Behind caution tape, a radiation protection technician holds a clicking instrument.
Workers at the Callaway Nuclear Plant in Steedman, Mo., are doing something that only happens every few years — they’re moving spent uranium fuel.
It’s a slow process. After cooling off for years in a deep pool of water, the fuel is now in big concrete and steel containers, “like a can in a koozie,” said Shannon Gaydos, manager of outages and project manager for dry field storage at Callaway.
Workers use a crane to lower the canister into a hole in the ground, next to rows of identical spent fuel casks.
This process is key to one of the biggest unanswered questions for nuclear energy’s future — what to do with the used-up fuel?
There’s a growing push to expand nuclear energy at the federal and international level, but as aging nuclear plants around the country look toward the future, spent fuel is just one of the potential roadblocks.
Carbon-free reliability
The Callaway Nuclear Plant’s cooling tower rises above the mid-Missouri horizon, releasing a cloud of water vapor into the sky.
This is Missouri’s only electricity-generating nuclear reactor, and it’s celebrating its 40th birthday this year. The fuel differs, but most power plants work the same basic way, said Warren Witt, Callaway’s plant manager.
“Bottom line is you get something to spin and you connect a generator on to the end of it, you can generate electricity,” Witt said.
Inside one of the large buildings at the plant, Witt steps off an elevator into a giant room with huge machines, rumbling with the sound of spinning turbines and scaldingly hot steam flowing through pipes.
A fossil fuel plant burns coal or methane gas to create steam to rotate turbines, but here, they split uranium atoms. Last year, this plant created enough electricity to power about 800,000 homes. That’s about a quarter of Ameren’s 2023 electricity — and all of that nuclear power was carbon-free.
There’s a big push for nuclear right now, mostly because it doesn’t emit greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.
The U.S. and more than a dozen other countries recently pledged to triple this source of energy by 2050 at the global climate meeting in Dubai, COP28. There is also funding for nuclear energy programs in recent legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Nuclear is a core component of the Biden-Harris administration’s climate agenda because it could be a reliable complement to more variable energy sources like wind or solar, said Kathryn Huff, former assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy.
“Nuclear power runs 24/7, regardless of the weather, and it rarely needs to be shut down for refueling, which means it provides an extra level of resilience to the grid, where other variable sources of renewable energy need a backup,” Huff said.
There’s been a shift in Americans’ perception of nuclear in recent decades; 57% of Americans now support nuclear energy, up from 43% in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.
Huff recently left her federal position to return to her role as an associate professor in the department of nuclear plasma and radiological engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
While Missouri just has Callaway, Illinois has more nuclear plants than any other state. A recent Illinois law repealed a nuclear moratorium, which could clear the way for new nuclear plants in the form of small modular reactors.
“There's a lot of excitement in Illinois about the future of nuclear,” Huff said. “But that moratorium that had been in place was keeping any real possibilities from being tangible.”
In Missouri, Witt said Ameren is also keeping an eye on the new small modular technology.
“That's the big unknown of how much it costs and how long it takes to build it,” Witt said. “Once some of those bugs are worked out and the technology's proven, I think not too long after that you'll see Ameren building.”
'Simply too expensive'
Despite all the hype around nuclear, there are plenty of downsides, said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. One of the biggest is cost.
“It's simply too expensive compared to the alternatives, both with regard to fossil fuels, but also increasingly, it's not competitive with renewable energy, like wind and solar,” Lyman said.
As an example, Lyman points to the country’s newest nuclear plants in Georgia. They were some of the first to be built in years but ended up reaffirming critics’ points about cost.
“It turned out to be an example of the same old, same old,” Lyman said. “It ended up costing more than twice as much and taking more than twice as long to build and start up as originally anticipated. And so instead of being a shining example of how nuclear power has reformed itself, it just became another illustration of why the industry has a lot of problems.”
Huff had a different take away from the Georgia example. She said in the 1970s and '80s when the U.S. was building lots of nuclear plants, the country developed construction muscle memory that helped streamline the process and make it less expensive. She thinks if more plants are built, it will become more efficient.
“These were reactors that were being built for the first time in the United States,” Huff said. “And our skilled crafts and trades hadn't had a lot of experience in nuclear builds in a really long time.”
But Lyman worries about other risks, like the potential for Fukushima-like catastrophic accidents or sabotage from terrorist groups. He also said plants across the country are vulnerable to natural disasters like flooding or earthquakes.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the safety and security of commercial nuclear power, has not fully addressed the vulnerability of nuclear plants to natural disasters, especially in light of the potential for more severe flooding, and wind storms and other consequences of climate change,” Lyman said.
When it comes to safety, Huff, again, sees things differently. She compares nuclear's risks to the risks of fossil-fuel energy sources.
“You absolutely cannot ignore the fact that air pollution is killing people,” Huff said. “And that doesn't even count the likely existential threat we face from climate change.”
On top of those points, there is the issue of the long-lived radioactive fuel.
Callaway’s future
The federal government is responsible for spent nuclear fuel, but after years of nuclear plant operators paying into a fund, there still isn’t a plan for a place to put the fuel. So for now, operators have to store it on-site.
At the Callaway plant, the storage area for spent fuel is running out of open space. This year, the workers reached 42 of 48 filled spaces; those final openings will be gone by 2027. After that, if the federal government still hasn’t stepped in, Ameren may need to build another storage pad.
Huff said the federal government is trying to use a consent-based process to find a place to store this fuel. That’s important after original plans to store it in Nevada turned out to be politically impossible. But so far, nothing has come together.
There are other questions in Callaway’s future, like how long it will operate. In 2015, the plant’s operating license was extended to 2044, so the plan is to operate for at least another 20 years, but Ameren could apply for another renewal.
What about plans to add a nuclear plant in Missouri?
“We will keep all of our options open from a corporate perspective,” said John Beck, Ameren’s vice president of nuclear engineering. “Right now, there's no plans for for another nuclear plant.”
