Idaho Senator Dave Lent on nuclear energy

0:00Here we have Idaho is sponsored by First Class Cleaning, Tom Luna and Victor Miller. Welcome to Here We Have Idaho. A local show focused on celebrating Idaho and all it makes Idaho great. Here we have Idaho will highlight important issues and events that impact Idaho's citizens and families. Each week we will visit with those people who are writing Idaho's story and keeping the spirit of Idaho alive and well. Just like our state song says, there's truly one state in this great land of ours where ideals can be realized. The pioneers made it so for you and me, the legacy will always prize. Here are your hosts, Victor Miller and Tom Luna. Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Here We Have Idaho. You're listening to KSPD 94.5 FM 790 AM. On your AM dialed, I'm Victor Miller, one of the co-hosts and Tom Luna is not with us today but he sends a warm hello to all of you and

1:04of course you Senator Lent. And I just gave it away who our guest is today. It's Senator Lent, David Lent who represents District 33 and he's in fourth term. Just so you know he's on the edge, he's the chair of the education committee is on the Agricultural Affairs Committee is on the Judiciary on Rules Committee and he's a national accreditation in radiation protection. He retired from the Idaho National Lab as a nuclear facility training manager. He's on the advanced nuclear task force which was just named by the governor and he's also on the energy caucus in the in the state house. So I bet you can just get an idea of what we're going to be talking about today. First of all, welcome to Here We Have Idaho Senator Dave Lent. And thank you. Victor, it's good to be here and I miss my good friend Tom. Yes, he's a good friend, isn't he? Yes, he and I have known each other for a long time and back when I was on a school board in Idaho Falls, I can remember him coming around as a superintendent and on those bus tours.

2:07Actually, he wasn't on a bus tour then he was just driving but it was like that and he and our superintendent sat down and had a great discussion. That was my first meeting with him. So good man. Yeah. So what we're going to talk about today is nuclear energy. And we're going to try to build the brick for people so that we can understand where we've come from and where we're going. And you recently introduced a concurrent resolution on nuclear fuel reprocessing capabilities. That's going to where that's where we end, but the beginning is on in May of 2025, President Trump issued four executive orders imploring the country to get its act together relative to nuclear energy. Just talk about that background and when you heard that, what was the first thing that came into mind in terms of Idaho getting back in the game and the signal that the federal government was sending? Well, for a long time, we've had this issue in our country that the negative

3:12narrative has run the table. We've allowed people for many, many years in our country to say and do things unchecked that just weren't true about radioactivity, about exposures, about the hazard and all that related to nuclear power and nuclear waste as we call it. So I think as you think about that and my career over about 40 years, I've seen some some starts and some stops and you know, along that way we had three mile island and we had Fukushima and you know, you say, well, go back and look and see what the what the health effects were from three mile island. The nation's worst nuclear accident. Right. And you see that essentially there were no measurable health effects from that. And you have that discussion and people start to become a little more aware of what really the facts are related to this particular type of energy. And that was almost 50 years ago. 50 years ago. So what I really

4:13appreciate about President Trump is this is the leadership we've needed. We've needed someone to step up and say, hey, wait a minute, we are almost 50 years behind the rest of the world. We have let this pass us by and now we're saying, oh man, electricity probably is the new oil. And that's going to run the next generations of our country is electricity. And we need to have a lot more control, a lot more self control our own destiny when it comes to energy rather than be so dependent on foreign countries. We see that right now with what's going on. We have the ability, we have the technology and we just have to step up and do it. So I'm really happy to see that. Well, one of the things that we have in Idaho, which nobody else has, is this lab called the Idaho National Lab. And you were a part of that. You worked there. You know intimately, your expertise couldn't be better timed, honestly relative to this coming to the

5:19four. Tell us about the Idaho National Lab, how it's different and why it's so important to the nuclear renaissance that we hope will happen. Yeah, so I worked on and off at the National Lab for about 40 years. There was a period of time about 10 years when I left the lab and my family was young and my wife and I were adventurous. We wanted to travel the country. So I went chasing big projects and we lived in California for about three years. We lived in South Carolina for about three years. And I went to where these big projects were happening. Then I came back to Idaho and back to the National Lab. The National Lab is an interesting place just to give you a perspective of what it's like. This is really cutting edge first time technology that's developed there. So when we think about the nuclear energy program, nuclear energy was really developed, that technology was really developed at our National Lab. So all of these reactors from the world

6:24are there. And as we fast forward that, even the technology to process the waste, which we'll talk a little bit about, was developed there. My first job there, and I hate to say about 1980, which was a long time ago, was working at a fuel reprocessing facility at the National Lab, where we actually brought spent fuel in and reprocessed it. But what's really, really need about the National Lab a couple of things. One is that they now have just stepped it up. We've been ready and we have all these technologies. And so now we have all this new design of what we call micro reactors and small modular reactors. The big reactors that we've traditionally built for the for so many years are the big and they think they used megawatts as a unit of measure of electricity so the big ones are about a thousand megawatts to 1200 and you can think of a megawatt as one megawatt. In general terms as providing electricity for about 750 homes.

7:31So when you scale that up to a thousand megawatt, you can see that's a lot of people. And it wouldn't take one or two of those and you can power the whole state of Idaho with no problem. I mean that's the size and the potential of these. What is the new trend is really big. The issue with the big ones is they like to run, they just like to run full blast all the time, 100 percent power. So what happens when they refuel, they have to shut them down for one to three months to basically refuel them. The new trend is small modular reactors which are more in the 50 to 60 megawatt range, 65. And you build those in a bank so you have like six, seven or four of them kind of like a pack. And then so you can have one or two of them down all the time and you rotate through that. So you have constant power output 100 percent of the time. That's the real advantage. They're also a lot easier to manipulate on on peak demand. Of course when you're talking about electricity you know that during the day you have a demand and kind of wanes during the nighttime and then during the day.

8:36And the big ones I think that really are big that we're developing at the INL moving very quickly with their called micros. And these are kind of reactors that could sit in a sea land container. And they could be shipped to you know someplace in Alaska that's normally on diesel generator power. I mean these are very versatile. And they're easy. Basically you would just swap out this container. It's almost like a plug and play. And how many megawatts is typically a micro reactor. Yeah they're typically less than five. Okay. But if you even thought about a five megawatt I mean three to four thousand homes. Yeah. And that's that's a fairly fun. Or you can run you can run a small factory. You can run a military installation. Keep them off the grid like our most sensitive assets off the grid. Yep. And they're designed to be intrinsically safe. I mean they're we have come so far in the development of this technology. That's the other thing that it's helpful to have people understand is how the technology and safety has evolved. So the last thing

9:38I would say about the INL is we have a really strong what's called a safety culture which means it's a culture of safety. So safety comes first and foremost. So some of the projects I've been involved we were criticized because we were taking longer to get them to get them done. But I can tell you as a manager as a member of the management team on those projects we refuse to do something or be pushed by schedule if we didn't feel 100% that we were going to do so safely both to protect our people and our environment. Those those are non-negotiables. And just to give set people a sense because some other facts about the lab. There's 17 national labs right in the United States. This is the only one that's focused on nuclear energy. People don't realize the size of it senator. It's 890 square miles. There's a lot of there's a lot of space to develop and to end as you said and the safety element of it. And it also has what was the experimental breeder reactor

10:42which was active from 1964 to 1994. Some of that fuel from from that reactor is actually being now used to test some new new capabilities out there which is very exciting the fact that we've got fuel here in Idaho to start that. And lastly this cyber security the lab is very critical to cyber security here in the United States as well. This is a very special place and gives Idaho distinct advantages. Anything else you'd like to add about the lab itself that you think is special. I think you have also the people in Idaho. They bring their their values to this to this important work and that's an aspect that I think that you can't just credit it as well. Yeah John Wagner is a real treasure national treasure. Yeah and we're lucky to have them as the director. So now let's talk about the next brick as we start to put together what's happening. There was a thing called the bat agreement and that was signed in 1993. Tell people a little bit

11:49historically on why that happened and why that actually may be a competitive advantage now for the state of Idaho when maybe originally people thought oh that might be an impediment but maybe not Senator. Well I think that's a good thing for the state of Idaho but here let me give you the backstory on that. During the Cold War time when the United States was involved with nuclear weapons we developed a lot of our nuclear weapons. A major component to that was done in Iraqi flats which is just outside of Denver there. The waste associated with that. So these are the the clothes the tools the garbage was put into 55 gallon barrels and then brought to Idaho as the nearest you know federal reserve I guess you could call it at the Idaho National Laboratory and in those days again and you have to remember that this is moving you know we're 50 60 years back here as far as technology goes and in those days they started by just digging trenches

12:54and dumping that those metal drums in the in the ground that progressed over time to where they actually had concrete like parking lots that they would set them on in big stacks with a covered building and that worked pretty good but still the metal containers over time will start to break down break down. So what you had what really drove the bad agreement was you had this initial waste that was in 55 gallon steel drums just drums placed in the ground and over time what happened is literally those drums rusted away and now you have that waste that radioactively contaminated waste just setting in the dirt covered up and so the bad agreement really drove the federal government to do something about that from every aspect that needed to be cleaned up that was not a good thing and when we talk about nuclear waste that was nuclear waste that waste part of my responsibility there was to develop the training programs for the people who went in redug that up and then put it

14:01in containers drums and plastic line it came in plastic drums and then other containers that they then ship those that's what we ship to New Mexico and it goes down in the salt mines basically so that's the that's the repository for what we call true waste which is a transherantic waste so that's the radioactive waste and so that really drove that at the same time we did not want to be the long-term repository of spent nuclear fuel now in in the hazard category spent nuclear fuel the way it's handled today is probably the most boring part of the whole thing it you know it's handled under water it comes out it's dry stored in six inch at least I can remember the exact I think six inch thick stainless steel vessels and then that goes in concrete walls from a radiological hazard is point of view this is solid material this is solid material that's been in a reactor core for three years basically at temperature and pressure if

15:03anything was going to happen to it it would have happened so it's pretty stable it's very stable and from a radiological point of view spent fuel is probably the easiest part of the whole nuclear piece right so the bad agreement really regulated all of that and it was very specific about we don't want to be the final repository now we there is a thing called interim storage where that can come here waiting for what we're going what and if you remember right Yucca Mountain was the original designation for final repository right I think the country will get to that the European countries are getting to that now themselves so we just have to catch up but so when we talk about the bad agreement where we're at in this new resolution Senate concurrent resolution 120 talks about let's think in terms of how do we stand on the shoulders of those people who protect this in the past with this structure in place and how do we think in terms of what's the next

16:03version of that what's 2.0 and that's what we're working on now as the Department of Energy looks to these big major growth areas and nuclear that we're going to have to do to catch up we want to make sure that Idaho is well-positioned from making sure that we protect again our non-negotiations roles we protect we protect our people we protect our environment those are that's where we have to start from so interestingly I attended an event and by the way we're speaking with Senator Dave dave lent to represents legislative district 33 is in his fourth term and he's an expert in all things nuclear we're just grateful that he's in the legislature to help guide our policy in nuclear energy here in the in in Idaho as it's um advanced nationally um what's interesting is I was at a presentation you were talking about and the idea at one point is that there would be a central repository for all of the nuclear spent fuel to go um the federal government did not

17:11get its act together in that way so I think if I remember you were saying and maybe you should tell people what's the amount of money you think this federal government is cutting checks to the nuclear sites to keep the fuel where it is I mean just what the magnitude I was shocked by the size of that okay check so so really this goes back to 1983 the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was the way the the government at that time laid out on how we're going to handle the waste that comes out of these power reactors okay and the the principle was that once it comes out in the Department of Energy would take possession of it they would create a long-term storage which it which was Yucca Mountain right and it would go there what's happened with Yucca Mountain stalling is that the fuel that has come out now because they've continued to run they do what's called onsite storage so they put it in these shipment-ready containers and then it's in concrete vaults

18:12and it's located across the country um on the sites on the sites I mean where the nuclear power plants are yeah if you go to a nuclear power plant today you'll see probably next door you'll see a parking lot with these big concrete cylinders setting there they're about 12 feet tall maybe 16 foot tall and maybe that wide and they're around concrete cylinder and that's what's in there it's their spent fuel and and incidentally you can walk right up to these you can touch and make do whatever because the radio activity is really contained inside them so what's the amount of money they're spending to keep it there so essentially that that what that created was a situation where the Department of Energy has to pay essentially rent to these power utilities across the country and that amount per year is approaching a billion dollars a billion dollars rent being paid out because they haven't figured out a way to manage this high level waste and basically that's the government saying we promised something we didn't deliver it you're you're bearing these

19:18incremental costs and we are basically reimbursing you for the cost of keeping this fuel now let's talk about I was at the Oak Low in September of 2025 Oak Low broke ground on a 75 megawatt plant where it's going to generate electricity using HALU which is fuel that was recycled from the experimental breeder reactor that fuel that was the 30 years at that ran and I asked the I asked the CEO of Oak Low at that point I said if you took all that fuel that was sitting at the plants and in Idaho what's like how do we wrap our heads around on how much potential energy that is and his estimate I don't know how he got it but he said it was 1.2 trillion barrels of oil so just talk the potential of that lane of reprocessing fuel because it's at the heart of your Senate concurrent

20:19resolution 120 talk about our potential there and why you think that's the best lane for Idaho. So what we're doing in Idaho right now today is this reactor that run that we call EBR2 experimental breeder reactor number two was a prototype it actually produced I believe 20 megawatts of power and it was built to be intrinsically safe so part of that plant two different times they cranked everything they turned all the dials as high as they would go and they just step back to see if it would automatically shut itself down and it did two times so that technology I think is where we're going to end up eventually. What happened then is that fuel came out and so we have developed right now over at the INL we've developed a process to take that spent fuel and essentially recycle it so what happens in a nuclear fuel is when it burns we talk about enrichment

21:20and essentially that's a concentration of the uranium a concentration level of the uranium in the fuel so typical power plant fuel you know five percent is you know you can pick a number there but it's very very low and what happens when you have a fission process in a nuclear reactor when the uranium atom splits it creates heat and radioactivity just like like a gamma or an x-ray when you go get an x-ray I mean it that's how it stabilizes itself and it creates two new elements in this case a common one or cesium and strontium but but the end result is these what we call daughter products and I apologize for your kind of technical here but the fission product results in these daughter products which tend to slow the efficiency down of the next fission they're called actinites but so what happens then is we can run in a typical nuclear power plant they'll run it but when they pull the fuel out they're still 90 percent of the uranium can be

22:24extracted out of that and recycled so the volume reduction of waste is tremendous so right now at the INL we have developed a new technology that is produces less waste it's more efficient and they're taking this old older EBR2 fuel running it through this process and developing the new fuel for these new reactors that they're using over there so it's it's tremendous and the department of energy is it's leveraging this but to your point their victor when you think about the amount of energy again we talk about electricity as a new oil if we start recycling this think of the potential that we have to create our own energy here and I mean a trillion barrels of oil think of the value of that to our economy right right um the the other interesting thing is that France has been essentially recycling spent nuclear fuel for almost 50 years

23:25where did that technology come from center lent and is there more um more efficient ways of doing that now and is the INL at the center of that as well absolutely so I mentioned my first job was working at this fuel reprocessing plant that technology that we developed used very high concentrations of acid to melt the fuel elements down so in a separation process you ended up with this very caustic waste and the uranium uh urinal nitrate I believe is what it was at that time so I had the opportunity to go to France and that is the technology that the rest of the world uses now for their reprocessing and in France I got to to go over there to their facilities and go to their full blown nuclear fuel reprocessing facility that's very successful uh it's been in place for years the difference is we've developed this new technology called pyro which uses a molten salts and it doesn't use the acid method it uses just heat primarily to separate these out

24:30much more efficient much more effective and uh it's really state of the art and we're doing it right now developing that technology at the INL so let's talk about exactly you're bringing a uh you introduced it last week the Senate concurrent resolution 120 what is the purpose of this what signal are you trying to say in terms of Idaho we want to play federal government private enterprise let's do this go ahead tell tell people what this does I think what it does is number one it brings the attorney general's office the governor's office and the legislature to focus on we're ready and stand ready our doors are open the state of Idaho to move forward in developing this technology and serving however uh we need the department of energy to come to our state and talk about what that means to our state what kind of impacts that will be uh and so that the state can be compensated in in some way for the services that we're providing to the federal

25:34government uh we look very strongly to the jobs other things but there's more to the equation than that that we have to consider so I think it's a signal to the department that we as a state stand ready uh to start this work of what can we do and how can this move forward in Idaho let's talk about uh the the federal government um has also been pretty clear they've they've put out a request for information for a nuclear life cycle innovation campus I think they've just talked uh just talked about another opportunity recently uh were again they they they want to get this done um and I imagine they don't want to cut billion dollar checks to keep fuel in you know off-site and they'd like to use that fuel right for the benefit of the country so just talk about what you ultimately see as the potential for Idaho relative to spent nuclear fuel well I think that uh

26:37there's a couple of things to consider one is they're talking in terms of up to 10,000 jobs related to this so if we talk in terms of that boost to our economy and then really an inner mountain thing so this is just not an eastern Idaho thing we would be relying on all across the state to help us support those kind of things I mean I know of uh companies right here in Boise that are suppliers to the Hanford nuclear facilities over there as well as the INL so it's really a state economy boom so I look forward to this uh I think as we uh think in terms of what does the next view of nuclear energy in our country look like Idaho stands ready and we're at a point now where we can utilize the uniqueness we have in Idaho we have trained expertise we have experience we have a great location for doing this work um and we're ready to do it we just need move forward and just remind people the parties involved are the governor the attorney general

27:42in the bad agreement represents the state you have the Department of Energy Department of Navy and everyone should know the navies all the spent fuel the navy resides in Idaho so it seems like we are the epicenter of of all this we're developing the technology we've got the site we've got the knowledge we've got the capability we have fuel here and we are actually very well positioned to be a part of the nuclear renaissance and boy do we need it because as everyone says if you control AI right uh you control the world and we need a lot of electricity to generate AI so you know we're just really grateful senator that you um your expertise is in here in the legislature and that you brought this concurrent resolution we employ everyone to watch this as it goes through the senate and the house one should it be voted on in the house and the in the senate it could be voted on as early as today uh it's in the 10th order and uh once it's voted on and it's ready to go

28:47on the floor so very good any day will go on and who will carry it on the house side uh probably representative hill perfect yeah who's also part of the advanced nuclear task force representing the house anyway we thank you senator davine for joining us on here we have Idaho and as always say before we sign off god bless the great state of Idaho again thank you senator davine you're welcome my privilege thank you for joining us today on here we have Idaho we hope you enjoyed today's show and we look forward to visiting with you for a half hour each wednesday and friday at 4 p.m. on kspd 790 a.m. and 94.5 fm till next time god bless the great state of Idaho