AES small modular reactor announcement highlights nuclear summit at Purdue University

Nuclear energy leaders from across the country and world converged on West Lafayette Wednesday to reenergize an industry they hope will meet booming energy needs.

“Now’s the time. Indiana is the place,” said Indiana Energy and Natural Resources Secretary Suzanne Jaworowski. The state is “ready, and willing, and able to deploy nuclear.”

She spoke on the first of a two-day Global Nuclear Energy Economic Summit at Purdue University’s Loeb Playhouse, which was the launchpad for a flurry of announcements.

There, AES Indiana President Brandi Davis-Handy announced the company — one of the state’s “big five” investor-owned electric utilities — would study the feasibility of building small modular reactors at its Eagle Valley and Petersburg power plants.

The analysis will look at licensing, construction and operations, she said, plus siting factors like how the population is distributed, whether there’s water nearby for cooling, if transmission infrastructure can handle the power generated and emergency planning considerations.

The study will “guide the selection of the most suitable site and provide a clear growth path for future progress,” Davis-Handy said. It’s expected to be done by mid-2026.

Nuclear isn’t part of AES Indiana’s “current preferred portfolio,” spokeswoman Mallory Duncan said in a statement to the Capital Chronicle, but “we remain open to considering it in the future if it becomes more economically viable and aligns with the best interests of our customers.”

First American Nuclear staff also flocked to the stage to celebrate Tuesday’s announcement that the company will site its headquarters, manufacturing facilities and a specialized energy park in Indiana. That park will be the first in the country to operate in “closed-fuel cycle,” meaning that spent nuclear fuel will be reprocessed and reused, according to FANCO.

Purdue also launched a new Institute for Energy Innovation and announced the nation’s first online credential program in small modular reactors. University President Mung Chiang further celebrated a research and development agreement with nuclear manufacturer BWX Technologies.

Chiang later joined Indiana Gov. Mike Braun to headline the summit with a “fireside” chat.

“I feel confident that, if we play our cards right, Indiana will be … first on SMRs, on having data centers without burdening the average taxpayer,” Braun said.

Nuclear development takes years to come to fruition.

A Boston University study found that runaway construction costs and delayed timelines stymie many energy projects.

Nuclear power plants are the worst offenders, with an average construction cost overrun typically twice as much as expected, and the most extreme time delays. To be exact, the average nuclear power plant has a construction cost overrun of 102.5% and ends up costing $1.56 billion more than expected.

Supply chain woes

Panelists repeatedly lauded Indiana’s approach to nuclear.

“It’s going to take a village to do what we’re talking about, and the village in Indiana is strong,” said Brendon Baatz, who works on energy market development at Google.

He cited “strong state leadership,” supportive utility companies and a pipeline of nuclear engineers coming out of Purdue’s program.

A stunted supply chain could be among the industry’s greatest challenges.

“If there’s going to be a big problem with a project in the future, it’s going to be because of a failure in the supply chain,” said William Magwood IV, the director-general of the Nuclear Energy Agency.

One supplier missing a deadline could cause a chain reaction, he said, and “that’s when we have these big overruns, and that’s when we cancel projects.”

For Theodore Garrish, the assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, a nuclear reactor fuel crunch was top of mind.

He highlighted an ongoing shortage of high-assay low-enriched uranium. It’s set to worsen, as a ban on Russian uranium imports takes full effect in 2028.

“We have really relied, up to 25% in our country’s (uranium) enrichment, on the Russians. When this happens, we are going to have a huge gap that we’ve got to meet,” Garrish said. The federal government will soon award $2.7 billion to develop domestic production, he added.

Getting parts in on time is a “tightrope dance,” said Stephen McKinney, vice president for U.S. commercial operations at Westinghouse. The company is working with Google on an artificial intelligence-powered project to optimize when equipment is needed.

“If you’re waiting on a certain component to arrive at the site, you could have a large amount of labor sitting there,” he said, driving expenses higher.

Eric Williams, the executive vice president and chief operations officer at TerraPower, called for the country to bring back heavy manufacturing from overseas — and develop the American workforce’s skills and knowledge.

The months-long wait on equipment from Asia or Europe “does not fit into a tight schedule,” he said.

Speakers indicated the industry’s pause four decades ago — after the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl nuclear plant in what’s now Ukraine — has limited American expertise.

Julie Bentz, a nuclear policy and safety adviser to FANCO, recalled graduating from college at a time when about 60 universities had affiliated research reactors. That dropped by half when she returned to university a decade later for graduate-level work.

“You have an unusual 20-year gap in this profession, and when we look at supply chain, that’s going to have an impact across every single component,” she said. Experts, for example, are typically either aged 60 and older or 40 and younger.