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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."
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
Isn't that what is happening at Fukushima right now?
Very little. As I understand it, smaller reactors don't have such a big heat problem as large utility scale reactors especially if the cooling fails.
Plus, even if one of these SMRs has problems, they are so much smaller that they don't cause anywhere near as much trouble as larger reactors.
That got funded, It was a failure.
The MSRE was a resounding success. We gained practical experience with a new technology: a far safer and more efficient iteration of nuclear power. We made mistakes (metal embrittlement, evolution of uranium and plution)--and we learned from them. They were costly in terms of money, but we walked away with the knowledge to do it better the next time. This is how science and engineering works.
Getting Thorium power off the ground is going to require at least $20B, two orders of magnitude more money than what we're talking about here.
I'm a proponent of Thorium power, but there is an absolutely massive amount of work to be done between now and industrial scale power generation.
Indeed. I don't see why we're pushing a technology that we know to have serious issues with stability, even on a smaller scale. The MSRE showed that we can build a safe nuclear reactor. In over 15,000 hours of critical operation, not once did the system exceed its safety margins. There were 0 instances of control rod scrams. No matter which mistakes you point at (metal embrittlement, evolution of uranium and plutonium)--we learned from them and figured out how to overcome them. This is how science and engineering works, and at the end of the day, we have a far superior design--but no funding.
Then we'd better start funding it now, rather than later. What happens when something goes wrong with these "conservative" designs that are known to have many many issues, like melting down? Can you say NIMBY all over again, just when people are starting to reconsider the promise of nuclear power?
No. You know why? Because right now, the key stumbling block is not the science--it's the public.
You missed a few other open issues related to decommisioning (e.g., mostly what to do with the salt).
In any case, the only efforts I know of are:
FUJI which I think died in the fund-raising stage back in 2011.
TTS an attempt to resurrect this.
Thor Energy
MSRE showed that the physics worked, however, as with many things, the engineering problems remain. AFAIK, most people are attempting to figure out the salt problem. The metal problem is currently unsolved (and a much more important problem since you need the reactor to have a reasonable operating life to make the whole thing economical in the first place).
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.
Soros? Left?
What the fuck are you smoking?
....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
Oh hi, you must be new here. Welcome to slashdot! You're fitting in just fine
I say we put him in charge of the safety of the new reactors.
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
The metal problem was solved with Hastelloy-N by adding various alloys (primarily 1.1% Nb) and they predicted it to have a sufficient lifetime for an operational reactor. That was in 1977.
A metallographic examination (Fig. 10) of the tensile tested specimen showed a complete absence of grain boundary cracks.
We have found that if the U(IV)/U(III) ratio in fuel salt is kept below about 60, embrittlement is essentially prevented when CrTel.266 is used as the source of tellurium.
They recorded a crack depth of 0, and very minimal cracking for other sources of Te.
The evolution of fluorine gas was solved in 1970 by putting insulation (a reflective layer) around it.
Nevertheless it is clear that prevention of fluorine evolution from stored MSR salt will not be very difficult or expensive,
A decommissioning process was developed in 1997 and the original MSRE, without the later developments, improper defueling and storage and all, was decommissioned and now serves as a source of thorium for medical research at present. The original decomissioned procedure in 1969 was simply to turn it off and walk away. So we don't do that anymore. Wiki summaries:
Cleanup of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment was about $130 Million, for a small 8 MW(th) unit. Much of the high cost was caused by the unpleasant surprise of fluorine and uranium hexafluoride evolution from cold fuel salt in storage that ORNL did not defuel and store correctly, but this has now been taken into consideration in MSR design.
If the fluoride fuel salts are stored in solid form over many decades, radiation can cause the release of corrosive fluorine gas, and uranium hexafluoride.[94] This was due to radiolysis of the salt from remaining fission products, when colder than 100 degrees Celsius.[79] The salts should be defueled and wastes removed before extended shutdowns. Fluorine and uranium hexafluoride evolution can be prevented by storing the salts above 100 degrees Celsius.[79] Because some of the fission product fluorides have high solubility in water, fluorides are less suitable for long term storage. For longer term storage, fluoride containing wastes could go through a vitrification process to be encased in insoluble borosilicate glass suitable for long-term disposal.
Corrosion from tellurium—The reactor makes small amounts of tellurium as a fission product. In the MSRE, this caused small amounts of corrosion at the grain boundaries of the special nickel alloy, Hastelloy-N used for the reactor. Metallurgical studies showed that adding 1 to 2% niobium to the Hastelloy-N alloy improves resistance to corrosion by tellurium.[24](pp81–87) One additional strategy against corrosion was to keep the fuel salt slightly reducing by maintaining the ratio of UF4/UF3 to less than 60. This was done in the MSRE by continually contacting the flowing fuel salt with a beryllium metal rod submersed in a cage inside the pump bowl. This causes a fluorine shortage in the salt, reducing tellurium to a less aggressive (elemental) form. This method is also effective in reducing corrosion in general from the fluoride salt, because the fission process produces more fluorine atoms freed from the fissioned uranium that would otherwise attack the structural metals.[92](pp3–4)
Radiation damage to nickel alloys—The standard Hastelloy N alloy, a high nickel alloy use
I have a boner for the long-term survival of conscious entities in the universe. You can huddle around the fire (Sol) until it goes out, or you can learn to build fires yourself. You want to save the planet, invest in science, figure out how to mine the rest of the Universe, and get us off this rock. Then you can turn the Earth into your nature preserve.
Some of their pipelines carry both LPG and natural gas. LPG is a byproduct of crude refinement. They own coal mines. They operate businesses that manufacture industrial equipment used in power plants. So yes, they do have a stake in this.
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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One would think that "energy needs will keep growing fast enough to keep all providers happy" but there is the greed factor where the established industries don't want any competition any time for any thing. They want the entire market to themselves. They will work to crush and destroy any competition (real or perceived). This is capitalism. I want it all to myself. Screw everyone else (and the environment while we're at it).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
These have a smaller core. In the event of a catastrophic failure, there is a much smaller meltdown.
As I understand it, the whole reactor lives in a giant pool of water.
Also, this reactor appears to be able to self-cool without external power. (Core cooling is by convection, not pumped coolant.)
Of course we need to put funding into Thorium research ASAP. But $226M is not going to produce anything substantial.
Thorium reactors don't melt down, but they are fully capable of having major accidents with massive impacts. U-232 is nasty stuff.
They're probably going to do a Microsoft, just wait until someone develops the technology to a point where it's worth building, and then buy their way in. Safer and cheaper than doing their own research and development, and they get to play the stock market game in the process.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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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Yes, India is investing billions of dollars into Thorium and that's great. But they are very far from real industrial scale energy production.
The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor is mostly built, and will eventually produce 500MW. The average US nuclear plant produces twice as much power. The PFBR *could* use Thorium, but will use Uranium for the foreseeable future.
The Advanced Heavy-Water Reactor will use Thorium, but it won't be completed for several years and it will only produce 300MW.
There is a very long road ahead and it will require a massive amount of money to get there.
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.
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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Listen to yourself. Predictions, theoretical fixes and a decommissioning plan that hinges on it all working. There is a reason why people won't invest in this technology, especially when proven clean energy sources with predictable costs are competing for funding.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
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.
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