This is our final edition of the Rundown in 2021, but we’ll be back January 7 in the New Year!

Wishing you a happy and safe holiday season!​​​​​

1. 4 big takeaways from COP26

 

Rich Powell shares a few high-level takeaways on COP26, which took place last month in Scotland.

• Nuclear energy is coming back in a big way as a globally favored climate solution.
• India finally came to the table with a long-term, zero-carbon goal of net-zero by 2070.
• More innovation is needed in the U.S. to build on The Energy Act of 2020 to meet global demand.
• China nor Russia sent top leaders to the COP, nor did they increase their commitments, and China increasingly appears to be a global outlier on climate.

What’s clear: Until this year, there had never been a coordinated delegation of conservative U.S. lawmakers attending COP to bring their ideas and solutions to the table. 

2. Energy markets analyst joins ClearPath policy team

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Casey Kelly joins ClearPath as a policy analyst from the International Council on Clean Transportation. She previously worked as an electricity market analyst at TrueLight Energy.

Welcome Casey!

3. NuScale goes public

NuScale announced this week they are becoming a public, standalone company by merging with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

• The new publicly listed NuScale Power Corporation is designing a small modular reactor (SMR), and will list on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “SMR.”
• The combined entity is estimated to be valued at $1.9 billion.

Plug in: This merger creates a first-of-its-kind energy company “poised to power the global energy transition by delivering safe, scalable and reliable carbon-free nuclear power,” according to the announcement.

4. GEIS proposed rulemaking sent to NRC Commission

The NRC staff sent the proposed rule for the advanced reactor Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) to the Commission to vote.

Plug in: The NRC staff estimates that use of the GEIS would reduce the costs of environmental reviews for licensing advanced nuclear reactors by at least 20 percent and potentially up to 45 percent.

Rewind: ClearPath initially sent a white paper to the Commission outlining how an advanced reactor GEIS could support the deployment of advanced nuclear energy.

5. ICYMI

• The smallest element on the periodic table, hydrogen, could unlock some of the biggest energy challenges — electricity grid resilience, energy storage, and industrial decarbonization.
• NIA released a new report, Promoting Efficient NRC Advanced Reactor Licensing Reviews to Enable Rapid Decarbonization, and hosted a webinar to discuss it.