Rising demand for electricity, largely to power the artificial intelligence boom, has stirred a resurgence in nuclear energy. Older plants like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania are being brought out of retirement, but there’s also investment in smaller-scale reactors with different designs.

These “modular” structures are, in large part, built in factories and meant to reduce on-site construction, along with costs.

The fresh interest in nuclear generation has also renewed discussion about how to build these facilities ethically, in other words, with an approach that’s sensitive to the needs of the community and the world at large.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Aditi Verma, assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, who co-created an undergraduate course about ethically designing modern nuclear facilities. Verma discussed her effort to train young engineers to transform the industry.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Aditi Verma: If you look around at the nuclear fission and also fusion energy technologies that are being developed, there’s a whole range of different kinds of energy technologies of a whole range of different sizes. It used to be that our nuclear reactors were gigawatt-scale systems that were connected to the grid, quite distant from population centers. But the newer systems that are being designed are meant to be quite smaller and even potentially going to be embedded in the communities to which they’re going to supply energy. And so that really was the motivation for the course: How can we educate and train the next generation of nuclear engineers to design with the use context for these technologies in mind?

Meghan McCarty Carino: So when you talk about ethically designing a nuclear facility, what exactly do you mean? Because we should sort of note here that there are a ton of regulations having to do with safety already. But what is designing “ethically” in this context?

Verma: Yes, that’s a great question. So I don’t mean at all to say that past facilities have not been designed ethically, but what I mean by “ethically” in this context is that it’s going to look a little bit different. It used to be the case for the larger reactors that because they were built so far away from people and communities and had large emergency planning zones around them, very few people were involved in thinking about the emergency planning procedure. So certainly that is the dimension that needs greater public input for the smaller reactors. How should the people who live around them, you know, what do they need to know in the event that something goes wrong? How do you practice for a possible emergency? But that’s not the only element. You might want to have a say in, you know, what are its socioeconomic impacts? What kinds of jobs is it going to create? How can I, as a community member, maybe visit this facility and see what’s going on there? What is its land use, what is its water use? Aesthetically, what does it look like? And so all of these dimensions also should be considered for the design of these smaller reactor systems. Certainly, I would want to have a say in what that facility looked like if it was built around the corner from where I am.

McCarty Carino: So back to the safety issue, how do you ethically design nuclear safety features into a facility like that?

Verma: For the smaller reactors that we are designing now, they’re much simpler. They’re also much safer, but, you know, when you design a complex system, or even a simpler version of a complex system, you know, some form of failure has to be inevitable or designed for, in a way. I think that is another area where it would be very beneficial to seek public input, you know, in terms of understanding what risks, if any, are acceptable to the people who live around these facilities. Certainly, we hope that, you know, accidents will never occur, and we design for that, but in the very low probability event that they do occur, we want the people who might live around these facilities to know how to respond.

McCarty Carino: What about some of the environmental factors? How do you sort of consider those in ethical design?

Verma: Yeah, a big factor, obviously, is land use. If you site a reactor, what are you, you know, potentially displacing from that land? Or how can you integrate that facility into its natural or urban surrounding? So that, you know, that is a big consideration. Another one, of course, is water use. If we need water for cooling for these reactor systems, what is that water potentially being taken away from? Is it disrupting the natural ecosystem in some way? There’s also a lot of talk [inaudible] data centers with reactors, with smaller reactors. And so that, again, you know, we’re talking about not just the water needs for cooling the reactor, but also potentially what cooling you might need for the data center itself. It’s been fascinating in the course to see that those considerations around environmental impact have been at the heart of the discussions that the community members and the students have had here in southeast Michigan.

McCarty Carino: One consideration for ethical design that you have talked about that was kind of surprising to me was increased automation. How might that figure in?

Verma: Yeah, that is a really interesting question. For the smaller reactors that we’re designing now, the small, modular reactors and even the micro-reactors, some of the approaches to operation that are being considered include remote control rooms for the reactors, or control rooms that are, you know, almost entirely or significantly automated, where operational work that would have been done by reactor operators, who typically operate in shifts around the clock, much of that work would be automated. Certainly, it’s possible to do that for these smaller reactors, which are much simpler systems. But I think an interesting question can also be raised about trust in these technologies. Would you feel more comfortable living around, you know, a system that’s almost entirely under autonomous operation, or would you prefer to have a human in the system? And the reason I bring that up is if we look at the big reactor accidents that we’ve had in the past, it can be said certainly that human error contributed to those accidents, but actually it was also improvised human intervention that significantly mitigated the consequences of those accidents. They could have been more serious. And, you know, these decisions are not set in stone, they’re being considered. But I think that is an important consideration, particularly for these smaller reactor designs.

McCarty Carino: So what are you hoping your course, and others maybe like it, could achieve as we see this resurgence of interest in nuclear power?

Verma: You know, the hope, the expectation, really, the hope for most nuclear engineers is that these smaller reactor systems that we are designing will be deployed at scale in the 2030s and maybe into the 2040s. My hope as an instructor, as a teacher, is that our students today and in the coming years are the very people who will be working on the continued design of these technologies and also the development of these facilities. And I hope that what they are learning in the classroom — how to do community-engaged design — I hope that informs their practice in the real world, and I hope it changes how real world reactors are designed. And certainly from what we’ve been hearing from the students over the last two years, they found the course to be very meaningful. I think almost every student team in their final presentations, they tell us that the course has changed how they think about designing, how they think about their roles as engineers and designers, and so I hope, you know, in that small way, it’s already changed how they think about engineering and design.

More on this

At the moment, there aren’t any active small, modular reactors in the U.S. But like Verma mentioned, we could see them go live as soon as 2030.

Holtec International and Hyundai Engineering plan to build two small modular reactors at the Palisades nuclear plant near Lake Michigan and bring them online by 2030. The Palisades plant itself — which has been shut down since 2022 — is on track to come back online this year.