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US Small-Scale Nuclear Reactor Industry Gains Traction In Missouri
trichard writes with this quote from an AP report:
"Ameren Missouri is vying to be the first utility in the country to seek a construction and operating license for a small-scale nuclear reactor, a technology that's appealing to utilities because of the smaller upfront costs and shorter development lead times. The small reactors, about a fourth or less the capacity of full-size nuclear units, are appealing to the nuclear industry because they could be manufactured at a central plant and shipped around the world. By contrast, building nuclear reactors today is a more cumbersome process that must be done largely on site and takes years."
Do lots of smaller reactors fail at a rate statistically below or at least equal to a single larger reactor that generates the same amount of power?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Anyone have technical details for the reactors?
Leave it to those of us in "flyover country" to actively move society forward, whilst the coastal elites bicker among themselves.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Should be interesting. That place floods over and busts levees every year.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
At "about a fourth or less the capacity of full-size nuclear units", I'm sorry but it's still too large.
It just won't fit in my backyard, even if I try.
For a small town, a small (~220 MW) plant will come very handy. It helps ensure they will be up if the grid goes down, that businesses would have a utility power guarantee, and it also gives clean power without having to deal with a coal or other fossil fuel plant.
I keep seeing these pieces of a puzzle popping up on /. that would solve the core problems our culture faces. A wind turbine to pull water from the air here, small reactors there, isobutane from CO2, better batteries from IBM, and self driving cars. Putting these technologies together, and we have done a lot for the transportation infrastructure. The reactors would give reliable power, which can be used to charge batteries on electric vehicles or make usable fuel for IC engines. Road congestion and even the need for a vehicle (as opposed to just renting one for a trip) would be eased by self driving cars.
I just wish some of these cool potential ideas came into practical use. Self driving cars would allow for a lot of flexibility especially.
As energy availability improves, so do economies.
I have been saying for years they need to build small (Nuclear Carrier) sized power plants and put them inside a huge building and built over a pool with heavily leaded water if there is ever a problem hit the mayday switch and the whole thing drops through the floor into a pool with a cover and the whole thing is contained in a matter of a minute or two at the most. clean efficient and SAFE. And how many time have there been failures of nuclear power plants on ships?
Looks like a new business of nuclear security consultants will boom.
Whats next small private nukes for large land owners?
Hopefully this will be stopped before it becomes a real problem.
Leave it to those of us in "flyover country" to actively move society forward, whilst the coastal elites bicker among themselves.
Just thought you might like to know that the company that is building it for Ameren Missouri is Westinghouse, headquartered in Pennsylvania. As in George Westinghouse's corporation from New York. And they are looking for $452 million of investment funds from the U.S. Department of Energy in order to start this project ... does your state solely fund the DoE?
Also, I might point out to you that recent data shows that in 2005 for every dollar Missouri paid to the federal government you got back $1.32.
whilst the coastal elites bicker among themselves
Could you describe what bickering is happening on the coasts that isn't happening in your own state?
I'm not saying anything bad about Missouri, I applaud this movement as I don't think Wind or Natural Gas or any single solution is going to save us moving forward so I'm happy to watch this piece of the puzzle be experimented with. Just don't go patting yourself on the back too hard or you'll get me started about the massive wind farms in my home state of Minnesota (that were set up by a largely Californian company selling it to almost anyone within cable laying distance).
Energy-wise, none of us are alone and we all share very similar problems.
My work here is dung.
So will this be one of those Toshiba reactors made in Japan with Westinghouse IP? If so it would be shipped by sea and probably up the Mississippi River, then out toward Jackson. I hear they can't "melt down".
Alaska was scheduled to get one in/near Fairbanks IIRC and there were "funding issues", as Alaska is well in favor of nuclear, oil, and everything military and commercial.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/nuclearenergy/english/
JJ
we all know missouri is a failed state full of religious extremists; letting them develop nuclear power is just a first step toward a nuclear weapon. if Missouri continues then the only option the united states is left with is a pre-emptive strike.
Good people go to bed earlier.
have been in use by the U.S. Navy for decades. They've plenty of safety and failure rate data on them, they've got a high safety rating, and they're pretty small. Start mass producing them suckers and they'll be cheap as hell. Start peppering the power grid with them here and there, and soon we'll have clean, virtually unlimited power. Most counties in the country can get by with one, and still have plenty of power to spare which can be sold off to the larger cities that need would more than one.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
"Ameren said the application process could cost $80 million to $100 million and take four years."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
As I understand, this comes after russians started to do the same thing making many people realise that this is actually doable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station
Basically a small reactor on a floating platform that you pull to the shore, connect to a local prepared transformer station and you have power. It makes a very good alternative to constructing power plants in remote regions for example. I believe the suggestion in OP was mirrored by other nations with capability of building naval nuclear reactors.
That's an editorial addition by the submitter - and not part of TFA. And it's not quite right either.
Regardless of the size of the plant, the major machinery is built off-site and shipped to the construction site for installation. What's time consuming and expensive on site (and it's not clear that small reactors escape this) is the labor intensive work of hooking up all the piping, wiring, and ancillary systems for the plant.
What saves time and money in this kind of construction is eliminating building major machinery only on demand, and instead building it at a slow but steady and predictable pace. I.E. if you can negotiate to buy April's production in February of the previous year, you have less capital tied up (and thus pay less interest) than if you had to order your machinery two, three, or four years in advance. Though standardized serial production isn't quite the same as mass production, it has the same benefits to a lesser degree.
I mean seriously, what we're talking about here is literally "the mobile home of nuclear reactors" ;-)
Problem : Private utility companies (and government agencies, honestly) each operating their independent nuclear fiefdoms can bribe, lawyer, and lie their way out of running a reactor responsibly. As you may be aware, they are not liable if a catastrophe actually happens, and each reactor is again, unique so unless you are an expert on a particular plant a regulator cannot know if it is ACTUALLY safe. The reactors in Fukishima had numerous containment failures that the party line from General Electric said was impossible (but other engineers showed could happen 20 years ago)
Guess who the Japanese regulators chose to believe?
Well, if the modular reactors are built in such a way that no matter what, the module cannot leak the hot fuel into the environment (by using much lower density reactor cores so they cannot melt through containment), buried in the ground, the modules are located in an unpopulated area, and the factory that makes the modules is watched by government regulators like a hawk...
Just MAYBE nuclear could be a viable option and we wouldn't have any more nasty incidents.
Then again, who am I kidding. How can you engineer something to work for 50+ years, contain metric tons of extremely energetic fission fuel, never break no matter what maintenance steps are skipped, and never fail even in completely unforseeable ways (like a huge wall of water slamming into the plant, or terrorists planting a truck bomb right next to the reactor, etc)
You can't. And, for every dollar of actual economic or health damages, you have a million dollars of psychological damage in the minds of the general public.
This is why when I hear about Fukishima, I asked all the engineering students at my school if they planned to switch majors.
That's true, but let's keep in mind that it won't be the U.S. Navy operating these new reactors. I trust the Navy to run a reactor properly a hell of a lot more than I trust a power company.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
While you're there, discussing new reactor designs. Thanks.
http://akiomatsumura.com/2012/04/682.html
There is no such thing as safety in the low bid construction world.
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
Actually, there's no reason at all someone can't just go in, pull out the fuel, and pass it on. That person will die, rather unpleasantly, shortly thereafter, but that's a small price to pay for kilograms of weapons grade uranium. E.g. "You WILL enter the reactor, remove the fuel, and deposit the fuel in this lead box. In return, we will NOT kill all your descendants." Last I heard, weapons grade uranium sold for about US$10,000 per gram, and you only need a few kg to build an atomic bomb. Please think these things through.
The US Navy keeps armed Guards on their reactors 24x7, AND the reactors are inside active duty naval vessels, all of which makes them a fairly hard target. A civilian reactor would be an easy and soft target, and the high black market value of weapons grade uranium would make it a very tempting target. Nope, civilian reactors need to use non-weapons grade fuel, with Thorium preferable to Uranium.
Incidentally, since the topic has come 'round to US Navy Nuclear Reactors, readers should know about Admiral Hyman Rickover, the 'Father of the Nuclear Navy', who personally built the first US Navy Reactors.
MO earthquakes
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&gs_nf=1&tok=0SB6aB3DK2yfA3N-gB-wgw&cp=20&gs_id=d&xhr=t&q=missouri+earthquakes&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=missouri+earthquakes&aq=0&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=e790b5a8625b1eb2&ion=1
MO tornadoes
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&pwst=1&sa=X&ei=G_yRT9qiBMjiggel7tXdDw&ved=0CCUQvwUoAQ&q=missouri+tornadoes&spell=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=e790b5a8625b1eb2&ion=1
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I'll probably get modded down, but this is exactly the scenario the disassembly of PUCHA in the 2005 Energy act allowed.
The vendor doesn't *have* to build the reactor to get the funding or the tax credits, it just has to be proposed. Can we see the design of the reactor, where it is going to be sited etc.
If five are proposed that's a tidy return on the investment of the license fee. Of course more of these will be proposed for funding remember; Obtaining the license would not require Ameren to add the reactors. Which is a similar scenario that led to the depression and the passing of PUCHA, Why provide the funding if they don't *have* to build the utility? But that's what the act allows. Would you seriously pay money for *anything* up front if you weren't guaranteed that you were getting what you chip in for?
Lame Car analogy: Hey Fred lets go halves in a car. Ok Jack here is half the money. Thanks for that money Fred but I've changed my mind.
"The fact that we are speeding so quickly into the whole small modular nuclear reactor is so frightening," Smith said. Of course - but not because these things will ever be built. It's because it's a con. Pro Nuke or Nuke Free, it doesn't matter. This is a scheme to plunder rate and tax payers money into the coffers of the large business,,, again.
I guess bubbles aren't just limited to the tech sector.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Nuclear waste? Nuclear waste. Nuclear waste. Nuclear waste!
Nuclear waste, waste, waste, nuclear. Nuclear! Waste!!!
Nuuccleeearr! Waaaaassstte!!
please stop using pebble bed reactors as supposedly a highly safe reactor only nobody is building them for political reasons! the germans tried now the site is the most one of the most contaminated places on earth and decommissioning cant even begin for hundreds of years. how many times do you think they want to trial that within your own country before you start running out of land. how many times can japan afford to repeat fukushima before theyre confined to some subpar corner of the islands while the premium parts of the country are uninhabitable for many generations.
No matter how much it makes sense, LFTR technology will never be adopted for land use due to nuclear hysteria. Until it has been vetted for 50 years via offshore, seabed nukes. And seabed nukes won't happen until we have a major energy emergency where the Feds have a mandate to force a 'Manhattan' project, overriding all localities in the guise of National Security.