Earlier this year, Energy Central dispatched our annual call for nominations for power professionals leading the way in Innovation, and we're proud to announce the 5 winners and 4 honorable mentions, which you can read about here. This week, we'll be spotlighting each of those winners after conducting interviews to learn more about their great work.
Please help us celebrate Dillon’s and the other champions' successes by reading some of the insights garnered from these exclusive Innovation Champion Interviews.
While nuclear energy has been around for multiple generations of utility professionals, new excitement and opportunity pervades the role for the carbon-free energy source in the years to come. From small modular nuclear to nuclear fusion progress to identifying opportunities for optimization and improvement in safety, efficiency, and waste management, nuclear energy is experiencing something of a renaissance moment. That evolution is taking hold at the utility level in very real ways thanks to the innovative thinking and novel approaches of certain leaders, such as Dillon Allen, Senior Manager of Nuclear Projects and Advanced Nuclear Development at Entergy.
In response to our call for nominations for Innovation Champions on Energy Central, Dillon was identified by peers in the industry for his efforts to develop and deploy advanced nuclear reactors in Entergy’s service area, including a focus on decreasing risks, eliminating roadblocks, and finding additional opportunities for the technology as Entergy pursues their net-zero by 2050 aspirations.
To recognize Dillon as a selected Innovation Champion, keep reading for the exclusive interview conducted with him where the current developments and future opportunities for innovative nuclear development are discussed.
Matt Chester: Congratulations on being selected as one of our Champions of Innovation for 2023! Can you tell us a bit about your role in the utility sector and how you got started in this space?
Dillon Allen: I wanted to be an astronaut and assumed being a pilot in the Navy was a solid bet. They didn’t take pilots with 20/600 vision, however, so I attempted to join the submarine force. A training injury redirected me to Naval Reactors Headquarters, or NR, the Navy’s cradle-to-grave owner of nuclear propulsion. At NR, I participated in the design and construction of USS VIRGINIA (SSN 774) Class and USS GERALD R FORD (CVN 78) Class propulsion plants. As it turns out, Entergy, whose nuclear headquarters is based in my hometown of Jackson, MS, was investigating building some new nuclear units. My nuclear design, construction, testing, and commissioning experience and a penchant for hanging out in Mississippi as much as possible made us the perfect match. I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects at every nuclear unit in our fleet as well as projects outside nuclear across our enterprise.
My current role is four-fold, which keeps life interesting. I manage the commercial relationships with our largest nuclear vendors, manage the logistics efforts for the enterprise in preparation and response to natural disasters or other incidents, serve as the Vice Chair of our company’s Leadership Employee Resource Group to help current and aspiring leaders develop, and last but certainly not least, lead Entergy’s advanced nuclear development efforts.
MC: Your nomination focused on the role you’re playing in advanced nuclear technologies and opening up this technology to solve the myriad of challenges and goals in the power sector. Can you talk a bit about how nuclear generation, which has been around for decades, is now is pushing the innovation boundaries? What shifted to allow innovation to come through and what do those specific innovations look like?
DA: We think of decades as a long time. But humans have been converting resources into usable energy since before written language, see, for example, learning to control fire, so nuclear power is really nascent in our practical utilization of it. We’ve generally figured out how to harness it, but at scale in the power sector, we’ve only done so with a couple of technologies that utilize a single coolant (water) and generally use Uranium as the fissile material.
With those decades of experience, we have learned many lessons, both from the operation of the units but also from the construction of the units. Innovators in the space have looked at the things that constrain the safety case and the economics, then attempted to make designs that are even safer and more affordable to construct, operate, and maintain. The drive for the world to use fewer discretely limited carbon-based resources has sparked capital and government support to allow those innovators to progress their ideas toward commercialization.
MC: When it comes to the next stage of nuclear technologies, such as SMRs and advanced nuclear, are the innovations coming such that they can transform what the end customer expects? Or will they be non-the-wiser, simply using power as they always have?
DA: There are two branches to the tree needed to answer this question, as different customers have very different expectations from us. Though we are typically the first and last company with whom they interact each day, many of our commercial and residential customers don’t think of us often; they flip the switch and expect the lights, air conditioning, refrigeration to just work. For those segments, my goal is to find economic ways to implement the technology, so they can continue using power as they always have, and that power will be reliable and affordable.
Smaller, safer versions of existing light water reactors like Holtec’s SMR-160 (with whom we have an MOA to explore deploying their design), GE-Hitachi BWRX-300, Westinghouse AP300, or NuScale’s VOYGR have nearly no technology risk – we’ve used all these technology building blocks before, just in a different configuration. I believe reactors like these, where the innovation is in manufacturing, construction, operations, and safety, will be fielded and people will just continue flipping the switch.
In addition, our larger commercial and industrial customers increasingly have their own sustainability goals and are demanding clean, carbon-free energy to serve their needs. In some cases, these customers want time-stamped clean power so that they can demonstrate that clean power actually was being used to meet their needs. For these customers, finding new, economic sources of nuclear energy is critical because nuclear energy is available 24x7 and can be an important supplement to renewable resources, which by their nature are available only intermittently. The promise of more dispatchability of advanced nuclear plants further enhances the role that clean nuclear energy can play for these customers.
The second branch involves the potential to utilize nuclear reactors in industrial processes. As I stated earlier, we’ve primarily harnessed nuclear power commercially by fissioning Uranium, making steam from water, and turning a turbine to generate electricity. The end customer has to figure out how to change that electricity back into the form of energy needed (e.g., thermal, kinetic, potential). As the drive to innovate how energy is produced has increased, a number of companies have emerged to investigate other ways to harness fission that we’ve previously explored in R&D and with limited large scale deployments – different coolants, different fuel configurations, and even different fissile materials – to more directly take the energy from fission and apply it in its final form with fewer steps and an efficiency gain of the overall process.
Some of these new designs produce very high temperatures that enable uses beyond electricity (hat tip to Jeremy Shook at EPRI, who introduced me to the concept “Nuclear Beyond Electricity” and blew up my brain with the possibilities). Some offer fuel configurations that eliminate the concept of a meltdown, which has large implications on the need for emergency preparedness and the resulting space taken up by the plant. These designs, like the X-Energy XE-100 being built by Dow or the TerraPower Natrium being pursued in Wyoming have shifted the expectations of many large industrial customers – not their need for 24x7 reliable energy, but the method by which that energy will be delivered. Why turn steam into rotation into electricity back into steam if it’s possible to site a reactor within the footprint of an existing plant and go straight from reactor coolant to the heat needed for much of a plant’s overall energy needs? I think that non-light water designs have spurred innovation in customer expectations that, in turn, will iteratively drive innovation in the entire SMR space to meet these expectations.
MC: In the pursuit of innovation in nuclear generation, can you talk to some of the missteps or challenges that have ended up helping to pave the way for modern success towards new opportunities? How have lessons from the past guided innovation in nuclear today?
DA: New construction nuclear projects have a reputation of significant cost increases and schedule delays, some of which is well earned due to missed risks in planning or construction and regulatory challenges that arise and expand during high burn-rate execution periods, some of which is less well earned due to real successes as well as ineffective communication of known project risk to stakeholders early on leading to improper expectations.
In my Naval nuclear construction experience using modular construction techniques at a reasonably similar scale to SMRs, we were able to deliver the early boats in the VIRGINIA class largely on budget and schedule, even with significant first-of-a-kind technology integration. I am confident the lessons learned both in defense acquisition of nuclear reactors such as modularity and manufacturing specialization at a facility to improve constructability and get nth-of-a-kind performance quickly, as well as lessons from the civilian side of the industry such as regulatory engagement throughout the lifecycle coupled with advancements in engineering and manufacturing tools like 3D modeling, 4D scheduling, and additive manufacturing will yield significant innovation and decrease risk in the final products. I see the reactor developers pairing these technologies together in their planning, and it excites me that they could potentially bring disruptive change to the energy landscape over the remainder of my career.
MC: Can you give a preview of what sort of next steps may be in the pipeline? What will the next several years look like as these technologies shift towards commercial deployment?
DA: The key word is risk. Whether first-of-a-kind technical, manufacturing & construction, regulatory, or commercial, there is no silver bullet design or deal on the market that is without any risk. All of the industry players – developers, utilities, customers, and NGOs – are working toward a solution set that minimizes that risk and equitably shares the remainder among those who benefit. The visual that I imagine is a log jam with a number of crews working to clear it, all cognizant of each other. Once one crew figures out how to break the jam, I expect everyone else will follow a similar path implementing those lessons. I believe that during the next few years, we will see a focus on reducing risk across the spectrum of the asset life cycle so that developers, owners, operators, customers, regulators, and other stakeholders will be comfortable clearing logs in order to let the technology can be willing to kick a log free and let it flow.
MC: Something we want to ask all of our champions: what does innovation mean to you, especially when it comes to the utility sector? And how do you ensure it finds its way into the DNA of your teams rather than just being a buzz word?
DA: You said DNA, so I’ll return serve. I recently read The Innovator’s DNA by Jeff Dyer, Clayton Christensen, and Hal B. Gregersen. The authors have spent way more time studying and are far wmore qualified in describing innovation than I am, regardless of the sector. That noted, I fully identified with their concepts and practices that make for more effective innovation: Questioning, Associating, Observing, Networking, and Experimenting.
Hearing their explanation aligned well with many of the things I do – some better than others – but all are important aspects of innovation. I try to model the following behavior with my teams and most definitely give them a Dillon-intro so they know what to expect. I ask questions about whatever it is I’m working on to really dig for the issues I need to fix.
I try to look around at what’s in front of me, paying attention to the details to improve my situational awareness. Of the five innovation practices, this is my weakest and where I depend on other team members the most.
I participate in things others might see as weird or unrelated to my job so that I meet people and am exposed to concepts I wouldn’t otherwise encounter. I connect the dots between my observations, the unrelated concepts, the people who know way more about something than I do. Humans are great at connecting dots of little, seemingly unrelated information, observations, concepts, and people.
I try to engage with as many people as I can to build a network of diverse conceptual thinkers – other utility professionals, a TV news producer, nuclear physicists, professors, offshore sailors, financiers, outdoorsmen, rocket scientists, oil & gas prospectors, political strategists, a crowned prince’s helicopter pilot, global energy analysts, and even a lawyer here and there are people I’ve met within the last year I can bring immediately to mind. The same approach goes inside my company – participating in enterprise-wide employee resource groups and other opportunities to meet people who think and work on different scope than I do in their day job. When I engage with lots of people, eventually I think “I should get Mr. A and seemingly unrelated Ms. B together to talk about an idea.”
Once I see a crack in the status quo, I try to push past whatever remaining innate fear I have to try something unknown. How’s this going to turn out? I don’t know, but I think it will work and a minor failure is OK so I’m going to try. I am never afraid to at least question the status quo. As Admiral Rickover, father of the nuclear Navy said, “All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom.” So, I attempt to unabashedly question it and refuse to fit a mold. I keep that quote in my email signature to remind me to do so and help people understand what they’re getting into with me. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we’re getting. That thought pains me. I want better for my family, my community, my company, and our world, and that’s going to take some change, which can be uncomfortable for us all. So, we need to get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Read about the other Innovation Selections here: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/energy-central-announces-our-2023-innovation-champions
Check out the full Innovation Special Issue here: https://energycentral.com/topics/tags/special-issue-2023-06-innovation-power-industry