An agreement has been concluded to renew the Generation IV International Forum, which aims to build on its first 25 years of sharing research and development on innovative nuclear reactor designs, as William D Magwood IV, Director-General of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, explains.
The Generation IV International Forum dates back to January 2000 and is a grouping of countries that cooperate on research and development on next-generation nuclear energy systems, with the aim of making fourth generation nuclear available for deployment by 2030. The original agreement expires at the end of February 2025, and members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Japan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, the UK, the USA and Euratom (the European Atomic Energy Community).
Russia is not included in the new framework agreement, but most, if not all, of the other signatories are expected to continue for the second phase of the Generation IV International Forum, for which the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency provides the secretariat. The USA, UK, Canada, France, Japan and Switzerland have so far signed up to the second phase.
Here’s an edited transcript of the interview about what the forum has achieved so far and what its hopes for the future are:
How did the Generation IV International Forum come about?
The very first meeting of what became the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) took place in January 2000, in the middle of a blizzard in Washington, DC. We had been engaging in research and development in the US on a wide range of technologies and we wondered what other countries were doing. So we invited everyone who was interested to come to Washington to talk about what they were doing and to see where the common issues were. We had countries like Canada, the UK, France, Japan, South Korea and others who talked about what they were doing. The commonalities were very apparent and everyone left that meeting saying there’s no reason for all of us to be doing exactly the same research, so let’s find a way to collaborate – and about a year later we formally created the Generation IV International Forum.
How have you balanced national interests and the gains from collaboration?
Well, when GIF was formed, the research was being done exclusively by government ministries and laboratories so there was a much more straightforward collaboration between like-minded countries. We in the US had bilateral relationships with France, Japan, South Korea and many other countries so it was really just an expansion of that type of cooperation that takes place on a regular basis. But it was the first time that anyone had tried to do this on such a grand scale with so many countries working together. It was challenging to create the original treaty in the first place, but we were successful in doing it and it’s really pretty gratifying to think that all these years later the GIF is still going strong.
What do you see as the key achievements so far?
The GIF itself is a big one – the idea that you can have all these countries working together on the same basic set of technologies and collaborating is really an accomplishment of itself. A lot of this is very technical, but there are some really useful functions that have come out of the GIF over the years – there’s a collection of, a kind of encyclopedia, of material issues, that the GIF has put together that’s available to all the GIF members and they share this information. The Generation IV materials handbook provides a very good basis for researchers to draw on as they are looking at different technologies. So the GIF really has worked – I attended a GIF conference a couple of years ago where GIF researchers were presenting papers and there were more than 200 papers at this conference. It shows you the breadth of activities – even I didn’t really realise how much was going on.
Which technologies are part of the forum’s work?
So when the GIF was first formed, we recognised that it was going to take some homework to figure out what technologies we should do together, and we ended up doing, basically, a global solicitation. And we got concepts from basically everywhere. I remember we even actually received a concept from Ed Teller, the famous nuclear scientist (he played a key role in the Manhattan Project) who came up with the idea of building a reactor in a deep borehole, which is an idea which is coming back, so maybe Dr Teller was right. But we took all these concepts and we put them through a very disciplined analysis process where we looked at all the information we had available about each of the concepts and we began to compare those concepts to the criteria that we had set out – we defined Generation IV reactors in terms of safety, proliferation resistance, waste minimisation and economics and when we went through that whole process, in the end we came up with six technologies and those six technologies are the ones that we are still working on today, so I think we did a good job selecting them. One that really is interesting to me is the molten salt reactor – back in 2003 or so, we selected it as a ‘stretch’, something for the very long term future that maybe would never be done. We would use it to drive research, and now, of course, molten salt reactors are a very popular concept. The fast reactor technologies, both sodium and lead-cooled, the high-temperature reactors – all these technologies are really being explored around the world in various forms in various countries.
At-a-glance: GIF’s six Gen IV concepts
Gas-cooled fast reactors; Lead-cooled fast reactors; Molten salt reactors; Sodium-cooled fast reactors; Supercritical-water-cooled reactors and Very high-temperature reactors
Are you expecting to see Gen IV reactors become a reality in the second phase?
It was very clear when we created GIF that it was never to be a mechanism for deploying a technology. It was always a research body and it was always understood that eventually there would have to be a next step to go to demonstration and deployment. And what we’re seeing now is that that’s happening, but it is not happening the way we thought. We originally thought this would be something where governments would collaborate to demonstrate, say, molten salt reactors or high-temperature gas reactors or some other technology. But what is happening is the private sector has taken over and now you have dozens of private sector organisations that are looking at Gen IV technologies. And so the real challenge for the GIF during this new phase is to find ways to get what GIF has learned into the hands of the people who are now trying to deploy these technologies. That’s where a lot of energy is going right now, to get that intellectual property into the hands of the people who are actually building these reactors.
Are things happening more quickly than expected?
GIF was created to prepare for the future and the future is here, it’s happening and it is probably happening a tad earlier than we thought when the forum was created. We probably were thinking 2030s, 2040s, 2050s. But it’s happening in the 2020s and it’s pretty exciting and it’s a good thing that we have this large base of knowledge and understanding of these different technologies.
Is there a specific first deployment you have your eyes on?
Yes, I have felt for a long time that high-temperature gas reactors were going to be very, very important for a wide range of reasons. We have largely solved the tactical issues with building high-temperature gas reactors. The hard part is the fuel and the TRISO fuel. Now, after many years of work, we know how to make that fuel with very high quality, which is the key to success with high-temperature gas reactors. And now you see a range of different technologies and configurations for high-temperature gas reactors and even salt-cooled high-temperature reactors, which aren’t molten salt fuel, but salt coolant, and I think these have huge potential to have an immediate impact on the future of nuclear very, very soon, with different companies developing those technologies today.
How do you think the prospects for Gen IV technology has changed since 2000?
It’s a different future. I think we originally saw governments and government laboratories taking the lead and now you have the private sector doing it, which is very energising and very exciting, because there are so many different ideas and so many different groups out there working. But when you have a dozen countries coming together to work on the technologies – that’s a very straightforward, very traditional, well-understood path. When you have dozens of companies, now competing with each other, it is much more difficult to see how things will develop – it’s a complex future but it’s a future, I think, that has a greater chance for success because the private sector has greater ability to focus the technology on where the needs are, where the customers are, what the purpose will be, whereas I think in the government sector you’re much more focused on the technology itself and not so much on the specific applications. I think the fact that there are now companies that are developing these technologies with specific customers in mind – that makes the chances of success much, much higher. One of the things about the private sector is that once the private sector decides something is worth doing, there are huge resources that can go into completing a project. In the government sector, you have to defend the project year after year after year after year and if something takes 10 years to do, that’s a lot of defending. But the private sector, I think they’ll stick with it, they see the benefits, they see the economics and they want to go forward and if the technology’s a success I think they will be built.
With the signing of the new framework it seems governments remain keen on the forum
Absolutely. We are really excited about this and to see not just the GIF members who have been working all these years, but new countries have been joining along the way, like the UK and Australia. It’s a very exciting time and I’m confident that this provides a good mechanism for the private sector and the public sector to work together to get these technologies done and this new GIF agreement focuses much, much more on working with the private sector because of the way things have evolved. The world has changed since the first agreement – Russia had joined the GIF a few years after it was formed, and obviously with the geopolitical situation, Russia will not be participating in this particular edition of the framework, but that doesn’t reduce the vibrancy of the work that’s going on. There’s really even higher excitement now than there was a few years ago. That’s why all these countries have worked so hard to get this Treaty negotiated. It’s been almost two years they’ve been working on this.
Magwood, third from left, Stéphane Sarrade, GIF chairman, third from right, at the signing ceremony (Image: GIF)
And what are the main priorities?
I think the biggest priority will be to move more information to the private sector. We want to see the private sector succeed in the deployment of these technologies, and figuring out how the work of the GIF can facilitate that is really an active conversation right now, that is going to be a big focus for us going forward. It is also really essential that we also keep in mind that we need to have a new generation of engineers and scientists to design, build and deploy these technologies and that, for a lot of countries, is actually a bigger challenge than the technologies. And so that’s something that we all have to work on to make sure that we’ve got these young people excited about these technologies so that they are going to be there for us when the time comes to build and operate these new technologies.
And the main challenges?
The challenge, like the opportunity, is that working with the public and private sectors can be complicated with IP issues and we have to find ways of negotiating, to get people working together. But we’re seeing a lot of organisations that are planning deployment – it’s not research for research’s sake. These are companies that hope to make money by putting these technologies on the market, and when you talk to many of them, they’re really optimistic that by the end of this decade, by 2030, there will be a significant number of Gen IV technologies that will be actually on the market and available.
What about regulation?
That’s going to be one of the big conversations we’ll be having over the next few years, watching how the regulatory community deals with these new technologies. As I talk to lead regulators around the world, I think they all understand exactly that they cannot look at Gen IV technologies through a Gen II lens. They have to recognise that these are different technologies, that they require a different approach and the frameworks have to adapt to them. There are certainly some countries where there’s a lot of confidence that they have the frameworks in place to deal with these new technologies and there’s others that are less clear. So we’ll have to see how this evolves over time. But my view is that you will see some lead countries deploy these technologies successfully and show how they can be regulated effectively and then others will learn from those examples. That’s often how these things work. So keep your eye on some of these leading projects in different countries and as those are successful it opens the door for not just people in OECD countries, but for people in the global South as well.
And finally, what do you think of the general outlook for nuclear energy?
It’s brighter than it’s probably been in history. Honestly, I used to compare what we’re doing now to the Atoms for Peace days in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the original generation nuclear plants were deployed. But what’s happening now is actually even bigger than that, because in those days there really were only a small select group of very wealthy countries that were looking at nuclear technology. But now we can see it happening all over the world, in South America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. And SMR and Gen IV technologies are likely to make nuclear more accessible to more people, to more countries, to more economies and that is the game-changer, particularly because of the very, very high safety parameters of Gen IV technologies so you can now consider putting nuclear reactors in places that simply wouldn’t have been possible with conventional technologies. So it really opens a vast new landscape for deployment, but also all these new applications – talking about the hyperscalers, about the chemical industry, and hydrogen production – so not just electricity, but many, many applications. There are so many opportunities out there and we now have to see industry make these technologies cost-effective, deployable and do it in reasonable time-frame, and if they can do that, I think there’s a vast market around the world.
