Inside the BWRX-300 with Dr. John Zino | "We're just boiling water!"

John Zeno (0:00): John Zeno didn't start in a power plant. He started in submarines. Designing nuclear systems in spaces so tight, you couldn't just add more shielding without changing whether or not the ship could surface. A few years later, he's working for the Department of Energy, then commercial nuclear, and now he's in a classroom, teaching students who are about to enter an industry that looks very different from the one he started in. Because right now, nuclear is changing.

John Zeno (0:30): I think this is where light water SMRs, whether they're VWR or PWR, have a decided advantage because we've got legacy history with the regulators in The US and in other countries like Japan and Europe. So it's a VWR, it's just smaller. And so they're familiar with the technology.

John Zeno (0:48): Doctor. John Zeno is a chief consulting engineer at the Advanced Plant Technology for GE Vernova Hitachi nuclear energy, as well as an associate teaching professor at NC State. And he's got about thirty eight years in the nuclear field. So I wanted to know, what does it actually look like to spend nearly forty years inside the nuclear industry?

John Zeno (1:11): Interestingly enough, I did not start my career in the commercial civilian nuclear power industry. I actually started with naval reactors coming out of school in the mid eighty. Worked for a company that did design and construction of nuclear submarines for the US Navy. And so that was actually a really fun job out of school. Got to climb around submarines, watching him put the reactor vessel in and hook up the equipment.

John Zeno (1:34): And I worked in the group that did some of the startup testing. I also worked in some shielding, shield design, which, you know, on a submarine is kinda cool because you got very limited space, and you can't put too much shielding because the ship won't be able to surface. Right? So but you have to have enough to keep everybody safe. And so that was a really interesting job.

John Zeno (1:53): And then I did that for about three years and then spent ten years in the department of energy, the DOE. At the time, it was the DOE weapons complex because we still had the cold war going on. And so I worked at the Savannah River Laboratory. And and that was a great job too. Again, it was very much focused more on DOE missions, Department of Energy missions.

John Zeno (2:13): Once the cold war came to an end in the early nineties, a lot of the work pivoted toward waste stabilization spent and used nuclear fuel, that kind of stuff. Then, after about ten years, I came to GE. At the time, it was GE Nuclear. Now GE, Vernova Hitachi Nuclear. That was twenty six years ago.

John Zeno (2:31): So the majority of my career has been in civilian commercial nuclear. About twenty six of my, you know, thirty eight or nine years, maybe two thirds of my career has been in the civilian world. But the first third was in the government world. So it was interesting to see sort of the differences between those sectors. But it's been a great experience.

John Zeno (2:50): I've had a really, really good time and a lot of great people that I've met. I teach about teach or co teach about five or so different classes. And it's funny because in many of the classes and most of them, I've used examples from all three jobs in one way or another. Now I don't necessarily give all the context, but I give examples. And so it really is fascinating without even realizing it.

John Zeno (3:15): As I was teaching and lecturing, I was giving examples of the different jobs that I've held in the different roles in the different industries. And a little bit sometime later, I realized, wow, it dawned on me, man, I've really been able to pull from a lot of experiences and without even knowing it, without even realizing it. And I think the students enjoy hearing a little bit of the industry perspective, whether it's, you know, military, department of energy, or civilian commercial nuclear. I think they like seeing and understanding how the different segments of the industry view nuclear. And each one is slightly different.

John Zeno (3:48): They have slightly different goals and slightly different drivers. But at the end of the day, it is the collective industry, which is important. And so, yeah, it it's been fun. I've been teaching now for almost five years, and it's been great. I've really enjoyed it a lot.

John Zeno (4:01): What's easy to miss is that those aren't just different jobs. They're different versions of nuclear. Military, government, commercial, each with its own priorities, its own constraints, its own definitions of success. So when someone like doctor Zeno walks into a classroom, what are its students actually learning? Sometimes it's a submarine story.

John Zeno (4:25): Sometimes it's a DOE project. Sometimes it's something from a commercial plant. And over time, those examples start to stack until students aren't just learning theory, but they're seeing how the same technology behaves in completely different environments. How do you talk to the public about nuclear? When people hear nuclear reactor, they expect something complicated.

John Zeno (4:51): And then you realize it's just boiling water.

John Zeno (4:54): Going back a little bit in the historical files, in the early days, the two primary water reactor types were the pressurized water reactor and the boiling water reactor. As it turned out, boiling water reactors weren't as good to put inside a submarine as pressurized water reactors were because they're lower pressure. They have larger volumes. Plus, you have contaminated steam in the secondary system, which you don't want exposing the crew to in the engine room. Right?

John Zeno (5:21): So it turned out that pressurized type reactors were better for submarine applications. And so that's probably one, maybe not the only, but one of the main drivers why the PWR technology has, at least in The US, has been more favored or more abundant. For the boiling water reactor, though, there's been a lot of great work that's been done. Obviously, GE was the founding member of that technology. It's interesting.

John Zeno (5:45): We see these small modular reactors today. And if you go back in the history files into the nineteen fifties and sixties, what you see are small modular reactors back then because they were small as we were learning and designing and building. And we started with small little test reactors and eventually build it up to the large scale plants. And now we're actually kinda going back to the small designs. So it's interesting how that's changed.

John Zeno (6:09): But but, yeah, GE has a tremendous legacy in the boiling water reactor world. Many, many different types. The BWRX that you mentioned, x 300 is the tenth generation. So we've had BWRs basically one through six. We've had the simplified boiling water reactors, the ESBWR, the economic simplified boiling water reactor.

John Zeno (6:30): So there's been several iterations of simplified and boiling water reactors that use natural circulation. I mean, so both b's and p's have nuclear fuel. The difference is that in a boiling water reactor, as the liquid water circulates, it actually boils in the core. Whereas a pressurized water reactor operates at a much higher pressure, and the primary liquid stays as water. It doesn't intentionally boil.

John Zeno (6:52): And that energy is transferred to a second loop, a steam generator, which produces steam. So in a boiling water reactor, it's sometimes referred to as a direct boiler. We're boiling the water right in the core, generating steam right from the nuclear fuel and sending that to the turbine. So it's a direct boiler. So the efficiencies are quite good, and and the thermal response characteristics are really nice because you don't have this secondary loop that you have to deal with.

John Zeno (7:18): But, of course, you know, the downside is that transient events that can happen with the balance of plan can affect the core more directly, like an overpressure event or a turbine trip or something. So it does require a lot of dynamic analyses. So yeah. So the fuel in the core, the reactor vessel, right, which holds the fuel and the internal components, then you've got a steam line that goes out to a turbine. Turbines connected to a generator, and the generator spins and puts electricity on the grid.

John Zeno (7:45): The steam is then condensed back to liquid through a series of condenser systems, a feed water system, pumps it back as liquid water into the core, and then the whole cycle repeats itself. I used to teach a class called nuclear one zero one where we would teach these basic principles to all the people in our business who aren't engineers and don't know anything about nuclear. And they're shocked to find out all you're doing is boiling water. Like, they they seem to think there was, like, this magical nuclear thing that and somehow it just made electricity. And they're like, really?

John Zeno (8:14): We're just boiling water? I'm like, yeah. That's it. We're just boiling water. And so, you know, from that standpoint, it's not significantly different than, you know, let's say, a combustion plant or, you know, a coal fired plant.

John Zeno (8:26): Obviously, we feel like we've got an advantage in that we have a very stable and very reliable energy source, and that it doesn't generate any greenhouse gas and is self contained. And so we you know, all of our waste products are contained in the fuel. Right? So all the fission products stay in the fuel. Whereas for a combustion source, you know, the products go out the stack, you know, as CO two and water.

John Zeno (8:49): Right? Yeah. That is one of the things we like to point out. But essentially, that's it from a plant design. There's a lot more nuance than that, but essentially, that's what it consists of for a BWR.

John Zeno (8:59): In a boiling water reactor, water flows through the core, gets heated by the nuclear fuel, and turns directly into steam. That steam spins a turbine, that turbine generates electricity, and then the cycle repeats. These designs go back decades. In the early days of nuclear power, two main types of reactors emerged, boiling water reactors and pressurized water reactors. Both use water, both generate steam, but they do it differently.

John Zeno (9:30): And for a long time, those designs just got bigger. So if bigger was the goal, why are we suddenly going smaller?

John Zeno (9:39): And now today with the tenth generation, we have a small modular simplified boiling water reactor that is, you know, passive safety, takes advantage of a lot of the safety features for for natural circulation and those kinds of things. But for an SMR, not a full scale, not a large reactor. So that, you know, it's evolved, you know, 10 generations over, I don't know, let's say maybe seventy years, sixty, seventy years. Yeah. It's the industry has not remained static.

John Zeno (10:06): The designs have evolved. In the early days as the industry was ramping up in the sixties and seventies and new plants were coming online, utility customers wanted big power plants because they needed the energy. And so you started to see both on the PWR and BWR side, the reactors got very, very big. And we have large installed base of very big power plants, you know, thousands and thousands of megawatts thermal. And that really has provided the baseload capacity, you know, that we have today.

John Zeno (10:34): Going forward, though, the dynamic's a little bit different because now we've got renewables, which we didn't really have in the sixties and seventies. We have net zero in carbon goals, which I can assure you nobody had in the sixties and seventies. And so there are other constraints around this. And then, of course, cost is a big factor, wanting to have a product that you can get to market for a price point that a customer can stomach and can handle and and doesn't feel like they're betting the company on this one project. A lot of drivers have now pushed us more toward these small modular technologies, which leverage all the history, but now we're doing it on a smaller scale.

John Zeno (11:11): In the nineteen sixties and seventies, utilities wanted scale, more power, bigger plants, higher output, and nuclear delivered. But today, the constraints are different. Now it's about cost, flexibility, risk tolerance, and a grid that's changing faster than expected. And that's where small modular reactors come in. Not as a brand new idea, but as a return to something the industry started with, smaller systems built with decades of learning behind them.

John Zeno (11:43): So what actually changes when you make a reactor smaller? But first, a message from our sponsors. If we're serious about building the next generation of nuclear power plants, we need more than concrete and containment domes. We need people, engineers, welders, licensing professionals, project managers, INC specialists, operators, the people behind the build. That's where a Nuclear Talent Scout comes in.

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John Zeno (12:45): I mean, from a safety and maybe an operational standpoint, it is a boiling water reactor. So from that fundamental standpoint, it operates basically the same. But there are some interesting features that make it unique because it's a much smaller core with less fuel and a lower power level. Removing the residual heat and removing the heat during operation can be done in a different way. And so we have a system that removes heat just through natural circulation, through passive natural circulation.

John Zeno (13:12): So we don't have to pump the water inside the vessel. We don't have to have a system that recirculates the water like we would in a larger BWR. And so it has very nice passive safety features such that even when you're running at full power, the core is just naturally cooling itself by natural circulation. So there's no concern about shutting off the pumps because there are no pumps. It just cools.

John Zeno (13:35): So if you shut down the reactor, it just continues to cool itself with natural circulation just like it was doing when it was at full power. So it does provide a lot of flexibility in that sense. Now the converse to that is controlling the flow may be a little different because you can't throttle the flow like you would with if you had a recirc system. So you have other parameters that you have to control for the plant to operate, but there are a number of inherent safety passive systems, and its size being smaller make the heat removal a lot easier. And so from that standpoint, we think from an operational standpoint, if you're gonna own and operate one of these things, you have a lot less stuff that you have to worry about.

John Zeno (14:15): You a lot less maintenance. You don't have to worry about fixing pumps. You don't have to worry about replacing a research system or having a leaking seal on a pump or something because the pumps aren't there. The system's not there. The plant has significantly fewer pumps, valves, significantly less piping total because, again, it's a smaller system, a lot less active cooling, more passive cooling systems.

John Zeno (14:38): So the simpler operation, we hope, will make it a lot easier from an operational and maintenance standpoint for the operator, for the owner operator. And then in terms of how it looks on the grid, I think x 300 will probably operate like most BWRs with the desire to sort of get up to full power and operate at steady state for, let's say, two years for a fuel cycle. However, it does have the ability to load follow and go up and down in power as needed. If there was a need for, let's say, to match or increase or decrease power, let's say, to match what renewables were doing or if there was any larger demand. But it will serve a lot of the same purposes of baseload capacity.

John Zeno (15:17): And if we have a customer that needs more power, well, then you just add a second unit. Right? Rather than having to buy one big unit, you can just add as you go in sort of a modular fashion. And so we hope that that makes the technology appealing to smaller utilities that maybe don't need a lot of power, maybe only need one. But then there's a big utility that says, no, I need a lot of power.

John Zeno (15:39): Well, okay, let's build four of these. Right? And you can do it either way. That way it's a little more customizable for the utility owner operator. The x 300, the 300 is 300 megawatt electric.

John Zeno (15:51): So that would mean that the thermal power is slightly less than a thousand thermal megawatts. If you compare that to, let's say, one of the larger BWRs we have in the fleet, we have some plants in the fleet that are 4,000 plus megawatts, some upwards of 4,200, 4,300. So so it's certainly a factor of three or four smaller than some of the larger BWR fives and sixes, which are big plants. But again, so again, if you were taking a large one offline, you could replace it with three or four smaller ones if you needed to. That certainly would be possible.

John Zeno (16:24): And then the other part of it too is the capital cost. The initial capital cost is high for these plants. And so the desire to keep the initial capital cost down, I think, is also a very big factor because place all your bets on one large reactor that might be $10.15000000000. Now you've got a lot invested in that one asset to get online. Whereas again, if you're only dealing with, let's say 1 or $2,000,000,000 the financial risk maybe is a little more tolerable.

John Zeno (16:53): And if you're a little, you know, delayed or if things don't go as planned, you're not putting as much capital at risk because it's smaller. Many of the reactor vendors today are going towards these smaller modular reactors.

John Zeno (17:05): The BWRX 300. At its core, the BWRX 300 is still a boiling water reactor, hence the BWR. Same basic principles, same fuel, same physics, but the design is stripped down. No large circulation pumps, fewer components, more reliant on natural circulation, where the reactor cools itself using basic physics instead of mechanical systems, which means there's less that can go wrong. And that simplicity doesn't just affect safety, it changes how these plants get built.

John Zeno (17:41): Instead of building one massive plant, you build smaller ones, one, then another, then another, Each producing about 300 megawatts of electricity. BWRX 300, that's where the 300 in BWRX 300 comes from. Stackable, scalable, and most importantly, less financial risk up front. Because instead of betting everything on one project, you grow as demand grows. And demand is changing in the ways that industry didn't expect.

John Zeno (18:15): The new customers, tech, and data centers.

John Zeno (18:18): Obviously, if the fuel and the core are a third or a fourth as big, let's say, of a traditional existing, you know, installed reactor, I mean, your source term is significantly lower, factor of three or four lower. So yeah, your EPZ is going to be smaller because it doesn't have as many fission products. And so yeah, everything would sort of scale linearly with that. The X 300 is, you know, has fewer, say a little bit less than 300 fuel bundles. Whereas some of the larger ones, you know, have six, seven, 800 fuel bundles in them.

John Zeno (18:52): So, you know, again, a radiological or safety standpoint, the risk is much lower in terms of total inventory. And then in terms of the amount of fuel you have to purchase when you do your reloads, it's significantly lower because you, you know, the core is smaller. So, you know, there are some benefits there at least in the eyes of the customer that I think would make it appealing. Despite all the differences between X 300 and the previous generations of boiling water reactors, the fuel is almost identical. There's really not much difference in the fuel.

John Zeno (19:26): We're gonna be using GE will be using fuel that is the same as we've used in existing fleet plants, which for us is good because it minimizes the you know, we don't have to retool the whole manufacturing shop because we're just gonna use the same fuel that we've had before. So, yeah, it's very similar, and we're gonna use fuel products that have a long history, that are very reliable, that have done well in the fleet for decades and decades and decades. And so I hopefully, that'll give customers a little comfort knowing that, okay. We've got this new reactor concept, but the fuel is the same. So you don't have to worry about new fuel as well.

John Zeno (20:02): Right? Because we're using the same fuel we've always used for just less of it. And so maybe that'll help in the mindset of a customer to say, okay. This is a proven and well established fuel product line. It's got, you know, thousands of hours of operating history, works well.

John Zeno (20:19): So we don't have to worry about Right? And then of course, later on, you know, as time goes on, I'm sure we'll introduce new fuel products eventually. But for now, we're gonna stay with the ones we've been using. Some of the newer advanced reactor technologies that are not water reactors have very specialized fuel that they use that have to be in either a silica carbide mix or for a molten salt as a liquid. And that fuel technology is not nearly as established as the good old u o two that we all know and love from light water reactors.

John Zeno (20:54): So yeah. Yeah. We the goal here is to try to change as little as you can to get the technology, you know, to get the platform delivered. And then later on, you can introduce advances in fuel if you want for fuel economics and fuel cycle operability. But, yeah, having to having to wrestle both a new plant and new fuel, that's a challenge.

John Zeno (21:13): That is definitely a challenge for sure. I can speak to just things that are in the public domain right now. So we've been working with Ontario Power Generation, OPG, in Canada since about late twenty twenty. They have the unit, the Darlington new nuclear plant. Unit one is in the lead right now and racing toward delivery by hopefully by the end of the decade.

John Zeno (21:35): License to construct is with us. They've started doing site prep work. The design is advancing very, very well. It will likely be the first light water SMR, what we call Gen three plus in North America. We're very excited about that.

John Zeno (21:50): We also now have signed TVA. That's public information. The Tennessee Valley Authority also is on the list. We have several other customers in Europe as well that are interested. And also actually a couple of other utilities in Canada that are interested.

John Zeno (22:06): Canada is really very progressive in this way. They are really forward thinking. They are very serious about their net zero climate goals, and they are really in the lead right now when it comes to advancing small modular and advanced nuclear technology. I think The US is not too far behind, but Canada is really in the lead right now. So we're glad to see that.

John Zeno (22:26): So one of the other things you've probably seen in the industry in the last six months to a year is we've got the traditional commercial utilities that are taking their their carbon plants, you know, their their their coal plants off the grid for carbon concerns because they have carbon mission goals they have to meet. And so they're looking in nuclear for replacement energy as well as renewables, wind, and solar. But then there's this whole another group of industries and businesses that are interested in nuclear that we've never seen before, which is all of these tech companies, Meta, Microsoft, Google, basically the companies that we would associate with and tech. With all of the advances and the demands that we're expecting to see with AI and advanced computing, they are wanting to set up these obviously large server farms where they can run a lot of their software and AI applications. And those things are very energy intensive, and they need steady, reliable power because they don't wanna have fluctuations in power from the grid, and they want it to be, you know, net zero carbon.

John Zeno (23:36): And they're starting to see it now too. Nuclear is a very strong candidate. If you want steady, reliable, long term power that that's basically net zero to the grid, but yet gives you the ability to operate in a reliable way, Nuclear works. So we're getting a lot of interest. A lot of the companies now are getting interest, you know, from these from from the tech company, the tech world that are really wanting to see what can nuclear do for them.

John Zeno (24:01): Small modular plays nicely with that because they don't have to build this gigantic power plant. They can build a relatively small plant and let it run a couple of server farms wherever they are out in Arizona or something. And it's off the grid. It's by itself. It's stable.

John Zeno (24:15): It's running. They seem to be interested from what I've read. They don't wanna own or operate the plant. They just wanna purchase the energy. Right?

John Zeno (24:23): They want a power purchase agreement. They show up saying we need energy. It needs to be reliable. It needs to be clean. We need to get it on the grid.

John Zeno (24:30): And so there will be opportunities for companies that wanna partner like a reactor company that wants to partner with a utility to say, okay. We'll design it. We'll build it. You operate it, and then we just sell the energy to Microsoft or to Google or to Meta and provide them the electricity they need. So, yeah, it's opening up a lot of avenues right now that we maybe hadn't seen before.

John Zeno (24:52): So I think for that and other reasons, it's an exciting time.

John Zeno (24:56): For a long time, nuclear served utilities. That was the model. But now, there's a new customer. Tech companies, data centers, AI infrastructure, chemical refineries, clean steel manufacturing. And they don't just want any old type of power.

John Zeno (25:14): They want power that is constant, reliable, and carbon free. You're running large scale computing systems that need constant power, so you don't get to have downtime. And that's where nuclear starts to look like exactly what they need.

John Zeno (25:30): And I think this is where light water SMRs, whether they're BWR or PWR, have a decided advantage because we've got legacy history with the regulators in The US and in other countries like Japan and Europe. So it's it's a VWR. It's just smaller. And so they're familiar with the technology. They've licensed this technology before.

John Zeno (25:50): They're familiar with the fuel. They're familiar with how the plant runs. It will likely be a little more of a challenge for folks that are trying to introduce newer technologies that regulators have not seen before. Like, say, a molten salt or a sodium reactor or a high temperature reactor. These nonwater reactors that are also SMRs, but the regulators aren't as familiar with those.

John Zeno (26:12): At least the commercial civilian nuclear, NRC, and commercial regulators in other countries are not as familiar with those. So from our standpoint, our approach is just like we would approach it for any other BWR. But I think that does give us a decided advantage because the regulatory bodies are familiar with this technology. It's just a smaller version of it. And so we hope that does help expedite some of the licensing trajectory for this.

John Zeno (26:36): We don't have to necessarily deal with as many issues as, let's say, somebody that's trying to introduce a newer technology that the regulator may not be familiar with on top of a new fuel type that the regulator may not be familiar with. Right? So we think that's an advantage for sure. When you look at the simplicity of these small modular reactors, the passive inherent safety systems, the failure mechanisms, the failure modes are significantly reduced because there's just a lot less that can go wrong because it's there's just not as much stuff in there. And so the failure probabilities, the thing we calculate, the the core damage frequency is quite a bit lower.

John Zeno (27:13): Orders of magnitude lower than historical plants that need active shutdown cooling or active cooling during operation and active shutdown cooling. So I don't know that there's necessarily been any significant issues that have been introduced with these SMRs. Hopefully, the goal was to eliminate a lot of the concerns that we used to have to worry about now have sort of been addressed with a passive feature and don't require operator engagement or operator interaction. And certainly the questions like the ones you mentioned, they had really good questions about, well, will it generate more used nuclear fuel? You know, certainly, there's always gonna be questions like that that come up.

John Zeno (27:52): But, yeah, I I think the general public is starting to warm up very much so to the concepts and the ideas. They just wanna know what's different and why is it better, safer, cheaper, you know, and what benefits can we see from that? Yeah. Well, with the older units, because they are much larger with a lot more fuel, they do require active cooling after shutdown. Right?

John Zeno (28:15): The core half you have to continue to run active cooling systems. You can't just turn it off and walk away. It has to you have to have shutdown. While not a big risk, it is important because the fuel there's still enough residual heat in the fuel that if you lost shutdown cooling or you had an event where you lost water inventory, you could damage the fuel. It could happen because there's enough residual heat in there, especially right after shutdown to where that could be the case.

John Zeno (28:40): For some of the more modular and passive systems that don't require active pumping or active cooling, you can just let it naturally cool itself through natural circulation as long as you maintain water inventory. You have to make sure you maintain enough water inventory in the plant. A lot of the designs today have long term capability to run a week or longer without needing to replenish the water supply. Because you will steam off a little bit of the inventory even with natural circulation. So you just have to make sure you don't lose your water inventory.

John Zeno (29:12): In terms of cooling, it just cools itself. From a simplicity standpoint and a safety standpoint, that certainly has some advantages. I know that just in sort of seeing and reading that that the expectation is that they will run at least with a forty year license to start. Most plants will seek a renewal after thirty or forty years, and maybe they get a ten or twenty year renewal. Like you said, there are existing power plants out there that are even beyond that, that are continuing to run.

John Zeno (29:41): But yeah, I don't know that we necessarily see a significant difference. I think from a lifespan or a life cycle perspective, I could certainly see them operating forty, fifty, sixty years comparable to what the larger install fleet is doing in that sense. So, yeah, two things there. One is on most nuclear sites in The US were cited and planned for more units than are currently installed. So most like, and I can just think of, let's just stay up the road here in Raleigh.

John Zeno (30:12): So I will say, so there's a couple of char categories here. So one would be students that are interested in engineering as a as a field, as a profession. And certainly nuclear is one. Although it it surprises people when I tell them we actually hire more mechanical engineers than we do nuclear because there's so much mechanical engineering work that needs to be done. These are big.

John Zeno (30:33): These are power plants that needs design and support. So anybody that works in sort of a power conversion or power systems degree, usually mechanical or nuclear, would be a good candidate for roles in this industry. And I think there's gonna be so many opportunities in the future for folks with that interest. The other one would be, you don't have to have a four year degree. There is gonna be a tremendous amount of work for folks that work in sort of the maintenance and technician roles let's say, a two year degree.

John Zeno (31:04): I actually did some teaching at Cape Fear Community College for their nuclear technology program, and we're starting to see a resurgence in enrollment in the nuclear technology, the two year degree programs. The last class I taught at Cape Fear Community College, I had two students in it, and that was in 2019. Today, the enrollment is skyrocketing because there's gonna be this need for significant workforce that can do maintenance and outage and refueling and inspections for all these new reactors. So I think whether you're looking at a four year degree or even a even a graduate degree or or just looking at a two year degree of study, There's plenty of opportunities in both directions, in both areas. We're gonna need it.

John Zeno (31:50): We're gonna need the support and and the expertise across the board. So you don't have to get a PhD to be useful in this industry. You really don't. There's a lot of great jobs out there that are gonna be available to folks. And so, yeah, it's exciting.

John Zeno (32:03): It's exciting to see. And the enrollments as an example, NC State's student and undergraduate enrollment is, I've never seen it this high. It's just hard to believe the number of students that are now migrating toward nuclear engineering. I easily see the next forty to fifty years having a tremendous path in front of people that wanna go in this industry. Just in the next twenty years, just the build out alone of the next gen advanced nuclear plants, all these new SMRs getting on the grid, that alone, just getting the units on the grid is gonna be a colossal amount of work.

John Zeno (32:41): Once they're on the grid and running, now you've got all these plants that need maintenance, that need refueling, that need outages, that need inspections. You're talking about fuels and services work for decades and decades and decades well into the twenty first century and maybe even into the twenty second century. So, yeah, I think from a career standpoint, we're right at the edge of the wave. We're at we're at the edge of the tsunami right now, and the wave is just getting bigger. So it's gonna go for a long time.

John Zeno (33:09): So I think there's a lot of longevity in this for sure. And and as we see energy demand continuing to increase, the the analogy I give my students is just imagine every automobile in The United States being an electric vehicle and needing to be charged every night at your house. Think about the all the other electric demand. Just think about that electric demand by itself is almost incomprehensible. If every combustion engine vehicle turns into an EV, all the electricity that's gonna be needed to charge those EVs, not even thinking about AI and machine learning and server farms.

John Zeno (33:48): And I mean, just that alone is astonishing to think about. Right? So, yeah, I don't think there's any real concern. There's gonna be more than enough runway for for many, many decades. Historically, the commercial civilian US nuclear industry employs 65 to 70,000 people a year.

John Zeno (34:09): The projections are that we're gonna be upwards of a half a million people, in the next fifteen to twenty years. It's literally gonna quadruple, if not more. You're talking hundreds of thousands of jobs that don't even exist today that are gonna be needing to be filled. One thing I will say that I've noticed in the last four or five years that I never saw in my career, four decades in the industry almost, is there is an a very interesting entrepreneurial sense in this industry right now, which I have never seen before. New companies are springing up, new ideas, new technologies, lots of venture capital investments, billions of dollars of cash coming into this industry because people want to invest in it.

John Zeno (34:50): That has not been the case for decades and decades and decades. We were a very flat, very steady as she goes industry, not much change, just delivering carbon free energy to the grid. A lot of people, quite frankly, didn't weren't even aware that we had this many nuclear plants, but it has become very much entrepreneurial in its demeanor and its perception. And we're getting a lot of people interested in wanting to invest in this technology who would have never been interested, you know, ten years ago. So that's also a really fascinating element of what I'm seeing today, which I think is exciting to young people because they wanna work, You know, we all can't work for SpaceX.

John Zeno (35:33): We all can't work for Tesla, but people wanna work in an entrepreneurial environment where things are cool and new and interesting and growing, and you can create and develop new things. And we are in that mode right now in this industry, and it's attracting a lot of attention from investors and venture capitalists and students who wanna work on really cool stuff that is really cutting edge and advanced technology. So I think the future is brighter than I've ever seen it in my career. I joke with my wife. I'm like, sure.

John Zeno (36:02): Now the industry gets really cool and interesting as I'm getting ready to retire. Great. Thanks. At the end of my career, I can continue to help motivate and, you know, encourage the next generation. So that's okay.

Unknown Speaker (36:12): That's a good role to go.

John Zeno (36:15): So the question is, how do we meet the moment? If you look from nuclear from the outside, it's easy to just focus on the reactors, the design, the technology, the scale. But when you start to spend time inside the industry, you start to notice something else. People who understand it and can explain it. People who've worked in the Navy, in the DOE, in commercial, and in schools.

John Zeno (36:40): Those people are just as important as the technology itself because none of this works without someone to connect the dots for the next generation. Thank you so much to doctor John Zeno for taking his time to explain a little bit more about the BWR X 300 and the nuclear industry, as well as the GE Vernova Hitachi team with John Allen for helping make this episode possible. Thank you for listening to this episode of Naked Nuclear, where all season, we're stripping down how do we actually build a nuclear power plant and the reactors that go inside. If you like this episode, feel free to like and subscribe, as well as share it with a friend. And if you're a teacher or educator, thank you.

John Zeno (37:24): Thank you for helping teach the next generation of our workforce. I'm Danielle Allen. This is Naked Nuclear. And until next time, stay curious.