Global nuclear industry must adopt safer new technologies: report

A new report on the global nuclear power market claims that China will lead the world in adoption of new technologies being developed to make nuclear power safer and cleaner. The breakthroughs intended to make nuclear power safer and cleaner are being commercialized in the US, Europe and elsewhere, but will take root first in China, according to Emerging Nuclear  Innovations: Picking global winners in a race to reinvent nuclear energy. The report is published by Kachan & Co.

Nuclear power has been criticized for being costly and slow to develop, dangerous to operate and for creating weaponizable waste. But certain companies around the world have been quietly commercializing technologies to address all of these concerns—which could propel wider adoption of nuclear power, even in the face of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi incident, and despite the distance some countries have been putting between themselves and today’s nuclear fission plants.

“Whether you consider it clean technology or not, the world needs nuclear energy. Solar and wind can’t supply baseload power 24/7,” said Dallas Kachan, Managing Partner of Kachan & Co. “The only questions are which type of nuclear technologies will be built, when and where, and why? This report helps investors, large companies and governments understand which new companies and technologies are likely to stand the best chance of adoption.”

For the nuclear industry to continue to grow to meet projected power demands beyond 2030, it will have to move away from conventional reactor designs of the type that were damaged in Japan. In a back-to-the-future play, it will adopt technologies first championed decades ago, according to the Kachan analysis.

“As undesirable as plutonium waste is today, it was in demand for the atomic stockpiling of the Cold War, which helped the water-cooled uranium reactor win the day in the 1960s. Since then, the industry and supply chain that grew around this entrenched trillion-dollar complex has suppressed better alternatives. That’s about to change,” said Kachan.

Some countries, especially China, are marching steadily along a nuclear path paved by radically different, safer, and less expensive reactor technologies than those operating today. Leading developers of advanced nuclear technologies are lining up to trial their systems in China, which is investing more in nuclear innovation than any other country. Regulatory and political hurdles and powerful lobbies in the U.S., by contrast, are expected to hinder the adoption of new, safer and more efficient nuclear breakthroughs.

The report profiles alternative technologies, some of which date back to the 1950s and ‘60s, when the water-cooled uranium-fuel reactor prevailed. They include a uranium replacement called thorium, as well as a new idea for cladding and housing uranium that boosts its efficiency. The report looks at reactor designs including molten salt, pebble bed, fast neutron, gas-cooled and fusion. It also examines the role of small “modular” reactors, expected to be driven by users like the U.S. military looking for off-grid power sources.

The nuclear movement faces a tough fight against the status quo of large nuclear companies like Areva, Westinghouse and General Electric. But the industry is at an inflection point. Just as Skype and Google eventually upended traditional telecom, media and technology giants, so, too, do innovators have the opportunity to unseat conventional nuclear, according to the report.

The Kachan report profiles those with the most potential, after exclusive interviews with executives from organizations such as Flibe Energy, General Atomics, General Fusion, Helion Energy, Hyperion Power, ITER, Lightbridge (NASDAQ:LTBR), NuScale Power, Ottawa Valley Research, QPower, Radix Power and Energy, RARECO, Terra Power, Thor Energy, Thorium One and others.