The nuclear renaissance of the 2000s turned out to be something of a mirage. Buoyed by rising fossil gas prices, growing climate awareness, and steady load growth, nuclear seemed poised for a breakout moment. But that momentum stalled. Electricity demand flatlined. The fracking boom sent gas prices plummeting. And Fukushima rattled public confidence in nuclear power. Ultimately, only two new reactors, Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Georgia, reached completion over a decade later.
So is this latest wave of nuclear hype any different?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Chris Colbert, CEO of Elementl Power, which on Wednesday announced a deal with Google to develop three nuclear projects of at least 600-megawatts each. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, is an investor in Elementl.)
Chris, a former executive at NuScale Power, thinks last year may have marked the start of a nuclear revival: the recommissioning of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island and Michigan’s Holtec Palisades; Big Tech deals to support small modular reactor development; and the start of construction on TerraPower’s Wyoming reactor, the Western Hemisphere’s first advanced nuclear facility.
But until new reactors move beyond one-off projects to serial deployment, nuclear won’t achieve the cost reductions needed for widespread adoption. Chris and Shayle discuss what it will take to turn this groundswell of activity into widespread deployment, covering topics like:
- Current tailwinds, like load growth and interest from corporate buyers
- Why corporate buyers may be better positioned than utilities to take on development risks
- Elementl’s technology-agnostic approach
- Different nuclear technologies — light water, non-light water, and advanced designs — and Chris’s predictions for when they’ll reach commercialization
- Why iteration is essential to driving down costs (and why the Google deal involves three separate projects)
- How regulatory timelines are speeding up
- The steps of project development with a corporate buyer
- Chris’s criteria for site selection — and why attracting skilled labor ranks surprisingly high
Resources
- Latitude Media: Was 2024 really the year of nuclear resurgence?
- Latitude Media: Is large-scale nuclear poised for a comeback?
- Catalyst: The cost of nuclear
- Latitude Media: Trump’s DOE is reupping Biden-era funding for small modular nuclear reactors
- Latitude Media: Utah bets on a new developer to revive its small modular reactor ambitions
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a platform enabling solar and storage developers and buyers to save time, reduce risk, and increase profits in their equipment selection process. Anza gives clients access to pricing, technical, and risk data plus tools that they’ve never had access to before. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude.
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.
Transcript
Stephen Lacey: Mark your calendar for June 12th, 2025. Latitude Media is holding its fourth transition AI conference in Boston. This year’s theme energy infrastructure in the era of AI driven load growth. We’re going to bring together investors, developers, researchers, and tech companies to talk about the creative ways to meet data center demand and companies include Fervo Energy, Form Energy, Scale Microgrids, Spark Fund, KKR, Generate Capital, Orennia, Flex Gen, National Grid Partners, and more. Plus, we’re going to have a live open circuit episode featuring Caroline Golan from Google and a Live Green Blueprint episode featuring Rick Needham from Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Get your ticket@latitudemedia.com slash events podcast Listeners get 10% off their ticket. Use the code latitude pods ten@checkoutlatitudemedia.com slash events. We will see you at transition AI.
Shayle Kann: Latitude Media podcast at the Frontier of Climate Technology. I’m Shayle Kann and this is Catalyst.
Chris Colbert: Have you ever went to IKEA and bought like four pieces of furniture the same type and constructed them yourself? The first one, you probably break it and have to go back and find a few things that you’re missing. The second, third and fourth ones, you’re just knocking ’em out of the park in terms of how long it takes you to do it. And the same is true for nuclear and that’s just been proven over and over and over again.
Shayle Kann: Coming up: New nuclear is coming to the U.S., right?
I am Shayle Kann. I lead the frontier strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. Alright, so I’ve been thinking about this and here’s the word that I would use to encapsulate what’s happening in the US nuclear power market. It’s a groundswell. I don’t think anyone would deny that there’s something happening here driven by a combination of political support and load growth, offtaker interest, capital formation, possible regulatory reform. But let’s be clear, it is still true that the US has built one count, one new nuclear project in the past X number of decades. And that’s why a groundswell feels like the right word to me because sometimes a groundswell leads to a massive wave, but sometimes it doesn’t. So in my mind, the operative question is in which direction we are headed here. We at EIP for disclosure do believe that there’s a wave coming as evidenced by the fact that we helped to stand up and invested in Elementl power.
The pure play nuclear developer whose CEO, Chris Colbert, you’re going to hear from in a few moments, but there is still a lot of work to do to translate all this momentum and excitement into actual capacity on the grid. Anyway, Elementl came out of stealth this week and announced a big partnership with Google to develop a three site portfolio of at least 1.8 gigawatts of new nuclear in the us. See groundswell. Anyway, there’s a lot to talk about though in translating that to real action. And so we brought on Chris, who is the co-founder and CEO of Elementl. Prior to that he was the CFO at NuScale, which many of you will know as the first SMR company to actually achieve design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And again, for disclosure, as I mentioned, we at EAP are investors in Elementl and I’m on the board anyway, here’s Chris. Chris, welcome. Thanks for having me. Let’s start by I guess getting your overall take on the state of the markets such as it is for new nuclear in the U.S.. You’ve been in it for a while. What does it feel like? Where are we today?
Chris Colbert: I have been in it a while. I first was recruited over the nuclear in 2007 at the first nuclear renaissance, but it’s been through its ups and downs since that time. But now I think that there’s the right confluence of both market demand, investor sentiment and regulatory and government policy to really make it happen this time. And we feel pretty well situated to make that happen in this marketplace. So I’m pretty comfortable with where it is and really excited about where we are given the journey I’ve been through with nuclear.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, you said the first nuclear renaissance in 2007 or so. That one was a mirage, right? So the question is, is this one going to be different?
Chris Colbert: Yeah, so there’s a couple of reasons why I think it’s different this time around is that all the things that we learned from that first renaissance. And keep in mind the Vogtle 3 and 4 project came out of that first renaissance-
Shayle Kann: That’s true, not a total mirage, just a project, just a project.
Chris Colbert: Not a total mirage, just the project and it had issues. But all the things that we learned from that first time around in terms of the policy, the offtake, the execution stuff I think is now all available to us with people who are involved in that to make this next round be successful. But really the advent of the demand side where back in the two thousands there was not really a demand growth. Now we’re seeing phenomenal demand growth, which was strong to begin with, but just I mean really taken off with artificial intelligence driving it and those trillion dollar balance sheet from those hyperscaler companies that can really allow nuclear to flourish and happen this time around that wasn’t prevalent last time.
Shayle Kann: So I wanted to talk through the sort of where we are now through four lenses, which I think are the key lenses and you’ve already alluded to a couple of them, but so one is off take and customers. Second is suppliers, OEMs, like who’s actually making reactors and of what kind and so on. Third is the role of the utilities who obviously have a big role to play here. And then the fourth, maybe the big one at the end is the regulatory state of regulatory environment for nuclear projects and nuclear reactors. So the one you talked about the most already we can just go through relatively quickly is the offtake side. What difference does it make? I mean, I think historically, correct me if I’m wrong, anybody who was considering new nuclear in the United States wasn’t really doing a corporate PPA type offtake prior to this new wave right now where obviously you guys just announced this big deal with Google, all the hyperscalers have made some kind of announcement or another on nuclear. So it feels like one big change there is of course there’s load growth in general, but also you’ve got this class of corporate buyers that are generally universally leaning into nuclear and interested in doing something creative with their balance sheets, right? Going above and beyond just saying, okay, I’ll sign a PPA when you get the price down efficiently.
Chris Colbert:
Yeah, absolutely. The first time around it was all based upon regulated utilities getting the repairs to underwrite it. And at the time they were trying to underwrite, underwrite 17 billion, 20 billion projects and their balance sheet or their market capitalization may be 20 to $30 billion and the growth didn’t show up and their expectation for high gas prices at the time didn’t come to fruition. We had cheap gas. And so those two things really conspired against the demand side of it where we have kind of the opposite where we have pretty much all time low gas prices, but still a huge demand and requirement from the hyperscalers out there as corporate buyers that want reliable base load power and increasingly want to see it be clean and build for long duration so that they’re going to have it available to ’em for a long period of time. So that has really changed from the first time around both in terms of what’s driving the demand and the rest of the environment around it. From a market perspective, really much better for nuclear this time than the first time.
Shayle Kann: Can you talk a little bit more about what is the market or what should the market be asking of those hyperscalers of the buyers? Again, above and beyond, yes, we will sign a PPA if you get the price down low enough because there’s a lot of risks to retire along the way in project development. And then there’s also this question of how do we get the cost down in nuclear, which is at least in part a function of building multiple projects, not a single project and then driving down a cost curve. So I know the hyperscalers have been thinking about, okay, what can we do beyond the obvious PPA? How do you think about that suite of possibilities?
Chris Colbert: That’s been the biggest change from the hyperscalers probably in the last two or three years, Shayle, is that when I was, before I came to Elementl, I was at NuScale and we talked a lot to the hyperscalers and really said in order for projects to go on, they needed to have some skin in the game or some exposure to the development costs because unlike renewables where the development costs might be in the tens of millions of dollars, at most it’s hundreds of millions of dollars for nuclear and you can’t just have a power purchase agreement to make that kind of investment as a developer. And it took a while for people to realize that that was what needed to happen. And necessity is the mother invention is that once people realize that I need clean and large amounts of base load megawatts, nuclear needs to be part of that how I was doing before isn’t going to work. That kind of moment really solidified over the last year and a half with the hyperscalers of saying, okay, I need to do more than just say, I’ll write you a power purchase agreement. We’re going to make some investment. They’ve made an investment mostly in the technology, but increasingly as this deal we’re doing now with Google is in the upfront development, which is really the key part that needs to be grest.
Shayle Kann: Okay, so that’s the customer slash offtake side. Let’s talk about the supplier universe. Obviously it used to be at new scale, which is one of the suppliers OEMs in the space, but it’s an interesting landscape there of lots of activity but also very few proven and or approved from a regulatory perspective. Products I suppose that you can buy as a developer. So how do you think about that landscape?
Chris Colbert: So we approached it in that there’s been billions of dollars invested by these technology developers and either traditional lightwater reactors, which we call gen three or Gen four reactors, which might be high temperature gas or sodium cooled. And they’re all kind of nearing the end of their development process where they’re not quite ready yet. They’re all kind of trying to solve for something, whether it’s in supply chain or licensing or whatnot. So we’re technology agnostic and the belief that, or the knowledge that we can go out and find sites that are amenable to the hyperscale is what they need for offtake and location that we can develop in a way that in a year from now or a year and a half from now, we can pick the technologies that have made it through their sort of crucible of licensing and development and cost estimation that we can pick with confidence that we know what we’re going to get, when we’re going to get it and what it’s going to cost.
They’re almost there and I can’t tell you which one of them is going to be successful, but there’s so many of ’em out there that have invested so much. I’m very comfortable that there’s going to be probably three or four at least that are going to make it through that part of it that will be successful in the long term. Just hard to pick now, but that’s how we really see it. And if you look at the two different kinds of broad types of the fission reactors between lightwater and non lightwater, the lightwater is 50 to 60-year-old technology. They’re just doing it with better designs that are safer and simpler and bringing the cost down sometimes smaller so they do more work in a factory versus doing it in the field. And then you have the non-law light water types which have better safety characters and whatnot, but may not be really quite ready from a supply chain or the fuel supply or some aspect of it, which probably will take a little bit longer to get confidence around that part of the OEMs equation. But certainly what we’re looking for in the early thirties and the late thirties, we think that that’s the early thirties is the light-water reactors In the late thirties is when we’ll see commercially more of the non light-water reactors coming to fore.
Shayle Kann: You mentioned briefly the question of scale. This has obviously been another hotly debated topic in nuclear world, which is historically we’ve built large mega projects pretty much exclusively. There are technology companies who are developing everything from micro reacts that are a megawatt or five megawatts or something like that up to gigawatts scale type reactors. The deal that you just announced with Google is for three projects of 1.8 plus gigawatts total, so 600 megawatts plus per project. Is that scale born out of what you view as the sweet spot given the technology landscape? Or is that more a function of, well, this is the scale that a hyperscaler needs to fulfill the capacity of a data center or both?
Chris Colbert: It’s really both because we’re solving for two things, right? One is they have huge needs, but they want to see us get down the cost curve, which means you need to have multiples. And we look at the sort of intersection of doing multiples, the size of the need they have, the capital they can deploy and what it costs for various, whether it’s micro, small or large reactors. The small lightwater reactors fit more generally into that category as well as some of the smaller gen four reactors as well. So this is kind of anything from 75 megawatts to 300 megawatts electric that fits pretty well because again, you get more swings at bat. So if you have one not work out, the other two will carry you through, which is how you want to see a portfolio work. And when you have multiples at a site and multiples in a deployment, you can get down those cost curves both in the factory and in the field more readily than you could with a large reactor. So that’s really how we saw it playing out in real time. And the hyperscalers looked at all of them and it was our goal as Elementl was to find the right solution that kind of threads in the needle between the OEMs, the utilities, and the customers in terms of what makes the most sense. And that’s where we landed up in our conversations with Google.
Shayle Kann: So to sort of encapsulate what you’re saying overall on the supplier side, your bet is that currently nobody’s quite crested over the commercial readiness hump yet, but you think there’ll be multiple vendors, OEMs who will get there over the next year or two. And so you’re basically positioning yourself to wait and see who gets through the crucible, over the crucible around the crucible, whatever the metaphor is meant to be, and then pick the winners there. But that’s obviously contingent on anybody sort of getting through and getting commercially ready. Which maybe is a good segue to the next category here, which is the regulatory, the state of regulatory and permitting. Talk to me about where you see that.
Chris Colbert: Yeah, I mean number of designs have gone through a design certification process, which gets you a license for your technology. Think about like Boeing gets their 7 87 jet liner approved, some folks have gone out and gotten construction permits or they’re applying form, so that’s getting the permission to start constructing it. Nobody’s gotten yet to the point of an operating license where you get the ability to load the fuel into these new designs. So that’s kind of like the remaining one. But for the light-water reactors, this is really 50-year-old technology being run by the Navy successfully since the fifties and the commercial nuclear fleet since the fifties, it hasn’t changed dramatically in terms of the fuel type of what you do. Basically you split atoms, create heat, make steam, turn a turbine, make electricity. It’s that simple. So all these technologies are going to work and I would point out that all the technologies that have been deployed just most recently, whether it’s an EPR, an APR 1400, or an AP1000, they may have had challenges getting to the finish line, but once they got to the finish line, they’re all working. And an AP 1000 is working very well. So for lightwater reactor technology, there really isn’t a technology risk. It’s just pulling together the right pieces to de-risk it in the front end to get to a final investment decision and then start construction and have a solid plan to be successful when you get into the field. That’s where the challenges have been traditionally.
Shayle Kann: Do you see any evidence, there’s obviously been a lot of talk about having the NRC reformed in some fashion or another to speed up permitting. Do you see any momentum there from the NRC? Has anything changed? Do you need anything to change there?
Chris Colbert: So there’s been a lot of legislation over the last several years really driving the NRC to revise its policies, become more balanced in its approach for making sure to maintain the safety to the public and the environment, but recognizing that there’s a public benefit for nuclear power, given its clean base load attributes that has been demonstrated by reduced timelines for them to review various applications that I’ve observed just in the 15 years I’ve been in the nuclear space where what once took four years is now being done in two years. The hope is that we’ll get down to maybe a year, year and a half, but what you’d like to see is that for this base load technology, which is what it is to be sort of in the same timeframe of development of a traditional combined cycle gas plant, which might be two years of development and licensing and then two years construction and then four years or five years year operational, we’re not there yet. But I do see a path by which you get down to from the seven to eight years, we’re looking at the first ones to getting down to five or six years, which to me really makes a game changer when have their planning horizons. That brings it all forward to be a real equal discussion. And I think we’re going to get there and we have been getting there clearly.
Shayle Kann: Alright, so then the final lens through which to look at the current state of affairs I think is utilities operate basically all of the existing nuclear in the United States. Georgia Power is the one company that has actually built a new nuclear generating facility in the past, I dunno, three decades, four decades, whatever it’s been. And now many of them are also exploring new nuclear. But I think coming into it maybe with a little bit more caution at least than the hyperscalers seem to be, what’s your perspective on what you’re hearing from utilities?
Chris Colbert: Yeah, what I hear from utilities now is what I heard from utilities back in the past is that they fundamentally can’t take development risk. And having done fossil plant development, I did that for 15 years of coal gas plants. That’s a business where you expect to make two or three times return on your investment on the development of that FID. And that doesn’t happen for utilities. They’re stuck at 10%, right? So they’re taking three x risk for a 10% return. It just doesn’t work out for ’em. And we’re seeing with many of them, not all of them, but many of them is a desire to have a developer like Elementl come in, align with the hyperscaler, take care of the commercial risk, take care of the development and the construction risk, and then transfer the asset at commercial operation when you can just look at what Constellation trades at in terms of what their cost of capital is.
Pretty easy for ’em to do that very huge markups and value to them to do so. Or they can operate the plant as you operate for in their territory. And we’re looking at all those models with them, but what we really see is that the recognition that somebody needs to come in to take that development and construction risk, the government’s taking a piece of it, but there’s going to be a slice left over for the private sector and utilities just aren’t the right investor for that because they’re just a fundamentally different risk profile from what a developer does. Traditionally.
Shayle Kann: I think the other thing that we’re seeing from utilities is interesting is the subset of utilities that already have operating nuclear that either has retired already, I’m sorry, was operating and has retired or is scheduled to retire or that they were thinking about building but then stopped building. I mean, they’re all kind of reexamining all of that and saying, oh, maybe there is a nuclear renaissance coming here. How do I take advantage of the fact that I do actually have experience in nuclear to get that capacity back online or online in the first place? And that seems kind of universal, right? I feel like every utility in their boardroom, if there’s nuclear somewhere in their fleet or there was supposed to be nuclear somewhere in their fleet, they’re taking a fresh look at it.
Chris Colbert: Yeah, I think that most of these utilities that are operating utilities of nuclear plants, if they had the opportunity to pick up an existing operating asset or one that was largely complete and de-risked, they’d be very inclined to do it because you just look at what Constellation stock prices has done. I mean, that’s the example I look at since it floated. It has just been phenomenal returns because of the preponderance of nuclear in its base. And that’s a purely merchant generator. It’s not even a regulated utility constellation. It’s phenomenal in terms of what it’s done, but that just proves the value of nuclear to all these folks. It’s how do you get the assets on there? And interestingly, through the investment that EIP made in Elementl, we’re exposed to a large number of those operating nuclear utilities. So we have that capability of working with them and they’re familiar with what we’re doing and in part validated what we are claiming to do, which is to really span the void between the billions of dollars that have been invested by OEMs doing new designs and the gigawatts of demand required by hyperscalers. How do you meet those two things? And us coming in the middle and making that happen is really what Elementl is about.
Shayle Kann: All right. So I want to talk about project development for nuclear. I think it’s actually something that people certainly we hadn’t thought enough about before we started chatting with you folks and getting involved with Elementl. It’s different and distinct from project development of a wind or a solar project, for example, or a battery project or even a gas or coal project. So you just give me a quick snapshot of end to end. What does project development look like for new nuclear?
Chris Colbert: Yeah, so we start off with, and this is the first thing we did was we went out find a customer, somebody who’s willing to say, I want 20 to 30 years of power at this price range and willing to put in a portion of the development capital. That was probably the first 12 months of our existence was doing that with all the hyperscalers, just Google happens to be the first one across the line on it. And then working with them saying, where do you need these assets? And working cooperatively with them and their host utility, because many times they’re building data centers where they have existing data centers and they know the existing utilities. We we’re coming in saying, we don’t want to get between you and your customer, we just want to give you what your customer wants in a way that works for you as a utility.
That’s a very different model from what you saw in the late stages of Fossil, which I participated in, which was basically if you build it, they will come also with renewables. We go out and get a plot of land, connect it, and then go hunt for a PPA from somebody. We’ve reversed that process by putting the customer and the demand first, then finding a site, working with utility, go through the red-flags analysis of it, do it in a technology agnostic manner, which you can do in the NRC process under an early site pyramid application. And then once that’s in and you’ve gotten the site proven up from that perspective, and that’s really the environmental characteristics of it, you then select the technology and do a construction permit that’s particular to that technology. And that kind of brings us to say 25, 26, we’re doing that first part, 26 to 28, we’re doing a construction permit, 29 we start construction and by 32, 33 we’re operating the plant.
There’s a lot more in there than what I just said obviously, but there’s a lot of pieces to it. It’s more akin to a fossil plant development, but just much more expensive because the amount of work you have to do with the regulator and the amount of design you have to have done and the fact that unlike a two-on-one CCGT, which you can go out and talk to Siemens or GE or Austin or whoever’s out there doing those now they have proven designs. We’re still getting through that end of the development cycle for the new technologies and nuclear.
Shayle Kann: You talk a little bit more about the site selection bit just at the high level, what are the characteristics? What are the check boxes you have to check for a site to be suitable for new nuclear?
Chris Colbert: It comes down to which of the technologies by size you’re looking at, because generally size dictates how much fuel you have on the plant and the amount of fuel it tells you how much danger or risk you have. So the smaller plant sizes, the small mod reactors looking at for Google could probably fit about a hundred acres or so or less. And you have no other consequences beyond that. But the sites have to be seismically qualified for the design you’re building, and some designs are more seismically robust than others. So you kind of have to envelope that part of it. You want to be sure you have access to transmission because I’ll tell you that it’s going to be easier to permit and get a nuclear plant built than it is to get new transmission lines. And that’s just historically how it’s been everywhere I’ve been, whether it’s in the us, the uk, Australia, over in Taiwan, the Philippines, people think that somehow transmission is a uniquely American problem.
It’s not. It’s a challenge wherever you go because transmission lines are infrastructure that don’t provide a lot of spinoff economic development to the people whose property crosses. That’s just the fact of life. So you want to be close to that. But fortunately in the US we have a pretty robust system where any former coal plant or any former or large industrial site will typically have the transmission infrastructure necessary for it. So that’s the key piece of it. And then beyond that, it’s pretty much you can be in a lot of places and we have a proprietary system that we’ve developed through a number of different databases and vendors that rapidly just select down those sites that meet those criteria and then layering over it where is it that our customer wants to be and the utility they want to work with. And that’s probably the interesting thing because people started off l investors asking, well, what’s the right place to be?
And the answer is the right place to be is where our customer wants to be. Well, where do they want to be? And what we found is that there is some geography to it, but they are more focused on who the utilities they’re working with because they feel they have a better relationship with some utilities than others. And given that they’re going to be making these investments for assets that will provide benefit not only to the hyperscaler, but also to the rest of the grid. Because frankly, once you add a very robust nuclear plant to the system, it benefits everybody that’s connected to it because of the reliability and the stability it brings to the grid. They want to make sure that they’re getting proper benefit for that recognized in what they’re doing. And some utilities are more evolved than others in doing that, or the discussions between the hyperscaler and utility are more evolved in that regard. So that’s kind of the process that we’ve been going through in the site selection. And I would say that finding sites hasn’t been the challenge quite honestly. It’s making sure we know where the people want ’em. Once they tell us where they need to be, we can find sites.
Shayle Kann: Alright. I want to get to I guess the last key questions about nuclear in the us, which are how much, when and at what cost. Maybe we’ll start with at what cost. The knock on nuclear in the US has been to the extent that we’ve done any of it, it’s ended up being very expensive, cost overruns, et cetera, et cetera. And there’s lots of different theories on how you drive down costs and lots of different examples from other countries, whether it’s Korea or China or whatever it might be. Given your strategy, what is your thesis on how we get nuclear in the United States to be cheap enough to be economic for whoever the customer is? Obviously it’s a different answer if you’re Google or Meta or whatever versus somebody else, but clearly we need to drive costs down. It’s not entirely clear. The first project anybody builds is going to be the cheapest. So what does it take? Is it just repeatability? Do the same reactor over and over again? Is it at a site level? What’s your thesis on cost?
Chris Colbert: Yeah, there’s probably two levels to it. One is repeatability, right? So just doing a one-off design isn’t going to work. And so that’s why it led us to the three projects with Google. Is three a good number? Yes. Would five be better? Absolutely. Does it need to be five? It would be a bigger check for people to write to do that. So you kind of have to be constrained by what that part is. And to put it mildly, you can’t do enough large reactors in order and raise the to do it. It’s just too much of a check to write to make it happen. So you need that repeatability because Google and everybody we’ve talked to recognizes that, okay, the first one is going to be more expensive than the second one, than the third one. And if I have a project that has two units on the site, the first unit, that site’s going to be more expensive than the second unit of the site.
That was true for Vogel, that was true for Baraka, that’s true for any single, anytime you’ve looked at a construction that had multiple of the same units in the same site, units two, three, and four, you’re amazed at how much less they are. But it shouldn’t be surprising. If you ever went to IKEA and bought four pieces of furniture the same type and constructed them yourself, the first one, you probably break it and have to go back and find a few things that you’re missing. The second, third, and fourth ones, you’re just knocking ’em out of the park in terms of how long it takes you to do it. And the same is true for nuclear, and that’s just been proven over and over and over again. So I think the key thing is that the repeatability and going in there with the mindset of you’re doing multiples on a site and multiple sites really allows you to have the confidence because it’s been demonstrated even at Vogel. Unit four I think was 40% less than unit three. I mean, just think about that part of it. So if you started off at unit four instead of unit three years example, you probably would’ve been okay, but that’s not the way it played out.
And then there’s the site specific stuff, which again, lessons learned is just make sure you have a good plan going in and we all know what a good project looks like. You have to go through and have the design complete, have the supply chain lined up, and most importantly, have a plan for attracting the labor you need when you start and keeping the labor there for the three years you need it. And that’s not that hard. You just got to be able to, as an owner admit that if I have to pay a person $5 extra an hour to keep working on my project as opposed to going down to the data center project down the road, then you pay that. Because if you don’t, the cost for delay is not $5 an hour. It ends up being five times that. So it’s really kind of having a plan and sticking to it and working with labor because that’s the most uncontrollable aspect of this because we’re a free country and labor can go where it chooses to go. You’re not going to prevent that. So your best goal is to make sure you incentivize them properly and treat them well, and you should have a successful project.
Shayle Kann: All right. So that gets to our final question, which is how much and when, not specific to Elementl, but what’s your view? I mean, you did mention some timelines for projects you guys are working on where you expect commercial operation in the early 2030s. Realistically, given what you see out in the landscape in general, how soon do you think we could or will have new nuclear operating in the United States, and how much can we get in the timeframe that matters to today’s customers?
Chris Colbert: Yeah, so our goal was to have a under construction by 20 30, 10 by 35 and a hundred gigawatts by 2040. We’re now looking at 4.2 gigawatts by 2030, so we’ve already quadrupled that or halfway there to our 2035 goal. I think realistically for commercial deployment, it’s going to be the early thirties, OPG just in Canada. So it’s not part of the United States yet.
Shayle Kann: It’s Ontario power generation.
Chris Colbert: That Ontario power generation up in Canada. They’re talking about their first plant being GE-H BWRX-300, starting construction, nuclear safety related construction this month or next is what they had announced. They haven’t announced it yet. And then being operational by 20 29, 20 30. So North America, that’s the timeframe. You have others like Dominion, Duke, TVA, AEP, Holtec with their plant out of Palisades, all talking about lightwater reactors, small ones in the early 2030s timeframe. So I think that’s still a pretty good prognostication on it in terms of when we’d expect to see it. Arguably, some are further ahead than others, but again, whoever starts first doesn’t mean they always finish first, but I think for a number of reasons, we can see these folks being available and working those projects in the early thirties. And in terms of the cost, the first ones are going to be expensive, but overall we’re looking at once you get down the curve of probably $10,000 a kilowatt, so if you have a 600 megawatt plant, that’d be about 6 billion.
The first one might be 15, 20% more than that, the follow on, it’s going to be less and less and less. So we expect these to come down dramatically over time as we get through it. But getting through the first one is key and we have a plan for doing that to be successful. And we have great support from folks like Google who recognize that, okay, I’m willing to accept the first one’s going to be more expensive, but I’m sure as heck not going to accept it. The second and the third one cost the same, and they won’t. We’re comfortable with that.
Shayle Kann: Alright, Chris, great to finally be able to talk about this publicly excited to go on this new nuclear journey with you for the next hopefully decade and not decades.
Chris Colbert: Well, I’ve already been at it for 15, so it’s another 20 or so, right?
Shayle Kann: That’s right.
Chris Colbert: But yeah, I’m with you. I expect to have 10 gigawatts by 2035 and you can hold me to it.
Shayle Kann: I plan to. Alright, thanks Chris. This is great.
Chris Colbert is the CEO of Elementl Power. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over latitude media.com for links to today’s topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures, prelude backs, visionaries, accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more@preludeventures.com. This episode is produced by Daniel Woldorf, mixing a theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
