The unquestioned need for scads more electricity to power the coming age of artificial intelligence is pushing industry and government to come up with new forms of nuclear fission reactors. And to do it fast.
Maybe too fast.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced last week a deal with an unknown and untested start-up — Valar Atomics — to have a prototype of a new kind of small reactor up and running in barely a year at the state-owned San Rafael Energy Research Center in Emery County. To be followed by many more, actually generating power, all over the state, by 2034.
At least that’s the dream Cox shares with Isaiah Taylor, the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Valar Atomics.
We shall see.
With such an ambitious timeline, we should find out soon enough whether this technology is really the breakthrough Cox hopes for, or another of those shiny baubles that often fascinates Utah’s political class, right up to the moment it blows up in their faces.
Metaphorically, that is.
The rapid selection process, with no discernible public input, of a new company that has not yet built a campfire, much less a nuclear reactor, raises many questions. It is a corporate resume so thin that most of us wouldn’t hire them to put a new roof on our house, much less whip up an atomic power plant.
On the surface, Taylor’s major qualifications seem to be audacity, a Star Trek-inspired website and a Utah-like antipathy for federal regulations. His argument that the kind of reactors he will build are too small to merit federal oversight is troubling, given that they will still produce highly radioactive waste.
These “small modular reactors,” we are told, will be vastly cheaper to build, will use much less water and will be much less likely than their ancestors to melt down.
Components for fleets of SMRs would be built in a factory, then assembled on sites where there is demand for power. Industrializing the process, they say, means engineers can improve each model as it rolls off the line.
The good news is that Cox has, if indirectly, acknowledged that fossil fuels, coal especially, are not the energy of the future. The marketplace has seen that, if some members of the Utah Legislature haven’t.
It is too bad that Cox and other Utah leaders have not expressed so much glee about the giant potential the state has for infinitely renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and geothermal.
The Legislature recently set aside $10 million to support nuclear development in the state. Valar, coming out of nowhere, has reportedly raised $21 million in venture capital seed money.
Utah’s eagerness to adopt the next new thing has not always turned out well.
There was the 1989 Syn-crete debacle, an expensive attempt to resurface a stretch of I-15 in Salt Lake County with a new kind of surfacing that literally crumbled before our eyes. And the COVID-era state contracts for testing services soon found to not be up to standards and support for questionable pharmaceutical solutions.
And don’t forget cold fusion.
Now Utah, whether we want to or not, is going to give this nuclear idea a ride.
We’ll believe it when we see it … but we do want to see it.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
