Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/08/720728055/this-company-says-the-future-of-nuclear-energy-is-smaller-cheaper-and-safer

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

99 113 7 years ago

holografix• 7 years ago

“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."”

What if there’s a leak? What if for some reason the temperature inside the reactor is slight enough to vaporise the water?

vages• 7 years ago

About the water vaporizing: I'm guessing the pool is so "huge" that the sheer amount of energy required to vaporize the water can't be found in the fissile fuel alone. That doesn't account for the possibility of a leak, though.

rwcarlsen4• 7 years ago

In an accident scenario, the heat that is problematic is not from the fissile material (i.e. U235, Pu239) but from the fission products' decay heat - the isotope soup remaining after the fissile atoms split. It is much less intense than the heat/energy produced during normal operation and drops off significantly after a couple days. So the pool's purpose in terms of accident mitigation is to keep things cool enough during the period of time after reactor shutdown and before radioactive isotopes left over from split atoms decay/cool-down enough.

acidburnNSA6• 7 years ago

Leaks are designed out because the entire reactor vessels are surrounded by a giant swimming pool. The temperature stays low enough because this swimming pool is passively cooled.

Lack of relible decay heat[1] cooling caused both Fukushima and three mile island accidents. Having passive decay heat removal usually decreases the probability of core damage by about 100x.

1 https://whatisnuclear.com/decay-heat.html

benj1113• 7 years ago

"Having passive decay heat removal usually decreases the probability of core damage by about 100x."

100x isn't 100% though.

100 of these small reactors has the same risk as one large reactor. Perhaps higher, because like you, everyone goes around saying the risk has been designed out.

Though obviously one small reactor going boom is preferable to a big one doing the same.

C1sc0cat2• 7 years ago

What happens if the swimming pool leaks ?

loganwedwards• 7 years ago

Although NuScale is not the first to focus on this type of implementation (Westinghouse, Areva, B&W, etc..), namely small modular reactors (SMR), I am glad to see more hands in the mix. As a South Carolina resident (and supporter of nuclear power) and witnessing the shit-show with SCANA and the cancelled VC Summer plants, I am hopeful that economies of scale can take effect in the SMR-based designs.

benj1113• 7 years ago

Is this economies of scale in the right place though?

I'm doubtful we'll ever get to the point where you can just plop a reactor down and go. You're still going to have the years of political wrangling, all the bulky containment and supporting infrastructure.

jabl4• 7 years ago

Most likely multiple units will be deployed on each site, allowing them all to take advantage of shared infrastructure like grid connections, spent fuel storage, security etc.

beat6• 7 years ago

Although I'm not a big nuclear power fan for various reasons, I'm really happy to see someone approaching it with an eye to realistic safety, modern economics, and compatibility with a renewable-based grid. It'll be interesting to see if this can compete financially with batteries.

sandworm101• 7 years ago

> ... if this can compete financially with batteries.

I don't think there will be competition. With storage costs dropping I don't see why nuclear plants would be any different than solar or wind. If solar+wind can cover current demands, why turn down the reactors? Why not keep them running and charge up some battery capacity for the day that solar+wind isn't enough?

The ideal grid would have all energy sources running constantly at their most efficient, usually 100% rated production, and use batteries to smooth out the load. The reactors wouldn't need to throttle. All that entropy would be pushed to the batteries.

beat6• 7 years ago

It depends in part on the cost/duration required to scale reactor power up and down. It's apparently being marketed (at least per reading of this article) as a supplement for when the solar/wind grid is inadequate. That puts it in competition with cached storage (batteries etc), and gas-fired peaker plants as well. And there's a lot of uncertainty here in the market, for multibillion dollar capital investments on low-margin regulated utilities. So it'll be interesting to see what the niche is.

That said, it's still a damn sight better than the usual rounds of how super-expensive old-style light water plants are just fine, or how magic thorium breeders will save us even though no one has built one for 50 years, or other flavors of condescension at the naive treehuggers who are going to ruin everything with their technophobia.

sharcerer• 7 years ago

May I ask why you aren't a fan?

beat6• 7 years ago

A number of reasons, but for starters, consider inequality. Are we going to give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia afford one?

They are expensive, require tremendous infrastructure, and mean deploying fissionable materials to countries that maybe shouldn't have them. So it's solving a First World problem, and exacerbating the divide between rich and poor.

beat6• 7 years ago

Another reason, as I have a moment to write... vulnerability to terrorist/military action. It's not enough to safeguard a plant against accidents. It needs to be safeguarded from malice as well - including inside jobs (a knowledgeable operator manipulating the controls, with full authorization) and brute violence, which could be crashing a fully fueled airliner into it or attacking with a bunker-busting military drone. What happens if your nuclear plant is hit with a weapon designed to destroy a modern military bunker complex? (Which could be a state actor, or an act of terrorism that somehow takes over a drone.)

Now, what happens when you blow up a windmill?

pfdietz3• 7 years ago

My concern with this is that small reactors have been tried in the past, and were too expensive to operate. The staff needed to run a reactor does not scale linearly with power output. This is why utility reactors got large. Even so, when natural gas is cheap and renewables are available those large reactors are having some trouble competing just on operating cost. Working reactors in the US are being shut down because of this.

NotPaidToPost• 7 years ago

"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

Bit of a red flag there...

Edit:

The article further states: > "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."

Let's not shoot the messenger here.

If they are regulatory requirements that clearly do not apply to this technology because, e.g. it does not use the regulated parts or technology then fine. But that should be very thoroughly scrutinised and no exception should be granted on the basis that it is safe on paper.

Many requirements are very expensive to meet so I would understand that a private startup tries to minimise the burden. But I think nuclear safety comes first.

jabl4• 7 years ago

Is there evidence of this actually happening?

Considering said Edward Lyman has made a career out of FUD'ing anything nuclear, I'd be sceptical of taking anything he says on face value.

nickik6• 7 years ago

Union of Concerned Scientists are an anti-nuclear lobbyist group. Anything they say should be dismissed out of hand. They have 0 credibility and have spent the last 50 years spreading lies and fear about nuclear energy.

The problem here is actually that the people at 'Union' are deeply convinced that nuclear is bad and no nuclear project no matter how much time was spent on safety has ever been endorsed by them. This is simply how they operate.

The reason there are 'exceptions' is because partly with the help of themselves the nuclear regulatory system was changed in a way to hardcore specific technological solution into the regulatory process that only work for traditional PWR, practically excluding every other form of nuclear energy.

NuScale uses PWR technology in a slightly different form but because that's what they believed to be able to regulated, but even that requires lots of extra cost to get regulated.

The regulatory changes after the nuclear accidents essentially killed all research and all progress. This can be seen both in the rates of new reactor designs and reactor building rates.

Union of Concerned Scientiests and Greenpeace have been at the forefront of this issue for a long time now, and their deliberate strategy since literally 50 years (and this is a fact that has been shown based on their internal documents) is to always focus on nuclear safety because that's how they can make it uneconomical. And to their credit, this strategy has worked perfectly. It might be the single most successful political campaign of the 'environmental movement'.

If they had been this effective against coal we would live in a better world now.

neuronic• 7 years ago

Union of Concerned Scientists are an anti-nuclear lobbyist group.

Or maybe they are just concerned about a power source which has proved catastrophic multiple times in the past.

Simulacra• 7 years ago

Why not thorium?

DennisP• 7 years ago

Why not both? Other companies are working on thorium reactors, as well as molten salt reactors running on uranium. Terrestrial Energy in particular is pretty far along, partly due to friendly regulators in Canada.

nickik6• 7 years ago

Thorium only has advantages if you use a breeder. Uranium is actually better for most applications.

And the development of any type of reactor is already expensive, adding the additional challenge of regulatory burden to change fuels is totally pointless.

The real debate is about reactor design, not fuel type.

I also started to get interested in Thorium, but I learn that its not about Thorium but rather your reactor type.

jabl4• 7 years ago

Thorium only has advantages if you use a breeder.

A thermal breeder, that is. In the fast spectrum the U-Pu cycle is superior.

And even so, a thermal Th breeder has a very low breeding ratio, and in the thermal spectrum poisons are worse, meaning that the reprocessing volume to produce a unit of fuel will be frickin huge. Good luck making that economical.

vidanay• 7 years ago

I have a hard time accepting their premise that they are designing for "cheaper" based on that artists rendering (which I assume is based on some real design elements). Curvy roofed buildings and arced cooling ponds are not at all the most cost effective construction methods.

I want truly cheap nuclear that sits in unobtrusive cheap concrete boxes like the old Bell telephone exchange buildings.

j9461701• 7 years ago

The issue right now is every plant is a unique one-off. Meaning the inspectors need to pour over the plans, construction crews need to learn how to build each design specifically, fabricators providing parts need to make each plant's run of stuff special. If we could have just one standard nuclear plant design, even if it was silly curved roofs or whatever, it would massively decrease plant construction costs by taking advantage of standardization.

France did this in the 1970s. They hired engineers to design them 1 single kind of plant that was cheap, safe and would last a long time and then they pumped them out by the dozens. Every plant was the same as every other plant, so construction crews got good at it, part manufacturers could tool up for big production runs and lower per-part cost, and government inspection was drastically simplified because everything on the project was as stock as possible and the original design had already been approved. Now France's problem is it has too much electricity, as it over-estimated how much energy demands would ramp up going into the 21st century, and so now sells excess wattage to Germany.

magduf2• 7 years ago

Now France's problem is it has too much electricity, as it over-estimated how much energy demands would ramp up going into the 21st century, and so now sells excess wattage to Germany.

Um, that doesn't exactly sound like a "problem", especially since Germany gave up on nuclear due to nuclear fears, and still has a lot of coal plants.

Zigurd• 7 years ago

Pore not pour

Retric3• 7 years ago

To much energy is the central problem with nuclear. It’s capital intensive so if they don’t operate 24/7 their cost per watt increases. This puts Nuclear in a bind as wind and solar are both significantly cheaper and Nuclear is terrible as a peaking power plant.

In the end it needs to either beat Wind or Natural Gas. Meanwhile grid storage prices keep dropping which may soon start undercutting Natural Gas.

inamberclad• 7 years ago

I think the artists were just told to make something that looks attractive for the public.

throw0101a• 7 years ago

Curvy roofed buildings and arced cooling ponds are not at all the most cost effective construction methods.

Just because the architectural facade is 'fancy' does not mean the internal plumbing is.

nine_k3• 7 years ago

An arched construction can cover more area with less material and without internal columns; this was realized back in ancient Roman times. So curves may be there for a reason. (The pond is by an artistic license, without doubt, though.)

The important parts not on picture:

* Small reactors units, built on a factory and delivered by truck.

* Reactor units are unified, so the economies of scale kick in.

* Full passive cooling, sufficient when all external power is off.

* Containment vessels for the reactor units, so the danger of any leaks is greatly limited.

What makes me wonder is the complete absence of a smokestack to siphon off any excessive second-circuit steam. The artist also did not draw an electric switching / transformer yard and a power line. Do they plan electricity egress by some underground superconductive cable? (Would be cool, but not cheap; currently only makes sense in very dense urban environments.)

aurelwu2• 7 years ago

Their webpage [0] has the construction cost at $3 billion for a ~700 MW reactor. This is about the same as the originally projected cost for the Flamanville EPR with 1600 MW, which now is expected to end up costing ~$10 Billion. Now even if we assume - and thats a big assumption - they really can build the reactor for $3 Billion, that still equals ~$7 Billion in construction costs for a Flamanville sized reactor.

They do not put any number on their operating costs which makes it impossible to calculate the electricity price they need to break even. If there is any information out there it would be appreciated.

[0] https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/cost-competitive

rwcarlsen4• 7 years ago

That $3 billion cost estimate is for first-of-kind of a reactor/plant that is intended to be replicated many times. The cost per plant is expected to drop significantly with total number of deployments. Also the plant is designed to have significantly lower operating costs, shorter construction time (which means shorter loan duration, lest capital wasted on interest). The Olkiluoto 3 (EPR) power station in Finland has been under construction for nearly 15 years! 15 years before you can even start paying off even 1 penny of the capital cost is a huge barrier overcome here with Nuscale.

aurelwu2• 7 years ago

I know, but they said the same about the EPRs, so I remain sceptical that it will work that way. Solar,Wind,Batteries,Hydrogen Production,Synthetic Fuel Production is becoming cheaper year by year so Nuscale need not only to meet their initial targets and then decrease the cost for future reactors but they also need to end up beating the other technologies costwise & safety & safety perception wise. Their Design might be faster than requiring 15 years, but I doubt it is as fast to build as solar or wind.

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

They do not put any number on their operating costs which makes it impossible to calculate the electricity price they need to break even...

You can kind of get an idea though, if you know a little about the industry. So we know each one of their modules will need to be refueled every 2 years. That's one cost, and a major one, that we have a pretty good idea of. We know that the design, (again according to the salesman), does not require renewed water for cooling. That's a not so major cost that we don't need to worry about. Etc etc etc.

But yeah, at 720 MWHe and refueling every two years, that's enough to tell you that it's obviously not cheap. It's more accurately characterized as cheap-er than current designs.

My own guess, build price once they get the build process down will come in right around 6 Billion. The first one will end up costing way more, but I do believe the price will come down provided the "modularity" boast is at all true. (6 Billion sounds expensive, but it's a major upgrade from the, so far, 28 Billion that has been spent at Vogtie for instance.) Expenses related to refueling are going to kill you, but hey, it kills you for a normal reactor in any case.

So yeah, obviously this thing won't be beating out wind any time soon. But it is wayyyy cheaper than nuclear is currently. If you're a poor area, Wind with some innovative pumped hydro storage designs seems like a better fit for your pocketbook. But if you're a area flush with a lot of cash, some of these may work out for you. They're definitely what you might call luxuries. They're future is, basically, to be used as ultra expensive storage solutions for wind. So over service lifetime, I'd suspect wind/pumped hydro to be much less expensive. (Plus, who knows what will happen with other storage tech development in the interim?)

The great irony here is that the places flush with the most cash, Texas, Cali, New York, Minnesota, etc., are also the places least likely to use this. The places with little cash, your Iowas, your Wisconsins, aren't likely to use it either because obviously wind/pumped hydro is cheaper for them long term. (And wind/gas or coal is acceptable to them as a transition tech.) They wouldn't have had the money anyway though, so no real loss there.

Upper middle class states not close to the Great Lakes might be your best bets? Georgia? Utah? Etc. It'll be a tough sell. But if they find the right marks, they can probably sell it.

nickik6• 7 years ago

SMR based on old school water PWR is just not the best idea. The only reason to do it, is basically because everything else is impossible to get regulated. Putting whole PWR systems in one module seams pretty crazy compared to the alternative reactors we could be building. The PWR SMR are still massively bigger other SMRs.

We built and tested better smarter designs for reactors that would be way smaller and cheaper but those are essentially impossible to license in the US and no other country has a market big enough to finance development it.

Nuclear is so energy dense the market for it is so divided that the economics of scale are just not there in the same way unless you do it stat driven as in France or you have a large unified market like the US was when nuclear was cheap and expanding fast.

thrower1233• 7 years ago

Per gigawatt-hour, nuclear power as it stands may very well be the safest power source that we have got already.

The biggest hurdle is irrational fear and the regulatory barriers consequent.

v_lisivka10• 7 years ago

Yeah, it's sad that people refuse to live at Chornobyl, Fucusima, or many other safe places. So much of land is just wasted because of this irrational fear.

thrower1233• 7 years ago

I grew up downstream of a whole set of International Paper and Boise-Meade paper mills on the Androscoggin River. I think I'd prefer Fukishima - there's less cancer there.

beoh• 7 years ago

I wouldn't necessarily call it irrational. While there are far less incidents in nuclear power, their severity and long term harm are much greater while being very hard to get back under control as we have seen in the past. I would assume many would prefer to have broken a bone a few times in their life instead of a single shot in the head. This fear is very much understandable in my opinion.

I do not mean to imply that there are less fatalities from other energy sources, especially since those harming the environment might cause the end of us all. It's much like the fear of flying, it is safer, but if something happens you cannot run nor stir to the side, you are completely of control and the outcome will be most certainly fatal.

smileysteve3• 7 years ago

their severity and long term harm are much greater

This is false; Coal has more radioactive waste release to air, soil, and water. In the U.S. we store what we do capture in "ash pools".

ajross• 7 years ago

So... following that logic, air travel is the safest method available, so your argument is that we should stop regulating it? It's the safest method available because it is well regulated with an attendant long-standing culture of safety -- so much so that even a single breakdown (c.f. the 737 MAX) is considered an existential disaster for a manufacturer.

For an argument from the other side: you're notably looking at (well regulated!) electrical industry statistics for your safety metrics, but if you include unregulated (military) applications things don't look nearly so rosy. There are a surprising number of reactors sitting on the bottom of the ocean right now...

beders2• 7 years ago

A 1% failure rate is not irrational fear.

pfdietz3• 7 years ago

No, the biggest hurdle is that it's grossly uneconomic.

thrower1233• 7 years ago

Because it costs billions of dollars to check everything over in octuplet and build everything special because everyone is so damned afraid of The Bomb that we gave up on building them fifty years ago at scale.

It's the safest thing going.

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/11255616735556935...

Animats• 7 years ago

"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.

Here's a picture of the setup.[1] The reactors all share the same pool. The pool is big enough to absorb the heat in an emergency, and passive heat transfer from reactor to pool is high due to a smaller reactor size, and all this passively prevents a meltdown.

So they have one class of failure covered. But that's not the only possible failure. Leaks into the pool become a big problem, because one reactor can contaminate the pool and all the other reactors. Three Mile Island had a valve failure and contaminated the containment vessel. That was expensive to clean up, and made the reactor useless, but didn't cause trouble outside the plant. A plumbing leak with NuScale could take down all the reactors.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/NuScale-SMR-ente...

mcguire5• 7 years ago

"The pool is big enough to absorb the heat in an emergency, and passive heat transfer from reactor to pool is high due to a smaller reactor size, and all this passively prevents a meltdown."

Out of curiosity, how is heated water circulated through the pool? I have this sudden vision of the reactor boiling the water around it and being surrounded by a pocket of steam. Or, the repeated formation and collapse of a steam bubble, which can't be good.

goatgate• 7 years ago

Complexity is the enemy of any reliable system. No energy source is simpler than solar arrays. They don't require any moving parts, thermal management, waste containment, or strong security. The only maintenance required is dusting. Why otherwise intelligent people cannot appreciate the cost of complexity for nuclear energy is beyond me, especially when viewed in contrast to something as simple as solar.

fromthestart• 7 years ago

There are costs other than complexity which must be considered before selecting a power source. For example, energy density per unit area. Nuclear has a much smaller footprint. Also the cost, maintnence, lifetime, and environmental impact of batteries required during night time/occluded operation is also not trivial, as is accommodating for unpredictable outputs due to weather.

zie• 7 years ago

Agreed, Also diversity of power is a win. But I agree, with the OP comment here, the simplicity of Solar is hard to get past, but sometimes it just won't work for a given application.

v_lisivka10• 7 years ago

Nuclear is slow to operate, so it needs batteries to handle peaks during day. Nuclear can provide baseline power only.

Solar panel can be installed at roofs, so it can double as shelter, and power loss due to transmission can be lowered. Backup gravitational battery can provide backup power on site for short (hours) periods of time, to cheaply offset energy from peak of production at noun to peak of consuming at evening. Efficiency of solar panels can be improved up to 80%, so they can reduce need for air cooling.

mcguire5• 7 years ago

Except that solar doesn't provide power at night, and reduced power on some days. That means you need either storage or alternative power. Areas which can provide large amounts of solar tend to be located far from population centers. That means long range transmission systems, which are among the most complex systems in existence.

Lutzb• 7 years ago

Or you could just overprovision solar.

mcguire5• 7 years ago

""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."

If it's safe, it should easily meet the criteria and so shouldn't need exemptions and exceptions, right?

AstralStorm5• 7 years ago

The idea is to save on some costs of monitoring equipment and recertification per each module.

Good luck...

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