Engineering The Future

Episode 38: Nuclear Power: A Linchpin in the Fight Against Climate Change

December 29, 2023 • Ontario Society of Professional Engineers • Season 2 • Episode 38

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In this episode, host Jerome James, P.Eng. discusses the untapped potential of nuclear power in Ontario's energy landscape. He is joined by Matthew Mairinger, P.Eng., president of the North American Young Generation in Nuclear, who shares insights on how the perception of nuclear power has evolved over the years and its current role in the fight against climate change.

From game-changing innovations like small modular reactors to advancements in carbon capture technology, Matthew breaks down how nuclear power is at the forefront of the sustainable energy revolution and how engineers of all disciplines should consider a career in nuclear, where they can contribute to solving one of society's most pressing problems.



ENGINEERING THE FUTURE
 EPISODE 38 NUCLEAR POWER: A LINCHPIN IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE

JEROME JAMES: This episode of Engineering the Future is brought to you by Member Perks for OSPE. Helping engineers save money on everything from electronics and food to apparel and home improvements. Visit Member Perks for OSPE before you shop and enjoy exclusive savings on brand names both online and in-store.

FEMALE NARRATOR: This podcast is brought to you by OSPE, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, the advocacy body for professional engineers and the engineering community in Ontario.

JEROME JAMES: Welcome to Engineering the Future, brought to you by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers. I am your host, Jerome James. In today's episode, we dive into the heart of Ontario's energy landscape and discuss the untapped potential of nuclear power. we will demystify its past stigma and shed light on how nuclear energy is a linchpin in the fight against climate change. From game-changing innovations like small modular reactors to advances in carbon capture technology, engineers continue to be at the forefront of the sustainable energy revolution. Join us as we explore the opportunities for current and future engineers in this complex industry. With us on this exploration today is Matthew Meiringer, president of the North American Young Generation in Nuclear. He is a professional engineer and project management professional with over 10 years in the nuclear industry. Matthew, welcome to Engineering the Future.

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: Yeah, thank you for having me and look forward to a great discussion today.

JEROME JAMES: And so let's just jump right into it. Matthew, In our quest to demystify nuclear energy, could you share a brief overview of how the perception of nuclear power has evolved over the years and its current standing in the fight against climate change?

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: And I think it is really prevalent in pop culture. We grew up seeing The Simpsons, The Green Goo. We see most recently the Chernobyl miniseries, The Days, which is the Fukushima disaster. So it does tend to dwell on the negatives. And coming from the climate conferences, my first one was COP 25 a few years ago. And I got to say the nuclear industry's presence there was minimal. You know, there was eight or nine of us from around the world. People were having anti-nuclear banners in front of us. COP26, we had a bigger presence. But still, even when we joined in climate marches, I remember like with Extinction Rebellion and some of the others, we were just marching with them, just saying, you know, we're here to talk about environmental justice, phasing of fossil fuels. And someone, you know, we were marching together holding hands and someone found out we were in the nuclear industry and it was almost like we were lepers. They were like, don't touch me. And so I think that's where we were a few years ago. So I just came back from COP 28 in Dubai. It's actually still going on right now. And we saw tons of nuclear announcements, the tripling of nuclear, 120 countries and industries signing on to meet those demands. And finally, I'm starting to see this shift here of people saying, okay, maybe we're not fans of nuclear, but it's a necessary transition or it's a necessary energy source to get us to net zero. So I think just over the years we've seen what's happened with Germany and some of the other countries that have tried to shut down nuclear and go 100% renewables and it's not working. So I think it's just these case studies are starting to pile up that says, we need nuclear. We may not, it may not be our favorite source, but we need you guys.

JEROME JAMES: That's very interesting. Where do you think that this overwhelming sentiment has come from? And why is the tables turning at this point towards more nuclear?

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: And I think it has just been the association in the past with weapons. There was a lot of secrecy and almost the industry treated it as, you know, we're not going to talk about it. It's just going to be there and it's just going to be accepted, right? People, you know, we're not going to talk about nuclear waste. We're not going to talk about the accidents and hopefully people just forget about them, right? We'll focus on just being in the background, producing power and people are going to love us. And that's not how it works. And so I think us as a younger generation, the newer generation is coming forward and saying, we need to say that we are environmentalists, we need to go out, talk to people, and just have honest conversations about how it works. Because every conversation I have, people leave a little bit more in in favor of nuclear because they're like, wow, I never knew that about the waste or I never knew that about the accidents or the low carbon or this dispatch ability. So that is really, I think this younger generation is trying to go forward and be very vocal supporters of it with influencers, with pop culture, with going to the climate conferences to build connections, build allies, and just have people talking to people in the environmental movement and say, hey, You know, I'm an environmentalist too. I care about the planet and I work in this amazing industry that is saving lives, that is saving the planet. Why don't we talk about it?

JEROME JAMES: And if people are just totally not understanding or averse in the technical details, can you tell us just from a high level why nuclear is such a important ally in the decarbonizing framework?

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: Yeah, so when we talk about low-carbon technologies, the number one source in the world is hydro. And hydro in the West is largely tapped out. You only have so many rivers, you have so many dams you can build, and only so many places. And some countries, they don't even have access to these streams, these water sources. And with drought as well, that is becoming harder and harder to get now. And nuclear is number two. So it's the second largest source of clean energy around the world. And the benefit of nuclear and hydro is the dependability. It doesn't matter if it's sunny outside, if it's windy. It's the high reliability. So nuclear is actually available around 93% of the time. And if you look at wind, it's anywhere from 30 to 40%. And if you look at solar, again, Canada is not a great place to put it because we have snow and we have lack of sunlight, but it varies anywhere from 18 to 30%. So when you start to look at these numbers, you're like, okay, if we're having something that's available 18% of the time, that means over 80% of the time, you need something else available to back that up. And what that means is you need the grid to either be very complex, so you need standby generation sources like gas, and you need to pay them to be available, to be dispatchable, and you need to have a payment plan that makes that affordable and cost-effective for the solar or the wind sources as well. So now you're starting to pay all these different sources, you're overbuilding your supply, where nuclear is really good at phasing out coal. So coal is the baseload technology, it's not low carbon, but nuclear and coal operate very similar as baseload technologies. So if you're trying to rapidly phase out coal, nuclear, in addition to intermittent renewables, is one of the best ways to do that.

JEROME JAMES: So for base load, nuclear is the way to go. Absolutely. We've heard a lot about small modular reactors or SMRs. How do these innovations play a role in reshaping the landscape of nuclear energy in Ontario? And what benefits do they offer for the industry and the environment?

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: So I think the nuclear industry kept looking at bigger and bigger designs. That was the big trend in the industry. And the reason for that is as you get a bigger reactor, you get more economies of scale with the neutrons. So the way a reactor works is it's a vessel and you have some neutrons that aren't creating more chain reactions. They're escaping the reactor and they're not being productive. If you make a bigger reactor, that surface area is more effective. So the designers kept making these bigger reactor designs and bigger and bigger, to the point where entire countries couldn't even have these designs because they're like, our entire country is not big enough to support just one of your reactors. And then the industry came together and they said, why don't we look at, you know, even though it's not the most effective in terms of neutrons, it is still a very effective source for these smaller communities, isolated communities, mining sectors. And this is where the term small modular reactor came from. So its maximum size is about 300 megawatts electric. which is about enough to supply 300,000 people. But again, they're very scaled down. So you have micro modular reactors, which are point one megawatt electric. And what this really does is it unlocks a lot of new potential sources for nuclear in Ontario. So, isolated communities, indigenous communities, remote communities, industrial sectors. So all of these communities that don't have the population size or the need for these large reactors, it now opens that up. The other advantage of small modular reactors as well is people are always worried about the cost overruns, the construction times, the financing of this. So what these do is they're smaller, and they're of a modular design, so they're prefabricated in factories. So you build the components up front, you use a standard design, and then you ship it to the site, and then that really cuts down the risk of schedule overruns, of construction overruns, And it also makes financing much more affordable because now you can have these smaller designs, they're modular so you can have one in your community, you can add a second one if you need later on, you can add a third one. So it's much more flexible in terms of scaling that up. And then the third benefit as well is the technology as well.

JEROME JAMES: I was going to ask you about that. smaller. I'm sure that the technology is different than our known can-do reactors that we have deployed in Ontario.

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: And that's what I always tell people about is our industry is fairly new. It's around 70 years old. So if you look at, you know, the first airplane, you know, 1901, 1902, Kitty Hawk, 70 years later, they were landing on the moon. So that is like the timeframe of change that our industry is looking at. So to compare those first reactors to the reactors doubts, totally different. So now we're talking passive safety features, So the reactors aren't even pressurized. They're using passive cooling systems, so natural circulation, to cool down the reactors. They also, some of them, operate at much higher temperatures. So what this unlocks is secondary benefits from these reactors. So the waste heat could now be used for hydrogen production. We could look at district heating. We could look at desalinization. And these small modular reactors, some of them are grid-following designs, so they could be integrated with wind, with solar, they could follow the grid demand as it goes up and down. They could even be integrated with wind and solar, so when it is windy, when it is sunny, those are producing electricity, and maybe the nuclear reactor switches to hydrogen production. So it's instead of curtailing that extra sources, now you're always getting efficient production in some form from this together.

JEROME JAMES: Oh, that's interesting. Uh, I was going to ask if, if the ramp up and ramp down times are shorter, but you're saying that not required because you'd just be producing something else in the meantime, when you're not providing electricity to the grid.

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: Yeah, it all depends on the design you pick and how you want to scheme that together. But again, these are just some of the features that are now being unlocked with some of the new technology features. Some of the other technologies as well is they're going to be able to use spent fuel, which still has a lot of usable energy in it, and get more energy from that. So that's something that I've seen, you know, people's concerns from in the past is, what about the waste? What about the spent fuel? Well, some of these reactor designs have said, okay, well, we'll just operate different. We'll have a new form of physics, we'll have a different reactor design, and we could use this spent nuclear fuel, which still, like I said, has a lot of usable energy in it, and get more energy from that for electricity production.

JEROME JAMES: Matthew, as the president of NAYGN, you're deeply involved in the future of nuclear. Can you highlight some key contributions and perspectives young engineers bring to the table in advancing sustainable energy, especially within the nuclear sector?

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: So I think these are where these new designs are coming from is some of the young people are really passionate about climate change. They consider themselves environmentalists and to have people attack our industry and view us as the enemy has really changed our perspectives. And really, I think that's where you see these new designs coming forward of using spent nuclear fuel as continuous electricity sources, solving some of the safety concerns with passive safety features. So I think it's some of these engineers that grew up with, hey, why don't we solve these problems? Why don't we design a new startup company? Why don't we design a generation four small modular reactor to attack these problems head on, rather than just going with the old guard, the old technology designs? So I think there's a lot of hope, and especially how we advocate for it. When we talk to politicians, I say I'm an environmentalist. I care about the environment. And I am proud to be a nuclear engineer. We're producing medical isotopes. We're producing zero-carbon technologies. We are fighting climate change. So I think that is probably the biggest thing that we bring is not being burdened by the misconceptions of the past and being hopeful that nuclear with other technologies can solve the problems that we have today.

JEROME JAMES: Fascinating. Ontario's energy future involves not only nuclear but also advancements in carbon capture technology and How can engineers navigate these dual fronts and what role does carbon capture play in the broader context of sustainable energy practices?

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: And carbon capture is going to be very important. We're still, we still have countries that are starting to develop and they need coal and China and India, we can't tell them not to have coal. So there's going to be fossil fuels in our future. And there's still going to be industries that are hard to decarbonize, whether it's steel, concrete, some of transportation as well. So I see carbon capture along with low carbon technologies as one of the future to actually getting to net zero. The thing with carbon capture is it's largely fans, right? It's this large building that's circulating air through filters. It's removing the carbon from the air. If that's direct air capture, other ones are going to be in the stacks of these fossil fuel facilities. But what the direct air capture is going to need is a lot of electricity. It's going to need a lot of energy. And that energy to power those fans and these systems must be low carbon. I'm not going to be burning coal to run a fan to capture carbon. That just doesn't make sense. So it's either got to be intermittent renewables, it's got to be hydro, or it's got to be nuclear. And if you want it to be scalable, one of the best ways to have this is, again, that high capacity factor of nuclear. And that's where I really see these small modular reactors being attached to these direct air capture facilities. So it's providing low carbon, consistent energy to power the facility, to run the fans, to circulate, to capture the air from the atmosphere. So I think nuclear is going to play a pivotal role in powering these carbon capture technologies.

JEROME JAMES: The industry has faced challenges and criticisms in the past, from near misses to catastrophic failures. In your view, Matthew, how can the engineering community address these public concerns, such as modular reactors functioning with enriched uranium over can-do reactors? And what are the steps being taken to ensure public safety and transparency of nuclear energy operations in Ontario?

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: So I think one of the great things is education, is just going past the headlines and talking about the actual impacts from these disasters. One of the best things I think as an engineer, because I love graphs, I love numbers, it's called the death footprint. So it takes the worst-case Chernobyl, it takes the worst-case Fukushima, all of the accidents, it takes the worst-case numbers that have been reported, and it divides that by the energy produced. So then you can compare wind and solar and hydro and nuclear and fossil fuels together on the impact to the environment and humanity. And what you see is that wind, solar, obviously you don't have many deaths. There's some conventional deaths due to mining, industrial accidents, but again, it's fairly low. And what you find is on the same scale, nuclear is on the safety record. And what you start to see, though, is fossil fuels from the air pollution, from all the other health impacts that they have, are much more damaging to humanity. So when you put that on that equal scale, you can see that, wow, fossil fuels are terrible, and hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal have almost no deaths when you look at the grand scheme of the electricity and energy produced. So I think, again, we have to look at it as an engineer and say like, okay, we're not seeing the deaths due to coal, but it's 7 million people a year are dying prematurely due to the respiratory and fossil fuel impacts. So that is what we're not seeing. It's not reported because it's standard. It's the way they're operating as they're designed to. So a nuclear accident, you know, something goes wrong, it has an accident, it has an impact. But coal, oil, gas, they're operating as they're supposed to, and they're guaranteeing to kill people every day. And that's what we need to shift our perspectives with.

JEROME JAMES: Wow, when you stack it up like that against each other, it's a very eye-opening statistic that you presented. Looking ahead, what advice do you have for aspiring engineers who see a future in the nuclear sector? How can you position yourself to contribute meaningfully to the sustainable energy revolution as a student?

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: So I just came from the climate conference, COP28, and I gotta say, if you're looking for a job, 22 nations from around the world, including Canada, just signed on this nuclear pledge. So they're going to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. So if you're looking for a job, take all the reactors we have in the world, triple them. That is what we're looking for. This is like a moonshot. This is the biggest possible news I've ever heard for our industry. It is just absolutely inspiring. So if you're thinking about studying nuclear engineering, or even if you're not, and again, this is where people sometimes get into the pitfall. They're like, I need to be a nuclear engineer and nuclear physicist. Now, at the nuclear plant we have about 3,000 people. These are boilermakers, pipe footers, electricians, communication specialists, and for engineering we have software, mechanical, civil. all these different disciplines working together because we have valves, we have pumps, we have buildings, we have structures, we need seismic protection. There's all of these disciplines that are needed to make a nuclear reactor run. So I would say the future is bright, and you will be part of something that is the most pressing problem for society right now. We are facing a climate emergency. When the governments come together and say this is an emergency, I think that is where I would look to finding engineers to fix those problems. So the nuclear industry, lots of potential new jobs, we need lots of bright young people to come into this industry, and we need people that feel like they're making a difference. going into work every day knowing that you're saving lives and saving the planet. So it's pretty rewarding, I'd say.

JEROME JAMES: That does sound rewarding. Matthew, thank you for joining us today. It's been a real eye-opening conversation on how nuclear power can help us achieve a sustainable future and the role engineers can play in making that future a reality.

MATTHEW MAIRINGER: Thanks for having me and always a pleasure to join you.

JEROME JAMES: And as always, thank you to our audience. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe and leave a comment or review. I'm your host, Jerome James. You've been listening to Engineering the Future, and we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00: From all of us at OSPE, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, thanks for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.