As the nuclear renaissance comes into focus in the U.S., the sector’s true bottleneck might not be advanced reactors, but its lack of heavy-lifting project developers. These are the companies who secure and permit sites, navigate the interconnection queue, line up offtakers, and assemble a team of both savvy EPCs and experienced plant operators.
In this episode of Catalyst, Shayle Kann sits down with David Faherty, co-founder of Elementl Power, to walk through the soup-to-nuts playbook for delivering new nuclear projects in the United States. David explains everything from how his team approaches greenfield site screening, why early-stage development capital remains the hardest money to raise, and how portfolio-level structuring could unlock nuclear’s elusive learning curve.
Shayle and David also discuss:
- What makes a viable nuclear site, from seismic and geotechnical screenings to community engagement and interconnection dynamics
- Why 20- to 25-year investment-grade offtakes from hyperscalers are critical for debt financing
- Why Elementl opts for GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300 SMR over Gen IV startup reactor concepts
- Lessons learned from Vogtle — from the design phase and regulatory alignment to workforce retention
- How standardizing the nuclear island can help developers cut costs
Editor’s note: EIP is an investor in Elementl, where Shayle sits on the board.
Resources
- Catalyst: The global geopolitics of nuclear fuel
- Catalyst: A blueprint for scalable fusion power
- Catalyst: Building a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain
- Catalyst: The path to market for new nuclear reactors
- Open Circuit: Is commercial fusion finally near?
- Latitude Media: DOE Is dedicating $17.5 billion in loans to the nuclear supply chain
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
Catalyst is brought to you by GridBeyond. GridBeyond is the world’s leading technology platform for managing distributed and flexible energy resources. Learn more by visiting GridBeyond.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the strategic communications and marketing partner behind the biggest names in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped breakout companies amplify their stories, build reputation, differentiate from the competition, define new categories and accelerate growth. Learn more at antennagroup.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.
Transcript
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann. I lead early-stage investments at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst.
So, I have long believed that a nuclear renaissance is coming in the US at some point, and along the way over the years, I’ve looked at lots of advanced reactor companies, and many of them are genuinely exciting. But some time ago, we at EIP came to realize that there’s a gap in this market that we think actually might be the bigger bottleneck than just a new reactor. A better reactor, even a significantly better one, doesn’t itself create a project, and this is really a project challenge.
Somebody still has to find a site that can actually host the project, get that site permitted with community support, sign a customer for decades of power offtake who is creditworthy, get through the interconnection queue and the NRC, assemble a series of vendors, an EPC, and an operator, figure out capital formation and risk sharing for potentially billions of dollars in various stages. It’s challenging.
It’s also not unique to nuclear. In every other type of power generation—natural gas, wind, solar, storage, geothermal, you name it—that somebody exists: it’s the developer. In nuclear, mostly though, it doesn’t. Utilities don’t want the early-stage risk themselves; hyperscalers just want the power; reactor OEMs are often being forced into developing their own projects, where really they should be focused on building their products.
So, our view ended up being that the magic in nuclear right now is not necessarily in the reactor itself; it’s in the complicated process of project development and capital formation—the often unglamorous work of turning a reactor design into something that a pension fund can own. And that process, I think, is very poorly understood.
So, let’s see if we can solve that. My guest today is David Faherty. He’s the co-founder of Elemental Power. David and his co-founders actually ran reactors in the Navy, and then he spent his civilian career in energy finance, and now is entirely focused on bringing forth the nuclear renaissance in the US. Full disclosure: I am not unbiased here. We at EIP are investors in Elemental, and I’m on the board. You’ll hopefully see why momentarily.
Before we get started, though, we are going to wrap up 2026, as we have in some other years, with an “Ask Me Anything” episode. Thank you for all the questions you’ve sent in the past. Come up with some new ones. Send any questions you’ve got by December 8th to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’ll answer as many of them as we can. And for now, David Faherty is coming up next.
David, welcome.
David Faherty: Thanks, Shayle, excited to be here. It’s great to finally be able to sit down and talk with you and share some of the things we’re seeing in the space, and look forward to this conversation.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, sit down and talk with me in front of a mic as opposed to the 10 times a week that we talk away from the mic.
I’m excited for this because I think people don’t fully understand like what it’s actually going to take to go from nothing to fully operating new nuclear project in the United States, which you and I agree will happen and should happen. So, I want to walk through it in detail. Here’s I think what we should cover: we should talk about the site and site selection; we should talk about customers, who’s buying the power; we should talk about the reactor selection; we should talk about capital formation; we should talk about construction and construction risk; and then I think we should talk about like how do you go from one project to a bunch of projects, which is really what what we agree needs to happen.
So, that’s my list. Let’s do it in that order. So, let’s start with the site. If you’re looking for a greenfield nuclear project in the US, like give me the criteria list of what makes a good site, what makes a bad site.
David Faherty: Yeah, you know, it’s a good list of topics, Shayle, and when we think about sites, a lot of this is kind of interwoven, so I might bounce around a little bit. But, big picture, there’s kind of two ways to go about it: you can kind of spec build and hope that folks come and take your power because you found technically the perfect site, or you can try to figure out where the customers might need the demand, and importantly for these first couple projects, are willing to pay a bit more of a premium for technology that still has some learnings before you get to Nth-of-a-kind.
And so, our approach has always been customer-centric: where does the customer need the power? And so, that’s sort of the first overlay. And then you get into the technical factors. And we certainly have learned a lot over the years. Ryan, Dan, and I first went out to try to go buy a retiring coal site that was on a river, had lots of existing transmission and distribution, but as we started doing diligence on the site, found that there were issues around buildable acreage, the floodplain, and then coal ash that was on the site that causes certain liabilities that you have to figure out for figure out and kind of solve.
And then we went and we partnered with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help our screening process. And they’ve got a really great tool, OR-SAGE, that takes technical data, GIS databases that the labs have collected, and helps you screen through technical factors for a site. So, what are the big categories? We break it down into exclusion criteria—stuff that immediately kills a site, and we’re not going to touch it, and that could be anything from seismic or, importantly, a community that doesn’t want you to be building in their location.
And then there’s also avoidance criteria, which requires more of a deep dive to assess the impact to the overall project costs and scope. And so, that can be certain challenges around soil composition or bedrock, logistical attributes of the site, whether proximity to transmission and distribution, and then there are also customer-centric screens that we apply as well.
And so, it was a pretty heavy lift for us to go find sites that were going to fit all those criteria. And we spent months going through this process, and now have developed a tool internally that we’re using that can help us take what was once a six-month process with multiple subject matter experts and can almost do the screening live by drawing a circle on a map to say, “Hey, find the right sites for us from a geotechnical standpoint, soil composition, seismic, and then also these economic factors that drive project economics.”
And so, certainly a bit of an art. And then there’s also what’s transactable: you could find the perfect site, and people don’t want to sell, or the utility knows it’s a crown jewel and doesn’t want to let go of it today. And so, it’s a combination of different disciplines to come to a good commercial decision.
Shayle Kann: Yeah. There are a million factors. You listed a bunch. I guess I want to drill down particularly on a couple of them, one being the community side and then one being interconnection.
So, on the community side, you said as an exclusion criterion, community that doesn’t want you there. But what’s been your approach to community engagement? When do you engage the community? How? Obviously, this is a big question for new nuclear.
David Faherty: Yeah. So, it’s a sort of phased approach, like many of the things that we do. There’s great public resources. One of our advisors, Todd Allen out of University of Michigan, has done a ton of work getting polling data to help provide some clarity on how community might accept a new nuclear project.
And then, once we get alignment from a customer to start looking in a certain region and we find sites that we think will work, then we start engaging at a very high level with local officials to get a sense of their read on whether the community would be supportive. As an example, for our project in Ohio, this engagement started well in advance of us actually making an announcement, at the local level all the way up through the State House, to collect feedback and gauge potential receptivity. The site in Ohio, in particular, had been sited for a coal plant in the past, so we knew that the community was supportive of that project. So, we knew that there was openness to it and a real desire to experience some of the economic uplift from a project like this that represents hundreds of long-term jobs and something that could be transformational.
On the interconnection side, that’s really important as well, and certainly in PJM it’s a difficult market. But understanding the right-of-way from the site to the project location and the risk associated with that is a key decision in ultimately deciding to move forward with site control.
Shayle Kann: Interconnection is one where—I mean, community seems like anybody who you’d ask what are the key factors in determining whether a new nuclear project should go in site X, they’re going to list community. Interconnection is one that’s interesting in that the complaints of other forms of power generation—solar and wind and natural gas and whatever—is like, “Oh, the interconnection queues are so long. I can’t get connected in time.”
The blessing and the curse of new nuclear is it’s going to take a little while to come online, and so a three-year, five-year interconnection time period is probably okay. And so, it’s interesting that despite that fact, interconnection actually is a really key and surprisingly challenging component of development, and we’ve seen that with other nuclear projects that have actually died on the interconnection vine. So, why? Why is it still tricky?
David Faherty: It’s tricky. It requires technical knowledge of the particular point of interconnection. In our case, we worked with some outside advisors to do preliminary studies, so we had a pretty good sense of what sort of upgrades would be required for that particular site and our sorry, our generation capacity.
I think it is a difficult process, and you have to stay on top of sort of the PJM interface and the modules that they have where they give updates on your interconnection request, and any feedback that folks have from the RTO on supplemental information that you need.
One thing that’s part of our philosophy is just trying to be as simple and straightforward with our projects, and what does that practically mean? Trying to limit the complexity of the project that we’re putting together. There are folks who think that it makes sense to stack multiple generating sources at the same kind of point of interconnection, and I think there are reasons to do it that can be pretty compelling, but given the complexity of what we’re trying to do with a new nuclear project, stacking that complexity is not something that we’re comfortable doing at this stage in the game. Perhaps later, once we get some more reps under our belt, and not just us, but the regulators and everyone else, all the other stakeholders that are involved in this, try to make things simple for them, as simple as they can be for what is a very complex and large project.
Shayle Kann: Okay. So, that’s the site. I mean, as you pointed out, maybe we should have done these in reverse order, but let’s talk about the customer.
This is one of the key differences in what makes it possible to build new nuclear in the US today versus where we were five years ago, right? The customer profile has changed; the customer willingness to lean in has changed. So, give me your view on who the customer is for the first, you know, bunch of new nuclear we’re going to see in the US.
David Faherty: Yeah. So, it’s a good question. And our view is, for our model, when we look at analogous energy infrastructure, such as LNG, you had offtakers who had high creditworthiness and were able to put some skin in the game early on, in addition to providing a solid offtake contract, which ultimately made those projects financeable.
And so, we think the customers that we’re targeting are folks who have a higher willingness to pay. They need the power; they need it today, but they’re also capable of looking ahead into the future to say, “Hey, if we don’t start solving for the 2030s today, we’re going to continue to have this problem.”
What do the customers want? An easy button, to the extent that you can create it. Most folks buying large quantities of power just want to sign power purchase agreements and then hope their electrons come back three, five, seven years later. Obviously, sooner is better, and would like to be able to step away and be able to trust the team to manage everything that comes with a nuclear project. And so, that’s what we’re trying to build.
And in terms of regions of demand or where new nuclear generation makes sense, there are parts of the country where—Texas, for instance, doesn’t have a capacity market. It has plentiful gas, wind, and solar resources. Generally, it’s easier to build generation. So, that’s not been a core market focus for us. And I’d say west of the Mississippi, you have many of those same attributes, whereas east of the Mississippi, it can be more difficult to build solar and wind, and then certain parts of the country don’t have the pipeline capacity for natural gas in the way that you would hope if you’re going to substantially build out more natural gas generation.
So, that’s how we think about the world today. Our view is constantly evolving as we listen to customers and other stakeholders and communities, but that drove us kind of to our first project location in the Northeast and Midwest.
Shayle Kann: Yeah. And just to put a finer point on it: I mean, categorically, you’ve got utilities as customers just to buy or the grid, I guess. It could be wholesale. And that’s interesting, but in terms of the degree of need and willingness to pay, it’s hyperscalers. Or I mean, I guess it’s hyperscalers, frontier labs—it’s the AI complex, right?
David Faherty: It is. But critically, to get the project finance together, you’re going to need a creditworthy offtake for as long a duration as you possibly can. And that’s 20 to 25 years is what you’re going to need in order to get debt from EDF, or formerly the Loan Programs Office, or even hopefully private debt markets become open to these opportunities as well.
And so, you might be long electrons and think that power prices are going up and want to capture some of that value, but to get a project through to final investment decision and under construction, today you’re going to need a long-duration offtake contract with an investment-grade counterparty.
Shayle Kann: This is jumping ahead, but it’s of a kind, in my mind, of like the way that you guys have approached it, and I think a misconception a lot of people have, which is, you know, you think of this like small upstart developer, as you are, trying to build this big infrastructure project. I think what you’re doing is assembling a coalition of large, creditworthy partners and experienced partners for various components of it.
So, offtake is one of them—creditworthy offtake. Jumping ahead beyond where we’re going to come back to how you construct the project and all so on, but I mean, the other part of that that I think people often don’t appreciate is the operator. Like, at the end of the day, operating a nuclear project is its own skillset, and I think I’ve appreciated that you guys haven’t claimed to be able to build that muscle on the first project, necessarily.
David Faherty: We’re blessed in this country with many great operators. It’s something the nuclear utilities do very well, including investors in Energy Impact Partners, right? Great operators of plants.
There is a decision that we make as a developer whether we want to take this business model to be an independent power producer. That’s not where we sit today. We’d rather partner with utilities who have that muscle, that experience, have training programs set up, and have the reputation with the regulator as well to help us stand up those programs.
And there are a couple of different things in operation there worth noting: one, when it comes to financing the project, to get that financing, you’re going to have to be able to credibly claim a capacity factor above a certain mark because that defines your stream of cash flows. And so, there are two components to that: one is definitely the operator, and certain operators have a higher capacity factor in their fleets than others; and then the other piece is the technology as well. And, not to jump ahead here, but…
Shayle Kann: Yeah, good segue. That’s the next thing to talk about. Well, let me ask you about it, actually. I mean, I think we’re going to get to the same place anyway, but okay, so on the technology, right? So, this is where I live in VC world, as you know, and this is where the vast majority of the eyeballs have been in VC world, is like what reactor vendor and what reactor technology is going to win. And there’s this whole landscape: there are incumbents, they’re the Westinghouses of the world with the AP1000 and so on, and then on the other end of the spectrum, there’s a Series A startup building a new SMR or microreactor or whatever. Your job is not to develop that technology; your job is to pick who you’re buying from.
David Faherty: That’s right. The founders, all of us, operated light-water reactors. It’s my submarine up there, USS Memphis, pressurized water reactor, hummed like a top.
Our view is that nuclear doesn’t have a technology problem as much as it has a business model, capital formation, and risk allocation problem. That being said, there’s a lot of really exciting stuff happening with the Gen IV technologies, and we remain very open to developments there. But we don’t view our role is not to de-risk the technology. That’s kind of outside what our investors expect from us and where our capability is set.
So, we have a screening criteria that we use to assess design maturity and then technical risks associated with reactor vendors at different stages. Site selection also drives technology selection as well. There are advantages and disadvantages to the large reactors: you’re probably going to get to an overall lower LCOE with the AP1000s than the SMRs, but there aren’t as many places where you can put the large reactors and still meet the technical criteria and screen, and most of those sites are going to be at existing new nuclear locations.
With our selection of BWRX-300, it’s a 10th generation of a technology that works extremely well. A boiling water reactor versus a pressurized water reactor has fewer components. The X stands for 10th generation. It’s passively safe, and GE Vernova Hitachi has removed a lot of incremental systems in previous iterations of this technology.
And it’s under construction right now up in Darlington with OPG, and the team with Aecon and Kiewit is doing a great job with a first-of-a-kind project there. So, that makes it much easier for us to step in and select that technology.
You also have to look at the supply chain behind the OEM as well, and where’s the fuel going to come from? And today, Shayle, we could go down to Wilmington and touch the fuel rods that are being fabricated—well, I don’t know if we could touch them, but we could see them.
Shayle Kann: Probably not the best idea.
David Faherty: Well, if we got certified, we could touch it. And so, you know where the fuel’s coming from. You know what the enrichment requirement is, and that part of the supply chain is there. There still needs to be additional investment for new builds. Same thing with AP1000: you go down to Columbia and touch the fuel fabrication facilities there.
So, for the other advanced reactor vendors, in addition to designing and licensing a reactor, which costs about a billion dollars, you have to potentially stand up significant portions of the supply chain in order to meet demand. And that’s just incremental risk to a project that, again, we don’t view it as our job to sort of retire that right now.
Shayle Kann: Yeah. It’s a good segue to the next topic, actually, which is: but the way that I understand you guys to be thinking about it is many of the decisions that you are making are framed around, how do we make this an actually financeable project? How can we raise private institutional capital for this project, and what are the decisions we need to make that will make that true? And reactor vendor selection, for all the reasons you’ve just described, is like a core component of that. It’s not the entirety of it, but it’s a big part of it.
David Faherty: Yeah. It absolutely is. And financeable to institutional capital, but then also there’re the insurers that have to come in as well. And for some of the Gen IV folks, there’s work that needs to be done to educate the insurance community on what sort of products and what sort of pricing is necessary. You’ve got to get the insurance to get the debt, and in order to get the equity, you need to have the debt piece as well. And so, there’s a lot of interplay between this and a lot of education that has to take place, whereas, again, a pressurized water reactor, a boiling water reactor, these are known quantities in the insurance markets, and the vendors are well known as well.
Shayle Kann: Okay. So, let’s talk about capital formation, then. This is, you know, if you’re asking somebody on the street—or maybe not quite somebody on the street, but somebody off the street who knows a little bit about the sector—about like what are the reasons it’s hard to build new nuclear, I think community acceptance would have been one, permitting would have been another, which I think that one looks better than it has in a long time. The third is going to be capital formation and figuring out risk allocation and capital formation. So, walk me through your thinking there.
David Faherty: There has been a ton of money that’s come from the venture community to fund new reactor technologies. And I think across the board in any in climate tech, there tends to be lots of funding available for sort of the widget, whether it’s in hydrogen or batteries. But at the project level, you’re dealing with a situation where the investor at the project doesn’t have the opportunity for a 100x payout like venture investors do. And so, that means there’s a much more conservative approach to capital allocation, particularly early on in a project when the risk is the greatest.
And so, we think about capital allocation as tying it to milestones that retire risk at the project and are bringing in capital that’s comfortable with the risk profile at these early stages, and then trying to prepare the project for the next tranche of capital that’ll be cheaper to retire bigger milestones as we move forward.
And what the investment community wants to see is alignment: alignment with the offtaker, alignment at this stage with the other key stakeholders in the supply chain—the OEMs and the EPCs, the developer, and potentially utilities as well.
The cost of capital for development is something akin to venture: 20, 30% IRR returns, 3 to 5x MOICs, to bring a project from inception to final investment decision. And then you experience a step-up in the value of the asset. If you’re able to reach final investment decision, get the project debt, the project equity, the tax equity lined up, then rather than this high 25-plus percent IRR, you’re looking at unlevered returns for the equity around 11%, maybe 20% levered returns, to fund the construction equity.
And then once you get to commercial operation, you have, for again light-water reactor technology, you’re looking at a cost of capital of around 10%. I mean, you could look at Constellation’s weighted average cost of capital, and they could be a natural owner for an asset along with a bunch of other utilities.
And so, we almost work backwards, right? It’s: what will this asset be worth once it’s operational with a 92% capacity factor? We have an idea what the overnight capital costs are going to be, and then we know what the offtake contract is going to be like. And so, we know this asset will be worth a certain amount of money, how much return is the equity sponsor for construction going to require, and then that tells you what a developer could earn on a project if they bring something to financial investment decision.
You’ve seen our recent press release with DSIP, a Korean financial institution with deep relationships with Korean strategics, along with Samsung C&T that represents key members of the nuclear supply chain. Our friends in Korea have done a great job.
Shayle Kann: Sorry, can you describe what that announcement—obviously, I know, but describe what that announcement was.
David Faherty: Yeah, absolutely. So, that’s announcing a preliminary agreement, a term sheet, for a development capital facility that’s going to fund a portfolio of projects, and it’s providing the investors preferred returns. We’re hoping to announce other participants in this facility over the next one to two quarters, and that facility will go fund the bulk of the development activities for three grid-scale projects is the goal.
Shayle Kann: So, it’s like solving for that first, as you said, there’s stage-gates, and this first one, the dev ex pre-FID, has been one of the—they’re all big challenges, but it’s been one of the biggest challenges historically. So, this is sort of a unique facility that sort of puts all the puzzle pieces together to get through that first stage-gate.
David Faherty: It’s a first-of-a-kind facility, pretty exciting to put together. And I think some of the interesting attributes and why it should appeal to investors: again, there’s going to be a series of requirements for a project to qualify for this facility, and that’s going to be the things investors want to see at financial investment decision: so the offtake piece, an operator, and then technologies that work for the investors.
Importantly here, it’ll provide portfolio-level exposure during development, so that the dollars coming in, these investors will get their dollars back based on portfolio performance. And so, if there are projects that you spend money on and then something happens where we have to hit pause or kill a project, they’ll still have an opportunity to earn a return on subsequent projects in the pipeline.
And so, sometimes to solve a big problem, you just have to make it bigger, and this is our solution to that. And that unlocks for us a couple of different levers: with customers saying, “Hey, we have a credible pipeline of projects. We have funding here for this.”
For the supply chain, importantly, it’s multiple at-bats to participate in some of the first-of-a-kind or earlier projects, and then be able to move across a portfolio. We think that’s really important.
For the operators, it’s an opportunity to operate a fleet of reactors, which is more appealing than just one-of-a-kind projects.
And then, from a financing perspective, once you get to financial investment decision, you get an opportunity to kind of standardize that process as well. And so, we’re very excited about it. Lots of excitement, inbounds on the wake of the announcement, and we’re hoping to be able to share more in the near term as we move forward.
Shayle Kann: Okay. So, let’s say you’ve secured the site, you’ve signed up the offtake, you’ve picked the reactor, you’ve picked the EPC, you’ve raised the capital, you’ve got the money. Now you got to build the thing.
What are the key lessons that we should learn about how to build new nuclear from Vogtle and from V.C. Summer and other recent examples, and also abroad as well? What are the ways to do this right, and to make sure that the cost overruns that we’ve seen on some projects historically don’t repeat?
David Faherty: Yeah. Great question, and very top of mind for us and key to the kind of business model here.
First, complete the design. I think if Vogtle taught us anything, it was don’t go out into the field and break ground and start pouring concrete until you’ve completed the design. And so, we’re here as the owner of the project to enforce that sort of discipline and rigor between the delivery team, the OEM, and the EPC.
And importantly, getting the constructor involved very early on in the project to help with constructability reviews, to think about the manning requirements, to start training the workforce so you’re ready to execute when you hit financial investment decision, but also importantly getting the licensing experts involved during the design process as well, and working with the constructor to make sure that the specifications in your license application aren’t overly prescriptive.
You had incidents with Vogtle where the rebar had a very specific spacing associated with it, which was infeasible to meet out in the field because it was hot in the day and the rebar expanded and then contracted at night. And so, things were always moving around within technically an acceptable tolerance, but not acceptable based on the license application. And there were just really unfortunate decisions that were made as a result of that lack of coordination across licensing, the constructor, and the OEM.
And so, that early engagement is key. Getting to a Class 2 cost estimate, that requires a completed design. And what that means is going out to your supply chain to get quotes for key components, quotes that you can underwrite to. And that’s really important as well. Now you’ve got to spend money on it. It’s a pretty heavy lift to get a fabricator to come back and give you a quote, and they need to be compensated for it. So, that all has to be factored into your development budget. And sometimes folks haven’t been incentivized to do that level of work before breaking ground on the project, and then you suffer the consequences.
On the operator piece, training your operators for the plant starts very early on in the project. You can’t wait till you break ground. You have to start setting up training facilities, recruiting. There’s a body throughput kind of equation in terms of how quickly you can train people to operate the plants, and you have to start early. And Barakah experienced some delays for the initial plants because they hadn’t started the training process as early enough as they needed to, and so that’s a key piece.
There’s the operators, but there’s also training the workforce. And so, key to our strategy is working with our EPC partner and the community all the way up to the state level to ensure that we’re coordinating with trade schools and colleges to help bring folks into the industry, into the project early on.
And then, longer term, ensuring that you’re pricing this all into the offtake and the financing is ensuring that you’re not just compensating technicians to show up to work on the first day, but you’re capitalized well enough to recruit, train, and retain talent throughout the duration of the project. One of the other lessons learned from Vogtle was they trained five to six technicians for every one out in the field, and they just had a real attrition problem. That caused a lot of issues, and you lose the skillset and spend more money. So, ensuring that you have your labor.
And another key component, and this is reflected in our project in Ohio, is working with the trade organizations as well, and they can be very helpful in getting the workforce stood up and prepared to go out in the field.
And again, this is to go back to the portfolio and making the problem bigger, this becomes more attractive to partners when you can point to a pipeline of projects and the opportunity to really make a career out of this participating in what’s coming in new nuclear.
Shayle Kann: Okay, good segue to the last question, which is basically, okay, you do all that, you build the thing, it works. The dream here for everybody in this industry is not to build one of them. That was what we did with Vogtle. The dream here is to build a whole bunch of them, not just because we need more power, but because we all agree that the way to drive down costs in the long term is going to be repeating.
I think people don’t really think through the next level of detail on that, though. What does it mean to do it over and over again? Is it just the same reactor over and over again, and who captures those learnings if it is? Is there something else that needs to be standardized across the project? Should it just be one megaproject? Like, how do you think about this learning curve?
David Faherty: Yeah, lots of different directions here, but when we think about the fleet orders, standardization is key. And again, we think that it’s important to bring the constructor to the table early to think about not just standardization of the nuclear island, which is approximately one third of most projects, but also the balance of plant and, further, the balance of site. And the extent to which we can make every project location similar, we’ll be able to reap those benefits from a fleet order.
That can be a difficult thing to do if you’re selling projects to individual utilities where the chief nuclear officer of one utility might have a very different view on certain valve types that he’s had problems with before versus another. And so, this is where we’re uniquely positioned as an integrator across multiple projects to enforce that standardization, again, not just in the nuclear island, but across the balance of plant and the balance of site.
When we think about lessons learned, there’s lessons learned across the fleet, but the most benefit’s going to occur at the project location if you’re able to go from one to two to five, as we intend to do in Ohio. We have very reasonable expectations of pretty demonstrable kind of steps down the cost curve there as the local workforce and the local supply chain get familiar with the technology.
We also think it’s key to embed folks early in projects who might transfer those skills to the next project, so having folks who are willing to transfer from one job site to the other, so sort of a long-term manning program as well.
The standardization for long-lead material procurement is also something that’s very important, and you’ve seen the great work that the Department of Energy and EDF, Jigar Shah, and the advanced nuclear supply chain loans, and that represents a model that we think is replicable once other technologies have a sufficiently large order of credible projects.
Shayle Kann: That one’s just for the AP1000, just to be clear.
David Faherty: That’s for the AP1000, yeah. And it’s a great model. And what that does is reduce the equity required during the development phase of a project quite substantially, and makes everything easier to finance. So, I think a lot of kudos to the team and the thought that’s gone into that.
But again, you need a standardized technology, and you need to retire, I think, the technology risk as well in order to make that financeable. So, lenders will look at those assets as something that’s fungible across projects. And so, if there’s, again, a credible pipeline of projects, then you’re unlocking another tranche of less expensive capital, and that’s just really important to be successful here.
Shayle Kann: All right, I think we’ve done it. I think we’ve gone soup to nuts on new nuclear in the US. David, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.
David Faherty: All right. Thanks, Shayle. Really appreciate the time.
Shayle Kann: David Faherty is the co-founder of Elemental Power.
This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today’s topics.
This episode was produced by Max Savage Levenson. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Anne Bailey edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. All of our episodes are on YouTube. Subscribe to Latitude Media for episodes of this show and Open Circuit. You can find the audio version of the show anywhere you get your podcasts.
I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
