Shrinking Fission
The competition to deploy small modular reactors is fierce and it’s global. My new mini-documentary gives a fast-paced tour of the promise and challenges of SMRs.
Few technologies show as much promise as SMRs. The reasons for the interest are obvious: if SMRs can be developed and deployed at scale, they could help meet soaring global power demand, stabilize electric grids, and help deliver on the enormous promise of nuclear energy. But the SMR market is crowded. This new 7-minute documentary on SMRs, which was shot and edited by my daughter, Mary Bryce, provides a dynamic look at the global competition to build and deploy SMRs. It includes a look back at Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms For Peace speech and a visit to the factory of Austin-based Aalo Atomics, one of the dozens of companies vying to win the SMR race.
Please have a look at our free new mini-documentary. And by all means, share it. I really appreciate your support. Thanks.
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The Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Vogtle cost about $13/watt. When the first unit was undergoing cold hydraulic tests a vibration in a pipe was found. That could have been corrected with a $30,000 brace, but NRC required a $3 million license review.
China is building upsized CAP1200 using ripped-off intellectual property for $2.69/watt. They have plans for CAP1400 and they have CAP1700 under design. So behemoths aren't intrinsically expensive. It looks like in USA $3/watt is construction cost, and $10/watt is the cost of doing battle with environists (the ones with no mental in the middle) and the NRC. Finland's Olkiluoto 3 was indeed expensive, but when it came online retail prices at the meter decreased 60%.
Terrapower is building a 300 MWe Natrium system at Kemmerer, WY around a GE/Hitachi PRISM — Power Reactor Innovate Small Modular — reactor. It's an upsized version of the liquid sodium-cooled inherently safe EBR-II that GE designed thirty years ago but nobody was allowed to build. NRC was designed to prevent reactors, and it worked fantastically well: Two reactors have been built since NRC was split from AEC. An important component of Natrium (Latin for "salt") is a molten-salt thermal store between the reactor and steam generator. It can provide up to 500 MWe for up to five hours. More importantly, output from it can be changed rapidly to cope with nearby windmills' unreliability. Another important result is that sodium is never near water.
The next important problem to tackle is 5%-used spent fuel, intentionally pejoratively called nuclear waste. 9.26% of fission products need custody for 300 years. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Unused fuel is dangerous for 300,000 years, but turning it into electricity ends that problem. We know several ways to separate fission products from unused fuel, but Jimmuh Cahtuh insisted that if we didn't do it, other nations wouldn't develop nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan and North Korea didn't get the memo.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 imposed a 0.1¢/kWh fee on nuclear reactors to "do something" about it. The Fund now stands at $43+ billion, and nothing has been done about it. Unfortunately, the Act explicitly forbade the Fund to be used for spent fuel processing. That needs to change. Write to you congresscritters. Oklo is developing a pyroelectric processing pilot at Oak Ridge with their own money.
Read about the Integral Fast Reactor in "Plentiful Energy" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang. You can get it from Amazon or read it at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Plentiful_Energy.pdf where Dr. Chang gave me written permission to post it. More details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy? A Comprehensive Quantitative System Engineering Study of the Relationship between Climate, Science, and Technology." Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
Great mini doc, Robert. Eventually some of these groups are gonna bust through.
Afraid the civil site work costs are gonna be high in the beginning on a per Mw basis. But we are optimistic these will get there even if it takes a decade or more.