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NuScale Power Awarded $226 Million To Deploy Small Nuclear Reactor Design
New submitter ghack writes "NuScale power, a small nuclear power company in Corvallis Oregon, has won a Department of Energy grant of up to $226 million dollars to enable deployment of their small modular reactor. The units would be factory built in the United States, and their small size enables a number of potential niche applications. NuScale argues that their design includes a number of unique passive safety features: 'NuScale's 45-megawatt reactor, which can be grouped with others to form a utility-scale plant, would sit in a 5 million-gallon pool of water underground. That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency - an issue ... highlighted by Japan's crippled Fukushima plant.' This was the second of two DOE small modular reactor grants; the first was awarded to Babcock and Wilcox, a stalwart in the nuclear industry."
This gets funding, but the LIFTR doesnt? yeah.. seems like a great idea.
Wish i could see the Koch Brothers Faces when they see this news.
There should be one between Corvallis and Oregon.
go wrong
Isn't that what is happening at Fukushima right now?
Fluor and B&W? Not exactly groundbreaking.
This should come out of their IR&D funds.
Any kind of leak and you've suddenly got 5 million gallons of contaminated water.
Of course, this assumes that your containment pool doesn't leak (yea right).
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/senior-fusion-researchers-give-major.html In a major endorsement of the fusion energy research and development program of start-up Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP), a committee of senior fusion researchers, led by a former head of the US fusion program, has concluded that the innovative effort deserves “a much higher level of investment based on their considerable progress to date.” The report concludes that “In the committee’s view [LPP’s] approach to fusion power is worthy of a considerable expansion of effort.”
Living is a horizontal fall
Cheap energy ftw.
Bring out the FUD crowd where they can act like nuclear is the most dangerous thing ever, and bring up "disasters" making it seem like thousands died when in reality it was 2 to 3 people tops. Then the old standard of crying "but Chernobyl!!!!!!". Saying that is like saying a yugo is a fair representation of all cars
Why not use the funds to engineer a safer and even better Thorium based reactor
and what happens if the earth splits and the water drains away?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
How long until this thing goes boom?
Canadian designed CANDU reactors support the thorium fuel cycle, and have a long and excellent safety record.
Ian Ameline
This plant is 45 MW. Assuming 90% capacity factor for nuclear vs. 25% for wind, you'd need a 160 MW wind plant for the same average output. (All of the top dozen wind farms are at least triple that.) Assuming $2M/MW for wind (second source), that's $320M for something equivalent to this $226M nuclear plant. I assume the nuclear plant cost includes waste disposal, although fuel, maintenance, and decommissioning costs would seemingly be lower for wind. For nuclear there is the question of pricing in possible catastrophe.
Sounds like this is just big enough to power a huge data center or corporate campus. So this is probably not a plant for the average citizen, but one to make power cheaper for corporate users. No surprise. It helps Google get cheap power, while we keep paying for coal and gas.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
....what ever happened to these?
China gets one running and... ...then nothing? A few people stopped funding theirs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
5 million gallons of water is approximately the size of one football field x 12 feet deep... or 360' x 160' x 12' ... or if you prefer cubed... about 87.4' cubed of water
And when its not windy you have a 0MW wind farm.
Here's a description without the hype. This has a small containment vessel, only slightly larger than the reactor pressure vessel. It's a vacuum bottle setup - there's normally a vacuum between the pressure vessel and the containment, as insulation. In an emergency, the reactor vents into the containment vacuum, which allows more heat conduction to the outside. The outside water pool is just a big heat sink.
Most containment vessels are much bigger than the reactor vessel. One of the problems with the reactors at Fukushima was that the containment wasn't big enough to contain the overpressure produced in a hydrogen explosion. Presumably there's some justification for the small containment vessel in this new design.
This gets funding, but the LIFTR doesnt? yeah.. seems like a great idea.
I am not an anonymous coward and I approve this message. It seems like despite the citation of this Thing as an 'answer' to anything useful... the lesson of Fukushima was not universally learned after all.
That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency - an issue ... highlighted by Japan's crippled Fukushima plant.'
All this for 45 megawatts?? And in the case of containment failure you have contaminated five million gallons of water.
The solution is to surround nuclear energy with less water, not more. None is best. Such as fissile contained in stable salts that, in case of a reactor breach, merely sit there not reacting to water or air or spreading into the environment until they can be cleaned up and recycled.
The chemistry of LFTR may seem odd and frightening to the proponents of water reactors, but if it takes ~7.5 olympic size swimming pools to thermally stabilize a 45 megawatt reactor, the idea of chaining these to provide utility levels of hundreds of megawatts is, um, just more silly?
Micro-reactors are being suggested as a means to give little communities a little bit of energy with only a little worry. And there is a small community somewhere who hopes to be given one of these. One would look great in your neighborhood. Then another and another. Pretty soon the combined cost and overhead of little things begins to exceed the cost running wires to fewer, bigger (shared) things. But we are committed to little things now. Little things sneak up on you that way.
The most likely scenario is that this 'fortunate' community runs aground on the unforgiving shoals of 45 megawatts, cannot afford to grow even past the point where it can afford to maintain even that. And some day it is all forgotten (except the decommission cost) and CAT disels save the day. By my logic, which I invite everyone to poke holes in, micro-reactors are a trap because an insufficient ratio of watts/person is a trap.
I am completely in favor of micro reactors, but honestly believe that micro-solutions should be scaled-down versions of proven and viable mega-solutions, and not pursued with any vigor until the mega-problem is solved.
In terms of survival this is common sense, it is why some in the medical profession choose to cure diseases rather than individual patients. But there are not enough engineers tackling these 'big' problems.
Be wary of itty-bitty things that could never scale to become a big-things. Build big things that can become itty-bitty. Because molten salt fissile technology is not explosive on any scale, its minimum size is (theoretically) limited to the mass of its physical containment and the cleverness of our engineering. And our resolve to get it done.
___
Obligatory bump to Thorium Alliance and my letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
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Not to mention that we're already running down our aquifers...
Which doesn't matter much because there are huge reserves of water under the ocean.
Not to mention the amount of water we are talking about is really tiny when compared to the amount used even by a small city.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This design is built primarily off site, which should greatly reduce construction costs. In addition, a standard design would reduce O&M as well.
Its modular design allows refueling of a plant while the other continue to operate, which could yield large savings since you could refuel during light load periods and stagger the refueling throughout the year.
Turbine design would be interesting - do you build a turbine for max anticipated load or for installed laid and then upgrade?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
That was a really cool link! They even use Linux (Gnome 2 desktop environment and all) on the computers. I particularly liked "THIS COMPUTER DOES NOT ACCESS INTERNET OR OUTLOOK. THIS COMPUTER DOES CAUSE POWER OUTAGES AND ALARMS."
Please read the following article to find out the real story behind LFTR reactors not being developed.
Ulterior Motives the Energy Solution Ignored Since The only addition to this information is the removal of an important scientist in the 1970's. Enjoy the reading!
Did you know that McMurdo base in Antarctica operated a small (1.2MW) nuclear micro-reactor from 1962-1972? It had a disappointing but uneventful service record -- until it reached sudden end-of-life when cracks were discovered at welds in the pressure vessel. That is why I really said "CAT diesels to the rescue" but forgot to add the context.
To avoid weld vulnerabilities at any stage of life, modern light water reactor designs call for a single-casted pressure vessel of 'nuclear grade steel'. Nuclear Grade Steel is to Steel as Superman is to Man.
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Micro-reactors are being suggested as a means to give little communities a little bit of energy with only a little worry. And there is a small community somewhere who hopes to be given one of these. One would look great in your neighborhood. Then another and another. Pretty soon the combined cost and overhead of little things begins to exceed the cost running wires to fewer, bigger (shared) things. But we are committed to little things now.
We perhaps learned something from behemoth reactors running near the physical limits of the materials used in them? That and the exceptionally impressive results when they do go south?
I've always likened the big ones to the supercharged engines in top-fuel dragsters versus my little 4 cylinder Jeep that is probably going to go well over 200 K miles.
Having raced in my youth, even running a nitromeathane drag motorcycle, I think the high power stuff is awesome. But they do fail more often, and often in quite spectacular manner. And yes, I would be very much in favor of a small plant running in a conservative and over-engineered manner in my area. I would however fight strenuously against a megaplant. All the excuses, all the "That disaster was because of the old (and dangerous reactor that we told you was safe when we built it)" just make the rationale for the megaplants have zero credibility.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why is the Nuclear Industry afraid of commodization? It would allow the Nuclear Industry to win a couple battles in the market place! Or lose to solar your choice!
Wasn't "solved" for the French who actually tried instead of sitting in their armchair and declaring it solved. The Russians are having another go with sodium cooling so let's see how they deal with liquid metal embrittlement at large scales.
The major problem is private corruption of the government for the benefit of a few individuals, which is why getting investigators to deal with that (ie. giving the government more control) DOES fix corruption problems one at a time. A government without such checks and balances is doomed to be little more than a way to funnel money from the economy to the friends, relatives and hangers on of a "President for life".
I know that's opposite to the "small government" propaganda line you seem to think is "obvious", but sometimes what you are told is "obvious" is wishful thinking pushed by an agenda and not obvious at all.
That only applies if you get a second chance and see if what has been figured out actually does the job.
For example you mentioned elsewhere that the metal embrittlement problem had been "solved" in 1977. Well the French had access to that information and the same alloys since then and it didn't seem to be solved for them. They had sodium leaks all over the place even after retubing in the 1980s and 90s. Currently the Russians are giving it a go, maybe they have solved it, but it needs to be started up and run for a bit to be sure.
The above poster has some sort of clue about the subject and will not need a citation, just a reminder. People without a clue who want to know what I'm writing about will need to look up "liquid metal embrittlement" on wikipedia then do quite a bit of reading from there on sodium cooled reactor problems and other uses of liquid metals. It's interesting stuff but you won't get all over the subject in an hour.
We perhaps learned something from behemoth reactors running near the physical limits of the materials used in them? That and the exceptionally impressive results when they do go south?
Here is a good list of nuclear energy lessons learned [1952-2011]. Also have a look at some NRC uptime data for 104 US reactors [2006-2013].
All in all in terms of gigawatt-hours over fatalities nuclear power is the safest 24x7 base load energy source ever devised by humankind.
And yes, I would be very much in favor of a small plant running in a conservative and over-engineered manner in my area. I would however fight strenuously against a megaplant. All the excuses, all the "That disaster was because of the old (and dangerous reactor that we told you was safe when we built it)" just make the rationale for the megaplants have zero credibility.
There is very little in the 'lessons' list that was not known in the days of Weinberg and Wigner. Weinberg even sacrificed his career in 1973 over his publicly expressed safety concerns (putting LFTR research into limbo). The effects of Xenon-135 buildup, which was a contributing factor to Chernobyl, had been discovered in the earliest reactor pile built and had been addressed in US designs. Fukushima was a '19th century fail' because in the 1800s the human race already had the technology to make water-tight compartments to secure precious things such as emergency backup generators. That had no business being in the basement. TEPCO really managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory there.
The Westinghouse AP1000 is a "best of breed" which would make a fine addition to Our Town. If you dispute that fact perhaps this will convince you.
Didn't think so. I thought pasting in Westinghouse's own artistic rendition as background would make these folks seem glad that it was in their back yard, but they're as grumpy as ever. And that pitchfork looks threatening.
But all of the catastrophic fire, meltdown and kaboom scenarios listed involve issues associated with solid nuclear fuels, water, hydrogen gas, graphite and (temperature-hot) zirconium cladding. If a small or even large scale LFTR was built in your area there would be no towering containment building because there is no explosion/steam risk. And it is not layers of applied cooling and containment systems acting in perfect harmony that says so, it is designers' consensus that the chemistry is so. Some clever people from the 50s onward have looked at molten salts and (unlike the water reactor issues which were documented early on) no one seems to have found any serious explody life-threatening oversights. Even the Hastelloy corrosion concerns are issues of cost projection that would affect frequency of replacement, not safety. The fluorine-beryllium chemistry is weird and embodies occupationally hazardous material but it is well within our current understanding and use in industry. Under all conditions imagined thus far the salts would be content to stay in salt form.
In reactors here's hoping that history will favor a reliable deep throated Harley design over some exciting but explody Japanese screamer.
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I am completely in favor of micro reactors, but honestly believe that micro-solutions should be scaled-down versions of proven and viable mega-solutions, and not pursued with any vigor until the mega-problem is solved.
That's the thing, especially in nuclear power things don't necessarily scale up or down well at all. Consider how easily we can 'tune' a nuclear weapon more than an order of magnitude in detonation size merely by controlling the timing of the shaping explosions, minute adjustments in the alignment of the various pieces of the core.
Take your standard 1 GW 'mega' reactor, it's 22 times the size of the proposed one, which is actually a lot bigger than the Kilowatt/signel digit micro reactors I've read about. To compare it to something that's probably closer to home, that's about the same difference in power between a car and a push-type lawnmower. To expand: It's the difference between an engine that needs an elaborate water-cooling solution and one that is perfectly fine being air cooled.
I like the idea of micro-reactors as well, though I think that chaining them up isn't the greatest idea. If you're going to make them that small, best to distribute them so they're also useful for things like providing heating to facilities and industrial processes.
All this for 45 megawatts?? And in the case of containment failure you have contaminated five million gallons of water.
On the scale of things, the thing to realize is that the 7.5 swimming pools isn't actually all that much, and the plant is small enough that you don't need pumps/elaborate cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. As for the contamination - water is actually 'pretty hard' to make radioactive, one of the reasons we like using it in reactors. Plus, what's the most likely cause of a containment failure? The biggest cause I can think of would be a meltdown, which is a lot harder the smaller your power system - it's a surface area vs internal thing, same with animals. Elephants are nearly hairless and have huge ears to help dissipate heat because they're so large, while meerkats have to have fur and huddle at night to stay warm.
I don't read AC A human right
Nuclear Grade Steel is to Steel as Superman is to Man.
Not really. It's good stuff, yes, but mostly it's about using alloys that stand up to radiation better. It's like modern vs ancient Roman concrete - our stuff is stronger, but actually less weather resistant.
So there's no real reason to get a 'nuclear grade steel' knife, because it's about the metal's abilities in context with it's use.
I don't read AC A human right
Nice powerpoint, but I suggest you look up liquid metal embrittlement to understand why those sodium leaks are considered a big deal. If you don't want to look it up then it can be described as high speed stress corrosion cracking with the liquid metal dissolving solid metal at the crack tip. If that doesn't make sense then consider my citation the wikipedia article on liquid metal embrittlement, then you'll understand the problem that was considered difficult to solve in full scale liquid sodium cooled reactors. The French had a lot of trouble with it for a while and had to do a lot of retubing, more than one full replacement of the cooling loop in one experimental reactor. Another poster has put a link to something they say show the French found a way around it but I have not read it yet, I suggest you look at that after you've read the wikipedia page to find out what we have been discussing.
With respect, from that article the stainless steel doesn't seem to be used anywhere near the sodium coolant and sounds like normal high temperature creep cracking in stressed areas so your quote has nothing to do with the liquid metal embrittlement I was discussing. Are you not taking me seriously, skimming too quickly, taking quotes out of context or just ignorant of the subject matter?
While steels are very prone to liquid metal embrittlement (as I've seen with some tensile tests of notched bars with a bit of potassium at the tip of the notch), in the article there's no suggestion that they were anywhere near the liquid metal.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9784044/China-blazes-trail-for-clean-nuclear-power-from-thorium.html
They are pouring loads of cash into Thorium reactors.
Take for example, Titan. They just found such a huge sea of hydrocarbons there, it would last us longer than we could calculate.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/meet-the-kraken-hydrocarbon-seas-spotted-at-titans-north-pole/
Nowadays it is possible to convert this into energy in a very clean way.
All in all in terms of gigawatt-hours over fatalities nuclear power is the safest 24x7 base load energy source ever devised by humankind.
Those bizarre life loss versus Watt hour or statistics are about as specious as we can get.
Allow me to show this with something more familiar to people
It is difficult to find the total orbital miles each shuttle has flown, but the info I could find was 537,114,016 miles for the total fleet, and missing the last shuttle launch. Given that there were 14 fatalities in the program, that works out to an astounding 38,365,287 orbit miles per fatality, probably the safest means of transportation ever - no doubt.
But quite frankly, shuttle astronaut was a rather dangerous occupation.
There were 135 Shuttle flights. 2 total losses with 14 astronauts killed. That tells a different story.
So we probably ought to avoid the statistic game.
Fukushima was a '19th century fail' because in the 1800s the human race already had the technology to make water-tight compartments to secure precious things such as emergency backup generators. That had no business being in the basement. TEPCO really managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory there.
Thank you for proving my argument. I don't give a damn about the failure mechanism, but the fact that bean counters, politicians, managers with no engineering background, and sheer engineering hubris combine to make sure that these things will indeed fail.
I looked up readily availble historical data of the area in which Fukushima was, data gathered by the Japanese for hundreds of years, open source data, freely available to all, and with visible artifacts of ground truth for the cynical among us. That plant was going to fail. The Tsunami that hit it was not among the biggest that ever hit the area, and there were going to be more. Why it was there? I don't know. But it was going to fail.
WestinghouseAP1000NuclearPowerPlant.jpg">this will convince you.
Didn't think so. I thought pasting in Westinghouse's own artistic rendition as background would make these folks seem glad that it was in their back yard, but they're as grumpy as ever. And that pitchfork looks threatening.
Perhaps you need to address that we have been lied to in the past, and just like an abusive husband who is going to clean up his act and never hit his wife again, perhaps there is a reasonable expectation that we are being served up yet another lie
I know that you would like to cast me as one more phobic anti nuc nut. I'm not. We'll either go back to nuc power, or enjoy Dark ages part 2. I do believe that modern designs are much more safe. I do believe that we have progressed much in design.
But consider this. You and those of your ilk, believe that most people are really really stupid. It oozes out of your posts. You know how things are, and if anyone disagrees with you, they are stupid. Not just wrong. Your superiority is unquestionable.
And you come across that way every time you or one of your brethren tries to tell us how awesome it is and how great things are now. You seem to expect people to look at the Fukushima plant blowing up and saying "How do I get a piece of this?"
And respectfully, you and yours are helping to poison the atmosphere as much as any fear of nuc power. People just expect more lies, even if you aren't lying. People expect that in 30 years, when a plant blows up, that you and your's will be saying, "Well sure! That was an antiquated plant design from 2015, Today, we have plants that are really safe!"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
But consider this. You and those of your ilk, believe that most people are really really stupid. It oozes out of your posts. You know how things are, and if anyone disagrees with you, they are stupid. Not just wrong. Your superiority is unquestionable.
I think you are misinterpreting my zeal for the idea as some some arrogant position of moral superiority. I feel personally pressed on the matter of nuclear energy, and I am trying to share the load in a way that it might make a difference.
Do I have some grand Atomic Utopia in mind????
HELL NO.
I just know that people are not going to stop.
And I KNOW that solar and wind will not work, in ways I'm weary of discussing.
Despite what you and I do or say, despite what Bill Gates or Ghandi would do, people will keep burning coal, sucking oil and natural gas out of the ground. Windmills will be built and windmills will fail, money gone. Some in positions of trust will step forward and exaggerate the amount of time we have left before these things run out. Many will believe them. Others will just as absurdly cry that the world ends tomorrow.
There will be novels written -- great novels, every day -- that portray the future as a nice comfortable place, a time when all the big problems have been solved. There will be New York bestsellers that dive into the details of imaginary crimes and brilliant detective work, ten more Harlequin romances and twenty new computer games and game startups showing us that life (as we know it) will just go on. People will eagerly and gratefully lose themselves in these things. All powered by coal and natural gas.
There will be other novels written that describe catastrophic collapse, fierry ruin and mass hysteria, focusing on that dire -- yet somehow comfortable -- moment of despair when all options have been exhausted, people are already hungry, bullets are spent. It is a fixation, this preoccupation with total despair and helplessness. Fear of the unknown and the known is great for business. People will lose themselves in these novels too, play apocalyptic games and imagine themselves as the last ones standing. What else could they do. But like the idyllic portraits, these dark scenarios are also cutting corners.
NO ONE DARES to discuss what the world would be like when we are merely three-quarters or even nine-tenths depleted of fossil fuel. Imagine a time with a few more people than it has today, a time when all gloves are off and nations are at war with one another and the transparent reason is to completely dominate and secure remaining resources. They will be met with terrible resistance by the peoples defending them, and the whole world will be drawn into it, crawling with suicide bombers. The military given one-way missions. Nations that have the power to move aggressively will do so ruthlessly, while they themselves are under siege from terrorism, because from modern technology no border is safe. All traces of the pre-war capitalist economy will be gone. Every nation will exist under a state of military and financial martial law of some sort, though it may be sugar-coated and those Harlequin romances will keep coming, though they will show men and women in battle dress with tanks in the background.
It's like you are driving and find your way into particularly busy interchange where too many things are happening at once. Disaster is close, it is all around you. You cannot stop, you cannot go back, no one is in a position to yield and the only way out is to accelerate suddenly and decisively in some new direction that will distance you from other drivers. By performing some unexpected and brilliant maneuver you are clear and your exit permits the others to thread the mess without incident.
A way out. That is what I perceive safer nuclear energy to be. And all the LFTR folks have done their part. I mean, they have really shined. From early concept [1950] Wigner to Weinberg to ORNL
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On the scale of things, the thing to realize is that the 7.5 swimming pools isn't actually all that much, and the plant is small enough that you don't need pumps/elaborate cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. As for the contamination - water is actually 'pretty hard' to make radioactive, one of the reasons we like using it in reactors. Plus, what's the most likely cause of a containment failure? The biggest cause I can think of would be a meltdown, which is a lot harder the smaller your power system - it's a surface area vs internal thing, same with animals. Elephants are nearly hairless and have huge ears to help dissipate heat because they're so large, while meerkats have to have fur and huddle at night to stay warm.
After a quick soul search I realize that you're right, I probably went off a bit on that five million gallons (NYT article says ten million gallons). It probably never will get contaminated anyway. It shouldn't. It can't. And even if it does there are some great techniques being deployed at Fukushima right now to clean and filter water. But I do glimpse NuScale Power's intent here. They want to over-build the water pool infrastructure for the first unit, then encourage the purchase of additional drop-in 45MW 'thermos bottles' to ramp up the output. With each additional unit the safety margin becomes smaller, and presumably they have a threshold at which they might refuse to add another. If I was convinced this idea would scale globally I might be concerned.
But I'm not concerned. "All this for 45 megawatts??" and probably thermal megawatts to boot. By the time a steam turbine spins, maybe a couple thousand homes or a few hundred homes and a few factories, and you're done. I am sure there are remote critical use facilities and a few wealthy communities who would love one of these and could actually afford one, but I find it hard to imagine these nuclear Easy Bake Ovens as being superior in approach to stringing a reasonable amount of wire to some more distant plant of ~x20 scale.
People are thinking of small nuclear plants as safer and more do-able, and that is OK. Because they are on the way to imagining something like Robert Heinlein's 'Shipstones' that populate his novel Friday, modular forever-batteries that were available to power a wristwatch or a city. And of course it happened that the Shipstone Corporation controlled everything. Or the actual nuclear P238 Shipstone we have created to power Voyager and other deep space missions.
Part of my personal WTF factor is that I am beginning to see the same scale-down and build more and somehow we'll all survive and be all right so-called innovation for conventional nuclear as I see in other energy proposals, such as the building a couple million of these and hundreds of these. Can anyone fault the dream? No, so long as there is time to think of fun things.
I'm convinced we're running out of time. We are at a crossroads right now, because so many people in this country are enjoying this state of modern comfort and do not realize that with every passing year we approach a dangerous precipice. Not the end of all things but the end of easy choices.
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Because we're not going to run out of this stuff. We will
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They want to over-build the water pool infrastructure for the first unit, then encourage the purchase of additional drop-in 45MW 'thermos bottles' to ramp up the output. With each additional unit the safety margin becomes smaller, and presumably they have a threshold at which they might refuse to add another. If I was convinced this idea would scale globally I might be concerned.
It's failure mechanics. You need X water available to cool a failed reactor. Trick is, if you have, say 4 reactors, what are the odds that all 4 will fail catastrophically at the same time? So the formula tends towards 'Ax +y', where A is the number of reactors, x is gallons per reactor, and Y is the emergency threshold. You could have a situation where with 4 reactors 2 could fail catastrophically and you'd still have enough cooling mass.
But I'm not concerned. "All this for 45 megawatts??" and probably thermal megawatts to boot.
Nope, its 45MWe
As for the scaling, I live in Alaska where we have a coal cogeneration plant - I think it'd be nice and pollution limiting if it was nuclear, or at least nuclear supplemented.
As for the stringing more wire - keep in mind my idea of using the waste heat profitably. This isn't currently done much, but with smaller plants it'd be more feasible. On the scaling down side - remember how I compared full size plants to car engines and these small ones to lawnmower ones? The smaller ones are MUCH simpler.
End of easy choices - yep. Also perhaps the end of NIMBY and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).
I don't read AC A human right
Oh yeah, and another thing -
Smaller reactors are faster to build and emplace than the large ones. NIMBYs tying up a small generator installation are costing less money(cost of capital, time) than tying up a big reactor. Not to mention that if you go to install ~25 of these in different locations the BANANAs are going to go nuts and have to split their attention.
Once you have one reactor in place it's known that it's easier to get another. So you have that.
I don't read AC A human right
Move the "and a few papers at the time" out and put it elsewhere. ..." instead of just taking your word that the problem was solved before I even heard about it!
I had the good fortune to work with some people from an experimental reactor that were working on high pressure high temperature pipework remaining life analysis and training people such as myself in the techniques they had developed. They talked a lot about various different reactors, including the liquid sodium cooled ones and the others involving liquid metals as the fuel itself. I also read a few papers at the time on problems with nuclear power station pipework because a lot of it was related to the coal fired power stations I was working on. Some liquid sodium cooling system problem papers came with it and I read those with interest, then some years later did some stuff with liquid potassium in cracks in a University testing lab.
It seemed too much to write above but there it is. That's why I'm going "hang on, what about
Nope, its 45MWe. As for the scaling, I live in Alaska where we have a coal cogeneration plant - I think it'd be nice and pollution limiting if it was nuclear, or at least nuclear supplemented.
Right you are, 160MW thermal 45MW electric, I'm getting too hasty on fact-checking. Still on the small side but perfect for Alaska, especially if your city or town is already piped for steam heating.
NuScale is projecting less than $5,000 cost per KW for these which is comparable to a recent utility sized 2010 capital cost estimate of $5,339/KW. In 2008 Moody's had really spoiled the mood by projecting $7,000/KW as the cost of new nuclear power and warning investors away.
So why is the capital cost of nuclear some 4-5 times the cost of a combined cycle natural gas plant (~$1,400/KW)? Aside from the obvious reasons like being dangerous and Atomic.
In 1970-71 Consolidated Edison built the Dresden plant for $146/kW ... still going today like an Energizer Bunny with ~1.7GWe. This is plant was built for ~50 times less than Moody's 2008 cost estimate.
What the hell is going on?
I found no easy answers, but plenty to ponder in Chapter 9 ("Costs of nuclear power plants -- what went wrong?") of The Nuclear Energy Option, a great little book by Bernard Cohen [full text online]. This work is dated [1990] and quaint -- he is bemoaning a plant that cost $3,326/kW in 1986 -- the whiner! But he does a good job describing the NRC practice of "regulatory ratcheting", where standard numeric metrics of safety have been codified, all the tough work is over, and every succeeding generation of regulators gains a round of applause and gets to wear festive party hats if they just plug in new (always higher: click) numbers.
This is an example of what I call "No one ever lost their job" syndrome, a creeping cancer of our society on many fronts. It is a malady that especially affects safety cultures. No one ever lost their job by announcing that things are not quite as safe as they could be, or regulation is strangling essential industries. The NRC has created plug-in metrics like requiring more concrete, more frequent inspections, margins and limits, time-tables and reporting requirements. And heavier fines (announcing a hike in fines works even when there are no infractions or violations, the public imagines this is being done to punish evil corporations who are foaming at the mouth and straining on their leashes this very moment).
Then there is outright abuse and intimidation. The recent yarn, Uneven Enforcement Suspected At [US] Nuclear Power Plants which made my eyeballs pop out on springs when I read it. It seems to say that the NRC is concerned that regulation (by the NRC) might be lacking in some (un-visited) regions for unknown reasons and the NRC is ... crap, no I cannot even summarize it, it's so ridiculous. They are treating better safety record in some plants as something suspicious to be investigated. Then their 'suspicions' are released in a Senate report which the nuke-hysteria press predictably treats as some smoking gun. It should go beyond embarrassment. I feel some one should lose their job over this -- a regulatory agency releasing damaging speculation on an industry on a topic they are supposed to be sure of.
But no one will lose their job, even when they susp
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What's your plan?
Small nuc plants
As many vehicles as possible running on batteries
Nuc supplied electricity to charge them.
Remaining Petrochemical stocks to produce plastics and provide machiinery lubrication.
Large scale effort to produce a fuel with high energy density and transportability to replace petrofuel in military uses like jets and planes. Our world is built on cheap accessible energy. Without it we will run the industrial revolution and civilization in reverse, and only stop when we once again party with the Visigoths.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I like your plan. It is clear, concise and ends with the Sack of Rome, as all good plans should.
Small nuc plants
As many vehicles as possible running on batteries
Nuc supplied electricity to charge
These two items would be the biggest game changer. I do hope though that we will have a choice, whether to invite small nuclear into our own backyard (I certainly would being a survivalist) ... or, through the grid purchase a bit of big nuke energy a good ways from someone who has a big nuke in their backyard. As shown by the Dakotas' boost in median income as the rest of us hold the line or sink, oil/energy is a path to wealth creation, one of the only now that so much manufacturing and exports have gone. All it would take are a few states of the Union to go full nuclear. My own state of Oklahoma could literally light the country coast to coast with big nuclear and HVDC conduits to render it into properly synchronized AC on the interconnects. So far I have received the standard goose egg response to this idea.
Remaining Petrochemical stocks to produce plastics and provide machinery lubrication.
Don't forget fertilizer and energy for irrigation and farming, the two greatest Achilles' heels of modern life. Here is where a larger scale nuclear approach really could help, for the amount of process heat required to knock hydrogen from water and sequester nitrogen from the air to make ammonia could not easily be accomplished by the small nuke in your backyard. Which brings us finally to
Large scale effort to produce a fuel with high energy density and transportability to replace petrofuel in military uses like jets and planes. Our world is built on cheap accessible energy. Without it we will run the industrial revolution and civilization in reverse, and only stop when we once again party with the Visigoths.
I wish I could say that ammonia was the grail but it isn't really. My current angle is hydrogen knocked from water by nuclear energy (via heat and/or direct radiation) for transportation, but elemental hydrogen is really dangerous. We'll either deal with it (boom!) or find some way to stabilize it.
Your party hearty plan had me thinking of a barbarian horde arriving in... electric Goth carts.
The cloud - Computing's version of the housing bubble.
The Cloud Is My Master. I've been chosen.
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I like your plan. It is clear, concise and ends with the Sack of Rome, as all good plans should.
I missed this on my first run through - Heheh, the Gaul of those people.......
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.