Kathryn Huff and Neil deGrasse Tyson talk nuclear
A former assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy recently appeared on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk YouTube show to discuss the future of nuclear energy in the United States and abroad.
Kathryn Huff, an ANS member since 2008 who recently returned to academia after her three-year stint with the DOE, is an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign. There she studies nuclear waste recycling strategies and is director of the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles research group.
Her conversation with Tyson centered around changing the public’s negative perception of nuclear energy and the ability of emerging technologies to safely meet our growing environmental and energy needs.
Battling connotation: When posed with the question of how the nuclear energy industry can sever itself from negative connotations brought about by the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, Huff spoke to the importance of bringing safety metrics to greater public awareness. Specifically, she said, nuclear’s death per terawatt-hour is marginally lower than both solar and wind and orders of magnitude lower than fossils, even when including the deaths caused by nuclear disasters.
She went on to say that similar life-cycle analyses can be applied to the total carbon emissions of energy sources. Again, nuclear is among the lowest, by virtue of the immense amount of power fission generates.
Increasing demand: Huff also spoke to how nuclear energy will act as a response to skyrocketing demand for electricity, which is on the horizon. That demand is coming from data centers and increased electrification but also from a “revival of manufacturing that requires not just electricity but heat” in the U.S., she said. Nuclear energy, Huff explained, is uniquely suited among clean energy sources to directly provide heat for the production of steel and other industrial processes.
Go deeper: Huff and Tyson’s full conversation, which covered a wide range of topics—including molten salt reactors, small modular reactors, uranium processing, the future of waste management and recycling, and more—can be found on the StarTalk YouTube channel.