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In Nuclear Power, Size Matters
PerlJedi writes "Most nations with nuclear power capabilities have been re-assessing the risk/benefit of nuclear power reactors following the Fukushima plant melt down, a newly released study suggests the U.S. should expand its nuclear power production using 'Small Modular Reactors'. 'The reports assessed the economic feasibility [PDF] of classical, gigawatt-scale reactors and the possible new generation of modular reactors. The latter would have a generating capacity of 600 megawatts or less, would be factory-built as modular components, and then shipped to their desired location for assembly.'"
One thing favoring the big plants is that neighbors' opinion about nuclear power, at least in the U.S., often follows a pattern where initially putting one in is very unpopular, but once one is put in, as it brings jobs, seems to be safe, and unlike traditional industry doesn't pollute or produce bad odors, local popularity goes up. In fact when you poll people living near a major nuclear plant about the possibility of putting in a new unit, results are usually quite positive. So from a political perspective at least, that favors putting in a bunch of power generation in the same place: it's not worth going through the trouble of convincing the local population in each place only to generate 600 megawatts there.
For these to work, I think we'd need a more widespread change where the default attitude towards being near a nuclear generating facility is positive or at least neutral. Then you could just scatter then around without much worry.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A friend of mine was interning for a company that did a lot of work with these about 10-11 years ago. He was saying they were the big thing, back then. Lower risk, easy to setup/install, cheap due to mass production. Of course, he was stating they they wouldn't go above 100MW., which is a bit of a difference.
Anyway, I'm surprised it's taken this long for them to see the feasibility in the idea. It really does make a lot of sense.
And Toshiba has been trying to get it's small, modular 4S reactors sited in nowhere Alaska for decades and hasn't been able to do it. Not gonna happen.
The only way for this to work is, as mentioned in TFA, have the US government buy a bunch and test them out. Seems actually a fairly reasonable idea - the military has need of off grid power in odd places, has built in technical and security forces that should allow for safe evaluation of the reactors, has the money to do this. So, if this has been true for at least a decade, what's the problem? Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The point of the actual paper has nothing to do with reactor design. It's that the financing of a 1GW plant creates too much economic risk for utilities. They point out that 70% of utilities with large nuclear plants at some point faced a bond rating downgrade.
A production line with steady production improves costs more than "modularity". That's how France did nuclear power - a lot of plants, built in the 1980s, all the same, with common components. There's a scale issue with how big an object you can move to the site - if the thing will fit on a road or rail car, it can be built and tested in a factory. There's a big discontinuity in delivered price when something gets too big to move and essentially gets built on site. The paper doesn't address that issue when talking about "modularity".
(This is even an issue with wind turbines. The upper limit on size comes from how big an object you can truck to the site. Ocean units can be bigger because they're brought in on barges.)