Small Nuclear Reactors Could Efficiently Charge Heavy Duty Electric Trucks

March 24, 2023

by Peter Maloney
APPA News
March 24, 2023

There is “significant” market potential for using small or micro nuclear reactors to charge heavy duty electric vehicles, according to a report by the Idaho National Laboratory.

 The report, A techno-economic analysis of distributed energy resources versus wholesale electricity purchases for fueling decarbonized heavy duty vehicles, used simulation models to analyze 219 hypothetical electric vehicle trucking stations across the United States. The researchers used two options for each station. One used distributed energy resources, including solar, battery storage and small modular reactors. The other used centralized power that would require building transmission lines to tap into the electric grid. The study applied to both electric trucks and hydrogen-based heavy duty vehicles.

The distributed energy resource option considered all three forms of distributed resources together, but gave precedent to the least cost resource to determine the level of investment in each resource. The analysis found that small modular reactors and microreactors would comprise more than 99 percent of total deployed distributed energy capacity. Using distributed energy resources for heavy duty electric vehicle charging also provides benefits by ensuring that charging electric trucks does not overwhelm the grid, the authors said.

For purposes of the study small modular reactors are defined as 60 megawatts in capacity and microreactors can be as small as 10 megawatts.

The study is the first to consider small modular reactors and other distributed energy resources as a competing energy source, the authors said, adding that most similar studies assumed heavy duty electric vehicles would be charged via connections to the grid.

The study projected the deployment and operation of distributed energy heavy duty vehicle charging stations to the year 2040 for fleets of 100 percent electric heavy duty vehicles to fleets that are 60 precent electric and 40 percent hydrogen fueled.

In the models, distributed energy resources were deployed at between 78 percent and 95 percent of all charging stations to meet between 24 and 30 percent of total heavy duty vehicle energy demand. Under the least cost guidelines of the study, the remaining vehicle demand would be met with purchased electricity from the grid.

Investments in distributed energy resources for electric truck charging would reduce annual costs by $647 million to $1.9 billion across all stations, compared with the cost of charging from the grid while individual stations could save $20 million to more than $100 million annually compared with the cost of charging from the grid, the study found.