Another contender for “new” nuclear power.
While I wish them all the luck in the world, I have questions.
Nothing in the NPR story about potential for proliferation. Nothing about waste. (see below for Nuscale FAQ on these questions)
First working unit to be on line in 2026 – assuming a decade or so to prove it out and get investor’s confidence – not fast enough to help in pre-2030 build out of clean energy.
Obviously if it works, there’s potential after that – not hard to imagine a role for small modular generators like this.
Nuclear power plants are so big, complicated and expensive to build that more are shutting down than opening up. An Oregon company, NuScale Power, wants to change that trend by building nuclear plants that are the opposite of existing ones: smaller, simpler and cheaper.
The company says its plant design using small modular reactors also could work well with renewable energy, such as wind and solar, by providing backup electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
The 98 nuclear reactors operating in the country now are large because they were designed to take advantage of economies of scale. Many are at risk of closing in the next decade, largely because they can’t compete with less expensive natural gas and renewable energy.
To respond to this dilemma, “we’ve developed economies of small,” says Jose Reyes, chief technology officer and co-founder of NuScale.
Instead of one big nuclear reactor, Reyes says his company will string together a series of up to 12 much smaller reactors. They would be built in a factory and transported by truck to a site that would be prepared at the same time.“You’re making your [reactor] pool and all that stuff on-site,” says Reyes. “In parallel, you’re manufacturing the modules, and then that cuts the construction schedule to about half.”
NuScale says it also has simplified how the plants are operated in ways that make them safer.
The 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan happened when a tsunami knocked offline the emergency generators that cooled the reactors and spent fuel, leading to reactor meltdowns.
“We’ve looked at ways the systems have failed in the past and tried to remove those kind of failure modes from our design,” says Karin Feldman, vice president for the company’s Program Management Office.
NuScale’s design doesn’t depend on pumps or generators that could fail in an emergency because it uses passive cooling. The reactors would be in a containment vessel, underground and in a huge pool of water that can absorb heat.
That means that even a reactor that fails would still be safe. “It doesn’t require any additional water,” says Feldman. “It doesn’t require AC or DC power. It doesn’t require any operator action. And it can stay in that safe configuration for as long as is needed.”
NuScale plans to build its first nuclear power plant at the Idaho National Lab. The electricity will power the lab and go to Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS, which serves 46 member utilities in six Western states.
The organization was looking for a carbon-free source of electricity to generate power when intermittent sources, such as solar panels and wind turbines are offline. And it turns out NuScale’s modular design is good for that.
Big nuclear reactors run all the time, but NuScale’s collection of smaller reactors can be ramped up and down relatively quickly. Batteries can back up intermittent sources of renewable energy, too, but UAMPS CEO Doug Hunter says NuScale’s reactors are cheaper.
“Each module would have enough fuel in it for up to two years of operations, so it’s like we’re a battery that has a two-year charge to it,” says Hunter.
NuScale still must convince the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that its plant design is safe. The company cleared the first phase of that review last year.
Licensing this design is challenging. It’s so different from existing plants that regulations must be changed to accommodate it. That worries some watchdogs and critics.
“My concern about NuScale is that they believe so deeply that their reactor is safe and doesn’t need to meet the same criteria as the larger reactors, that it’s pushing for lots of exemptions and exceptions,” says Edwin Lyman, acting director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Lyman argues that even with NuScale’s passive safety design, things could go wrong. He’ll be among those watching regulators closely as NuScale pushes to have its first power plant built and operating in 2026.
5. Doesn’t having SMRs at more sites create a higher security and proliferation risk?
The NuScale plant design builds in a number of intrinsic features that further reduce security and proliferation risks, even compared to traditional nuclear plants, which are already considered highly secure. The very resilient plant design, which is achieved through system simplification, reliance on natural phenomena for backup safety systems, and application of defense-in-depth principles reduces the plant’s vulnerability to the impacts from an external attack or internal sabotage. Additional design features ensure that control over the nuclear fuel elements is both secure and verifiable. All safety-related equipment resides inside a very robust reactor building, the majority of which is below
9. What about the nuclear waste problem—won’t NuScale make it worse?
The amount of used or spent nuclear fuel produced in a nuclear plant is dwarfed by the voluminous waste produced from most other energy technologies. The good news about nuclear waste produced in a NuScale plant is that it is exactly the same as most of the other 440 nuclear plants operating world-wide; hence, we know a lot about its characteristics and how to treat it. Specifically, we know very accurately the composition of the discharged fuel, the radiation hazard, the rate of decay of the self-generated heat, and its amenability to recycling, should the U.S. decided to embark on this path similar to other major nuclear energy countries.
Safe(r) nuclear is a heck of a lot greener than turning half the blinking world into a windustrial park as part of the “energy mix” brainwashed environmentalists acquiesce to.
http://google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wind+turbines+mountains (built with the very fossil fuels they’re ostensibly replacing; see “cubic mile of oil” for more context)
Technologies are only truly green if they keep a small footprint. Otherwise they’re just rebranded sprawl, which environmentalists used to fight. To be a hip environmentalist these days, you’re expected to fawn over massive machine-infiltration of the countryside & oceans, and act indignant if anyone criticizes the damage. It’s like something out of a Gilliam or Lynch dystopian film.
https://evilnoisypeople.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/cenobites-pinhead-planet-of-wind-turbines.png
https://evilnoisypeople.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/windschmerz-from-wind-farm-schoeneseiffen-euskirchen.jpg
ZZZzzz……(etc)…..!
That aspect, at least, sounds plausible. On-site “custom” construction tends to be a lot more wasteful and entail a lot more variables (workforce selection, weather, workforce commuting, etc.).
These would be so so so useful!
The problem is not the plants, it is regulator and legal system is so cumbersome it drives up the cost ten times what it should be. Each nuclear plant is essentially a one off project subject to endless court and political delays and that drives up costs.
The issue of spent fuels is one such delay. There is no actual reason except political to have all that spent fuel sitting at the reactor site nor is there any physical reason to not recycle, nor to build storage places for permanent disposal in a short time at reasonable cost, the delays are all political and always have been.
France when it built its nuclear reactors settled on one design, built by people who had experience building the previous plants so it never had Three Mile Islands or the Rancho Seco shutdown or any of the other political induced problems due to the way the USA built its plants.
This modular design is essential to building low cost plants of any size. The fail safe design for emergency cooling solves the melt down problem. The modular design means all the human factors which have caused every single reactor problem will be minimized thanks to identical operation and training. Example, Fukushima melt down was not caused by the loss of power, it was caused by the refusal of the management and than the government to use sea water to cool the reactors using fire trucks to pump the water until the reactors had already melted. Fail sate design would eliminate the melting and common design and training means the people in charge would know what to do and would have a plan in place.
There is no practical way to change the private capital mechanisms used to build US power plants (not for a long time, anyway). Modular units might make it easier for these projects to be built faster, especially since the nuclear regulatory analysis could be applied to production units, rather than a myriad of custom sites constructed by a myriad of different contractors.
Most enviably well said! James Hanson (Hansen?) supports nuclear as a necessary part of saving the planet.
Sounds hopeful (for the near future), but need to overcome the prejudices and dreads associated with Nuclear, and answer the questions on safety.
“Public dread of nuclear power limits its use”
In the ongoing effort to decarbonize U.S. energy production, there is one energy source that often attracts great controversy. Nuclear power has been a part of the American energy portfolio since the 1950s and still generates one in every five kilowatt-hours of electricity produced in the country. Still, for a number of reasons, including the association between radiation and cancer, the general public has long felt a significant dread about it. And this fear, suggest Carnegie Mellon University Department of Engineering and Public Policy Assistant Research Professor Parth Vaishnav, and Ahmed Abdulla of the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, may cause people to want less of this zero-carbon energy source in the nation’s electricity generation mix than they otherwise would.
https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2019/05/02-public-nuclear-power.html
Need to assure the general public that this will never ever happen again and understand the public dread.
“THE RIGHT TO LIVE FREE FROM RADIATION EXPOSURE IS ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS.” AKIKO MORIMATSU ADDRESSES PARLIAMENTARY PUBLIC MEETING, HOUSE OF COMMONS, LONDON, 19 MARCH 2019
Fukushima Mother Akiko Morimatsu gave the following speech at the Remember Fukushima Parliamentary public meeting, in the House of Commons, Westminster, London, on 19 March 2019
https://rememberfukushima.org/2019/04/16/the-right-to-live-free-from-radiation-exposure-is-one-of-the-fundamental-human-rights-akiko-morimatsu-addresses-parliamentary-public-meeting-house-of-commons-london-19-march-2019/?fbclid=IwAR1pK2hSlukc8Y5uxRBy08YQqm95DLL3ZeZP1VyZTtBsvV42g_LkQkyWmvk
Former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the biggest secret in the industry is that they will all fail at some point:
https://youtu.be/FJp1AObC-Sg
Greg Jaczko was never a ‘rogue nuclear regulator’ – he’d worked for years in Washington for antinuclear senators Harry Reid and Ed Markey, and only got to head the NRC because the former was the senior Democrat in the House, and stonewalled the appointment till he could get Jaczko in to kill the Nevada waste repository. Once Chairman, he voted against every proposal to licence a reactor, delayed the four that eventually started construction by years, and to the tune of billions of dollars, by ordering major design changes after they’d got underway, and was eventually slung out by the other commissioners for bullying his staff.
His statements that ‘every reactor is an accident waiting to happen’ is BS. Every airliner is just waiting to fall out of the sky and kill everyone on board, too, except most of them don’t last the couple of hundred years they’d have to wait for the odds of it happening. Reactors last longer than airliners ( sixty years ), but are statistically safer, and, unless they’re Soviet ones, don’t kill anyone when they do have an accident. (Not by radiation, anyway, bar a handful of plant workers over fifty years, and even with random industrial accidents, they’re far safer than gas, solar, wind, or hydro, and lightyears away from coal.)
Jaczko needs to be incarcerated for crimes against humanity and for being a lying shithead!
“THE RIGHT TO LIVE FREE FROM RADIATION EXPOSURE IS ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS.”
Good luck with that. There was a DoE sponsored experiment in raising lab mice with as close to zero radiation exposure as achievable – ironically, it meant taking them two thousand feet below ground level in the nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad, in New Mexico. That’s deep enough to avoid cosmic rays, and the massive salt deposit there doesn’t have the several parts per million of uranium, thorium, and their daughter products that nearly all rocks have. Since every other living thing that’s ever existed has evolved with a (gradually diminishing) background radiation level, it may be that we actually need a certain amount to keep our DNA damage control systems active – just like raising kids with no exposure to germs may be bad for the development of their immune systems. Anyway, the experiment was cancelled part way through.
Some data does support the ‘hormesis’ theory, that small amounts of radiation are beneficial, but in any case, even if the’ linear no threshhold’ hypothesis is true, radiation effects from nuclear power plants would generally be so small as to be lost in random statistical noise. That’s true for Three Mile Island and for Fukushima. It wasn’t for Chernobyl – the clean-up workers got quite high doses, and had a measurable rise in some leukemias, and the kids in the area got increased rates of thyroid cancer from Iodine 131. That isotope is more like the radiation dose that bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki got – it gives a very concentrated dose, just in the thyroid, over a short period – the half-life is only a week. The ‘linear no threshhold ‘ standard is based on the bomb survivors, who got a powerful, instantaneous dose of radiation that overwhelmed their cellular repair mechanisms. The data from that has been extrapolating to very low level radiation over long periods.
Another way of calming the general public unease over Nuclear Radiation , maybe is to list the beneficial uses, good example from the Aussie Ministry of Industry, Innovation and Science.
Radioactive materials have a variety of important uses in medicine, industry, agriculture, and sterilisation, as well as in our homes.
https://archive.industry.gov.au/resource/RadioactiveWaste/RadiationandRadioactiveWaste/Pages/Beneficialusesofradiation.aspx
Maybe we could start harnessing that type of fear by pointing out the extra radiation exposure from flying in planes. /s
What’s more probable: nuclear tech evolves to become cheap, safe, quick to build, and more applicable sometime in the next 20 years and we use it ‘just in time’ to avoid 5-6C warming (because we just accept 3-4C as we wait for the nukes to come online (because we can’t be saved without nukes says Jim Hansen)), or BATTERY technology (front of the meter-utility scale lithium storage + solar, and wholesale) becomes so cheap, safe, quick to build, etc. that it makes centralized, high density, high cost power relatively more obsolete and unnecessary? Ditto for other storage technologies.
Nuclear has had 80 years for the technology to get better, cheaper, quicker, and less government dependent; historically speaking it’s the largest welfare queen of all; private capital won’t touch it without huge government guarantees that were supposed to be phased out decades ago but which never were; battery storage is coming down in price fairly quickly, and I’ve yet to hear ‘if only we could cut all the red tape’ and the NIMBYism we could make batteries cheap enough to compete.
The one advantage that nuclear has is that it produces large volumes of high density energy, but if we’re talking small scale nukes, couldn’t solar + storage do the same thing and scale quicker?
Nuclear’s track record is that it was built for economic reasons, not to cut CO2, and, to begin with, very successfully. In fifteen years France went from mostly oil power generation to eighty percent nuclear, with reliable, low-carbon, and cheap power just a side benefit to cutting their oil bill. At about the same time, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Ontario, Belgium, and the US all got rid of oil power generation – one whole fossil fuel sector effectively eliminated. Those first four have the lowest figures for CO2 per kilowatt of any place not majority hydro.
The converse is that places that have got rid of nuclear, or started to – Italy, Germany, Lithuania, Japan, California, Vermont – have seen emissions either go up, or, despite extensive spending on renewables, remain high. Italy, for example, closed all its reactors in the eighties, and has the world’s highest percentage of solar, but still has average CO2 emissions far higher than neighbouring nuclear users France, Switzerland, and Slovenia. In fact, they get more power over the year imported from French reactors, than they do from their own solar industry. https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=IT-NO&remote=true
=Nuclear’s track record is that it was built for economic reasons, not to cut CO2, and, to begin with, very successfully.=
It was only economic against oil-based electricity. And incidentally the only energy industry that has received more subsidies than nuclear is oil/gas. If nuclear was the most economic source of electricity production, that map you posted would have Europe chocked full of nuclear energy. When OPEC tried to squeeze us in the 1970’s there wasn’t a flight to nuclear; there was a flight to cheap coal fired production; coal is cheaper than nuclear and isn’t as reliant on the government to get a plant built.
=have seen emissions either go up, or, despite extensive spending on renewables, remain high=
1) You’re comparing emerging technologies trying to compete against FULLY DEPRECIATED nuclear (and coal and gas) assets where the government/rate payers have already dumped tons of money into such;
2) Let’s see what happens if the government starts subsidizing large scale storage at the same rate they historically subsidized nuclear. If you put 9 hours of storage on the grid, then that favors wind/solar (cheapest sources) whilst making relatively expensive base load power (coal and NEW, non-depreciated nuclear) redundant. That’s when you see all those countries that have high capacities of renewables start to significantly lower their emissions.
3) You’ve already admitted that extensive hydro-power/hydro-storage can drastically reduce emissions; it’s not really a leap of faith, therefore, to infer that extensive renewables and storage can also drastically reduce emissions.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157167182810350&set=pcb.10157167183065350&type=3&theater
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157167182800350&set=pcb.10157167183065350&type=3&theater
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157167182820350&set=pcb.10157167183065350&type=3&theater
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157167182905350&set=pcb.10157167183065350&type=3&theater
Hydro is stored energy, which can be used when you need it – wind and solar, it’s a lottery. Cheap storage would actually benefit nuclear more than renewables – in fact, most of the existing pumped hydro was built to work with nuclear plants. Storage makes sense if you have a steady power source, with very low fuel costs, running 24/7. You can reliably charge it up every night for the day and evening peaks. To try to do the same thing with solar, you’d first need four to five times the solar capacity – solar doesn’t produce full power all day, only at noon, so just doubling nuclear’s capacity is not enough, and it has to be charging storage up and meeting daytime demand simultaneously. Then add another twenty or so percent for storage losses. Depending on how much fossil fuel backup you want to use, you could double again for winter, but there will still be days when the storage is not replenished, so the coal/gas plants will stay. You’re relying on wind being stronger in winter to top up your storage for those dark months, but wind is often strongest in spring and autumn, when demand is lowest. Here’s February 2018 in Germany, for example -https://www.energy-charts.de/power_de.htm?source=all-sources&year=2018&month=2
Any guesses on how much generation capacity, and multi-month storage, you’d need for that scenario ? 70 nuclear plants, a bit more than France has, would cover nearly all of it. They already had 17 before Merkel scrapped the industry to try to win an election.
Can you give me an example of where renewables and storage have reduced emissions drastically ? In most cases I’ve looked at, there’s been a ratepayer or taxpayer revolt well before that can happen. I’ve given you a dozen cases where building nuclear has demonstrably lowered emissions, or closing it has raised them.
I moved the thread down: https://climatecrocks.com/2019/05/08/could-nuscale-make-nuclear-smaller-safer-cheaper/comment-page-1/#comment-108034
Any discussion of wind power that fails to mention its massive footprint on scenery, weak per acre output, and growing harm to wildlife is ignoring its biggest flaws. But a lot of modern environmentalism is about “installed capacity,” not protecting nature from development. A complete obsession with climate change has taken over original motives.
Even if one eschews aesthetic values, Hew Crane’s “Cubic Mile of Oil” illustrates the scale problem with so-called renewables (which need fossil fuels to exist) compared to total energy consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
One of the first questions you learn to ask when evaluating new tech business proposals is “What is the barrier to entry?” That is, how easy is it for another two-bit company to come up with a competing product addressing the same need? In this case, nuclear power has very high capital costs while both R&D and production are low enough for everyone and their grandmother to crowd the field of battery storage with their brilliant ideas. As the large-scale battery-storage industry matures, both developers and investors will learn what works and what does not. There will be a lot of both clever and wild ideas left dead on the side of the road, because the material reward will keep competition high.
There are questions about potential for proliferation and waste? Those same questions we have been asking for years and that are really insignificant in the face of looming catastrophic AGW?
Nuscale and any other “new” small-scale nuclear technologies need to be supported and explored, just as we need to be doing research on SRM and other geo-engineering schemes. We may then be ready to apply them when the SHTF five or ten or fifteen years from now (pick a number—2050 now seems dead).
Yes. I do not know whether to be more fearful of nuclear war or climate change, but my concerns about nuclear waste and proliferation are quite small by comparison.
One thing that has so far gone unmentioned is that the only way to get rid of the accumulated nuclear waste is to burn it in some kind of LFTR or reprocessing nuclear technology. Highly radioactive material with a long half life can be safely disposed only by burning it with a technology that produces material with half lives in the range of hundreds instead of tens of thousands of years. Only material with a relatively short half life can be stored with some confidence that it will not reappear to harm all (human or terrestial) life after whatever cataclysm might hit in the future, be it natural or human induced.
We owe it to future generations of life to undertake this even if it is cost inefficient.
The same applies to nuclear weapons, if the human race ever gets around to decommissioning them. It would be great to repurpose the tremendous amounts of money spent on “defense” to defend against the real threats to future generations.
Small, modular…… More of the bullshit pipe dreams the nuke people keep coming up with. The perpetual motion machine has a better chance than “SAFE WASTE FREE NUKES”.
Moran!
=Hydro is stored energy, which can be used when you need it – wind and solar, it’s a lottery.=
Renewables are variable but their forecast(ed) production for next day bids is reliable.
=Storage makes sense if you have a steady power source, with very low fuel costs, running 24/7. You can reliably charge it up every night for the day and evening peaks.=
That’s the traditional method that relies on a pricing model where energy is expensive during the day (high demand) and is cheap at night (low demand). But what happens when you add enough 4 cents per kwh solar, placed westward enough such that it coincides with peak demand? What happens when there is so much renewable penetration on the grid that you start having to do demand shifting to keep the price from crashing to zero or less in the daytime?
There was a story on here several years ago where a pumped storage facility reliant on this old stratified pricing closed down secondary to cheap daytime electricity from renewables. However would not battery storage ALSO make sense *currently* in situations where utilities are having to export their extra renewable energy for free secondary to lack of demand? And it will even further when the capital costs to provide the batteries gets cheap enough concomitantly with higher implementation of demand shifting to keep discrete renewable electricity prices from falling too low.
And certainly storage hedges against variability (lottery) to provide what traditional base load has. LCOE for PV + storage is 10-20 cents per kwh with lithium storage being on the low range of that. LCOE for new nuclear is 10-19 cents with fuel prices causing the spread. If a utility wants a 300MW plant for 10 cents per kwh built in the next few years, are they gonna go with nuclear or are the gonna go with PV+ storage? Heck if they’re willing to jack up customer prices to include 15 cents per kwh might as well built solar thermal + storage.
=To try to do the same thing with solar, you’d first need four to five times the solar capacity – solar doesn’t produce full power all day, only at noon, so just doubling nuclear’s capacity is not enough, and it has to be charging storage up and meeting daytime demand simultaneously.=
Luckily the capital costs of solar and wind are 6 to 10 times cheaper than new nuclear.
But could you imagine how much clean electricity Japan would have right now if they invested that $200B it’s gonna take to clean up Fukushima into renewables + storage?
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157168362490350&set=a.51010675349&type=3&theater
That price of energy chart used to be divided into ‘ dispatchable ‘ and ‘ variable renewable ‘ ( ie ‘unreliable ‘) sources, with a footnote warning against direct comparison.
‘But what happens when you add enough 4 cents per kwh solar, placed westward enough such that it coincides with peak demand?’ Of course – New York powers into the evening peak with cheap watts wired in from Honolulu (though Tahiti might be better, so you get the seasonal offset – or both, in case one’s cloudy). Europe would get its supper cooked from US Midwest solar, or maybe from Brazil.
‘But could you imagine how much clean electricity Japan would have right now if they invested that $200B it’s gonna take to clean up Fukushima into renewables + storage?’ I don’t have to imagine that – Germany has already spent that much on renewables, without the storage, and its emissions per kilowatt are not too different from Japan’s. Mind you, Japan’s gas and coal imports have gone up 20% since they closed most of their reactors.