Startup Nano Nuclear is betting on naval nuclear technology for portable microreactors as the key to decarbonising sectors such as shipping, mining, remote industries and isolated communities.
The company’s first two reactors, Odin, under development with scientists derived from Cambridge University, and Zeus, with scientists from University of California at Berkeley, are based on units that have operated in US and Nato naval fleets for decades.
Microreactors “can fit on the back of a truck so existing transportation infrastructure, like trucks, trains, shipping vessels can ship these things anywhere in the world,” said Nano CEO and head of reactor development James Walker, a nuclear physicist formerly with UK Ministry of Defence in its nuclear programme.
Portability and costs of microreactors after mass production would make it highly sought after to meet both energy and decarbonisation needs, Walker asserted.
“If you look at just island communities and rural communities, already that’s thousands of these things,” said Walker. “When we get up to selling 1,000 microreactors on a yearly basis, you’re looking at a trillion-dollar industry.”
Nuclear currently supplies some 18% of US power needs off 95GW of installed capacity, according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA).
The Department of Energy (DoE) forecasts the country will need around 200GW of new nuclear capacity to reach net-zero by 2050, but the domestic sector has been in decline for decades following the near-meltdown at Three-Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania in 1979.
Only a handful of nuclear power plants have been built in the US in recent decades, most of them plagued by massive cost overruns and years’-long delays.
Construction began on Georgia’s newly commissioned 1.115GW Unit 3 at the Vogtle Nuclear Power Station in 2009 with an expected 2016 commissioning that was pushed back six years. Combined costs for the reactor and its Unit 4 sibling which was grid connected 1 March this year started around $14bn but have since ballooned to more than $30bn, according to EIA.
Several factors contribute to nuclear’s skyrocketing costs, not least the high Capex for massive power plants.
The Department of Energy (DoE) forecasts the country will need around 200GW of new nuclear capacity to reach net-zero by 2050, but the domestic sector has been in decline for decades following the near-meltdown at Three-Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania in 1979.
Only a handful of nuclear power plants have been built in the US in recent decades, most of them plagued by massive cost overruns and years’-long delays.
Construction began on Georgia’s newly commissioned 1.115GW Unit 3 at the Vogtle Nuclear Power Station in 2009 with an expected 2016 commissioning that was pushed back six years. Combined costs for the reactor and its Unit 4 sibling which was grid connected 1 March this year started around $14bn but have since ballooned to more than $30bn, according to EIA.
Several factors contribute to nuclear’s skyrocketing costs, not least the high Capex for massive power plants.
NuScale’s high price tag was due in large measure to the lack of US nuclear supply chain, according to Walker.
“Everything they did was first of a kind, with no supporting supply chain no supporting infrastructure,” he said. “Imagine if the infrastructure have been built up already, the supply chain was actually there and they could just buy the material like we used to be able to do in the States, they never would have had these issues.”
A key gap is the global scarcity of advanced fuels to feed next-generation reactors.
SMRs and microreactors typically use high-assay low-enriched uranium (Haleu) that contains 5-20% fissile uranium-235, compared to lower amounts for conventional nuclear power plants.
This allows reactors to operate more efficiently, consume less fuel and have longer lifespans.
But it it’s not yet commercially available in the US and will require billions of investments led by the government to reach anything like the scale of manufacturing needed to jump start the sector.
“The problem, of course, that the country has is that the facilities aren’t in place to do it,” said Walker.
“There’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built first off for the purposes of allowing the whole new supply chain to be in place so that reactors can source this stuff.”
Nano is jumping into Haleu production as well, which is already ramping as the Biden administration funds R&D into its production.
Westinghouse Electric Company is developing this transportable microreactor with support from DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) that will use advanced heat pipe technology and TRISO fuel to help expand access to clean energy to communities across the world.
eVinci’s passive cooling design uses hundreds of heat pipes made of a specialized iron, chromium, and aluminum alloy to draw heat away from the reactor’s fuel.
It doesn’t need water for cooling, so it can go places other water-cooled reactors can’t, and eliminates the risk of loss-of-coolant accidents.
According to the company, the microreactor will be able to generate up to five megawatts of electricity and operate for eight years or longer without refueling. It will be factory-built and fully assembled before being shipped to its destination.
Radiant is developing Kaleidos, a portable 1.2-megawatt gas-cooled microreactor, as a potential replacement for diesel generators.
All the components of the compact design would be packaged in a single shipping container, making rapid deployment to remote locations or for disaster relief locations possible.
Don’t bother being naive (and lazy) about nuclear, ‘new’ or otherwise, at $6 billion + per GW. This solar is the immediate future.
“. . . a total planned investment of CNY 56 billion ($7.8 billion), divided into four phases. Each phase will include 14 GW for the integration of ingots, wafers, solar cells, and modules. All phases are projected to be completed within a two-year construction period. The first-phase and second-stage projects are on track to start production in the first quarter and second quarter of 2024, while the third phase and fourth phase are scheduled for completion and production in 2025.
Hainan Drinda New Energy Technology (Drinda) said it will invest an unspecified sum in a solar cell factory that Hoang Thinh Dat is building in Vietnam. The plant, with a design capacity of 14 GW of solar cells, is located in the Southeast Economic Zone of Nghe An province, on 50 hectares across two phases. The initial phase, set for completion in the fourth quarter of 2024, will cover 30 hectares with a total investment exceeding $450 million.
Flat Glass has reported its annual results for the year ending Dec. 31, 2023, with CNY 21.52 billion, of operating revenue, up 39.21% from the preceding year. It said its net profit for 2023 was CNY 2.75 billion, up 30% year on year.”
The $ money tells the truth:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/29/chinese-pv-industry-brief-jinkosolar-breaks-ground-on-56-gw-pv-panel-factory-in-shanxi/?fbclid=IwAR2YBh-Xuuf6msX3dGTh7bBmy-VtG_e6inm_60lczVsokFa2mOHJV4KvcuQ
Sadly for consumption of microreactors, solar/wind/storage is cheap enough to eat well into that market, enough to keep volumes down and units expensive.
Many islands are already benefitting from the cheap and waterless* technology of s/w/s because the cost of importing coal and oil made their power more expensive.
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*It was late in life that I learned just how critical fresh water supplies are to smaller islands.
El Hierro, in the Canary Islands, population 11,000, was funded by the European Union as a flagship ‘100% renewable’ demo. It had some advantages. It’s the southernmost point in Europe (it’s really an offshore African archipelago), so insolation is on par with the Sahara, and it’s right in the trade wind belt. It also had a 2,000ft high volcanic crater ideal for pumped hydro, plus existing power was expensive (and dirty) oil, that had to be shipped in. Results so far are disappointing – oil as a % of generation fell to 34% in 2018, but had climbed back to 57% last year- better than the other islands in the group, but far from what was proposed.
Just about the polar opposite is the Bilibino nuclear plant, the world’s smallest and most northerly, in far north Siberia.. It’s been providing power and heat to the mining centre there since 1974. Four x 62MW (thermal), 11MW (electric) reactors were designed to run with high redundancy, low stress, providing heat, power and steam for the ~5,000 inhabitants. After fifty years, one of the four has been decommissioned, with the floating 2-reactor Akademik Lomonosov taking up the slack. Various micro-reactors are under development for Canadian Arctic mining camps and native villages, but nothing seems imminent.