DENVER — Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and Denver International Airport CEO, Phil Washington, announced Wednesday the airport will purse the viability of a nuclear energy source on its campus.
"Today, we are excited to announce that we will launch an RFP process to pursue and investigate the opportunity to build an SMR, which is a small modular reactor, or a nuclear reactor that we could use to help power the DEN Airport," Mayor Johnston said. "This means a couple of very exciting things that we stand to learn from this study. One is if we find from the study that it's a viable opportunity, we can move forward that would give us a path to have DEN become the greenest airport in the world. That would be the first airport with on site zero emissions. Energy generation."
Mayor Johnston and Washington emphasized they're hoping small modular nuclear reactors are a viable energy source as the airport continues growing, welcoming more and more passengers.
"We're also Colorado's largest economic engine, and that is a responsibility that we take very seriously as we look ahead towards that 100 million annual passengers, and then beyond that to 2045, our 50th anniversary for the airport, we are looking out towards 120 million annual passengers," Washington said.
"Today, DEN and its tenants consume about 40 megawatts of electricity, actually 45 megawatts of electricity," he added. The goal is these potential SMR's provide even more energy.
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"These SMR's could generate anywhere from about 40 megawatts up to almost 400 megawatts of power that would be more than enough to power the entire needs of the airport, plus the ambitious plans for the airport's growth over the decades to come," the mayor added.
However, before SMR's become a reality at the airport, the study on its feasibility will be conducted.
"The study itself will cost about a million dollars, and that is money well spent to learn everything that the mayor just talked about. SMR's can be built in three to five years," Washington said.
He added the study is expected to last anywhere from 6 to 12 months.
Denver7 spoke with professor and director of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Center at the Colorado School of Mines, Thomas Albrecht, about SMR's, what they are and how they work.
"When we think of nuclear reactors, we see those enormous stacks with steam coming out of the top of them, and those are our large reactors, typically more than one gigawatt in power generation, and they are cooled by water, which is why you see the steam coming out of the cooling towers," Professor Albrecht said. "Small Modular Reactors are just that. They're much smaller. Some of them are only, are only in the kilowatt range, or just a few megawatts, and because of that, they have much smaller footprints."
Professor Albrecht told Denver7 these SMR's are typically cooled with molten metals or salts, instead of water and are powered with Uranium.
"Uranium will be the fuel, and the fuel for small modular reactors is a little bit different than current fuel," he said. "It has a higher enrichment level, and that's a challenge that is being met, but it's a challenge that we're going to have to adjust to in the U.S. because of the higher enrichment levels for that fuel. We have to continue to mine and enrich Uranium as the fuel for small modular reactors."
He added he's not surprised the city and airport are exploring nuclear energy as an energy source beyond wind and power.
"It's true that there are other green energy sources, like like solar or wind, but those have very short up times. If it's cloudy, solar is not going to work. If the wind isn't blowing, then wind isn't going to work," he said. "Nuclear is typically online more than 90% of the time and so, so it's very stable and resilient, and you can pick how much power you want."
However, critics, like Patricia Garcia-Nelson with Green Latinos Colorado, say they don't believe nuclear energy is the direction the city and airport should be headed in.
"There isn't anything in the United States that has been built that has shown that all of these things they say are going to happen are actually going to happen. Another concern that environmental advocates have, especially us, is that a lot of these nuclear facilities can possibly already go into the communities that are already impacted," Garcia-Nelson said. "We are not supporting this."
Garcia-Nelson told Denver7 she wishes the city and airport would instead invest more in solar and wind sources instead of turning to nuclear.
Mayor Johnston addressed that point during Wednesday's press conference, saying the city and airport aren't abandoning those power sources, instead, hoping to add the SMR's to its energy portfolio.
"We are going aggressively still at solar options, aggressively still at wind energy, aggressively at geothermal, all of those, we're still pursuing an ambient loop here for downtown, so we are in no way slowing down on all of our other ambitious climate goals around renewable energy," the mayor said.
What the airport will do with the nuclear waste produced by the potential SMR's is also something Garcia-Nelson questioned.
"We've been trying to talk to the government that this is this is unproven and possibly unsafe," she said.
In Denver7's interview with Professor Albrecht, he disagreed with that perspective, saying the discussion surrounding nuclear waste is a policy one, not a technical one.
"The argument is, of course, what do we do with nuclear waste?," he said. "We know what to do with nuclear waste. You can recycle it and minimize the amount that you have to put in deep geologic repositories, or you cannot recycle it and put it in deep geologic repositories. It's not a question of knowing how to deal with the waste. We know that we just don't have a policy in the US that is effectively dealing with civilian nuclear power waste."
Mayor Johnston and Washington said during the press conference the question over what to do with the nuclear waste produced by the potential SMR's is something they hope to answer through the study.
If the study reveals SMR's are feasible on the airports campus, Washington said they'd be underground and would be stackable, too.
In the video player below, you can watch the full press conference.
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