The U.S. government this week set new nuclear power deployment targets including establishing a target to deploy 200 gigawatts of net new capacity by 2050, at least tripling U.S. nuclear energy capacity based on 2020 numbers.
The new targets are detailed in the White House’s “Safely and Responsibly Expanding U.S. Nuclear Energy: Deployment Targets and a Framework for Action.”
The framework identifies more than 30 actions the U.S. government can take within existing statutory authorities and also includes actions that the U.S. nuclear industry and power customers can take to enable successful deployments.
Under the framework, net new capacity gains would come from multiple sources, including building new plants (including large, small-modular, and microreactors and including Generation III+ water-cooled designs and Generation IV designs), uprating existing reactors, and restarting reactors that have retired for economic reasons.
To achieve this, the U.S. government is also establishing nearer term targets:
- Jumpstarting the nuclear energy deployment ecosystem with 35 GW of new capacity by 2035 that will be operating or under construction
- Accelerating the capability of the nuclear energy deployment ecosystem by ramping to a sustained pace of producing 15 GW per year by 2040, in support of both U.S. and global project deployments.
The White House said that the near-term 2035 deployment target “reflects the sense of urgency needed to make a significant expansion of domestic nuclear energy possible.”
The 2035 target includes capacity gains from all sources, both operating and under construction.
“Achieving the 2035 deployment target requires near-term action to establish orders of sufficient quantity for multiple reactor designs. These orderbooks are critical to enable the investment necessary to expand the fuel and component supply chains,” the framework states.
Though these nuclear deployment targets “are ambitious relative to the stagnation of new builds over the last 30 years, they are not without precedent based on achieved capacity additions in the 1970s and 1980s,” the document said. During those two decades, the U.S. nuclear industry completed construction of about 100 GW, with a peak at over 10 GW added in 1974.
“Through technology innovation, greater design standardization, modularization, and repetition, we have the potential to safely and responsibly deploy new nuclear power faster and more efficiently than in previous decades,” the White House said.
Existing reactors “continue to operate safely and with a high capacity factor, however their costs and construction times did not achieve the desired level of positive learning, in large part because most plants were built with unique, bespoke designs.”
The White Houses notes that the 94 currently operating reactors in the U.S. represent over 50 different combinations of reactor types, nuclear steam supply systems, models, power levels, containment types, and balance-of-plant architecture.
“This new era of nuclear energy deployments must feature greater standardization, along with the integration of modern design, project management, and construction techniques and a wealth of lessons learned from past deployments. To achieve these ambitious deployment targets, this framework outlines an expansive set of actions to accelerate and expand domestic nuclear energy deployment.”
