The scientists and engineers at General Atomics think the future of nuclear energy is coming on the back of a flatbed truck.

And the leadership at the San Diego-based company, which has been developing nuclear technologies for more than 60 years, has already spent millions in the expectation that its ambitious plans for the next generation of reactors will actually work.

“We have technology that we think is going to qualitatively change the game,” said Christina Back, vice president of nuclear technologies and materials at General Atomics.

Called the Energy Multiplier Module, or EM² (EM-squared), the concept still in the development stage promises to produce electricity more cheaply, safely and efficiently than the current fleet of nuclear plants across the country.


And it’s designed to produce a reactor that’s so compact that the company’s handout material shows it being transported by tractor-trailer.

But EM² is still a long way from becoming a day-to-day reality in a fast-changing energy landscape.

Just building a prototype, Back said, is at least 10 years away and, “we’re looking at 2030-ish” before a commercial reactor could be up and running using EM² technology.

And there are no guarantees the design will work, although Ted Quinn, a former president of the American Nuclear Society who lives in Dana Point, said of the 30 to 40 independent designs underway in the U.S. today, EM² is among the most promising.


“It has strong merit and deserves attention,” Quinn said. “The technology can work great.”

EM² aims to tackle a number of chronic issues that have long plagued the industry.

Nuclear power plants are big and they’re expensive.

The price tag for two new units at the Vogtle plant in Georgia — the first to be built in the U.S. in 30 years — has grown to $16 billion.


But Back estimates the cost of a plant using EM² technology at $4.6 billion.

Plus, the new design requires half the construction time — an estimated 42 months — of current reactors.

EM² is part of a growing class of nuclear projects called SMRs — small modular reactors that are a fraction of the size of big conventional plants like the San Onofre Generating Station.

Like modular homes, SMRs are built in sections in a factory, with the advantages of being more quickly assembled and then placed virtually anywhere, be it the Mojave Desert or some location far away from population centers or even large bodies of water.


Despite its size, each reactor at a proposed EM² plant would produce electricity at higher power density and at much higher temperatures, boosting thermal efficiency from the 33 percent seen in current reactors to 53 percent.

(Aaron Atencio)

“That’s a huge gain,” Back said.


The design uses tubes made of silicon carbide, or “cladding,” that hold uranium and can withstand the heat coming from the core of the EM² reactor.

“It’s a material that’s like the ceramic in your coffee mug,” Back said. “It doesn’t melt and that means you can go up to much higher temperatures without failing.”

General Atomics calls for each plant to be made up of four modules, each generating 265 megawatts of electricity in a steady mode.

“One module can run by itself but ideally you would have four,” Back said. Together, the four modules would generate a little more than a gigawatt of electricity, about the same output as a typical nuclear plant.


One gigawatt (or, 1,000 megawatts) can power about 800,000 thousand homes.

Unlike light-water reactors, the EM² design uses helium to cool its core and the inert gas flows through the plant’s turbines to make electricity.

The silicon carbide would not interact with water and make hydrogen, something that led to an explosion at the Fukushima nuclear site in Japan in 2011.

“We have a passive, natural convection that would cool if all the electricity failed,” Back said.


As in other nuclear plants, EM² would have multiple redundancies for safety systems and cooling but since the fuel does not melt, the plant does not require a source of electricity to keep the plant safe.

“We’re using new technologies that allow us to make the core much more compact and we would put it underground for added safety,” Back said.

The EM² design actually burns existing nuclear reactor waste as fuel, essentially helping get rid of some of the storage issues plaguing existing plants.

“Since we can re-use the spent fuel from a current reactor or from EM², we can keep burning it and burning it and get to 97 percent less waste,” Back said.


As a result of EM²'s greater efficiency, it uses only one-fifth of the fuel and one-fifth of the radioactive waste to produce the same amount of electricity as a current reactor.

What’s more, the core can run for 30 years without needing to refuel or re-position fuel rods. Current light water reactors need to be refueled every 18 months.

“We’re taking advantage of real changes in science,” Back said.

It all sounds good but can the EM² technology eventually make the leap from experimentation to everyday use?


Quinn, who said he has no financial interest in the design, thinks it may.

“It has a high degree of promise because it’s a design that has a higher safety factor than the current fleet,” Quinn told the Union-Tribune in a telephone interview. “It really is a very good design.”

China has already jumped into developing helium, rather than light water, plants. Using a “pebble-bed” design that’s different than EM², two 105-megawatt reactors that are touted to be immune from meltdown are under construction in the Shandong province.

.Vice president of nuclear technologies and materials at General Atomics Dr. Christina Back poses for a photo at the General Atomics composite lab in La Jolla. So far, General Atomics has spent $40 million on the EM2 project, a type of nuclear reactor which the company claims will revolutionize the nuclear industry by producing greater amounts of electricity in safer and more cost effective ways than current fleet nuclear plants.. (Misael Virgen)


Here in the United States, natural gas may pose an even greater challenge.

Techniques such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have unlocked vast amounts of natural gas in North America and the increased supply has lowered prices.

Utilities are increasingly turning to natural gas-fired power plants to generate electricity, at least in large part, because gas burns much cleaner than coal.

Where does that leave nuclear?


The industry points to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan — which calls for a 32 percent reduction in carbon emissions from hundreds of the nation’s power plants by 2030 — as evidence that the carbon-free features of nuclear power are needed now more than ever.

“You cannot get there if you keep adding more and more fossil (fuels) to the mix,” outgoing American Nuclear Society president Eugene Grecheck said at a conference in San Francisco earlier this year. “So nuclear is necessary.”

And while natural gas prices have remained low for the last seven years, gas futures have a history of peaks and valleys. Prices today are about $2 per million BTU but as recently as 2008, the price was six times higher.

“The purpose of our (nuclear) technology development should be to provide safer designs to the market if and when natural gas becomes much more expensive,” Quinn said.


But nuclear has long faced intense opposition from those who consider it an inherently dangerous source of power and the EM² technology is being developed at a time when nuclear plants are getting shut down in places such as Illinois, Vermont and New York.

The environment for nuclear power in California is even more daunting.

Last month, Pacific Gas & Electric, in conjunction with a host of environmental groups, came up with a plan to close California’s last remaining nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon.

The facility near San Luis Obispo accounts for about 9 percent of California’s power generation. PG&E believes the electricity lost when Diablo Canyon is scheduled to shut down in nine years will be replaced by renewable sources such as solar and wind as well as improvements in energy efficiency and storage.


The Natural Resources Defense Council is one of the environmental groups that signed on to the PG&E proposal.

“For years, some have claimed that we can’t fight climate change without nuclear power, because shutting down nuclear plants would mean burning more fossil fuels to generate replacement electricity,” said Rhea Suh, NRDC president, the day the proposed shutdown was announced. “That’s wrong, of course, and now we have the proof.”

NRDC senior scientist Matthew McKinzie told the Union-Tribune that even though he considered the EM² design “laudable” in its goals to reduce nuclear waste and improve safety, “our perspective is that energy efficiency technologies and renewable technologies have proven to be a faster, more cost-efficient, scale-able, reliable solution to address climate change.”

Back disagrees.


“I’m all for a diversity of (energy) sources — solar and wind, we should use them,” Back said. “I just don’t see how they can possibly take up the fraction of nuclear that is going to be disappearing.”

Critics of nuclear power respond by pointing to the falling costs and rising production numbers for renewable energy, as well as a mandate from the California Public Utilities Commission ordering the state’s big three investor-owned utilities to add 1.3 gigawatts of energy storage to their grids by the end of the decade.

McKinzie said the success of any advanced nuclear technology largely rests on its performance in the prototype stage, which does not come cheaply.

“Safety and performance really have to be addressed by the protoype,” said McKinzie, who holds a doctorate in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Pennsylvania. “When you’re talking on the order of a billion dollars to get to that point, that’s a pretty high hurdle.”


The leadership at General Atomics has invested $40 million so far in the EM² technology.

“We’re a private company,” Back said. “We’re not just a lab working on something because it looks interesting ... We’re trying to solve an issue here.”

The concept also received government support. General Atomics was one of five companies that received a share of a $13 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy in October 2014.

All told, Back said General Atomics has received less than $5 million over the last five years from DOE for research and development for silicon carbide technology, which carries a 20 percent cost burden.


Getting EM² technology through the federal regulatory process is another obstacle.

Licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is slow and geared to licensing light water reactors, which are much more common than helium-cooled facilities like EM².

“I absolutely think it’s worth it,” Back said. “I think it’s important for the country. It’s also important for energy security. But it’s dependent on many things.”