Glowing pains: Developing nuclear power could cost Utah tens of billions

Talk of new innovation through SMR, Kemp points out, is not new, and in fact government and industry have tried and failed over the decades to develop smaller reactors that could be factory produced. Those developments ultimately led to larger facilities that still had to be built all on-site and at tremendous cost.

The Vogtle modular nuclear plant built in Georgia was estimated to cost $17 billion when it was started in 2009 but when it came online in 2024, it ended up costing over $30 billion. Kemp says the project is the nation’s most expensive energy project.

The complexity of technology and challenges from the market and safety and other regulations make it so hard to scale up a project that the industry suffers almost from a “negative learning curve”— almost getting more expensive, the more it’s undertaken.

“Learning from nuclear has been so slow that it has been basically unobservable,” Kemp said.

Kemp sees nothing wrong with more research into nuclear technology and innovation but he does challenge nuclear cheerleaders out there who see it as the new solution to a greener future.

“You can buy nuclear power that will give you a gigawatt of carbon free energy for $10 billion or you can buy wind and solar that will give you four gigawatts of carbon free energy for $10 billion,” Kemp said.

Big picture

Kowalchik with the Office of Energy Development notes that the state’s position is to use the right energy mix to keep providing reliable, safe and clean energy to Utahns. While wind and solar projects may be more affordable right now than nuclear, he doesn’t see them providing the same reliability to the grid that is needed to keep up with Utah’s growth. The state supports energy storage, which basically means technology to store up energy from solar and wind that can be deployed when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing. But it’s not enough now to replace traditional fuel sources.

“It’s not that solar and batteries and energy storage are bad, you just need to use them when they make sense,” Kowalchik said.

Even Albrecht’s legislation, which creates a Nuclear Consortium staffed with experts from nuclear industry and scientific fields, also provides funding mechanisms for communities that want to develop energy projects that would include energy storage from renewable sources if they desired, along with other energy sources like nuclear.

Kowalchik points out that it’s hard to make predictions about reliability of renewable sources when considering extreme weather conditions and their impact on transmission or the fact that when the energy mix adds more renewables it can hit a point where expenses for certain types of generator technology make large jumps.

“Putting the whole grid on like 100% renewable is just going to be really expensive,” Kowalchik said.

He worries that over-emphasis on renewables in the energy mix would in fact be more expensive than even the dire predictions on nuclear power. But he’s careful to note that it’s not a definite prediction.

Kemp argues, however, that accounting for historical weather data, new transmission lines and energy storage “over build” — which means “you build more generating capacity than you need because the sun might not be shining as brightly and the wind might not be blowing as strongly” — could cover cover 95% of the grid’s needs. The rest could be covered by cheaper fossil fuels “for occasionally turning on once in a blue moon.”

Even with those added costs, he says it would be cheaper than nuclear.

Utah law, however, heavily favors the reliability of the grid over how clean the energy is. And Kowalchik points out that for some states that rely heavily on renewables that energy mix presents other challenges, as in California where rolling brownouts are used to help stabilize the grid.

Uncertainty is part of the reason why Operation Gigawatt is exploring all options in what the office has described as not just “all of the above” but “more of the above.”

Can Utah go nuclear in 2035?

Adding nuclear to the state’s energy mix has excited many but firing it up by 2035 for the Operation Gigawatt goal may be a challenge. Besides typically running over on cost, nuclear projects also run over on time. Kemp estimated most nuclear projects need at least a decade, or even closer to two, to reach completion. The same study on global energy that found consistent cost overruns for nuclear projects also found they went over on construction time by almost three years on average.

Other places are, however, already setting nuclear goals. South Korea has announced plans to develop SMR by 2035, alongside other traditional reactors.

Could Utah do the same?

Glenn Sjoden is a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Utah and is director of the university’s nuclear engineering program.

He says it’s possible – if Utah started building right now.

“With licensing and permitting and all of that it’s going to take a decade to build a nuclear plant,” Sjoden said.

But not just any plant. Sjoden says if he had the power he would tell the state to order the same reactor used by the Georgia plant. Even though it more than doubled in cost he thinks it would be the only reactor in the country that could benefit from lessons learned in the first installation. He could see it only costing the state $8 billion to $9 billion for the one gigawatt of power it could provide.

Currently the federal government’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission is evaluating how to streamline regulations to more rapidly deploy nuclear reactors. That change came about from the ADVANCE Act which was passed in Congress with bipartisan support in 2024.

But getting it completed in a decade, Sjoden says, would be contingent on the NRC finding ways to reduce the permitting and regulation process. Under those circumstances it could be done but that $8 billion would still not be the full price tag, Sjoden said.

Nuclear plants require a lot of water which Utah might not want to spare.

“A nuclear plant can use — depending on the design — up to two times the water that say a normal coal plant would use,” Sjoden said. Plants can be designed to use air cooling but they are less efficient and will cost even more to build.

There’s also the issue of waste, which he says is not really a problem for the rest of the world, only the United States, which lacks a facility to recycle nuclear waste.

“Nuclear plants are really awesome, 90% of that fuel is recyclable. People don’t realize that,” he said. “But you have to recycle the fuel and we’re not currently doing that.”

Transmission lines are also a factor; those would need to be upgraded as well to handle distribution from nuclear facilities. And then you also need highly educated workers to run the plants, it’s not an entry-level Homer Simpson position.

“Notwithstanding the business that I’m in, of training and educating nuclear experts, it takes some effort to do that and we need to create a lot more (jobs for people) that are going to stay in the state of Utah,” Sjoden said.

In September 2024 the U.S. Department of Energy released a report about the future potential of nuclear power, noting that one of the biggest challenges to the cost and completion of the plant in Georgia was an “untrained workforce.” Over the course of that project the plant ended up training approximately 30,000 workers.

Utah would be starting almost from scratch.

While Sjoden is an unabashed believer in nuclear he’s also a believer in the wisdom of adopting a strong mix of energy sources like renewables with storage and natural gas for the medium term while also planning for nuclear further down the road.

“All technologies need to be looked at in the right proportion,” Sjoden said.

With the right preparation it can happen here in Utah but it will take a lot of money, time and effort, he said.

“Nuclear is going to be, I think, very reliable, safe, and profitable eventually,” Sjoden said. “But a lot has to happen in the next decade to make that work.”