is our ability to engage on the safety, security and safeguards around new nuclear power in other nations as well as existing nuclear power in other nations. And we do a lot to ensure that research and development cooperation across borders can really focus on peaceful uses of nuclear power as well as the ability of the United States to continue to have a voice in leadership across the world in those topics. And it requires that we concentrate on what it takes to export safe, secure American nuclear technology, but also to ensure that other nations have the technical resources to manage whatever technology that they have. These are some pictures of me holding various pieces of fuel, which is awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. I noticed that too. Thank you so much, Katie, for that great presentation. Thank you for sharing the Biden administration's efforts around nuclear energy across the board. I'm looking forward to continuing that discussion after we hear from our panelists as well. Katie presented some really great slides. There was an important link in that. Just a quick reminder that all of our presentation materials are actually printed on the desk out front. If you didn't grab one, we have them for you. If you would like to visit us online, the briefing webpage, all of the presentation materials and other resources that are available online there as well as the live webcast. So if you wanna go back and see anything that Katie just said, if you wanna watch it again, you're welcome to do that, of course. We also are getting some questions from our online audience. If you have questions, just a reminder, there are two ways to share them. One is by following us on Twitter at EESI online, and the second is by sending us an email address to use as AskASK at EESI.org. Our second panelist is John C. Kandasamy. You may have heard John C's name mentioned by Senator Crapo, and we have her here today, all the way from the Idaho National Lab. That's where she's the director of the NetZero program. She's an electrical engineer, business professional, and past chair of the U.S. Women in Nuclear, and she co-founded the U.S. WIN, Nuclear Executives of Tomorrow. Prior to joining Idaho National Lab, John C. took on the challenge of developing carbon-free energy as the executive vice president of engineering for GE Hitachi. John C. also held multiple roles at Exxon's Limerick Generating Station, and Oyster Creek Generating Station, and PSENG's Nuclear Salem Hope Creek, New Jersey Generating Station. She's on the oversight committee for and initiated the U.S. WIN Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group, which addresses not only gender gaps, but all diversity in the nuclear workforce, and she's the co-founder of Atomic Allies. John C., welcome to our briefing today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you, Dan, for inviting me. I'm excited to be here. I have my phone with me. I'm not tweeting. I'll just let you know up front that some notes here. But again, thank you. This is really exciting to be here and to talk about something that's really near and dear to my heart. We talk about nuclear and we talk about... I lost my page. Sorry about that. Got to go back here. I knew this was gonna happen. So this particular job when I was offered, it was new, it was a blank slate, and I was told by 2031 we needed to get INL to net zero. What an audacious goal to get there by 2031. When I got there it was only a year. However, my boss told me the end date doesn't change. So you figure it out and see how we're gonna get there. And having Idaho National Laboratory, which is one of 17 national labs in the country, and being a nuclear and national homeland security as the core mission, what a perfect place to really demonstrate carbon-free emissions, how we're going to get to net zero by solving the emissions issue with incorporating nuclear as part of the solution. Excited to be here. You can see the map here. And the other exciting or interesting fact I would tell you is if you look at the map of the United States and look at all of the nuclear power plants, Idaho does not have a nuclear power plant, a commercial nuclear power plant. We have a testing facility. We test reactors. However, we don't have an operating commercial nuclear power plant. Another challenge. And the other interesting fact is if you go look at the map again, you'll notice not only Idaho, but the surrounding states except Washington state doesn't have nuclear reactors as their energy source. At the national laboratory, all of these national laboratories, they're really a bridge. If you look at that middle part of where national labs are very, very important in the research and development area, we take it from an idea from the universities, from the academia, do the research develop, demonstrate, and turn it over to the industry. Well, the net zero program being at INL, not only are we going to be able to research and demonstrate, we're also going to deploy it. And we're going to be the first ones to be the bridge. So if you look at this chart here, where we are is the bridges and drawn out, but between the national labs and the industry to really not only test and demonstrate, but actually deploy it and implement it right at INL to be able to show the world that we can use nuclear to be part of the energy mix. The other thing I wanted to mention real quickly is as far as INL and Idaho goes, our energy mix and primarily it's clean from hydro. We really sit on a very geographical aquifer. However, we have extreme climate changes. We have very hot summers and we have super cold winters where we're able to not only demonstrate and test different technologies in that environment and then being able to show nuclear as a 24 seven secure, reliable, carbon-free source. And that's what we're working on right now. INL, I've been told it's 890 square miles, which is a fact, but it's almost the size of the state of Rhode Island. And from the net zero challenges, it's not just the energy, but the energy piece that is actually going to address many of these carbon emitters that we have at the site. We have over 5,700 employees and counting. I think we're gonna have another 700 employed by the next year. So the employee count is going up and therefore building usage, driving to the facility and all of those are carbon emitters. We have over 600 in our transportation fleet. About 3,000 employees take our motor coaches onto the site, to the desert site, big carbon emitters. So what we've done from a net zero perspective is really take a look at it as with the EPA standards on the three scopes of carbon emissions, more than half of the carbon emissions are from purchased electricity. And so if we address that purchased electricity with nuclear, clean, reliable source, we're gonna be able to address 85% of all of the carbon emissions at INL. This is the vision. When I got there, we kind of looked at what are all the activities that are happening? What are all the carbon emitters at the site as a whole? And you can envision a city of getting the net zero by addressing all of these different carbon emitters. I really love this. And it was just drawn on a back of a flip chart. And when you look at it, you can have a microreactor or an SMR that's not only providing electricity, but heat and hydrogen. So why not have that as part of one of the energy mix? We've been working with our utility. There's a primary utility, Idaho Power. We've been working with them and trying to, not trying to de-mystify nuclear and be able to show that nuclear is a very strong solution for us to get to carbon free and including that in their energy portfolio. In the last year, we've come a long way with no nuclear to yes, we're interested and we definitely want to have an SMR on our site to be able to provide power, not only for INL, but the surrounding companies and areas as well. So we're well on our path to including nuclear as part of their energy portfolio. A utility that didn't have any nuclear at all or even a thought of nuclear. So we would use hydrogen. As I mentioned, we have a large electric fleet. I mean, large transportation fleet, transitioning them to electric, working with the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation as well. And then hydrogen is also another source as well as R99. It's a fuel, renewable fuel, that's 99% carbon free. So that's how we're going to make sure we're integrating as part of our transportation fleet. We have a landfill. The landfill has greenhouse gases. So how are we addressing that? Being able to use hydrogen from our nuclear reactor to be able to create ammonia, to be able to create clean fertilizers. So giving back to the farmers in the area, demonstrate, deploy, have the opportunity for the local communities and companies to actually implement and commercialized everything we're doing at our site. So you see the transportation fleet here. We're working with our local utilities and getting there. How do we get there for me as a nuclear worker working in nuclear power plants? We always have a plan. We always have a roadmap. We always have the vision and the goal. How are we gonna get there? So we have four nuclear, we're net zero to get to nuclear, really worked with DOE, NEI, the utilities that are the local utilities that we have, NRC and some of the developers. And we met a year ago and came up with a roadmap. Epri was already working on a roadmap that 19 areas, we chose these six. We said, these are the six that are going to help INL get to net zero. And if you look at it, it addresses some of the topics that are gonna be talked about. The areas that Katie talked about, these are all the things that need to be addressed for us to be the first ones out the gate to not only demonstrate, but to actually have commercial applications at INL. I mentioned we've included the NRC as part of the nuclear roadmap from a licensing and regulatory piece to make sure we're locked step and barrel with from day one. All of these folks that I mentioned earlier, including our utility and DOE, has been engaged since day one. We're working together, we're collaborating so that we can get there. I think you might have, some of you might have seen these slides and these are all the test reactors and the timeline for what we're working on currently. Net zero is gonna take advantage of some of these test reactors and be able to actually apply it. For example, the first one is Marvel. It's a DOE funded homegrown reactor. It's 100 kilowatt. And we plan on using that as our first application for an EV charger. You know, to be able to say when it's ready after it's tested, ready to go commercial application so we can show what the opportunities for a very small microreactor and scaling all the way up to a full SMR. We're really looking at microreactors and small modular reactors. Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. Really a big deal. I mean, if everybody doesn't play and everybody doesn't have the same goal and we're not gonna look at it together and come up with solutions together, it's going to be a really difficult path to get to where we need to in a short time that we're looking at. So the National Laboratory, obviously we're working with the other 16 labs, the state of Idaho, looking at the EV infrastructure, what's the buildout we need? Universities getting ready with some of the seniors and some projects so they can help us at the front end. We go through the middle and then we're ready to deploy and make a commercial at the end. Tribal nations, we've had some of the tribes that have talked about, hey, on our reservation, we're interested in a microreactor. What a great place to be in Idaho Falls and be able to work with the tribes, work with mining companies, including our utility to have microreactors so that they can power it up, mobilize, pick it up, go to another area and the net zero world. I'm also part of the representative for the net zero world team. So whatever we do here, we're gonna be able to demonstrate and I'll wrap up with this amazing video. We good? Thank you. Kind of tells the whole story of whatever I talked about before I got to this video in one minute. This video is on YouTube as well if you'd like to view it many times at your leisure. Thank you very much. Thank you, John C. That was really interesting and that video kind of reminded me of the Game of Thrones opening credits. I wonder if it was the same people. Yeah, yes. So thank you very much for that. We also, you know, amazing amount of work being done at DOE and the national labs around nuclear energy. Obviously an enormous priority of Congress too on a bipartisan basis. We're gonna hear from two more speakers but I wanted to make a quick plug. We did a briefing last week with Katie's counterpart in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alejandro Moreno talking about renewable energy, energy efficiency, sustainable transportation. So while today's briefing is today's focus, we cover pretty much, we try to cover all of the different work happening at DOE. And so that briefing is available online if you wanna go back and watch it. We had someone from National Renewable Energy Laboratory, it's from NREL. We had Alejandro, oops. Did I do that? Sorry. Sorry, Haruko, I'm stealing your thunder. And we also had someone from sustainable aviation industry, a sustainable aviation field industry and someone from Siemens talking about building technologies and grid edge technologies and things like that. So we try to cover it all. Our third speaker today is Dr. Haruko Wainwright. Haruko is an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. And before joining MIT, she was a staff scientist in the earth and environmental sciences area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an adjunct professor in nuclear engineering at University of California Berkeley. Her research focuses on environmental modeling and monitoring technologies with a particular emphasis on nuclear waste and nuclear related contamination. She leads and co-leads multiple interdisciplinary projects including the Department of Energy's Advanced Long Term Environmental Monitoring Systems Project and the Artificial Intelligence for Earth Systems Predictability Initiative. And thank you so much for joining us today and traveling down and you picked a great, you all actually picked a great couple of days to visit Washington. So Haruko, welcome to the lectern. Yes, thank you so much for having me here. I'm from MIT. So this talk will be a little bit academic taste, I would say. So I will talk about nuclear waste and I'll talk about how nuclear waste has been leading environmental and waste technologies in the past and right now. So here are the key points you have read for some time I think for a few minutes. So here are the key points. So nuclear energy has small and well-accounted waste footprint across the nuclear fuel cycle and life cycle. Nuclear waste is the best managed and isolated waste in human history. Environmental monitoring is really important for providing assurance. And I'll talk about, lastly I'll talk about the initiative to advance interdisciplinary research and education. So nuclear waste started from nuclear weapon production. Nuclear waste started from the Manhattan Project and there have been more than 100 sites across the U.S. that have been used for nuclear weapon production and it is called DOE's legacy sites. These sites have more or less soil and groundwater contamination, not just radio nucleys but also metal and organic contaminants. And I have been working on these sites for the past 15 years and last year I led the climate change impact on all these sites assessment last year. So these sites provide so much insights and information about nuclear waste and lessons about how to deal with them. For example, one of the key lessons is that these are the key contaminants across the sites. Most of them are very similar across the U.S. across very different climate conditions. These contaminants are mobile elements so the chemistry is very important. Also these sites provide sort of the perspective in a sense that large and problematic contamination came from low level radioactive waste or mining waste or non-radioactive elements like chromium or mercury at some locations. So we should consider all the waste, not just high level waste but secondary waste and mining waste. So we can think about waste across energy life cycle. For example, for nuclear and coal for nuclear energy to produce one gigawatt year electricity generation, we have about 30 ton of enriched uranium and the same amount of spent fuel goes to the geologic repository. And but we also have to think about natural uranium to produce this enriched uranium and it requires mining and milling activities from 1,000 ton to 200,000 ton depending on the oil fraction. We can think about coal energy for the same amount of energy we it requires about 2 million tons of coal which comes from mining and the primary contaminant is coal ash about 500,000 ton that's much more than the spent fuel and you can dispose it to the near surface disposal although it contains heavy metal and some of the radio-nucles. And we also have to think that this mass decrease from 2 million ton to 500,000 ton is basically CO2. Like CO2 is actually the waste. It is actually toxic at high concentration but you can actually release it. And you can also see that even if you consider mining nuclear also requires much less mining or waste activity. And also construction-wise, it requires much less than coal energy per gigawatt, a per-same amount of electricity generation. So for renewable energy, it is very difficult to account all the waste because it is a rapidly evolving area but there are some studies, for example, one study estimated the waste would be more than 3,000 ton per year to produce the same amount of energy assuming these capacity factor and lifetime. And also recently, there is a study focused on the heavy metal or contaminants coming from these solar panels along with batteries as well. In addition, we have to think about all the mining activities and mining waste producing solar panels which require precious metal and other kind of metals. We can also think about different disposal systems. We can compare high-level waste, high-level radioactive waste, including spent fuel, low-level radioactive waste, which is also similar to radio mining waste and also other hazardous waste. And high-level radioactive waste repository disposal is a highly engineered system. We have this deep repository in a very suitable low groundwater flow condition. Engineered barrier system has solid waste form and thick canister and also clay to slow down groundwater and catch radio-nucleys. Low-level waste and hazardous material disposal are similar. They are near surface. They have clay cover on top to limit the infiltrate water coming in and also geomembrane at the bottom of the waste to limit the leachate. But I can say that low-level radioactive waste or radio-mining waste tend to have much thicker geomembrane in these layers. And we can also compare the compliance period for high-level waste or low-level radioactive waste. We consider more than 500 years. Sometimes we can consider compliance of million years. Other hazardous waste, the current regulation requires only 30 years' compliance with potential extension. And for the radioactive waste disposal sites, there are requirements for a probabilistic risk assessment considering the many failure modes. But for the hazardous waste, current regulation does not require extensive assessment. We can also compare toxicity, radioactive toxicity actually decays over time or decreases over time. And also I can mention that long life, long-lived nucleys are internal exposure. So it's similar to chemical casinogen. And on the other hand, toxicity of hazardous waste like lead, mercury, and some other organic contaminants never decrease, never decay. So if you think about sort of this disposal system, radioactive waste, consider much higher, they have much higher bar, much higher requirements. We can also think about the history of waste management. The general hazardous waste, sorry. So general hazardous waste also started from contamination. There was no regulation until 1965. So all the environmental regulations, we have only 40 years of history, which is about my age. And we are still sort of clean up these super fun sites as well. For nuclear waste, as soon as US started producing the power, nuclear power, these people started thinking about disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste. There has been steady progress in terms of research and development activities. Even though the Yakka Mountain didn't move forward, there are still significant research activities going on. Katie talked about content-based siting approach. So currently there is no high-level waste disposal site in the US, so all the spent fuel has been stored in dry casks. So you can sort of see it's a kind of small footprint. And your spent fuel amount is two to three casks per year. It's a very small footprint. And these casks are constructed considering extreme events, scenarios like flooding and aircraft crashes. And there has been more than 3,000 casks since 1986, but there has not been any leaks, any accidents. So the environmental impact from, sorry, it kind of advances automatically. Yeah, so the environmental impact from these spent fuel, from commercial fuel has been zero, and which is remarkable compared to other industries. So Katie and others talked about advanced reactors. Advanced reactors are advanced reactor companies are thinking ahead about this waste problem. For example, one of the company has already planned to store all the spent fuel for the 60-year operation. You can see that it is a pretty small footprint. All the fuel can be stored in this very small area. And for other types of waste, like different fuel, different structure material, different coolant, DOE has been funding many research activities. So we are thinking about waste even before we even have a product, right? We are thinking always ahead. But this question still remains, is it really safe, right? I'm from the region that have all the nuclear facilities in Japan. This was the question when I grew up. And also I worked at many contaminated sites. Is it really safe? This is always a question. It is a tough question when the trust is broken, some of the sites people don't trust the government or they don't trust the operators. So in this situation, we have learned that environmental monitoring is really important. Monitoring and measurement provide data and evidence. So that provides assurance to the local communities. And we can detect anomalies if they happen. And it is a critical way to keep operators accountable and responsible. And monitoring has played a key role for consent-based siting. For example, U.S. has a successful first deep geological disposal for the transuranic waste. The community actually supported the idea of having this facility. And there was independent and state-funded environmental monitoring center near this site, which played a key role. So under DOE, I'm leading advanced long-term environmental monitoring system project. Environmental monitoring is really exciting time. We have drones, we have remote sensing, we have so many different sensors, as well as AI and simulation capabilities. So this project is aiming to create a new paradigm of long-term environmental monitoring so that people can use these new sensors and monitor the environment and make sure that these facilities are safe. And we are validating these technologies using actual contamination at DOE sites, but we are thinking about extending this to future nuclear facilities as well. So just to wrap up, I wanna talk about the education initiative. We have, sorry, excuse me. We realize that teaching nuclear waste is very hard because it requires from environmental science to nuclear engineering, civil and environmental engineering and geotechnical engineering. So several of us, many professors and professionals have gathered and we had a workshop last year. We are developing community resource to teach nuclear waste across different engineering department. And we also want to change the mindset. We aim to develop a diverse and inclusive community. It's okay to express the concerns. We recognize that antagonistic views are very important for protecting the environment and improving the safety. Also, we should stop saying send waste to the middle of nowhere. I'm from the region that people call middle of nowhere, but it's a beautiful place. It's a special place for people. And that was often the problem for environmental justice. So I teach at MIT and engineers should design the waste isolation in a way that they can have it in their backyard. That should be the mentality. And also, engineers should design reactor and technologies from the waste app. For the past 40 years, we learned that once contamination happened, it's really hard to clean up. Once we have difficult waste, it's very hard to difficult to get rid of. So we should think from that design not to create these difficult waste and contamination. And I will leave you with these key points, and I hope it makes sense to you. Thank you. Thank you for that presentation. Now we will come to our fourth panelist of the day, that is Dr. Patrick White. Patrick is a project manager at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance where he manages project research and stakeholder engagement. Patrick leads research and advocacy related to advanced reactor licensing strategies, regulatory modernization at the NRC or Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and state and federal policy on deployment of advanced nuclear energy as a climate solution. Patrick has worked in the commercial nuclear sector as an engineer and his nuclear experience also includes development of new regulatory frameworks for advanced fission and fusion systems, safety assessments of modifications at existing nuclear power plants and design evaluations of components at new nuclear power plants. Patrick, thanks for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you. Great, well thank you very much for the introduction and for the opportunity to participate in this briefing today. I also have to thank the panelists. It's really easy to give the fourth presentation when the first three have been fantastic. So I'll be really focusing my comments today on commercialization of advanced nuclear energy. I think we've heard a lot of really interesting discussion about what's going on at the DOE, how we're thinking about waste, how we're thinking about net zero, but what does this actually look like as we kind of move forward to thinking about advanced nuclear energy as a climate solution? So to get started, I'll give just a really quick plug about what the Nuclear Innovation Alliance is. So the Nuclear Innovation Alliance is a think and do tank focused on creating the conditions for success for advanced nuclear energy as a climate solution. So the Nuclear Innovation Alliance is funded primarily through private climate philanthropy organizations and we're really approaching this question of advanced nuclear energy in the public interest. If we think nuclear can play a role, what are the potential policy solutions, technical solutions or outreach to different stakeholder groups that are needed to really kind of move this conversation forward? How do we make sure that folks have the right information they need to really have informed discussions around nuclear energy? So I always like to start with a few major takeaways about kind of commercializing this. The first thing is really that I want to try to get the point across that nuclear energy can really play a major role in creating a clean energy economy. I think we heard a little bit about this previously and I'll give it a little bit more detail on that. The second is that advanced reactors have a wide variety of different commercial use cases moving forward. I think traditionally when we talk about nuclear energy, we think about it for electricity production. That's a really great thing that we're trying to address as we think about decarbonizing our electricity production, but ultimately that's only a small piece of what it's gonna take for us to get to a cleaner future when it comes to energy transportation electricity. So we'll talk a little bit about some of the different use cases. I think third, we're really looking at how developers right now are leveraging a lot of the support at the DOE and the National Lab Complex to accelerate reactor deployment. And finally that continued federal support incentives can really play an important role in really kind of catalyzing private investment moving forward. While we like to think about kind of federal support for programs, ultimately at the end of the day, it's gonna be private capital and it's gonna be private markets that really help us deploy the hundreds of gigawatts of clean energy that we need. And so how can the federal government play a role in really helping to accelerate that deployment, accelerate that transition? So to get started, I think it's really important to remember the role that advanced nuclear energy can play in really thinking of it as a complementary clean energy source as we move to kind of full decarbonization in the United States. Oftentimes again, when we talk about clean energy, we're talking about how do we get more clean energy on the grid? How do we try to lower the carbon emissions related with electricity production? But that's only a small piece of the puzzle. We're gonna have to look at how we have clean buildings, clean industry, clean transportation. And that's gonna take a variety of different energy sources, whether it's heat, electricity, or maybe carrier fuels like hydrogen and ammonia. And so when we take a look at a lot of the modeling that's out there, we really find that it comes down to kind of this combination of three different factors. The first is what we might call variable clean energy. These are the traditional renewable energy sources that we think about solar, wind, other resources. We then think about energy storage. How are we actually capturing that energy and having it available when we need it? But there's a third component that we're now realizing is more and more important as we get to really this 100% decarbonization goal. And it's this idea of firm clean energy, something that plays a really complementary role and can help kind of lower the overall system costs and increase the likelihood that we can actually hit our decarbonization targets. And so that can be a lot of different energy sources, including hydroelectric, geothermal, or nuclear. And so it's not a matter of whether or not you have to have nuclear, whether you don't have to have nuclear. It's thinking about what the role it can play as we're trying to hit these larger society-wide targets. And so one of the things I think it's really interesting to talk to stakeholders, especially if they haven't been following the advanced nuclear space, is that there is a large and even growing group of private companies out there that right now that are interested in developing advanced nuclear energy, specifically to meet climate energy needs or to meet our clean energy needs. This map is something you can definitely look at later. It's an eye chart of just a bunch of the different developers that are out there. And I've highlighted just even a few of the companies right now that have major research and development projects and are looking at deploying the first generation of advanced nuclear technology in the United States. But more than just having developers that are interested in kind of developing a product or pitching you something new, what we're really excited about at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, and I think we're really seeing kind of across the industry, is that you're now seeing utility partners, industrial energy users, and other groups really coming out and expressing interest in deploying advanced nuclear energy. Here is just a list of a few of the utilities and energy partners that are really interested in this, but a couple I'll flag, up at the top left, Ontario Power Generation. It's the largest electric utility in Ontario, Canada. And they have recently announced that they're going to be deploying the G Hitachi BWRX 300 Advanced Small Modular Reactor to really support their decarbonization strategy moving forward into the 2030s and beyond. This is not something where it's a hypothetical project where something they're talking about doing, they have signed contracts and they're moving forward with deployment. And so that's gonna be 1.2 gigawatts of new nuclear that's gonna operate for the next 80 years in Canada. And so we're starting to see kind of this transition over from talking about projects to actually deploying projects. Another one that I'll flag that's just really interesting is down at the bottom right, Dow Chemical. I've talked a lot about electricity, but we can also think about process heat. What are other applications that we need to remove carbon emissions from if we want to kind of move forward to a cleaner society? And so Dow Chemical has partnered with the company X Energy to look at the deployment of an advanced high-temperature gas reactor at one of their Gulf chemical production facilities as a way to remove some of the carbon emissions that are associated with chemical processing, chemical manufacturing. And so this is, again, it's not really a hypothetical, something that we're moving forward to as companies are recognizing the importance of clean energy in really all parts of the economy. So this is something that I think is really important in terms of highlighting the role that the Department of Energy has been playing, really kind of moving this process forward. And one of the things that we've seen is that these public-private partnerships are really helping accelerate the demonstration and deployment of some of these advanced reactors. For some technologies, you might say, okay, there's a very clear business case and there's a very clear operational history. For other technologies, however, there might be a little bit more incentive to really help kind of bring first movers into space and push commercialization forward. And so the various programs that we've seen at the Office of Nuclear Energy, including the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, the ARDP program, the ARC20 program and the Risk Reduction Awards, we've seen a variety of different incentive programs that have provided resources for different companies to really kind of bring their deployments from something that you might have seen in the 2030s into the 2020s and really get the first movers going. I think as we kind of look through the rest of this decade in kind of the 2025 to 2027 timeframe, we're really excited to see some of these smaller micro-reactors or some of these research and test reactors coming online to really kind of provide that initial proof of concept or operational data. And then as we start kind of hitting the later half of the 2020s into the early 2030s, we're seeing these full-scale commercial reactors coming online that are really trying to demonstrate that they can produce power at scale. The two flagships I'll just flag for DOE are the X-Energy Project I already mentioned that's gonna be with Dow Chemical to try to produce high-temperature process heat and electricity for their applications. And the TerraPower is a large sodium fast reactor technology that's gonna be cited in Kemmer, Wyoming at the site of a retiring coal plant with the idea that it can help kind of provide that bridge in terms of coal to nuclear energy, but it's also gonna have integrated thermal energy storage. So we're now having a technology that's meeting the need of the community, but it's also gonna be kind of looking forward looking into thinking about how do we integrate in with kind of this larger renewable system. Again, it's the hardest thing I sometimes have to emphasize. It's not nuclear or renewables when we talk about clean energy. It's really thinking about this complimentary approach and how we can have firm clean, variable clean and storage really come together and help us get to our clean energy goals. As someone that's a little bit of a licensing nerd myself, one of the things that I'm really excited about is that we're seeing this process kind of move forward. Again, it's not really a hypothetical people talking about these reactors on paper. We're actually seeing them move forward into the licensing and deployment process. And so what we're expecting to see even in this year alone is seven reactors are gonna be looking at submitting or having reviews on site-specific applications for new nuclear power plants. Another four applications are really being reviewed for kind of design-specific applications. And then there are a number of companies that are doing what are called pre-application engagements where they're maybe not ready to submit an application this year to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a project, but they wanna have initial discussions. They wanna have an idea of what are the regulatory requirements and how can they meet them most effectively and most efficiently. And this right here is, I think, evidence that the companies are willing to put their money kind of where their mouth is, where the project is, and really kind of move forward in this process because they see that commercial interest moving forward. And a lot of this, I think, has been supported by the DOE's programs and also through, I think, some of the collaborations that we've seen with the national labs, leveraging the expertise and experience that we have there both technically and in kind of the legacy data with testing work that was done at the Idaho National Lab specifically. So I think we already heard a nice little plug about the DOE Pathways to Commercial Lift-Off Report. It's a fantastic report. I really highly recommend that anyone take a look at it. But it's been a really interesting report that's kind of highlighted how we move on this pathway from essentially the first of a kind demonstration to wide-scale deployment of nuclear energy. And one of the things that was really highlighted effectively in this Pathways to Commercial Lift-Off Report was the idea that you can't just have one reactor at a time because that ultimately doesn't build the experience base that allows you to really have learn by doing. It doesn't let you build the order book you need to build out supply chains and it's not letting you kind of build credibility and expertise with technology. And so one of the things that was really highlighted in this report was how you can have this combination of a committed order book, let's say five to 10 projects to really kind of build out your industrial demand. You can then look at project delivery. At the end of the day, if developers can't execute these projects on time, on budget, well then it might not have a role in the future energy economy. So really emphasizing that and building in project management as a high focus on your technology from the beginning. And then finally industrialization. How do you move forward and not just build one reactor but set up the capacity to build 10 reactors or 100 reactors? And I think we've seen a really great example of this is G Hitachi leading on their BWRX-300 design. This is something where it's a scaled down version of reactor technologies that the G Hitachi has experience with and they've operated for decades. And they said, okay, let's try to figure out how to build more than one reactor. And so they set up a partnership between Ontario Power Generation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Synthos, which is a Polish company to essentially share in the research and development costs for their first of a kind reactors. So instead of having that first mover really kind of carry the entire brunt of the development activity, how do you spread that out over a number of different developers and so that all the companies can kind of benefit from that initial learning. And so this is something that we see is really kind of following in the pathway that DOE is really outlining and something that we'll be really excited to look forward to as other companies start to expand their scope from their first plant out to their end plant. One of the last things I'll hit on is really just thinking about how successful commercialization could really kind of dramatically increase the demand for advanced nuclear energy for a wide variety of applications. Again, I'm borrowing a wonderful figure here from the commercial lift off report that DOE published but it really starts to show that if we want to have essentially nuclear energy playing a significant role in deep decarbonization, we're not talking about one or two gigawatts of new plants. We're talking about hundreds of gigawatts of new plants. And how do you start to scale that up? And it's great to really have this kind of proposal from DOE or this projection about what it could look like but what are we actually seeing on the industry side? What are they starting to think about? Well, if we look at electricity alone, the industry group, the Nuclear Energy Institute had done a survey of just its 19 member utilities back in 2002 or 2022. And they were projecting the deployment of more than 300 new SMRs by 2050, 90 gigawatts of new nuclear generation. And they were looking at specifically the operation or the construction and operation on retired coal plants. And so this is something that if we see companies having serious discussions about 90 gigawatts of new nuclear energy just for electricity alone, you start to see as we start to think about decarbonization of heat and industrial uses, how wide this opens up. So there's the last thing I'll touch on is really just kind of remembering that continued federal support incentives can really catalyze private investments in nuclear energy. This is a great slide for later as folks are kind of looking through about what the federal landscape is, but we've had federal appropriations. We've had specific programs in a piece of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, both for tax credits and for large appropriations to really kind of help get these programs off the ground. And really it's gonna be this combination of federal programs and making sure we have effective regulation that helps us get to this idea of creating the conditions for success for advanced nuclear energy. With that, I think I'm just about out of time. So looking forward to the conversation and the discussion with the other panelists. Well, we will bring our panelists up to, oh, that's okay, thanks. To the table so we can have some Q&A. And while we're getting settled, oops. What are you trying to do? Okay, I get it now. I'm just unplugging things there. Let's see, oh yeah. Do we are getting a ton of questions from our online audience, and I have several of them. We'll also have questions in our in-person audience as well. But I think to kick things off, I'd like to open with one. And this, okay, thanks. I don't know what that was. Never seen that before, I've done like a hundred of these. Anyway, I'd like to start maybe with you, Katie, and then we'll go down the line. And I'd like to give everyone on the panel an opportunity to kind of sort of specifically talk about the challenges. Whether you'd like to frame them as opportunities or challenges, but the United States faces with this as whether it's domestically or internationally, which I think is something that came up. And I think this might be a good place to start to kind of reset now that we've all heard each other's presentations, and then we'll get into the regular part of the Q&A. But Katie, if you'd like to go first, I'd like to hear your kind of assessment of sort of what the landscape of challenges looks like from the department's perspective. Yeah, I think the challenge that I think is at the core of new nuclear builds, in fact, even old nuclear builds is ensuring that we can get to a place where reactors are at least reasonably on time and on budget. It is really common for long timeline mega projects, whether it's a train station or the big dig in Boston, right, it took a way over budget, way over schedule because you can't predict inflationary changes, you can't predict the dynamics of some components of supply chains over those time periods, engineering and construction trades in the United States can be really challenging to recruit and retain. And so what we really wanna see is these small modular reactors really being built modularly in such a way that they can be built more on time and more on budget because you're focused on the kind of factory activities rather than onsite like stick build construction. I think that's gonna be a critical component and it's a challenge for the industry to handle and a challenge for us collectively to have patience with some of these first builds because the intent will be to bring those to a convergence in end of the kind. Another component is to not forget when we're deploying commercially some of these reactors and focused on executing federal dollars and even state dollars and private dollars on the deployments to not forget about the importance of research and development. We are here as leaders in the deployment of these technologies in the United States because of research and development. Nuclear fission is an inherently American invention. And we brought a lot of people from other countries to make sure that that was the case in the Manhattan Project and we succeeded and I think it's critically important that we continue to focus on what it means to remain at the bleeding edge of technologies like nuclear fission, even nuclear fusion, wind, solar energy, long duration storage, a hydrogen economy. We have the innovation in the United States because we invest in it. So we should continue to do that. Thank you. Johncy. I think this is working. Thank you, Dan. And I agree with Katie. I think that the biggest challenge we have right now, you know, after being the leaders, we actually had the very first commercial nuclear plant that provided electricity for a little city in Idaho and to be the first in the world, we should be there again, right? And I think there's opportunities to learn from other countries. As Katie said, as we are in the forefront of these advanced reactors and getting them out there, it is a collaborative effort. We're all facing it together as an industry, as a developer, as the national laboratory and identifying all of these different areas that we need to go after. And it needs to be done quickly and we need to figure out how we're gonna accelerate going forward in identifying these things. So again, there's funding involved, there's supply management from understanding everything that we need, the different technologies. The other big challenge I would say, not only, you know, nationally, but globally is the different technologies and advanced reactors and being able to identify the ones that we're gonna be able to address holistically and move forward quickly. Thanks, Aruko. Yes, so I guess in terms of the talents that I'm working on, spend fuel disposal and internal storage have been a major issue for nuclear industry. I think that we have to think how to communicate about nuclear waste. The Texas governor wrote a letter about against the internal storage site. He said, this is the most dangerous waste ever. That's, I think we have to change this narrative that the nuclear waste have been the best managed waste. At the same time, we should not put this burden on like rural area. Those rural region are actually the successful repository deployment in other countries. For example, Sweden or Finland, that waste repository were very close to the communities or actually they were on the community nuclear power plants. So I think that changing the narrative, but also from the technological point of view, environmental monitoring and these measurement sensors can provide assurance. They can provide actual data set, measured values that can show that it's securely contained, it's safe. So I think that this monitoring development is really important for providing assurance for the disposal sites. And Patrick? There we go, red light. That's the thing I'm looking for, great. So I think on top of what the previous panelists have said, I think the big thing that we're interested in is how can we kind of shift the conversation from a market push to a market pull. Right now I think there's a lot of discussion around how do we get people to want to build nuclear power plants. And that's great and it makes sense, especially for novel technology, a first mover. But ultimately if we're gonna see kind of this wide scale deployment of advanced nuclear energy as a climate solution, we need to figure out how to change the conditions so that this is something that companies are clamoring to build, that companies are getting in line to say, okay, I want to build five of this type of advanced reactor technology. And I think with that it's thinking about kind of everything across the spectrum that we discussed. How do we make sure we have social license for the technology? So this is something that companies see as something they can kind of actively engage with communities on. How do we change the financial incentives? Oh, there we go. The financial incentives at a federal or state level. So this is something where it makes sense as part of their long-term energy strategy. How do we think about project execution? At the end of the day, if a project takes twice as long and costs twice as much, well that's not something that a private company is really gonna be interested in. So how do we think about project execution? And then the final thing I'll just touch on again because I love regulation, which is still a weird thing to say out loud, is trying to think about how do we create the regulatory conditions where we can ensure public trust so we can make sure that it's a safe technology, but it's also something where it's an effective process where companies don't see that as kind of an unnecessary barrier. I think this is a conversation that we're having across the space when we talk about trying to make sure that we're thinking about the transition to clean energy in a really efficient and effective way, but also making sure that we don't let permitting or other barriers like that ultimately slow our clean energy transition. So how do we do it in an effective and a just way? Yeah, we were talking a little bit earlier about the pull versus push and we see something similar in green hydrogen, right? Developing demand and DOE has their hydrogen hubs program. We did a briefing about that about 10 months ago. So if you wanna learn a little bit more and we'll be coming back to the topic of hydrogen in the next couple of months as well, there's some really cool stuff happening with DOE on green hydrogen. All right, well, we have our friend Isabella who's our roving microphone today. And if we have folks in the audience, I think we have a first right up here in the second row, we'll be happy to take some questions and then I'm gonna do my best to intersperse some of our online ones as well. Hi, thank you very much. I'm familiar with the carbon capture and use storage sector. And they have had a tremendous amount of government encouragement of that whole sector with massive R&D money, massive multiple pilot projects, et cetera. But there seems to be a real stall in getting across into the commercialization, even with companies like Southern Company that has participated actively with the government kind of phase that's been going on for 10 or 15 years now. How realistic, I mean, what timeframe, how are you getting the private sector, not only from the point of view of the investment, which is enormous, but the utilities or the providers themselves seeing a stable commercialization pathway that they're willing to commit to. Thank you. Thank you. Well, open it up to the panel. Whoever would like to go first, please feel free. Yeah, I think one benefit that we have is that we have a number of nuclear utilities already that are kind of poised to think about what it looks like for them to deploy new nuclear, which I think unfortunately CCS does not have necessarily that history, right? They're in the very first stages where we're sort of a next generation of this technology. So that'll help, right? There are some folks who are already familiar, but I think it's really, they also struggle with the risk. The report on this lift off, this lift off report on commercial pathways is largely, it gives a number of recommendations, one of which I think gets to some of what you're at here, which is that it could be helpful to have some kind of program that supports effectively like overrun insurance for projects that go a little over budget or over schedule to give folks a confidence to invest in those first of a kind deployments until we get to the convergence on the end of the kind costs and schedules that will be easily investable. And I think that kind of thing doesn't really, it's not, there's not a natural way to sort of describe this in policy or in current DOE programs, but it's an interesting idea that's in that report, among others, but yeah. Yeah, I would also add, for us to get to net zero, it's gonna be a long haul in some of these areas, especially if we're depending on traditional reactors or otherwise from a cost and installation. Carbon capture becomes a very key solution in that bridge. I call it a bank account, right? So to be able to be able to sequester or recycle or reprocess carbon emissions to get to when we can say everything is carbon free. So we're working on that. We're looking at that from, how do we take advantage of some of these funds that are available to do research to say, how do we in those cases or we will never be able to remove that carbon emitting source, carbon capture becomes a solution at that point because you're still gonna have diesel generators that probably we haven't identified the technology to replace them holistically. However, carbon capture becomes an answer. So that's something we're looking at right now to say, how can we accelerate it? How can we identify one capture, recycle, and then storage? Thank you. Yeah, and the last thing I'll add is I think this is gonna be really a case where success begets success and you have to have that first essential commercial proof of viability. I think when we take a look at the nuclear industry historically, we can largely describe the plants as either being stick built if you wanna be technical or bespoke if you wanna be a little more colloquial, but each one of these plants was essentially a custom one off. And so you didn't get that idea of having a standardized product that you can really kind of deploy in large numbers and gain a lot of efficiency in doing so. I think we can probably, and again, not an expert in carbon capture, but I have to imagine a lot of these early projects are very much a demonstration. It's not, hey, here's a commercial product where we've worked out all the kinks. I think on the nuclear side, and again, it's highlighted very well in the DOE liftoff report, is this idea of if you can get alignment among a group of stakeholders to agree on kind of the initial set of deployment of a technology, well, you're really reducing that risk. It's no one has to be the first mover we're sharing it among the first 10. And so hopefully, and again, I think this is the really interesting thing about how to draw people into the marketplace and encourage those types of commercial alignment. That's how you ultimately get that order book of 10 projects that then lets you really test what does this technology actually look like in the commercial market space and create essentially those signals that'll get other companies really want to invest in it more broadly. Thanks. That kind of reminds me, Haruko made a point in her presentation about trust and I imagine too, like once the first couple of these, right now, it's kind of like a no trust me, right? But once, I imagine that would also be very helpful for that as well. We have a question over here. I saw you, I didn't get to you first, but we can get to go second. We'll just wait for Isabella so that the live cast can pick it up. Hello. My question is for Catherine and Patrick. I've heard a lot before about the transferable skills and jobs from coal plants to nuclear plants. And you talked a little bit about the Terra Power plant in Wyoming. I was wondering if there are any other projects like this and how are they're going and what are the other challenges to kind of making this transition? Yeah, I think, you know, we can, there's an analogy here in every nuclear reactor power plant outage across the country in outage season. So a nuclear reactor typically operates about 18 months and then has to be refueled. And during that endeavor, we bring on a whole bunch of skilled crafts onto the site at these nuclear power plants and they have jobs the other 18 months of the year, right? And they spent one month at a nuclear power plant and a lot of those folks go from nuclear power plant to coal maintenance, et cetera, et cetera. And so we've seen very clearly there are skilled crafts folks who find themselves really like translatable from plant to plant, particularly when they're particular tasks or things like, you know, steam turbine maintenance and stuff like that, right? There's a lot of steam turbine maintenance in a nuclear reactor just like a coal plant. And I think when we look at the construction trades, the construction of the Vogel nuclear power plant took thousands and thousands of skilled crafts people. It's going to be operational really soon. It went critical, the unit three and the other will go critical later this year. We are in a place where those thousands of workers are now nuclear trained skilled crafts workers and they came from lots of places, traveler workers from 48 states. And I expect that they too will be easily deployable to new nuclear plant projects across the country. And I hope that they will not leave the nuclear field because they'll be in high demand for lots of other clean energy infrastructure. So. Yeah, I think the thing that I would add is I guess maybe I'll say it's kind of a two separate issues that we can talk about. The first is when we're talking about deployment of nuclear at kind of existing fossil fuel sites, I think we're going to see over the course of the next couple of years more conversations on what exactly that applicability is. I think Katie spoke to it a little bit saying, okay, the DOE has identified some potential sites, but now let's start to really dig in on it. What are sites are going to be most compatible? Where do you essentially get the most economic advantages? One of the big questions I think we're still working through and a lot of proponents are still trying to figure out is how much of that existing fossil fuel infrastructure do you want to reuse? Versus how much of it is something where, okay, well, we might just use land and kind of go from there. And so I think we'll see kind of more serious and kind of detailed technical analyses to provide us insights on that. I think in terms of kind of the workforce, again, there are a lot of really good opportunities for kind of this very cross-disciplinary workforce, but one of the things that we're going to have to talk about is how we make sure that we're actually intentional in transitioning these communities over. It's I think just kind of a sad truth that if a coal plant shuts down and the nuclear plant isn't going to come on for another five or six years, well, those workers might not stick around, those families might not stick around. So if we're really interested in kind of providing a transition for these communities, how can we talk from kind of the very beginning stages? What does that intentional transition look like? How are we thinking about training workers? How are we thinking about providing that pathway for them? So it is something where they are actually gaining the benefits of the nuclear power plant coming into their community. I think we're still in the early stages of a lot of these discussions, but it's going to be really exciting things to look at in the course of the next couple of years as we start to kind of make plans and see what could this actually look like. You actually touched on something that's responsive to this online question, which is, cold plants are shutting down at one pace. Cold nuclear conversions are possible at a different pace and how do we align those things? I don't know if anyone has any thoughts about that beyond what you just said, but I thought that was a really interesting point. I agree, it will be hard. Yeah. Now it is going to be hard, and that's where I think Kitty and Patrick were even saying starting early. So you know, if the nuclear plant is not going to be ready for five years past the shutdown, one, you continue to operate the cold plant until it's ready, but then there is going to be delays. There might be things unforeseen that we're now prepared for. So looking at a bridge, looking at something, whether it's another renewable solar wind, some of these other activities that could be started as they're planning on it, and then kind of a phased approach. So you have a little bit of an overlap from this going off this, so it'll address the technology, the electricity as well as the workforce. Great, thank you for that. And last July, we had our clean energy expo, Senator Crapo and Senator Reed were a part of that as well. We had Andy Bachman, who's with Idaho National Lab talking on our national security panel, talking exactly about this. He had some great comments. So if you dig that up, it's pretty easy to find if you visit us online, but there's some good stuff on that. I think we have time for at least one more in-person question and we'll go to you. Thank you. I started my career many years ago as a social scientist looking at actually West Valley as a problematic waste disposal site. For the past 10 years or so, I've been working on renewable energy. My question is about commercialization potential and factors affecting that that I haven't heard. And specifically, one of the things that I've seen in the renewable industry is extraordinary advances that have economic implications of both, particularly in solar panel design, but what I want to ask about is specifically batteries. So like one of the values that I see, the value propositions that nuclear could bring to the table is I think one of you, several of you mentioned the sort of base load coverage. How much is it if batteries keep advancing at the pace they've been advancing in terms of those capacities, does nuclear still have that advantage or will it disappear? Feel free to jump in. Yeah, happy to. So I think this is something where it's really important to kind of take that larger energy system view because I think there are places where if you have certain renewable resource availability and then you did have both short and long-term duration storage. And I think especially when we have conversations around battery technology, we have to remember both short-term and long-term. Maybe 100% renewable system there makes sense. But the fact is that not all parts of the world are gonna have that resource availability or essentially the demand characteristics where that combination might make sense 100% of the time. And so I think this is something where if we're really interested in making sure we hit our 2050 or 2035 to pay on what you're looking at decarbonization goals, how do we make sure that we've kind of got that suite of technologies? Again, I think there's a lot of developments in the battery space. But what is it gonna take for us to go from storing let's say gigawatt hours of energy on the grid to storing terawatt months. We're talking orders and orders of magnitude. And so I think it's something that if we can say, hey, let's start deploying all the clean energy we can and then we'll start to figure out what makes sense over time. I think that's the best place to go with it. I think it's also gonna be really interesting to talk about what are the different types of energy storage that we'll need for different applications. Again, if you're really interested in industrial heat applications, going from like a renewable electricity to a battery and then converting that back into heat for an industrial process is pretty inefficient. So you might think about in that case, oh, how does something like a high temperature advanced nuclear reactor really fit in there and help you kind of get that efficiency gain and thinking about kind of what are the niche applications of all these different technologies. So again, really excited I see it again as kind of one of those major three major pieces thinking about what is that firm energy source? What is that variable energy source and what's storage? And we're really gonna need to deploy as much of all three of those as possible if we're gonna hit some of these goals. Please, absolutely, please jump in. In terms of battery technologies, for example, I think it's really important to take account what would be the waste and what would be the life cycle cost. I think people are getting aware of sort of mining needs, for example, and the potential impact of mining in like developing countries, for example. So I think that most of these technologies are optimized for cost and energy storage capacity, but I think that this environmental impact concern, life cycle, environmental impact concern should come in. And I think also providing sort of the perspective is very important. For example, I thought that I used to think it's okay to just drive electric car, but then I heard that lithium mining is actually impacting groundwater and people's life in South Africa, South America. So okay, it's best to take public transportation and bike, I should bike, right? So I think it's kind of people, if people don't know these things, we just don't know. And it's hard to optimize for environment, but for that I think it's very important to sort of keep open-minded and this kind of trade-off could happen and we should think about the environmental impact as a life from the sort of environmental, sorry, the environmental impact across the life cycle of each technology. Thank you for adding that. Next time we'll have to cover it with closing time by Semi-Sonic. And that's the, yeah, that's the hook. All right, so we have a tremendous panel. I want to just give anyone a last opportunity. We have a lot of congressional staff in the room. We have a lot of congressional staff online. Are there any additional things that staff should be looking for, whether it's out of the department or any big announcements coming up on this topic that you might want to highlight just as a final word? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely take a look at energy.gov slash consent-based siting next week. We'll have more information on the consent-based siting process. Great, thanks. All right, well, we will go ahead and wrap it up there. I think this thing is warming back up. And my colleague, D&O, will once again come up and do this. But first off, I would like to say tremendous thanks to our really excellent panel. Sorry for the awkward screen up and down, but you aced it in terms of dealing with it gracefully. But thank you, Katie, John C., Haruko, and Patrick, for really providing excellent remarks that all worked really, really well together. I feel like I have a much better understanding of what this is all about, although I still probably couldn't keep up in your class, Haruko, I'm not even close. But thank you so much. And I think they deserve a quick round of applause and appreciation. We are now going into the portion of the presentation where I just thank people because a lot of people are involved in pulling these together. I'd like to start by thanking Senator Crapo and his awesome staff for helping us be here today. And thanks to Katie, all your great staff for helping us pull this together as well. I'd also like to thank my colleague, Dan O'Brien, Omri, Allison, Anna, Molly, as well as Lindley, Isabella, and Madeline, who are, Lindley and Isabella are here. They're two of our spring interns in helping us out today. So thank you all for everything you did to pull today together. I'd also like to thank my man, Troy, for our expert videography and live casting. So thank you so much, Troy. This brief, this slide here just shows our, you'll have to trust me, but it shows our upcoming Farm Bill briefings. We are gonna turn into the Farm Bill in a big way, starting next Wednesday with an online only briefing where we're gonna talk about process. We have people who can answer questions about pretty much anything you wanna know. So I really encourage everyone to sign up for it. I signed up for the whole series, but the reason why we're running these as a series is because we wanna make sure that we're getting as much information out there. So we're gonna do process, we're gonna do climate, economic, environmental, when winds, we're gonna do rural development, we're gonna do conservation, we're gonna do forestry. And that's just now between now and the end of June. And that's in addition to the side by side by sides. And that's in addition to the hearing tracker. So if you wanna go back in time to anything, the 117th Congress or the current Congress, we have a running tracker of all climate topics I discussed at Agriculture Committee hearings. So a ton of stuff coming up on that and they're all gonna be really good. And many of them will actually be in person, but we'll always have the live stream as well. And if you'd like to go back and see any of our great presentations again or read the presentation materials, everything's available online. And it would be a real shame if you visit us online and didn't sign up for climate change solutions because it is really, really good. I had an article in it yesterday about my home, where I live, they had a leaf blower buyback program or trading program so you can get a look. I already had one, so I missed out on it, but it was a really cool program. And I wrote an article about it and wouldn't wanna miss that. Finally, this is a link to our survey. If folks in our in-person or online audience have two minutes to help us improve how we do our congressional education briefings, this link will take you to that. We read every response and we take them all to heart. So if you have any suggestions, if you had any audio problem, video problems, logging in problems, anything like that, please let us know. We really do appreciate all the great feedback. We'll wrap it up there. Sorry for going a few minutes over, but we'd be back next Wednesday, April 26th. Online, right, Dano? You're shaking your head. Okay, I can see you. So next Wednesday in the afternoon for our first Farm Build briefing, and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of the great weather. Thank you.