Higher fuel prices and increased carbon emissions have been giving nuclear energy a boost. So far this year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received licensing requests for 19 new nuclear power plants. That number could increase exponentially, along with the number of suitable sites for a plant, if the NRC approves a brand-new design for portable modular units developed at Oregon State University.
Interest in minireactors has grown over the past few years, according to Felix Killar at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “They're simple and robust, with safety features to allow a country without nuclear expertise to gradually put in small plants, and get people trained and familiar with them before moving into more complex plants.” But small-scale plants could prove useful in the United States, too, particularly in areas where residents must now rely on diesel generators for electricity. Toshiba
is reportedly working on a small-scale design for Galena, Alaska. But NuScale Power, the startup spun from Oregon State, is the first American company to submit plans to the NRC, which regulates all domestic nuclear power plants.
The plant's design is similar to that of a Generation III+ “light water” reactor, but the size is unusual. “The whole thing is 65 ft. long,” explains Jose Reyes, head of the nuclear engineering department at Oregon State and a co-founder of NuScale Power. The reactor unit of NuScale's containment unit is 14 ft., compared to a Westinghouse AP1000, a standard current design, which is about 120 ft. in diameter. It has to be built and serviced on-site, but NuScale's units could be manufactured at the factory, then shipped on a rail car or heavy truck to any location and returned for refueling.
As in modern reactors, the containment shell acts as a heat exchanger, Reyes explains. The water closest to the core is vented into the outer shell as steam, where it condenses and drips into the cooling pool, which is recirculated to cool the core. The whole unit sits below grade, without telltale cooling towers. The reactor doesn't use pumps to circulate the water if the unit overheats, which means it needs no external power to cool down. That's a “passive safety” feature that protects the unit from electrical sabotage.
The new unit can be manufactured cheaply, with standard turbines from General Electric, for example, rather than custom-made parts. Because the steel reactor vessel is only 9 ft. in diameter, it can be made entirely in the U.S., rather than relying on Japan Steel Works, the only manufacturer who can cast today's one-piece, 25-ft.-plus reactor vessels.
Each 45-megawatt electrical unit would generate enough power for about 45,000 homes. By comparison, plants operated today generate 1000 to 1700 megawatts, according to NRC spokesman Scott Burnell. “You can't take an AP1000, a large base-load reactor, and put it down where there's no grid to support it. A smaller design could be useful in a remote setting.”
I was able to contact Bruce Landry, public relations contact at NuScale Power and he told me that their strategy is to market power plants consisting of 12 modules of 45,000 MW each, or a total of 540,000 MW. The estimated cost for the 12-module nuclear power plant is between $2 billion and $2.5 billion. This is about half of Westinghouse's AP1000 Gen-III reactor, and about about 30% what a Gen-II power plant would cost today. Not bad, if they can get NRC approval and find buyers.
Large utilities could also use smaller units to their advantage, according to Reyes. Instead of shutting down an entire plant to replace fuel, as happens today, the utility could build a modular plant and then shut down only the unit affected.
NuScale has built and tested a one-third-scale unit that uses electrical heat to simulate a nuclear core. After the design is presented to the NRC on July 24, NuScale will spend the next year and a half testing it. They will then submit a final report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which can spend two or three years reviewing documentation before approval. If all goes according to schedule, Reyes estimates, the minireactors could start to go on line in 2015.
COMMENTARY: I am about as anti-nuke as they come, but what I like about nuclear is that it runs 24/7, 365 and is now safe enough, that there hopefully will never be another Three Mile Island or Chernobyl incident. The problem is disposing and storing of all that nuclear waste. It is troublesome to ship to a storage disposal site. Nobody wants it in their backyard. Most of the current uranium waste storage sites are reaching their storage capacity, and Yucca Mountain the newest and largest storage site, with a capacity of 77,000 metric tons, is still not ready. I get visions of barrels of nuclear waste stored twenty feet high, and slowly leaking.
In spite of my concerns, I found the NuScale Power concept of building modular mini-nuclear power plants very interesting. Their website explains the concept very well, and makes it almost sound like it is a slamdunk, which of course, it is not. I had been doing some research on modular mini-oil refineries, and those are not cheap. About $1 to $1.7 billion to build, but you have all those carbon emissions, and we need to get off oil, or the planet is doomed.
Apparently there is movement towards advanced power plants, something I was not aware of, with Westinghouse at the head of the pack with its AP1000 III generation nuclear reactor, which is smaller than the classical II generation nuclear reactors, but will still $4 billion to build. I am very familiar with Westinghouse, researched the company during my days at graduate school, when they were a major US supplier of uranium, and got into all sorts of trouble when the price of uranium spiked, and they were stock with supplier contracts at a much lower price.
I wrote an email to NuScale Power about the cost for their mini-nuclear power plants and was told in an email from Bruce Landry that standard configuration would consist of twelve 45 MWe mini-nuclear power plants for a total of 540 MWe at a cost of $2.0 to $2.5 billion. This is approximately half of the Westinghouse AP1000 III generation nuclear reactor and about one-fourth the cost of a larger second generatin (Gen-II) nuclear power plant.
The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) funding for nuclear energy was just over $1 billion in FY 2008, almost $1.36 billion in FY 2009 and is budgeted to be reduced to $844.6 million in FY 2010, a decline of 37.8%
The DOE budget request includes $191 million to continue developing advanced nuclear energy systems known as “Generation IV (Gen IV).” These next-generation technologies will enhance nuclear power’s safety, cost-effectiveness and proliferation-resistance.
Gen IV research and development includes activities in support of the solving the underlying technology challenges (fuels, materials and neutronic and thermofluids modeling) of the seven Gen IV nuclear energy technologies: Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor, Molten Salt Reactor, Supercritical-Water-Cooled Reactor, Lead-cooled Fast Reactor, Very High Temperature Reactor and the Gas-cooled Fast Reactor. I would assume that NuScale Power fits into the Super-Critical-Water-Cooled Reactor category.
The Department of Energy is authorized to provide a total of $36.7 billion in grants and loan guarantees through the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of Feb 2009, aka Stimulus Plan, but the nuclear slice is only $6.0 billion, and most of that is for nuclear waste disposal. If President Obama, who has championed the use of nuclear energy as a way to reduce the importation of oil, more funding will be necessary, if Gen IV projects will get off the ground in earnest.
A real factor in operating any Gen IV nuclear reactors, once they are approved, and begin going online (sometime in 2020 according to the DOE), will be the cost of uranium fuel. Uranium prices have nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2008, increasing from $11.91 to $43.43 per pound. As of January 29, 2010, the price for uranium was $42.25 per pound. Commodity experts dealing in uranium have prredicted that the price per pound could increase to $56.00 in 2010. In the past, spot prices have peaked at $106.00 per pound, which is kind of scary. God only knows what the price will be by 2020.
World wide demand for uranium has outstripped supply since 1989, as major suppliers (US and Russia) have reduced production due to the world financial crisis, which has slowed construction of new nuclear power plants. The U.S. has not built a new nuclear power plant for nearly twenty years, and this has affected demand. Prices are projected to increase substantially once the world economies improve to pre-recession levels.
NuScale Power plans on filing their NRC paperwork sometime in 2011, which will take three years for approval, so that by 2014, if everything goes right, they will have their license to build one of these puppies. If it takes two years to build one of these mini-nuclear power plants, you are looking at 2016 or 2018 to go into operation. This ties out with NuScale Power's estimate, but it is difficult to tell how the anti-nuke groups will react. New nuclear power plant approvals could be tied in the courts for years.
I noticed tha NuScale Power listed CMEA Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, as one of their investors. Normally, I would not bring this up, except when taking a pot shot or two at a VC screwup, but It is highly unusual for a VC to invest in anything as risky, controversial and taboo as nuclear power. I actually tried presenting several VC's an electron beam irridiation technology for scanning ocean containers during the early days after 911, and my attempts failed miserably.
During these turbulent economic times and dramatic drop in venture capital fundings, VC's only invest in deals that are anticiptically clean and wringed out of any financial and business risk. So, it comes to my surprise that Maurice Gunderson, a senior partner at CMEA, would put his venture capital career on the line, but I don't know how much CMEA invested in NuScale Power. I am fairly sure that the amount wasn't significant, probably in the neighborhood of $3 to $5 million, which is a guess on my part.
Out of curiosity, I looked at Mr Gunderson's resume on the CMEA website, and I noticed he is an alum of Oregon State University, the folks that developed and engineered the first small nuclear reactor with natural circulation. Wow, what a coincidence that is.
Courtesy of an article dated July 15, 2008 appearing in Popular Mechanics
interesting post, pretty much covered it all for me, thanks.
Posted by: new balance | 11/09/2010 at 05:51 PM