NuScale said it supports cost estimates based on its new design and has long been in touch with regulators about revisions. “We didn’t expect any surprises,” said José Reyes, NuScale’s chief technology officer and co-founder. UAMPS spokesman LaVarr Webb acknowledged the uncertainty of the design-approval process, but said the planned Idaho reactor’s $89 electricity price would remain competitive given soaring natural gas prices and the fact that always-on power would help stabilize the grid. He noted that rising interest rates and tightening supply chains have increased costs for all power plants, not just those that split atoms.
Despite the optimism, officials in Morgan, Utah, a small town in the Wasatch Mountains north of Salt Lake City, decided to quickly exit the project. City Manager Ty Bailey said he is concerned about where the energy for the community will come from in the future, given the retirement of coal and the rise of electric vehicles. “It’s so disruptive to the way it used to be,” he said. “The system has been stable year after year. Policy has changed that — no commenting on politics.”
This year, the city realized it had new alternatives to deal with the rising costs of nuclear power. While the Lower Inflation Act is expected to help offset the cost of the Idaho plant, it also includes money to help rural communities start their own energy projects. Bailey wants the city to become more self-reliant, installing its own solar panels and batteries to store electricity overnight.
Morgan was the only defector in this round, though Palovan, another Utah city, cut its commitment from 3 MW to 2 MW — just enough to make up for the loss of its coal power. But a new deal with the utility, struck at a two-day meeting with UAMPS members this winter, puts the project in a state of urgency. It includes a requirement to stabilize the price at $89 per megawatt-hour and — most worryingly for utilities that want the project to succeed — at least 80% take-up for the project by next year. If that threshold is not met, towns will get refunds for most of their fees to date.
At this point, the utility has put relatively little of its own money into the project, but that will change in 2024 as the project begins seeking site-specific building approvals followed by actual construction. The group is in talks with utilities elsewhere in the Northwest to gain full subscription for the project, and NuScale is competing with other SMR startups, including Bill Gates-backed TerraPower, which recently signed with private utility PacifiCorp. A Feasibility Agreement. UAMPS’ Weber said he was optimistic about where the talks would go.
At Los Alamos, Garcia hopes confidence will be in place. As the county’s coal power contract expires, he has secured 15 megawatts of “solid” energy from a combination of wind and solar for less than half the price of a nuclear project. But that’s only about one-sixth of the county’s needs, and he doesn’t expect similar prices to come up again.
Without nuclear power, he worries the county will have to slow down its decarbonization plans. “We’ll probably have to actually invest in a natural gas plant to bridge the gap until something else comes along,” he said. Currently, county councils voted to increase their share of electricity at the NuScale plant from 1.8 megawatts to 8.6 megawatts, an long-term plan. Garcia hopes this will help encourage other utilities to seize the opportunity to spark a nuclear renaissance.
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