On August 27, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox made a bold argument while on a Bloomberg podcast: Nuclear energy could meet several lofty and seemingly disparate political goals at once — not only in Utah but nationally.
“If you care about economic progress in our country, if you care about national security, if you care about the environment, you have to believe in nuclear power,” Cox told the Bloomberg reporter.
Nuclear power has taken a backseat role in the United States’ energy sector for decades, making up less than 20 percent of the country’s power generation. It suffered setbacks due to fears of repeating historic accidents and meltdowns, as well as exposure to radiation that causes environmental and public health concerns. For financiers, massive upfront costs in the range of tens of billions of dollars also solidified the sector’s limitations.
But for many large tech companies and politicians, the attitude has been slowly shifting over time. Proponents argue that nuclear is both clean (like renewable energy) and safe (despite famous accidents) while delivering larger amounts of power that can keep up with the booming needs of modern society. They continue on to say that neither wind nor solar, for example, delivers the amount of power necessary for modern technology or a sufficient number of jobs.
Massive tech companies, meanwhile, have already been investing in nuclear. In June, the World Bank and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) entered into a partnership to help ensure that global financial institutions would back the nuclear power industry and push for a “scale up” of the sector.
Utah’s going nuclear
The legislature and governor of Utah aim to move the state into the center of that process, while the state’s private sector is vying for regulations that will streamline licensing and help ensure success. Cox’s 2024 plan, “Operation Gigawatt,” aims to increase Utah’s power output by embracing geothermal and nuclear power. On the Bloomberg podcast, he reflected on what he saw as poor energy policy in the U.S.
“We made a very bad decision,” Cox said, arguing that in the 1970s, the country decided, “We weren’t going to bet on nuclear. The rest of the world has moved ahead of us, and that’s a huge mistake right now, as we are in an energy arms race and we have to win.”
In May, Utah signed a memorandum of understanding with Hi Tech Solutions and Holtec International to create business and infrastructure for the nuclear power industry in Utah. In August, the state signed a memorandum of understanding with TerraPower, another nuclear power company.
“Two years ago, I would say [Utah] wasn’t positioned much at all [to build nuclear power]. The legacy nuclear in the state was not the industry-leading, growing entities that a lot of us are,” says Chris Hayter of Hi Tech Solutions, explaining that there were wealthy companies in the industry, but not ones that were driving innovation or growth. “The industry itself in Utah had no real footprint for growth.”
Hayter has been working in the nuclear power industry since 2009, shortly after he graduated from college. He’d met the founders of Hi Tech Nuclear in 2007, when he would change garbage cans and mop floors in their office in Washington while working as an account manager at a company in the same building.
By 2009, Hi Tech had offered him a job. When two of the founders quit in 2013, he had the opportunity to start the company again, now named Hi Tech Solutions, and take it in a new direction.
When Hayter first started with Hi Tech, “We were shutting down perfectly operating plants,” he says. “We were struggling because of the gas lobby; the cost of natural gas was almost artificially low, and what we call renewables today were receiving massive subsidies. The lobby as an industry wasn’t quite getting us to that level. We were facing not even a slow death, but a kind of an expedited death of industry. And I think it went from Fukushima [in 2011] to about 2018.”
Hayter says the Utah Legislature’s favorable attitude toward nuclear power convinced him to move his family and Hi Tech to Eden, Utah, betting on more favorable business conditions.
For him, promoting nuclear power has been a long-term effort, with several difficult years spent waiting for the market to bounce back. One of the key changes has been technological developments around small modular reactors, which are more cost-effective and considered safer.
“In that early 2010 to 2013 timeframe where the tragedy happened at Fukushima, all of these things happened; I will tell you, people told me I was crazy,” Hayter says. “They were like, ‘If you’re going to go build a company, why not just build it in the tech sector?’ I didn’t want to end up in a company that was more worried about profit or the technology than the people.”
The future of nuclear
The shift to building more nuclear power infrastructure could make a big difference for technology and business in Utah. This month, Hi Tech and Holtec, alongside Cox, announced a plan to build a set of small modular reactors that will be constructed and developed in Brigham City. The companies are creating a campus where people can be certified to do nuclear jobs at the site, and are partnering with universities and high schools to make it a strong educational option. To achieve this initiative, the companies will be partnering with the Division of Natural Resources and the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity.
Hayter says he plans for the company to hire 3,000 to 5,000 people over the next decade. He also hopes the campus will enable their employees to be trained and located in Utah rather than bringing in people from other parts of the country.
Hayter says the development is a result of Cox and the Legislature firmly supporting nuclear power, and he hopes that the state continues to embrace this approach. As technology advances, he believes that the nuclear ecosystem of companies being built is crucial to make sure Utah can deliver at the necessary scale.
“It’s a race to provide the best ecosystem,” he says. “Now we actually have to put rubber to the road, and that’s where we have to build our plant. … Currently, we have hope, but we don’t have the infrastructure.”