But the imperatives of climate change and development will inevitably require greater supplies of electricity. It is increasingly clear that nuclear power plants must play a consequential role.

Nuclear power is, in many ways, the most promising source of zero-carbon electricity. Unlike solar, wind and water power, electricity from nuclear plants is predictable; generators run when the sun is not shining, the wind is not blowing and water levels are low. Nevertheless, the industry has a dicey reputation, and there are fewer commercial reactors in operation today in the United States than a generation ago. This year could see three commercial reactors decommissioned in the United States — with plans to shut down about 20 more in coming years.

The problem is a misunderstanding of risks. Humans are constantly exposed to radiation — from the sun, from the cosmos, from the very ground we walk on. Even the most fearsome and publicized nuclear reactor accidents have added relatively little to background levels.

After an earthquake and tsunami wiped out the nuclear plant at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, scientists concluded that the trauma of a mass evacuation had caused greater health effects than the radiation release. Within months of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, in the former Soviet Union, approximately 30 operators and firefighters on-site died of acute radiation syndrome, but investigators nearly two decades later found “no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality or in non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.” The alarming near-meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant in 1979 ultimately exposed neighbors to approximately one-sixth the radiation dose they would receive from having a single X-ray.

Of greater concern are the health risks to uranium miners of extended exposure to natural radiation. Their safety should be protected as the industry advances. But the general fear that has stymied nuclear power over the past generation is unreasonable. //

The model to have in mind is not the hulking plants at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island but the small, imminently reliable reactors that have powered the United States’ submarines and aircraft carriers across more than 134 million miles in 50-plus accident-free years of cruising. Nothing more clearly showcases the potential for safe, reliable nuclear power than these 83 floating demonstration projects, in which healthy sailors live in proximity to tireless fission power plants.

Carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases are the environmental challenge of our age. Nuclear power is one tool for ridding ourselves of them — while keeping the lights on.

How does the United States generate electricity currently?

Over the course of 2020, the U.S. generated 4,009 TWh of electricity, with the majority coming from fossil fuels. Natural gas (40.3%) was the biggest source of electricity for the country, accounting for more than nuclear (19.7%) and coal (17.3%) combined.

Including nuclear energy, non-fossil fuels made up 41.9% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020. The biggest sources of renewable electricity in the U.S. were wind (8.4%) and hydro (7.3%).

But on a state-by-state breakdown, we can see just how different the electricity mix is across the country (rounded to the nearest percentage). //

But for the U.S. to reach its ambitious carbon-free goal by 2035, the biggest impact will need to come from the biggest electricity producers.

That title currently goes to Texas, which generated 12% of total U.S. electricity in 2020. Despite being the most populous state, California generated less than half Texas’ output, and less than both Florida and Pennsylvania.

Let me start by dispelling the notion that I think smaller, modular, manufactured nuclear power systems – often called SMRs or micro reactors – are the be all and end all solution to anything, including climate change or energy security.

Though not THE solution, they have the potential to be a crucial, uniquely capable part of a fully-integrated, 0% emission climate-solving grid.

The best of the breed build on lessons from aircraft manufacturing, submarine construction, electric vehicles, wind & solar and even computers. They are leavened with six decades worth of experience in building, operating and maintaining extra large nuclear systems. They address some of the public relations challenges that have plagued very large reactors. //

As former submarine engineer officer who also had the rare opportunity to plan and budget for fleet level nuclear power training, maintenance and construction programs, I have a personal understanding of how economies of series production and standardization work to help keep costs under control and schedules predictable.

It is enlightening to see how much costs fall when you can train a group of operators in a common speciality and send them out to several dozen plants that have identical equipment, spare parts lockers and layouts. It’s also easy to see how maintenance procedures can be written once and used by all and how alterations can be planned, reviewed and implemented. These are just a few of the examples I can list. Rules protecting confidential information prevent me from sharing quantified details. Space prevents me from listing other examples.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has made anything that people learn to do things with experience or that doing the same thing repeatedly produces better results the more often the task is done. Those learning curve-related improvements don’t require mass production of thousands or millions of units, they start improving cost and performance with the second unit. //

The modern renewable industry – wind and solar energy collection systems – demonstrate the utility of replication. Starting from the high cost systems of the early 2000s, the industry took advantage of tax credit and mandates originally designed to help them build markets and achieve scale economies. Their impressive cost reduction performance is more attributable to the economy of learning by doing than it is to technological innovations and new inventions.

Uranium was discovered just over 200 years ago in 1789, and today, it’s among the world’s most important energy minerals.

Throughout history, several events have left their imprints on global uranium production, from the invention of nuclear energy to the stockpiling of weapons during the Cold War.

The above infographic visualizes over 70 years of uranium production by country using data from the Nuclear Energy Agency.

The first commercial nuclear power plant came online in 1956. Before that, uranium production was mainly dedicated to satisfying military requirements.

In the 1940s, most of the world’s uranium came from the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo. During this time, Shinkolobwe and Canada’s Eldorado Mine also supplied uranium for the Manhattan Project and the world’s first atomic bomb. //

Kazakhstan has been the world’s leading uranium producer since 2009. In 2019, Kazakhstan mined more uranium than Canada, Australia, and Namibia combined, making up 42% of global production. It’s also worth noting that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Ukraine—four countries that were formerly part of the USSR—made it into the top 10 list.

Canada was the world’s second-largest producer of uranium despite production cuts at the country’s biggest uranium mines. Australia ranked third with just three uranium-producing mines including Olympic Dam, the world’s largest known uranium deposit.

Nearly 47 years after construction began on the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Northeast Alabama, the Tennessee Valley Authority is giving up its construction permit for America's biggest unfinished nuclear plant and abandoning any plans to complete the twin-reactor facility.

TVA notified the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week that it would not renew its regulatory permit at Bellefonte after a federal court agreed to cancel the proposed sale of the nuclear plant to an investment group that had hoped to complete the two boiling water reactors and operate the nuclear facility.

Former Chattanooga developer Franklin L. Haney, whose Nuclear Development LLC agreed to buy the Bellefonte plant five years ago, was unable to transfer the construction permit from TVA and a federal judge ruled last month that TVA could cancel the sale of Bellefonte to Haney's group.

Giving up the construction permit at Bellefonte signals the end of any new nuclear plant construction at TVA with only seven of the 17 nuclear reactors the utility once planned to build ever completed.

Illinois passed one of the most aggressive clean energy bills in the country on Monday, in a rousing success for environmental advocates that, unusually, also bails out some of the state’s biggest sources of clean power: nuclear energy. //

Importantly—and unusually for a bill cheered by green groups—the bill also contains a huge bailout for the state’s nuclear industry. It earmarks nearly $700 million in subsidies to prevent the closure of the Byron and Dresden Generating Stations, two of six nuclear plants in the state. Doing so will extend their lifelines by another 5 years. Exelon, the plants’ owners and one of the biggest utilities in the country, had set a deadline of Sept. 13—the day the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act was passed—as the day they’d need to start closing Byron without some help from the state. Doing so would have taken one of the biggest nuclear plants in the country offline. A report from nuclear advocates estimates that Illinois’s six nuclear plants currently provide 90% of the state’s clean power. Some analyses have shown that the plants’ closure would spur coal and gas plants to run more frequently to keep the grid operational, in addition to affecting the thousands of workers at the plants. //

The Illinois bill, on the other hand, clearly ties the nuclear bailouts to new provisions for clean jobs and environmental justice. Green groups like Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club have both supported the closure of nuclear plants in the past, and the Sierra Club has spoken out against subsidies for nuclear in Illinois. But both groups have cheered the passage of this new bill.

The success in Illinois doesn’t mean nuclear is suddenly on the table for green groups, however. “Illinois needs to transition away from dirty fossil fuels as quickly as possible to fight the climate crisis,” JC Kibbey, a clean energy advocate for NRDC in Illinois, said in an email. “Longer-term, we will transition away from nuclear because wind and solar provide a cheaper, safer and more reliable source of energy.

Shares of uranium mining companies surged Monday as retail traders from Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum focused their energies on the rallying radioactive metal.

Companies tied to uranium in Australia and the U.K. powered higher Monday, while shares of U.S.-listed companies also rose.

• Fourteen uranium cubes are what remain of Nazi Germany's nuclear arms effort.
• The Nazis had more than 1,000 of these cubes to start, but what happened to most of them remains a mystery.
• Researchers Tim Koeth and Miriam Hiebert have been tracking the history of these cubes. //

On someone's desk, one of the little gray cubes wouldn't raise an eyebrow. To the untrained eye, they look like paperweights.

"Marie Curie's granddaughter has one. She uses it as a doorstop," Miriam Hiebert, a historian and materials scientist, told Insider.

The weight of the 2-inch objects might be surprising, though — each is about 5 pounds. That's because they're made of the heaviest element on Earth: uranium.

The cubes were once part of experimental nuclear reactors the Nazis designed during World War II. As far as researchers know, only 14 cubes remain in the world, out of more than 1,000 used in Nazi Germany's experiments with nuclear weapons. Over 600 were captured and brought back to the US in the 40s. But even after that, what happened to most of the cubes is still unclear. //

Hiebert and Timothy Koeth, a professor of material science and engineering at the University of Maryland, are writing a book about the cubes. After years of research, they told Insider they think they know what happened.

Koeth describes the cubes as "the only living relic" of Nazi Germany's nuclear effort.

"They are the motivation for the entire Manhattan project," he said.

Scientists are excited about an experimental nuclear reactor using thorium as fuel, which is about to begin tests in China. Although this radioactive element has been trialled in reactors before, experts say that China is the first to have a shot at commercializing the technology.

The reactor is unusual in that it has molten salts circulating inside it instead of water. It has the potential to produce nuclear energy that is relatively safe and cheap, while also generating a much smaller amount of very long-lived radioactive waste than conventional reactors.

Construction of the experimental thorium reactor in Wuwei, on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert, was due to be completed by the end of August — with trial runs scheduled for this month, according to the government of Gansu province. //

When China switches on its experimental reactor, it will be the first molten-salt reactor operating since 1969, when US researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee shut theirs down. And it will be the first molten-salt reactor to be fuelled by thorium. Researchers who have collaborated with SINAP say the Chinese design copies that of Oak Ridge, but improves on it by calling on decades of innovation in manufacturing, materials and instrumentation.

Nuclear energy has been quietly powering America with clean, carbon-free electricity for the last 60 years.

It may not be the first thing you think of when you heat or cool your home, but maybe that’s the point.

It’s been so reliable that we sometimes take it for granted.

Did you know about a fifth of the country’s electricity comes from nuclear power each year? //

1. Nuclear power plants produced 790 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2019
   The United States is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power. It generated 790 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020, surpassing coal in annual electricity generation for the first time ever. Commercial nuclear power plants have supplied around 20% of the nation’s electricity each year since 1990.

2. Nuclear power provides 52% of America's clean energy
   Nuclear energy provided 52% of America’s carbon-free electricity in 2020, making it the largest domestic source of clean energy.

Nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases while generating electricity.

They produce power by boiling water to create steam that spins a turbine. The water is heated by a process called fission, which makes heat by splitting apart uranium atoms inside a nuclear reactor core.

3. Nuclear energy is the most reliable energy source in America
   Nuclear power plants operated at full capacity more than 92% of the time in 2020—making it the most reliable energy source in America. That’s about 1.5 to 2 times more reliable as natural gas (57%) and coal (40%) plants, and roughly 2.5 to 3.5 times more reliable than wind (35%) and solar (25%) plants.

Nuclear power plants are designed to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week because they require less maintenance and can operate for longer stretches before refueling (typically every 1.5 or 2 years).

4. Nuclear helps power 28 U.S. states
   There are currently 94 commercial reactors helping to power homes and businesses in 28 U.S. states. Illinois has 11 reactors—the most of any state—and joins South Carolina and New Hampshire in receiving more than 50% of its power from nuclear.

5. Nuclear fuel is extremely dense
   Because of this, the amount of used nuclear fuel is not as big as you think.

All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.

In July, House and Senate appropriators zeroed out funding requested by the Biden administration for the Versatile Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratories, a decision that could have disastrous impacts on America's role as a leader in the next generation of advanced nuclear technologies. The VTR would allow advanced nuclear reactor developers here in the U.S. to test fuels, materials and components for fast neutron reactors for the next 60 years or more.

These new reactor technologies offer a range of important safety, efficiency and economic advantages over large conventional nuclear reactors. They represent a critical pathway to cutting emissions to address climate change, especially in hard to decarbonize sectors of the economy such as steel production and refining. They are critical to assuring that the United States remains a global leader in advanced nuclear technology and nuclear security.

Predictably, opposition to the VTR has been led by entrenched opponents of nuclear energy, who have long attempted to regulate conventional nuclear power into obsolescence and fear that innovation of the sort that many U.S. nuclear startups are presently betting on might give the technology a second life. //

In service of that effort, the author makes all manner of easily falsifiable claims. No, the Natrium Reactor is not capable of having a runaway chain reaction like the one that caused the Chernobyl accident. The basic physics of the reactor core would shut down the fission reaction long before such a chain of events could occur. No, the Natrium Reactor does not require more uranium than a conventional reactor per unit of energy it produces. It uses its fuel much more efficiently.

These and other claims are drawn entirely upon a self-published report based, by the author's own acknowledgment, on his own "qualitative judgments," reviewed only by his employer, and contradicted by an enormous peer-reviewed and refereed literature, much of it based on technical evidence from decades of full-scale tests.

The author's position reflects not a considered position informed by the latest scientific and technological progress but rather a posture toward both environmental challenges and nuclear energy that has hardly evolved since the 1970s, before most people had ever heard of climate change, much less come to terms with the scale of technological change that would be necessary to address it.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/advanced-isnt-always-better

China’s natural experiment in deploying low-carbon energy generation shows that wind and solar are the clear winners. //

2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging

In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years. //

My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly. //

My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.

Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.

A Russian research expedition has rediscovered the location of the container with two damaged reactors from the Soviet navy submarine K-19, dumped in Ambrosimova Bay in 1965. //

17,000 radioactive objects
The two reactors from the K-19 submarine are not the only objects posing a risk to marine environment. In fact, no other places in the world’s oceans have more radioactive and nuclear waste than the Kara Sea.

Reactors from K-11 and K-140, plus the entire submarine K-27 and spent uranium fuel from one of the old reactors of the “Lenin” icebreaker are also dumped in the same sea. //

17,000 radioactive objects
The two reactors from the K-19 submarine are not the only objects posing a risk to marine environment. In fact, no other places in the world’s oceans have more radioactive and nuclear waste than the Kara Sea.

Reactors from K-11 and K-140, plus the entire submarine K-27 and spent uranium fuel from one of the old reactors of the “Lenin” icebreaker are also dumped in the same sea. //

While mentality in Soviet times was «out of sight, out of mind», the Kara Sea seemed logical. Ice-covered most of the year, and no commercial activities. That is changing now with rapidly retreating sea ice, drilling for oil-, and gas, and increased shipping. //

Additional to the reactors, about 17,000 objects were dumped in the Kara Sea in the period from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

Two of Poland’s richest men have signed a deal to build the country’s first nuclear power plant, which they aim to complete by 2027. They see the plans as a necessary step in Poland’s move away from its reliance on coal and towards lower-emission forms of energy. //

The investors plan on setting up between four and six nuclear reactors with a capacity of 300 MW each. The plant would operate “on the basis of the most modern and safest American technologies,” they say. However, SMR-type reactors have not yet been commercialised.

In a tunnel 40 feet beneath the surface of the Greenland ice sheet, a Geiger counter screamed. It was 1964, the height of the Cold War. U.S. soldiers in the tunnel, 800 miles from the North Pole, were dismantling the Army’s first portable nuclear reactor.

Commanding Officer Joseph Franklin grabbed the radiation detector, ordered his men out and did a quick survey before retreating from the reactor.

He had spent about two minutes exposed to a radiation field he estimated at 2,000 rads per hour, enough to make a person ill. When he came home from Greenland, the Army sent Franklin to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. There, he set off a whole body radiation counter designed to assess victims of nuclear accidents. Franklin was radioactive.

The Army called the reactor portable, even at 330 tons, because it was built from pieces that each fit in a C-130 cargo plane. It was powering Camp Century, one of the military’s most unusual bases

Nuclear energy is far safer than its reputation implies. It's also clean and reliable -- yet power plants are being phased out around the world. //

A quick thought experiment. What would the climate change debate look like if all humanity had was fossil fuels and renewables -- and then today an engineering visionary revealed a new invention: nuclear energy. That's the hypothetical posed to me by Dietmar Detering, a German entrepreneur living in New York.

"I'm sure we'd develop the hell out of it," he said, before sighing. "We're looking at a different world right now." //

Detering thinks nuclear energy could be the key to solving the climate crisis. A former member of Germany's Green Party, Detering now spends his spare time as co-chair of the Nuclear New York advocacy group. He's part of a wave of environmentalists campaigning for more nuclear energy.

Though the word evokes images of landscapes pulverized by atomic calamity -- Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima -- proponents like Detering and his colleague Eric Dawson point out that nuclear power produces huge amounts of electricity while emitting next to no carbon.

This separates it from fossil fuels, which are consistent but dirty, and renewables, which are clean but weather dependent. Contrary to their apocalyptic reputation, nuclear power plants are relatively safe. Coal power is estimated to kill around 350 times as many people per terawatt-hour of energy produced, mostly from air pollution, compared to nuclear power. //

But many scientists and experts believe nuclear power is necessary to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. "Anyone seriously interested in preventing dangerous levels of global warming should be advocating nuclear power," wrote James Hansen, a former NASA scientist credited with raising awareness of global warming in the late '80s, in a 2019 column. //

In the public imagination, nuclear power presages disaster. But the numbers tell a different story. Estimates of deaths from nuclear incidents range from less than 10,000 to around 1 million. As you can infer, it's a highly contested number -- but in either case dwarfed by the death toll from fossil fuel pollution. Around 8.7 million premature deaths were caused by fossil fuel pollution in 2018 alone, according to a February Harvard study.

U235 is 5 orders of magnitude more energy than wood, and breeder Thorium had 3 orders more than that!

This is a revisitation of a post that I published in 2011, with the title “The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox“ Here, I am expanding the calculations of the previous post and emphasizing the relevance of the paradox on the availability of energy for planetary civilizations and, in particular on the possibility of developing controlled nuclear fusion. Of course, we can’t prove that nuclear fusion is impossible simply because we have not been invaded by aliens, so far. But these considerations give us a certain feeling on the orders of magnitude involved in the complex relationship between energy use and civilization. Despite the hype, nuclear energy of any kind may remain forever a marginal source of energy.

Post revised and readapted from “The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox” — Published on “Cassandra’s Legacy” in May 2011

https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/10/hubbert-hurdle-revisiting-fermi-paradox.html //

It seems clear that planets are common around stars and, with about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, organic life cannot be that rare. Of course, “organic life” doesn’t mean “intelligent life,” and the latter doesn’t mean “technologically advanced civilization.” But, with so many planets, the galaxy may well be teeming with alien civilizations, some of them technologically as advanced as us, possibly much more.

The next step in this line of reasoning is called the “Fermi Paradox,” said to have been proposed for the first time by the physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s. It goes as, “if aliens exist, why aren’t they here?” Even at speeds slower than light, nothing physical prevents a spaceship from crossing the galaxy from end to end in a million years or even less. Since our galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, intelligent aliens would have had plenty of time to explore and colonize every star in the galaxy. But we don’t see aliens around and that’s the paradox.

Paradoxes are often extremely useful scientific tools. They state that two contrasting beliefs cannot be both true and that’s usually powerful evidence that some of our assumptions are not correct. The Fermi paradox is not so much about whether alien civilizations are common or not, but about the idea that interstellar travel is possible. //

But let’s imagine that an alien civilization, or our own in the future, avoids an irreversible collapse and that it moves to nuclear energy. Let’s assume it can avoid the risk of nuclear annihilation. Can nuclear energy provide enough energy for interstellar travel? There are many technological problems with nuclear energy, but a fundamental one is the availability of nuclear fuel. Without fuel, not even the most advanced spaceship can go anywhere.

The techno-uptopians keep promising us technological solutions to our myriad critical problems that either don’t appear, don’t solve the problem, create many new difficult problems, or keep getting delayed far into the future (fusion-based energy comes to mind). What they never seriously ask us to do is change the way we live. That must be a major reason their “solutions” find such a large audience of ready believers.

Wyoming’s political leadership, while making no bones about their total support for coal, announced that Bill Gates’ advanced nuclear venture, TerraPower, had selected Wyoming and a yet-to-be-determined retiring Rocky Mountain Power coal plant, as the site to build and operate the first sodium-cooled advanced Natrium™ reactor, with matching funding from the DOE’s ARDP program.

The Governor’s plan to test the conversion of coal plants to new nuclear is being supported with a combination of private and federal funding as well as advance work by Wyoming’s legislature, which passed HB 74 with overwhelming bipartisan support, allowing utilities and other power plant owners to replace retiring coal and natural gas electric generation plants with small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). The bill was signed by the Governor immediately and is now House Enrolled Act 60.

Wyoming will see the development of a first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear power plant that validates the design, construction and operational features of the Natrium technology and enables Wyoming, which currently leads the country in coal exports, to get a lead in the form of energy best suited to replace coal—built right at coal plants, potentially around the world. This conversion path not only reuses some of the physical infrastructure at the coal plant but also takes advantage of the skilled people and supporting community that have been operating that plant. //

What makes this announcement truly “game-changing and monumental” in the Governor’s own words, is just how cost-effective and efficient converting a coal plant to advanced nuclear might be. According to the Polish study, retrofitting coal boilers with high-temperature small modular nuclear reactors as a way to decarbonize the plant can lower upfront capital costs by as much as 35% and reduce the levelized cost of electricity by as much as 28% when compared to a greenfield installation.