When It Comes to Nuclear Power, Companies Should Think Small
Take for instance the Hyperion Power Module, or HMP. Developed at, and then spun off from, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Hyperion is marketing the diametric opposite of the power companies’ massive and complex facilities. Hyperion’s reactor is a relatively tiny device, about the size of a dinky Smart Car.
Unlike large-scale plants requiring 24/7 monitoring by a small army of engineers and technicians, an HPM contains no moving parts, and is intended to operate for years with no human interaction to speak of. Hyperion reactors are actually intended to be buried underground during their service lives, with no hands-on maintenance at all between refueling cycles, which occur every 7-10 years.
Of course, a single Hyperion unit is hardly the equivalent of a Westinghouse AP1000 reactor, two of which are planned for the Votgle facility. One HPM generates only 25 MWe, while a massive AP1000 churns out an appropriately massive 1250 MWe or so.
But nobody ever said you have to buy just one. If we assume that a single new AP1000 costs about $7 billion for 1250 MWe (which is not entirely fair as “sticker prices” go, since the $14 billion estimate for the Votgle plant upgrade includes financing costs as well as actual production), that works out to about $5.6 million per MWe.
A single HPM currently lists for $50 million (and I should note here that this is already twice the price Hyperion promised in its initial 2008 press releases). At 25 MWe per unit, we’re looking at $2 million per MWe, a little more than a third of the unit price of power from an AP1000.
Hyperion says its reactors aren’t intended to replace large-scale generation plants, but the engineer in me wonders, why not? HPMs are built on an assembly line, and Hyperion already has over 100 orders for them. Picking up my calculator again, I figure that in order to equal the output of one AP1000 reactor, I’d need to buy 50 HPMs.
At $50 million per unit (how about a bulk discount?), that would cost $2.5 billion. Now, I don’t have that kind of cash laying around myself, but you don’t need to be an accountant to see that $2.5 billion is a lot less than $7 billion. And that doesn’t count the untold millions I’d have to spend on the aforementioned army of maintainers for the AP1000 — although either way, you’d need a sizable team of regular power plant workers to maintain the actual power turbines.
I’m sure that these simple, back-of-the-envelope numbers don’t reflect anything like every detail of big vs. small in nuclear power, but a Hyperion or similar small-scale reactor would have to get a heck of a lot more expensive to cost as much as big, traditional plants.
There would also be other benefits, in that you wouldn’t have to locate the entire power apparatus out in the middle of nowhere. Hyperion-style reactors can’t melt down, and are designed to be buried in small plots. Why not use that easy portability to distribute your power plants all over the place? Put a couple near your city’s main hospital, a couple more in your industrial zone, with single units scattered around the suburbs and residential cores, and you’ve got a redundant system that’s far less susceptible to, say, blackouts during bad weather, as opposed to running power across hundreds of miles of transmission lines.
So, Georgia Power, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, et al — why aren’t you thinking small?
Good Points. Great article.
Thanks.
The government – especially THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION – is all about control. It’s easier to control a few large facilities than dozens or hundreds of small facilities. And to ensure the control, our government, which has no money and just raised its debt ceiling to $14.3 TRILLION, is going to subsidize big plants. Energy producers will go where it’s easiest to go – for large plants built with subsidies and tax incentives (another form of subsidy).
A government interested in increasing energy production and efficiency, rather than being mostly about control, would be looking at all types of nuclear generators and facilitating their un-subsidized construction through timely review and approval of construction plans. Unfortunately, all would-be producers will still have to fight the “No Nukes” crowd, still wowed by 30+ year-old events and movies – 3 Mile Island and the China Syndrome both date to 1979.
There are reasons this can’t be used as sole solution. Much of it has to do with the limited amount of fissile material, and specifically U-235. On the other hand, there’s an obscene amount of fissionable, but not fissile material (such as U-238) that can be converted for use. So, even as a large-scale solution, these guys would be part of a two-step solution.
Beyond that, however, the biggest problem is that they are just as subject to the same political fear-mongering that makes our current stock of PWRs and BWRs so expensive. Change the laws (especially regarding reprocessing) and you’ll change the price. I’m not saying to cut back to the point where you make things unsafe. However, some of the legal hoops are for no other reason than to give operators something to jump through.
The Japanese are coming on this one.
The Americans are still disco-ing away, hands waving in the air and, like cows in the meadow, all facing the lit stage holding Mick Jagger and Al Gore.
That’s why. And it’s sickening.
You bring up A lot of good points that seem to make A lot of sense. Another point you don’t mention is with the multiple smaller units you don’t need all the large transmission lines and have the power losses associated with them.
Sounds like the way to go. Has my vote.
Two very important problems with those little units: One is the ancillary costs not associated with the reactor and generator. Transformers – controls – monitoring equipment – nuclear security – and the rest that have to meet government regulations. These costs would make each smaller unit much more expensive, but reasonably so, the bigger problem is the ancillary costs for security and the like are all operations and maintenance costs (O&M).
Those costs could possibly be overcome, but the second problem can’t. The semi-monopoly nature of electric generation has put the government in bed with the electric business and changed the way utilities have to do business. You see systems that don’t require capital improvements on a regular basis are not as profitable. A power company is allowed to profit from its capital investments, depending on the state it’s around 10%. So a 10 year capital project for $14Billion dollars would mean about $1.4 billion in profits, in addition to the smaller profits that the generation of the additional energy will produce, and the continuing capital improvements massive systems require offer an ongoing source of profit.
O&M costs are pass through costs, meaning the power company can recover those costs but not profit from them, so a system that get’s put in for less capital costs, and needs no capital improvements for nearly a decade is not a profit generator. Electric companies exist to make profits not electricity. They play by the rules forced on them by government, the current regulation that exist, mean that what appear to be smart energy decisions are not smart business decisions, they could be both, but not with current government control of utilities.
Interesting idea.
I wasn’t aware that this possibility existed. The notion of miniaturization could well apply to many of our other problems, as well. A networked proliferation of small, decentralized power plants could be made safer from attack, in the same manner as our financial markets on 9/11. A bit of over-design to cope with the usual natural disasters would go a long way to mitigating the effects of an EMP attack, as well.
The same is true of many of our environmental concerns. Effective water treatment is well-understood, these days, and a combination of compact, on-site water treatment with air scrubbers (also well-known) could provide a basis for resurgent manufacturing capability in this country. We don’t have to sacrifice our ability to make things in order to have a decent environment.
Excellent arguments.
Another point to consider: If we truly wish to use hydrogen fuel cell, we must create hydrogen with electricity. Hydrogen is not a source of energy; it is an energy carrier. The problem with hydrogen is finding a way to transport and store it. Small, regional reactors can help mitigate this problem. Instead of having to transport hydrogen through massive pipelines, trains, or trucks, hydrogen can be produced in close proximity to consumption.
The thoughts of Mr. Collier are similar to what I have contemplated for many years. The State of Washington went through their WOOPS bonds default debacle some years ago and it seemed to stifle any interest in nuclear power generation. The plants that were shuttered were the behemoths not unlike the Georgia plants. While I am unfamiliar with the HPMs, the history and safety of the US Navy’s small nuclear generator program is unparalleled. The HPMs appear to be an extension of the Navy’s technology, making them even more reliable and safe. In this case, small is better and more economical. It is far past the time to get on with the HPMs.
DoublePlusGood !
Galena, Alaska, a remote small town
which has to import fuel for its
electric generator, may get the 1st
Japanese mini-nuke power plant **IF**
they can get the US Feds permission.
Furtherandmore, a Hi-Tech 21st century
society is critically dependent on the
_uninterrupted_ availability of power;
Small units, not tied into a power grid,
are the way to go; See the news out of
Oklahoma for one reason why.
Lastly, at the nay-sayers: Believing
the PC propaganda, Politically Correct
or Power Company, may void your lifetime
guarantee; This is a solved problem, and
the answer may keep you from freezing
to death, some cold winter’s night.
I think its Mitsubishi that made reactors the size of buses that can be buried under ground and supply enough energy for decades to a town. Why these aren’t all over I don’t know. I’m sure it has some thing to do with political favours and environmentalists who block everything that has to do with energy.
The government started using uranium fuel for power reactors because you could make nuclear weapons from the byproducts. But there was another fissionable fuel that was easier, safer, more abundant and cleaner. You can’t make nuclear weapons out of the energy reactor process though. So because the cold war caused them to want nuclear weapons, they ignored a great alternative. The fuel is thorium. Check out these articles. To be fair, the article does not mention that you can breed thorium into uranium 233, which would make nuclear weapons. Besides, making a bomb from U233 is difficult because there will also be U232. It gives off gamma radiation which will cook your electronics and the explosive lenses need to compress your U233 sphere. So it is VERY difficult and impractical to use for bombs. You could also use all the nuclear waste from uranium reactors and burn the stuff to get energy and get rid of it.
The technology to create thorium power reactors is almost trivial to engineer compared to fusion power. Yet the government spends billions trying to get fusion to work, when they should be investing in thorium. Fusion still hasn’t worked.
Thorium doesn’t meltdown and the energy is potentially so cheap it could change human civilization.
Why don’t more people know about this?
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8
Got to agree with North Forker. Having operated the Navy’s reactors, I can attest to the absurdly-high level of safety and quality. If we could strip away the non-safety regulatory BS, we could be running on a now-cheaper, safer, cleaner nuclear power. On top of that, since the price of fuel is actually a minor part of the cost of a reactor complex (this information is available in any Fundamentals of Nuclear Engineering class, such as the one I took at Virginia Tech, last semester, so there’s nothing classified being divulged here), nuclear plants are actually far more financially stable than their dinosaur-burning counterparts, whose cost fluctuates quite significantly with world oil prices.
These new reactors clearly have a place in the electric grid, but let’s not jump into it, whole-hog until they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. After all, What Would Rickover Do? Right now, we know how PWRs behave. We know their safety history. Even BWRs (though I’d be perfectly happy never to see another one commissioned) are a known quantity. Let’s build more of those while we see what secrets and surprises the HPMs have for us.
Rudemeister, fissionable is one thing, fissile is another. With fuels that are fissionable but not fissile, you can make a fast reactor. With fissile fuels, you can make thermal reactors. If you want unparalleled safety and inherent stability, then thermal reactors (preferably PWRs) are the way to go.
For the curious, what makes a fuel fissile is the ability to fission solely on the increased energy from the nucleus absorbing a neutron. With non-fissile fuels, the neutron needs additional kinetic energy, beyond just its mass energy, to cause fission.
Polywell fusion is the future;
First prototype in a year, first final direct-conversion version,
maybe +20 years, but _right_now_ mini-nukes are the way to go.
I’ve been reading about Hyperion reactors for a while now and I’m really excited about them, especially the possibility of them being used to power Vasimr propulsion systems but, I have a question….
Why do the big conventional nuclear reactor cost so much? What exactly is built into those costs? It can’t simply be the construction costs of the physical site. Is it the gigantic array of regulatory hurdles and legal hurdles?
Another consideration as well:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690627522614525.html
A couple of things. First, the overall life cycle costs aren’t being considered. Secondly, a lot of small plants create a proliferation hazard, because you have more sites to guard.
One thing I’ve learned is that when the salesman tells you that their product isn’t a good fit for your idea, believe him.
Of course we have coal.. enough for about a thousand years.
On the plus side of coal.. if we burn enough, and consider that the Al Gorean warmongers might have even a little kernel truth hidden in their Church of AGW hysteria. Then we might… might, stave off the next ice age for awhile.
Why are states and large cities already placing orders for these micro power plants? Ever since I first heard of them I was wondering when they would start delivering these units. Something tells me there is some regulation probably multiple regulations that make it hard to purchase and have a unit installed.
They are such a great idea build them install them and forget about them till time to refuel them every 7 1/2 years. Dig a hole stuff the thing in it and let it rip and just tie to local grids that may or may not supplement the larger grid. Hell without maintenance and all you could run alternate utility lines (hopefully underground so they are not subject to car crashes and weather events to tear the lines up) to smaller areas which would create plenty of jobs…Ahh that is too simple though isn’t it, it would probably disturb some sort of bird hare or strange little animal so you will probably not see it in your lifetime!
Amazing !
Thank you for the information !
But don’t worry, the nihilist- marxist- leninist destroyers will find a way to stop this too.
Hyperion says:
Obviously, a steam turbine has moving parts, and lots of them besides the main rotor. It has ‘auxiliary systems like a lube oil system for the bearings, vibration monitoring, speed control systems, overspeed protection, condensate water treatment, temperature monitoring, and probably some I’ve forgotten since I used to work on them.
And then there are the generator auxiliary systems.
Then there are the main and auxiliary transformers and electrical switchgear.
This sounds a lot like “too cheap to meter” hyperbole to me.
Calvin Ball:
I’ve read this security argument several times. But, as I understand the Hyperion reactors, they are completely buried, so that gettting to the nuclear material is hardly easy. the point is, security costs should not be terribly high, no higher than what many utilities already do for protecting natural gas lines and pump stations.
I have to agree – the navy approach is the way to go. Relatively inexpensive and ultrasafe.
Large or small, I worry about security. It’s the big elephant in the room.
The security at the reactor at Russellville, Ark. alone has been a horrible joke. It and others are massive ticking timebombs. Nothing to see here, move along.
I don’t think the Right’s nuclear power advocacy is anywhere near as nutty as the Left’s wind-and-solar advocacy. Even if nukes are far more expensive than we righties think, they actually work and can provide baseload power. Wind and solar can’t.
HOLD ON!
There are many many auxiliary power plant sites that are now used for backup and surges plus some are semi-abandoned. Most of the latter are STILL distribution points.
What’s the difference between a nuke boiler system and a coal fired one? Only the monitor and controls. And how much do those cost for a nuke ship? And how much might the price for those go down in terms of a thousand or so?
And how about the effect v the overland grid when almost any medium size city or even smaller can supply its own power using the overland lines as smotther and backup?
The WSJ was mostly right. Problem is, while they did their research, they don’t have a background in nuclear engineering. U-238 IS fissionable. It’s just not fissile. Still, the point remains, there’s no good reason why we aren’t reprocessing spent fuel, only political ones.
The Hyperion device is like a non-rechargeable battery; it needs to be replaced every 7 – 10 years.
The reason that security is an issue at the large power plants is because of their size and complexity. A tiny plant that can be easily secured is a much smaller risk. Monitoring can be done electronically, and access can be much more easily controlled. The much reduced size of the fuel supply also makes it less attractive to terrorists.
Power losses due to transmission can be greatly reduced by co-locating the power supply with the users.
hyperion has been talking about their stuff for a while now. it’s going to take more time to deliver and field test it. i research a business plan a couple of years ago to use naval tech. mobile water based atomic plants is something the russians are/were working on as well. trying to get this idea off the ground with ecogangbanger opposition would be a nightmare i’m sure.
Agreed. Even if the power at the generating plant were free, the utility would still meter it, because T&D costs are a major part of the overall cost. TANSSAAFL.
As an electrical engineer with power generation experience, I have reached the conclusion over the last forty years that Washington is incapable of making an intelligent decision on nuclear power. The dazzling technology that was pioneered at the University of Chicago, Los Alamos, Hanford and NRTS (National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho) has been turned into a bureaucratic nightmare.
Hyperion Power Modules (another dazzler from Los Alamos) represent an intelligent method for supplying nuclear power based on incremental needs. Whether a single module serves the purpose of small applications, or a series of modules are sequentially installed for applications having increasing needs, no other power source is capable of competing with this approach.
What is required is to throw out the Washington retards and the political will to start over again with simple regulation.
Site permits and cooling combined with design build have been the problems. Standardized design and reasonable sites for smaller units would be ideal.Fighting special interests is another expense and delaying tactic to deal with.Maybe all National Guard Armories should be designated mini nuke plants!
Imagine a working reactor site in the US, known to be understaffed and they overworked. Imagine a small group of Pak/India mercenary arms dealers having a battallion-strength cache of heavy weapons literally next door to said reactor. A small,local Sherriff’s Dept. being the only thing between them and the reactor. A large compound of sharia-law practicing Muslims is nearby, as is I-40 and water transport.
Imagine them overtaking the reactor, and the prevailing winds killing millions of people and fouling the soil in many states.
ATF and Homeland Security can’t; nothing to see here, move along.
You really don’t know?
Look back at the cost overruns for the first set of reactors. What it shows is, the reactors cost a couple billion, and the rest of it went for lawyers, “regulatory” approval, and soothing the delicate sensibilities of the Luddites. What makes you think you’ll get away with spending one penny less for those features of a 25 mW plant — or for a 25 watt plant, for that matter, if it’s “nuclear” — than you do for a 1,000 mW one? Especially since you’re proposing planting those things around neighborhoods. I’ll bet the ATLA has a program going to advocate precisely that — they’ll get the seed money from Presidents of “neighborhood associates” and condominium boards who are currently wasting it persecuting people who want the wrong shade of green on their shutters, and plan on raking in billions from the utilities and/or the Government when (not if) they win.
The metric for building anything in this country nowadays is watts per kilolawyer, and the only way to make things possible is to make them so big that the cost of the litigation is amortized sufficiently. Therefore gigawatt electric plants, which make about as much rational sense as sulfuric acid hair spray but are about the only thing that can actually be accomplished.
Regards,
Ric
There’s not much opportunity for congressional graft in small reactors. Taking bets on what will be built?
If this was small scale thorium type reactors I’d think it’d be much easier to pull off.
Thinking small only makes sense. Conservatives believe in small localized governments whenever possible (only use fed apparatus for federal needs)… so why have a centralized electrical power grid?
Great discussion.
With oil at $20 or $30 a barrel a few years ago, as well as the green and political hazard, the financing of most alternative power plants including nuclear plants was destabilized. That is except for coal and natural gas for peak loads.
Obama seems to want expensive energy. He has shut down shale oil leases and cut off offshore drilling. This makes many PC alternative energy sources look promising, including nuclear. The energy cost structure has changed and will change again. Notice we suddenly have a 100 year supply of natural gas. This is a huge change.
What is needed are alternatives and flexibility. These small nuclear plants address that.
Look, it is very simple. The NRC regulates a nuclear power plant. After 3 mile island they became very careful of what they approve.
If you want to build one then you have to have a design that has been “approved” by the NRC. That takes years, mega man hours, and millions of $. Next, you have to apply for a construction/operating license that has to be “approved” by the NRC. That takes years, mega man hours, and millions of $. Oh, if one person doesn’t want to go along then you have to “work through the problem.” That can take years, mega man hours, and millions of $.
Even though all the new reactor “designs” with all of the safety systems to ensure that the plant would withstand a Design Basis Accident (DBA) with limited radiation release were approved in the ’80′s and ’90′s they still have to go through an “approval” process. It then becomes an economy of scale. You need large, base loaded plants (Nukes don’t like to change load)and you need replacement parts and the support systems manufactured on the economy of scale so that Companies Will Go Into Business to provide them to you and all of those companies have to pass NRC muster. The actual plant is not “That” expensive. The fuel is even cheap. It’s all of the regulation and record keeping that comes along with all of this. Anything associated with the Reactor has to have a pedigree (record trail) which means it has to pass muster all the way back to where it came out of the ground. All of this stuff was in place at one time and is being put in place again. If companies can’t make money, and many are very leery of this whole idea of bulding them again and making the huge investment, then you get nowhere.
Otherwise the small, portable reactors sound great. Oh, and what do you do with the fuel, eh? Get it from whom? Store the spent fuel where?
The terrorist idea? Those who espouse that idea have ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE what they are talking about. Go visit a nuclear plant if you don’t believe me.
Rewrite!: A little more rad health and a little less China Syndrome, if you please.
Ric Locke,
“watts per kilolawyer”
I am so stealing that.
For those who are pushing Polywell fusion, it’s got less than about a 10 percent chance of working.
If the marginal cost is low enough, it makes more sense to bill for subscription, rather than use, to save the costs of sending someone out there to read the meters. Just bill a flat rate of $50-100/month to hook your house up to the grid, and use as much as electricity as you want.
By the way, what sort of proliferation risk are people worried about with mini-nuke plants? You can’t crack one of these things open while they’re running- you’ll be cooked alive by the radiation. It takes several hours after shutdown before the fuel is cool enough to transport into cooling pools, where it must sit for ten years or more before being removed for reprocessing or final disposal. Also, you can’t let the hot fuel hit air or it will burst into flames.
Anyone else see these as Giant RTG’s like we used on Voyager and the like? Hell I STILL track Voyager to this day yet the little Mars rovers are having power problems because of sand on the solar arrays. If only we could shoot all our little toasters into space with RTG’s. *Sigh*
Honestly these nukes seem way more reasonable and modern to me than the big easy target nuclear plants. I mean how big a hole can we put these into? How hard is it to defend a deep filled in hole to prevent attacks? I’m just saying these sound more cost effective both production wise and guarding wise.
Plus don’t they just sound like giant nuclear batteries from Steam Punk stories and the like? Plug em in and leave em be!
Unfortunately for the back-of-the-envelope numbers, the economist in me screams “increasing marginal costs of production” as I read this article. How many of the mini-reactors can the company actually churn out during peak demand, and how much will prices rise if they attempt to go beyond capacity? How fast can they scale up production to meet demand? There’s simply more to the matter than looking at a snapshot of the current situation and extrapolating from it without accounting for the feedback into the system as a result of upscaling.
It wasn’t just the cost of federal regulations that ended construction of nuclear plants in the 80′s. Liberal Governors got into the game.
Dukakis tried to kill the Seabrook plant by refusing to approve the evacuation plan. Because the plant was in NH, he was overruled and Seabrook went on-line.
Cuomo used the same trick to block the fully constructed and tested Shoreham plant. That $6 Billion debacle really killed the industry (and Long Islanders have enjoyed the nation’s highest electric rates ever since).
Governors and local idiots are going to be a problem again – look at how the nuclear disposal issue was exploited in Nevada (the same place people used to picnic while watching nuclear test detonations!).
Maybe the HMP’s are the way to go – not because they are small but because they are fast. A short permit / construction / test / go-live cycle might ensure that a lost election doesn’t scuttle a project.
Just as it took Nixon to go to China, maybe it will take Obama to push nuclear and free it up from some of the harrassment.
1. No, the whole industry isn’t stuck on the 1200MW+ brutes. Just this operator is.
2. Hyperion is certainly an option worth a close look. The utility’s load growth need is a consideration too.
3. Other smaller modular units also are worth a look. Consider B&W’s mPower units. 125MW each and they are small enough the critical (expensive) pieces can be made in a shop and delivered on railcars. You locate them underground and security risks get much smaller.
Economics is the primary factor in size but standard pre-approved designs are the only way to go these days.
Babcock and Wilcox (www.babcock.com) is on the fast track for supplying small, modular, factory-built nuclear reactors. The company has a track record building military reactors, and uses proven technology — unlike Hyperion.
In fact there are several companies that are well ahead of Hyperion in the race to build modular, factory-built, safe small power reactors.
The problem is the underfunded Nuclear Regulatory Commission which is another fossil bureaucracy totally unfit to meet the needs of the 21st century.
Obama will always talk a good game, as long as his speechwriters get enough drugs and booze, and his teleprompter is working. But he is extremely weak in his consistency and follow-through.
Forget the government. You’re going to have to get it done yourself in spite of the government.
44. Those big plants aren’t easy targets. They are very hard targets, almost as hard as a missile silo, meaning nothing short of a nuclear weapon is going to breach the reactor from the outside. And of course, if a terrorist had a nuke, he wouldn’t waste it on trying to blow up a nuclear power plant to enhance the fallout. Taking it to the center of a city and detonating it would kill far more people.
#35 Ric Locke absolutely nailed it. The cost of getting all of the approvals is the same regardless of plant size. One 25MWe HMP installation will cost about the same as a 1250MWe PWR less actual construction cost. All of the regulatory BS is statutory not constitutional so it is not out of the power of Congress to fix. In a pinch, they could simply pass a single law to funnel all of the legal actions through a single expert court one level down from the Supreme Court and strip all jurisdiction from other federal courts and commissions. Of course this would be political suicide on the order of health care reform or amnesty, so expect to sit freezing in the dark first.
All of the problems cited for the small reactors can be overcome simply by putting a whole bunch of the small ones in a single facility. Then you have consolidated monitoring and security, and an engineering and maintenance staff that can be efficiently used across a farm of small reactors. The engineer in me wonders why a bunch of small are cheaper than one great big, but a collection of little ones screams high availability through redundancy – a good thing.
I know that utilities are regulated on a capital basis. However, isn’t it now possible to build your own generating plant (as a pure power producer) and sell into the grid? In that case, I don’t think you are regulated as a utility, but not sure.
Building many smaller reactors has the advantage of reducing vulnerabilities. If someone wants to attack the distribution grid, the reactors, or even to use EMP technology against us, it becomes much more difficult to put us out of action. A local electrician can potentially reconnect the terminals of a small unit. If the units can be buried, then they might be buried deeply, making them relatively invulnerable. Think of a unit in a cylindrical shaft half a mile deep. If the technology supports buried operation, then the cooling problem is solved and we don’t need to kill the fish population of a major river with each installation, or to build giant cooling towers which are vulnerable to surface attack. All in all, a technology worthy of consideration.
21. John Cooper,
You are correct that this small nuke produces heat that needs to turn a steam turbine, which does require maintenance.
Here in Redondo Beach, CA, we have a power plant that runs on natural gas. It used to run on oil. It’s rarely turned on because it costs so much for the gas compared to importing hydro-electric power from out of state.
Seems to me existing gas-, oil- or coal-fired plants — all of which have existing operating steam turbines looking for a source of heat — could be retrofitted with these little nukes. More than one if necessary.
I know there is plenty of land for the reactor around our little power plant. It used to have gigantic oil tanks, which have been removed. Not to mention two other non-operating turbines from the old days.
The only thing stopping it would be fear of nuclear power.
Very interesting post and comment thread. One thing to consider when comparing Hyperion’s projected costs to those of a large nuclear project like the Vogtle plant expansion is to check to make sure that you are doing a comparison of complete systems that produce the same final product.
I am a big fan of the HPM, but the price that is often quoted is for the nuclear heat source – aka the nuclear island. It is not, like the published numbers for Vogtle, the price for a complete electrical power generating station that is connected to the grid and ready to be dispatched.
It is perfectly appropriate for Hyperion to quote just the price of its heat source; it is positioning its reactor not only to serve as a boiler for an electrical power system, but also as the heat source for a process like extracting oil from the Alberta tar sands. When you price out all of the components, including financing and site costs, that will be required to turn an HPM into an electrical power generator, the cost becomes much closer to what GA Power is projecting for Vogtle.
There is so much to be discussed with regard to small reactors. I encourage you all to continue thinking and challenging conventional wisdom.
On the subject of why, if it seems so obvious, hasn’t anyone successfully deployed smaller commercial nuclear generating plants already: All industries, especially commodity industries, must pay close attention to the effects of competition and of supply and demand. Energy is a particularly fungible commodity where coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, plutonium and thorium can be competitive fuels because they all produce heat.
The specific ways that they produce heat can vary and require certain kinds of handling systems, but once the heat is produced, the rest of the production system – whether it is steam turbines, a district heating distribution system, or an industrial process system needing large quantities of high quality heat – can be identical.
Therefore, the people who make money in the business of selling coal, oil and natural gas at heat prices ranging from “cheap” coal at $1.75 per million BTU in freight cars to refined petroleum products at $30.00 per million BTU (roughly $4 per gallon) get very worried about the competition from those heavy metals which can be profitably converted into commercial fuels suitable for power plant use for about 50 cents per million BTU. They get REALLY worried when they realize that the nuclear fuel price has more room to drop and when they realize that a heat customer using nuclear fuel does not need any atmospheric pollution control devices because they do not produce any polluting emissions.
I believe that the opposition to nuclear energy comes from folks who recognize the Tonya Harding school of competition – if you cannot beat them, encourage someone else to kneecap them. I am not sure if you all know this, but the fossil fuel industry has a little bit of money and power and is perfectly capable of finding surrogates to perform the task of handicapping its atomic competition.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcat
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. (est. 1993)
Personally, I like the idea of small scale nuclear reactors. Buy one of these things for a couple of million dollars, bury is in your new housing development, and have run your own local power company. No worries about changing oil prices or state wide blackouts, etc. However, I have to admit that there ARE problems.
For starters, the price tag on these sorts of things are JUST for the reactor. And you’re going to need a lot more than THAT to run a power plant. Steam generators, electrical generators, transformers, etc. For that money ALL you’re getting is a heat source.
I’m not seeing much of a terrorist / profileration hazard assuming these things are buried under ten or twenty feet of dirt and concrete. I’m having a hard time imagining a terrorist group with enough firepower to crack a nut like that.. Or being given enough time with a backhoe to dig down to it. As for proliferation, I’m not sure what sort of fuel loading these things use and how much plutonium it might generate over it’s lifetime… But I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that one or two reactors are going to be unlike to make enough plutonium for a proper bomb. And in any case, reprocessing spent fuel is not a trivial task and not something you can do in a hurry in the back of a truck. I’m not seeing terrorists sneaking off with one of these things to crack it open in their secret lair to make some bombs.
#12. Rudemeister> I hear more and more people going on about Thorium. It’s an interesting system, but some people seem to believe it’s some sort of miracle reactor. You say that the engineering problems are trivial compared to Fusion… that’s rather true. Compared to Fusion they are. Compared to just about anything else, they’re FAR from trivial.
Mind you, I think Thorium reactors are something to look into. But I can’t imagine any being built commercially for QUITE some time without a LOT more research and a few test platforms. It is NOT trivial to engineer a reactor that uses super heater liquid floruine salts as a coolant. Plus there’s the fact that it IS trivial to seperate U-233 from the reactor… Which is QUITE suitable for nuclear weapons. We built one ourselves. The reason it isn’t used for bombs is because it’s a gamma emitter, which makes hanging around the warhead a bit unhealthy. As a matter of fact, OSHA guidelines are one reason we don’t build U-233 weapons. Does anyone really think that would be a big stumbling block to nations in other parts of the world?
One year ago Bush commissioned a Nuclear aircraft carrier. I posted on 2 greenie blogs the response they claim no new nuclear since the 70′s.
I am also aware during some recent energy crisis in California, a regional railroad parked some locomotives and generated electricity. The state can’t regulate what is on railroad tracks.
It drives the greenie weenies nuts when they don’t have physical access to protesting. Railroad trespass is a federal crime.
So we now have modern nuclear but many won’t admit it.
Rewrite!
Ok, you’ve convinced me.
So when do we start drilling?
Good thread making some good points, but ignoring or working around the one(s) that constitute the blockages.
Look at #34 Rewrite! He(?) clearly didn’t read the article as Will wrote it — he simply saw something about small nuclear plants and went off into a riff on the dangers of terrorism, in the process giving us some insight into why the Leftoids talk about “bedwetting”. This is the reaction that will dominate the “news cycle” if any of these proposals rise into the public eye, and the result will be more, not less, “regulation”, obstructionism, and payoff to the trial lawyers and their greenie clients.
Now: those who pay attention know that these small, standardized reactors are heat sources designed to replace the oil, coal, or natural gas feed that boils water to run turbines, and that they are sealed units designed to be buried out of reach of any but the most energetic effort. Across the country there are hundreds, if not thousands, of 10-25MWe plants, originally city utilities or small feeder plants, that aren’t in use because the fuel costs are prohibitive, but which have the turbines, heat exchangers, generators, distribution facilities, and everything else just sitting there waiting for a heat source. Koblog (#54) describes one; there’s another in the neighboring town to where I live. Drop one of the modular units in there, upgrade the plant (primarily the heat exchangers) to accommodate the new heat source, and you’ve got ten years of electric power with a marginal cost so small as to be ignorable. It won’t happen because Rewrite! and his cohorts will control the “debate”, with the willing consent, if not absolute support, of the media gatekeepers.
Regards,
Ric
My 2c…
You don’d just drop a single module into your pre-existing generating station; you need at least two or three. You need one to use, a second already installed five years after the first one came on-line and that will take its place, and the one you are about to install in time for the first one to be refueled and which becomes the back-up.
Don’t get me wrong; this is imminently DOABLE and it is a crime it is not being done already! The luddites have always feared what their limited education did not allow them to understand, and popular media has for too long confused nuclear power with nuclear weapons. That’s like confusing locomotives with tanks!
One of the great problems facing the US is the aging of the power grid and the expense of upgrading and extending it. If, instead we were to install modular generating facilities in mid-sized towns the grid does not need to be expanded nationally, just locally. Small towns all over the country would see lower energy costs combined with more high-tech jobs. Even though the module is not intended to be “operated”, the power generating station DOES need people to operate it. These are good-paying professional jobs in the energy sector and which are not dependent on the price of oil.
For all the “China Syndrome” crowd – since the module is already buried and probably capped with a concrete lid several inches thick, terrorists would be better off attacking the distribution system than the core. Also, if nuclear nightmares keep you awake at night just remember, it’s already underground, so if the unthinkable happens it merely smolders down the hole and nothing gets out. Those of us who know assure you that it cannot explode; it won’t melt down to the earth’s core and it won’t breach containment. Trust us, we’re scientists (and engineers, and technicians, and electricians, & etc.)!
34. I can’t imagine that scenario either, because it’s absurd. You can’t breach a reactor from the outside with battalion strength weapons- the blast from a fighter jet and all its fuel exploding doesn’t breach the concrete containment. Besides that, nuclear fuel doesn’t work that way. Chernobyl, an incident with an unsafe reactor and negligence on par with intentional sabotage resulting in a massive explosion and fire, spewing radioactive material into the air, did not kill anywhere near the number of people you are talking about. Indeed, the panic from the fallout killed more people than the fallout itself did.
55. You know, it makes more sense for them to simply join the nuclear industry than trying to fight it. Why kneecap rival technology when you can just copy it and make a lot more money?
I am not convinced the proliferation of small nuclear reactors will not in the long run compound the nuclear waste elimination problem that is far from being solved to date as far as I know. I am ready to listen to sound arguments that such is not the case, but have not heard any so far. On the other hand I’m all for small-scale electricity generation cutting out miles of power lines, but believe that there are other more viable ways of achieving this.
In the meantime, the blog post author should push to get Georgia off the regulated market meter and into an unregulated one. My company operates several large nuclear facilities in the southeast (not Georgia) and they are all regulated, with an oversight Public Service Commision in each state to boot. The company has to go hat in hand to these commisions to ask for rate increases; they usually get them, or substantial chunks anyway.
In the north, the company operates about the same megawattage in an unregulated market. Guess who makes power cheaper? Guess where the most profit is made? If you said in the South East, you’d be wrong. In the unregulated market, the generator gets no guarantee on investment, so if he wants to build a 50WMe or a 1200 MWe plant, the generator assumes all of the financial risk, without recourse to the PSC to help them fleece their customers.
By the way, pigs will fly before you see portable or small modular reactors in this country outside of military or direct federal control. And they will wear lipstick.
John Wright (#62): There are a lot of us getting increasingly impatient with that particular stupidity. It merely waits upon getting a decent hearing.
To a very close first approximation there is no such thing as “nuclear waste”. If the substance is “hot” enough to be dangerous, it is active enough to be the input to a different fuel cycle. The fact that the fuel cycles it’s an input to are forbidden is a political matter, not an engineering problem. The current proposals (locking it up in ceramics, e.g.) are going to get us cursed by later generations for making all the decent fissionables inaccessible.
In the second place, all but a very few isotopes are dangerous only for a short time, and the dangerous ones can be separated from the others by relatively simple means. Radioactivity is longer lasting than simple heat, but nothing can be highly radioactive for a long time any more than a rock can stay hot from the fire forever. The “ten thousand years” nonsense is for low-level stuff, easily shielded and/or diluted to inconsequentiality.
In the third place, the volume is nil. Forget comparisons and consider: all the “spent” fuel that exists is stored in “swimming pool” facilities within the grounds of current power plants! The whole point of nuclear power is that the “hot” part is compact and very hot — that’s what makes the system possible. And even there the volume is overstated by including such things as used gloves with the “nuclear waste”. The actual hot waste from a nuclear power plant being decommissioned — that is, all the spent fuel from its entire lifetime, because the stuff can’t be transported legally — would fit easily in half a dozen semis including the shielding. There’s just not that much of it.
Nuclear waste is a political problem, not an engineering one. If we were allowed to reprocess — recycling is good and Green, no? — the volume would be enormously reduced and the amount of really dangerous stuff even more reduced. The only reason there’s as much as there is is the irrational fears of people like yourself, and we can’t do anything about that. As the wise fellow said, you can’t reason people out of a position they didn’t arrive at by a rational process.
Regards,
Ric
#64 – you beat me to it!
Adding in… the less hot waste is still somewhat dangerous for quite a while. However, the idea that it has to be protected, without any future human maintenance, for 10,000 years is just ridiculous.
Also, radiation hazard is calculated using the out-dated zero threshold linear dose effect model. This means the tiniest amount of radiation increases your cancer risk, by a tiny amount.
There’s lots of evidence to indicate that there is indeed a threshold, and it’s pretty high. Start with the massive over-estimate of deaths from low doses due to Chernobyl. Then look at the genetic studies of the critters living at ground zero of Chernobyl – no significant genetic damage, no increase of cancer.
Then notice that people who live or work at high altitudes experience much higher levels of radiation than those at low altitude.
For example, my Geiger counter gives 16 counts per minute here in Phoenix (if I shield it from the ground, which is 10 cpm radioactive). I took it up on a SW Air flight one time (pre 9-11) and it hit it’s limit of 999 cpm well before we hit cruising altitude. Cosmic rays cause that.
Likewise, people who live in high natural radiation areas (from radioactive soil) have no excess mortality or morbidity.
Nuclear waste, and the fear of radioactivity, are political tools used to squash nuclear power.
I suspect that the utility is going with what is relatively proven technology, namely the big reactors. A bunch of small reactors might prove to be more effective and/or efficient than a single big reactor (even better, site small clusters of small reactors near the loads), but the utility almost certainly does not want to be the guinea pig or test case to prove how well (or how poorly) the concept works, given current experience and technology.
Once the small reactor technology is proven safe, reliable, securable and with more certainty in the costs involved, then a power utility may then look at a “better way to do things”. Until then it will go with what is known to work.
In fact, the matter of long lived isotopes is even less problematic than the previous two posts make it out to be, because the isotopes with half lives between one thousand and one million years (long enough that we can’t just wait for it to decay, short enough to be sufficiently active to keep the fuel hot) are all fissionable. Just stick it back into a reactor and let it get burned up. Problem solved.
#61 – The idea of simply copying and joining is not so easy when you are a several hundred billion dollar company with an enormous store of still leveraged capital assets that are essentially worthless in a nuclear fission economy. Think carefully for a moment – if we logically allow fission plants to operate on anything close to a level playing field, they can produce emissions free power at a cost approaching 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour.
If you own oil leases, exclusive production agreements with dictatorships, tankers, storage farms, pipelines, refineries, coal mines, coal crushing equipment, and off shore wells; what would they be worth in competition with that kind of power?
If you happen to be a country whose major source of income is from selling oil and gas (Russia, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria) what would you think of the competition? If you are a country with a large and powerful oil, coal and gas industry (UK, Germany, US, Norway) how would you react to the potential of a complete change in the game from a system dependent on moving hundreds of thousands of tons of extracted material every day to one dependent on fissioning a few kilograms of material for power every day?
It is a very interesting thought exercise to tally up the winners and losers in such a competition and to see what capital investments can be made worthless.
#64 I do not represent any militant movement and can be swayed by reason. However I am still stuck trying to fathom out what you mean by “The fact that the fuel cycles it’s an input to are forbidden is a political matter, not an engineering problem.” Please summon up the patience to explain.
“Taylor referenced industry studies showing nuclear electricity costing four to five times as much per kilowatt hour than coal or gas plants…”
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The nuke plants are self sustaining after startup. The others need a constant input of interruptable supplies. Security requirements include a dependable supply of electrical power.
I suspect that the ‘political matter’ is the US prohibition on reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel which dates back to the 70s. The way it was written is not particularly clear. The “fuel cycle(s)” referred to must be a reference to reprocessing.
If one could reprocess the spent fuel to remove the unusable portion, which would be much reduced in volume but have to be secured for a sufficient number of half-lifes, then the usable processed fuel could go back into a nuclear reactor and go through the cycle again.
68. You can sell the oil to other countries. Nuclear power is very intellectual capital intensive, requiring hundreds of nuclear engineers who are not easily replaced by other types of engineers. Developing countries simply don’t have the educational resources to go exclusively nuclear very quickly. Then there are the legacy automobiles, which will still be running on gasoline for another ten to twenty years. Finally, there’s the matter of plastics, which are made from oil and natural gas. Hydrocarbons aren’t going away, so oil drillers and refiners have plenty of time to modify their business models. It’s the coal plants that would suffer; then again, we need to get off coal anyway because of the heavy metal emissions, which not only deposit mercury into the water supply, but emit three times as much radiation as nuclear plants. Russia has uranium reserves about as big as the US; it’s one reason they were able to mass produce nuclear weapons just as easily as we did, so Russia would just take the path of least resistance and give Australia a run for its money in the uranium export business. The other countries are too small to matter.
69. Fission product buildup is a massive drain on the neutron economy of fuel, and exposure to a neutron flux causes the protective cladding to swell and crack over time. Thus, in order to extract energy from the residual actinides in the fuel, one must first reprocess and refabricate the fuel rods before reinserting them into reactors. Nuclear fission is so predictable from a statistical standpoint that any reactor scenario can be simulated with the MCNP program, including testing of any emergency scenario. We already know exactly how to build liquid sodium fast breeder reactors and heavy water thermal breeder reactors; all we need to do is implement them, which requires licensing and capital.
Fast reactors also benefit from the fact that they can burn fissionable isotopes that won’t burn nearly as well in thermal neutron reactors; Np-237 is particularly problematic in spent fuel because it’s a proliferation hazard. While not fissile, Np-237 has a fission threshold low enough that it can go supercritical with it’s own neutrons. Worse yet, neptunium is isotopically pure in spent fuel, meaning procuring weapons grade neptunium from spent fuel is a matter of simple chemistry. At the same time, a reactor run on pure Np-237 is nearly impossible to control because the delayed neutrons (emitted from very energetic beta decays of fission products) are too slow to fission neptunium in significant quantities. However, a fast reactor can dispose of Np-237 by alloying it with plutonium and then burning it.
72. I am not saying that we would stop using oil. I am saying that oil, gas and coal companies are very interested in the PRICE that they are able to obtain by selling their commodities. If the supply of energy is vastly increased and the perception of scarcity goes away the PRICE drops substantially.
Less restricted fission represents a new, low cost, emission free energy source that can compete with oil and gas in markets where it makes sense – which include not only current baseload electricity, but also ship propulsion, and increased penetration by electricity into markets like locomotives and heating that are currently dominated by oil and natural gas.
Oil and gas companies may have time to “modify their business models”, but they are not software companies. They have very real investments in equipment that is designed for a long life and is often paid for over time. There is a great deal of inertia associated with fossil fuel production systems; the companies that operate them have a strong interest in keeping the sales volume and the prices as high as they can get them without damaging demand. They do not take kindly to the idea of an upstart competitor.
You mention the large number of trained people associated with nuclear energy. This is also a reason why oil and gas company leaders are not terribly excited by the technology. They like selling a commodity that does not require too many employees that want to share in the wealth created. They like being able to pay golden parachutes in excess of $400 million for a departing CEO and they like being able to generate an annual sales volume of $340 billion with just 80,000 employees (ExxonMobil 2009)
Nuclear takes a lot more people who all make good money, need good educations and can raise prosperous families on the income. That bothers the elitists who run oil and gas companies.
72 Myth Buster> “We already know exactly how to build liquid sodium fast breeder reactors and heavy water thermal breeder reactors; all we need to do is implement them, which requires licensing and capital.”
Whenever I hear someone go on about liguid metal or liquid salt cooled reactors and how we’re all set to build them if the government just got out of the way, I groan. Mind you, I LIKE the idea of fast breeder reactors and thorium cycles and whatnot. I LIKE the idea of the government getting out of the way. I LIKE the fact that the physics of these processes is well understood. But do any of you people understand the engineering difficulties these systems represent? They’re FAR from trivial!
Just as an example, how do you design a valve that will work in a liquid metal reactor? Molten sodium or lead or bismuth is pretty dense. Plus it’s, obviously, quite hot. How do you make a valve that will seal properly at high temperature, and not warp or deform when it cools? What materials do you use to make it? How long will they last? What effect will neutron flux have on them? And let’s say you use one of these valves to shut down the system for maintenance, thus cooling the system.. and solidifying the coolant. How are you going to heat up the piping to get the material into a liquid state again so you CAN open the valve?
Sure, some of these questions have been answered in small scale test plants. That’s wonderful! However, that still leaves questions about how to scale these things up. And how long will they last before they wear out? How much will each valve cost, and how difficult will it be to replace one when it DOES wear out? Will the entire system need to be shut down and allowed to cool and solidify for the valve to be changed? How long will it take to cool down the system and then to get it back up and running? How much down time is my commercial plant looking at every time one of these valve needs replacing? If I wanted to build a liquid metal cooled reactor tomorrow, is there even a vendor who could build these valves? How fast could they be built? Is the infrastructure there yet? What sort of quality control specifications would I need?
All of these questions are answerable. and they definitely should be looked into. But I’m just not seeing a corporation putting it’s neck on the line to build a fast breeder or a thorium cyle reactor anytime soon. A pilot plant perhaps. But until you can nail down a LOT of those variables, I’m not seeing these things popping up like mushrooms anytime soon. Even i all the government regulators had a change of heart, the lawyers vanished in a puff of brimstone, and the luddites and anti-nuke hippies died off from a batch of tainted granola.
They might be great technologies, and they might solve lots of problems, but the fact of the mater is that the engineering just isn’t there yet.
74. You act as though there is anything new about liquid metal reactors. The Soviet Navy powered submarines with liquid lead fast reactors, and lead is a lot denser than sodium.
Robert: A functional small scale thorium cycle reactor has been built and operated in the 1960′s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment