BYRON, Ill. (WGN) — On any given day, 50-80 percent of the electricity produced and used in Illinois comes from nuclear energy. In fact, Illinois is the nation’s largest producer of nuclear power.
With the demand for electricity on the rise, a mix of sources will be needed to meet the nation’s needs, and nuclear power, which is a carbon-free form of energy, is going to play an essential role.
About 80 miles outside of Chicago, along the rolling hills of farmland, is Constellation’s nuclear energy plant in Byron.
Outside, there’s water vapor billowing from giant cooling towers, but it’s what’s happening on the inside that’s even more impressive.
“Nuclear plants are always on, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, independent of the weather, sun, wind, whatever,” said Bryan Hanson, Constellation executive vice president and chief generation officer.
Inside a reactor, neutrons bombard uranium atoms, which then split and give off heat. The process is called fission.
“All that heat then is transported to water to convert that water to steam,” Hanson said.
That steam is piped into a football field-sized room, where it turns two massive turbines. The rotational force of the turbines generates the electricity that flows out of the plant, and ultimately to the grid.
“We make electricity. We sell it on the open market just like if you grow corn, you sell it as a commodity,” Hanson said.
That’s when utility companies like Com-Ed buy it up for their customers.
“If you add it up, over two million homes get their electricity just from this single plant,” Hanson said.
But it’s not just homes that benefit from nuclear-generated power.
“The surge in load growth in certain regions of our country is because of AI and AI data centers. We’ve never seen this kind of growth,” said Gil Quiniones, ComEd chief executive officer.
Quiniones says the demand for electricity is expected to double in the next decade and will require a diverse mix of energy sources to meet the unprecedented demand.
“We have to win the AI race for national defense, national economy, national health. We have to win this war on AI and again, those are thirsty engines for electricity,” Hanson said.
Water plays a critical role when it comes to generating nuclear power, particularly after the uranium fuel is swapped out of the reactors every 18 months.
Submerged 26 feet below the surface, spent fuel, or used uranium, bathes in a cooling pool for five years. Then it’s moved outside and stored in seismic-resistant concrete cannisters.
“They are safe there for at least 100 years,” Hanson. “If you took all the spent nuclear fuel from the whole United States for 50 years of reactor operations, it would fit inside a super Walmart. That’s not big at all.”
Turns out the spent fuel is not all spent — It has about 95 percent of its energy left to be captured. How to harness that potential is the focus of scientists at Argonne National Laboratory.
“We’ve always felt the much better way to manage this used fuel is to recycle the useful constituents that remain in the fuel after it’s discharged from the reactor,” said Hussein Khalil, research program director for the nuclear science and engineering division at Argonne National Laboratory.
Safety is essential when it comes to nuclear reactors.
In the control room at Byron, plant operators, who train on simulators just like airline pilots, monitor for any potential problems.
“Then if you kind of work your way around the left side of the panels, there are safety systems sitting in standby,” Hanson said. “If for whatever reason we had some unfortunate incident and we needed to start a safety system, they would all respond automatically.”
While nuclear energy will help power technology of the future, there is deep history at plants like the one in Byron.
“Illinois has been a host of nuclear energy since 1960, a long time,” Hanson said. “We want to tell the nation, we want to tell our communities, we want to tell the school boards that you are the host to a nuclear plant providing clean energy.”
