Please the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Fellow Dr. William Nuttall, Professor of Energy, The Open University, presenting a virtual seminar titled Nuclear Renaissance – Second Addition on Wednesday, January 18, 2023 at 9:30am MT.  

In 2005 Professor Nuttall published the first edition of his book Nuclear Renaissance – Technologies and Policies for the Future of Nuclear Power. The book was well received, but the posited wave of new nuclear investment in Europe and North America largely failed to take hold. While the March 2011 problems at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant in Japan were a clear setback, the renaissance was arguably already in serious difficulty by then. This was largely a consequence of rising costs and investor risk aversion in newly liberalised electricity markets. In the 2020s, however, nuclear new build remains firmly back on the national agenda, in the UK at least. In addition, prospects for future advanced nuclear technologies such as small modular reactors and nuclear fusion energy are attracting ever more commercial interest around the world. Spurred by the awareness of a need for deep decarbonisation and the return of significant concern around energy security the possibility for a new wave of nuclear energy investment is once again attracting serious interest. Professor Nuttall will present key ideas drawn from the entirely rewritten second edition of his book, as published in June 2022. It is well timed for the Nuclear Renaissance – Second Edition.

Today Dr. Nuttall is known as a specialist in energy technology and policy, but his career started in experimental physics. Born in the UK, in 1987 he won a Fulbright Scholarship to MIT from where he graduated with a PhD in Physics in 1993. After a total of 10 years in physics research, in 1997, his career shifted to matters of technology and policy. In 2002 he was founding course director for a new masters at Cambridge University created using resources from the Cambridge-MIT Institute. In 2012 he took up his professorship at The Open University, but he retains close links to Cambridge University as a Fellow of Hughes Hall, a college of the university. He is author, or editor, of ten books and author of more than 90 academic journal articles.