Ketchup and Conversations: Sustainable Energy with Added Equitability

By crunching the numbers, last year Wilber created the Alaska Electric Vehicle Calculator. An online tool accessible via tinyurl akevcalc, users can decide if the economics of an EV car or truck pencil out for any given community. For further research, ACEP has money to deploy electric four-wheelers and snowmachines in Galena and Kotzebue and collect feedback on actual performance.

“We’re doing more research on how EVs would work for Alaskans in their real lives. Do they have the range needed? Do they have any issues in cold weather that we don’t know about yet? And we’re looking at impacts on rural power grids and how to minimize those impacts,” Wilber says. She is also looking for more data to help the Anchorage School District decide whether to electrify its bus fleet, just as ACEP is assisting the city’s Solid Waste Services (SWS) to evaluate EV garbage trucks.

At a conference panel, SWS acting director Kelli Toth described the newest additions to the fleet. “It was just like Christmas when, finally, those two [Peterbilt Model] 520EVs showed up,” Toth said. “We’re finally going to have a like-for-like chassis vehicle that we’re going to be able to compare, to put on the exact same routes.” The trucks launched in March, but integrating other systems like radios kept them off the streets until the end of this month.

As part of a five-year plan running through 2026, SWS has been operating an EV box truck, albeit not on collection routes. ACEP collected data on power consumption versus temperature. “This is an innovative project; no one’s ever done it before in Alaska, as far as large, heavy-duty refuse trucks,” Toth said.

Nuclear Anticipation

The conference convened shortly after the Alaska Legislature adjourned its regular session in Juneau. One bill that passed, HB273, establishes a Green Bank as a subsidiary of the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation. The fund would support loans for energy efficiency improvements in homes and businesses.

“This is just the beginning. There is so much we can get done on the policy front to unleash Alaska’s enormous resource potential,” Dunleavy said. “I’ve got to give credit to the legislature and the state departments. On some of these critical issues they came together, and the result is what we have today.”

The new legislation echoes the inaugural Sustainable Energy Conference, where Dunleavy signed a bill streamlining state regulations for the next wave of nuclear energy technology. At the time, nuclear power was on the verge of coming to Alaska; two years later, it still is.

Gwen Holdmann, ACEP’s founding director and now the associate vice chancellor for research at UAF, calls it a “ketchup bottle problem.” Holdmann says, “You keep shaking the ketchup bottle and saying, ‘It’s almost there. It’s coming out.’ I feel there’s a point at which a lot of activity happens really quickly, and we’re close to the cusp of that.”

Signs of the cusp include the imminent completion of the Alaska Advanced Nuclear Energy Roadmap, a guideline document that began two years ago. Richelle Johnson, lead analyst with the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development, says the roadmap is almost done.

Eielson Air Force Base is still on track to install the state’s first commercial nuclear power plant in 2027. The US Air Force tentatively awarded California-based Oklo the contract to build the 5 MW facility.

The US Department of Defense is leading the design of a similar transportable reactor. Project Pele chose BWX Technologies of Virginia to build it. Jeff Waksman, program manager at the department’s Strategic Capabilities Office, told conference attendees that a final design will be locked in later this year, and the project is on track to receive its full supply of TRISO fuel. The multi-layered pellets of enriched uranium are the key to passively safe reactor designs.

Waksman observed that fear of nuclear energy has been replaced by bipartisan interest. “Almost more dangerous now is people thinking nuclear is too easy,” Waksman said. “We’ve got to make sure we’re really serious about doing it so we don’t create unrealistically high expectations, and then people get disappointed.”

At the first Sustainable Energy Conference, nuclear was the only alternative energy source among the exhibitors. Westinghouse was there, touting its eVinci micro-modular reactor, another rival in the 5 MW range. Two years later, the nuclear energy pioneer is furnishing a factory in Pittsburgh to manufacture heat pipes, the reactor’s key component. Later this year, Westinghouse aims to choose a site for a final assembly facility while continuing mechanical testing. The first customer lined up for eVinci is the Saskatchewan Research Council by 2030.

A smaller reactor aims to reach the market by 2028. Radiant, spinning off a power plant conceived for a SpaceX Mars colony, is holding to the schedule laid out in 2020 when McKinley Capital Management backed the project. Radiant bills its 1 MW module as the first mass-produced nuclear reactor, set for demonstration and testing at Idaho National Lab in 2026.

A few more annual conferences will go by before nuclear power escapes the ketchup bottle and feeds into the Alaska grid. Even so, Dunleavy says, “The conversations over the past week will help move Alaska and the world forward toward solving challenges for our energy needs.”