Aero-engine giant says small modular reactor technology will generate at $78/MWh and falling //

UK power technology group Rolls-Royce claimed it's on track to grid-connect mini nuclear reactors that can match renewables such as wind power on cost of electricity produced.

The group’s chief technology officer Paul Stein said its small modular reactor (SMR) technology, which uses prefabricated components that can be transported on a truck and assembled on site for scalable projects, can revive the prospects of nuclear as a source of zero-carbon energy by avoiding the pitfalls of massive, gigawatt-scale power station builds.

Stein told the BBC: “We think we can get the cost of a power station producing 440MW … to about £1.75bn ($2.23bn).

“If you go through the maths of the cost of capital, it means we’re selling electricity below £60/MWh ($78.5/MWh) which puts it into the territory of many of the renewables.”

The British blue chip company, known for providing power solutions for aircraft, ships and land projects, says its Small Modular Reactor concept would dramatically reduce the cost of building nuclear power sites.

Nuclear-powered icebreakers in 2019 escorted at total of 510 vessels on the Northern Sea Route. //

According to Rosatomflot, the company managing Russia’s fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, the increase comes as production of LNG in the Yamal Peninsula has hiked.

The 510 vessels that were escorted through the Arctic ice had a total gross tonnage of 30,29 million tons, the company informs. That is an increase of 54 percent compared with 2018 when 331 vessels with a total tonnage of 12,7 million tons were followed through the area. //

Russia today has a total of four nuclear-powered icebreakers in operation. In addition, the Rosatomflot operates that nuclear-powered container ship «Sevmorput».

A new fleet of icebreaking vessels are in the process of construction. The LK-60 vessel «Arktika», «Sibir» and «Ural» are to be delivered in 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively. In addition comes another two LK-60 vessels as well as three «Liders».

Greater efficiency in Russian nuclear power plant maintenance outages saved nearly 180 days last year and enabled 2.9 terawatt hours more electricity to be produced than would otherwise have been possible, Rosenergoatom said yesterday. This amount of electricity is enough to meet the energy demand of, for example, the Smolensk or Tver regions for six months, the company said. //

The main contributors to the achievement were Kursk units 1 and 2 and Leningrad unit 4 thanks to improvements in “managing the characteristics” of RBMK reactors, Rosenergoatom said.

In total last year, there were 37 maintenance outages at 32 power units. This year, 41 maintenance outages are planned, with a total duration of 2484 days (at the target level).

When units three and four go on-line, Plant Vogtle will stand alone in the nuclear power industry.

“If these two units go into operation, it will be the only four-unit nuclear plant in the United States,” said U.S.NRC Spokesperson, Roger Hannah. “It will be the biggest nuclear power plant in the country.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has to approve the reactors before they’re operational. //

“This project is vital, and we continue to expect that we will bring these units on-line,” said Wilson. “November 2021 for unit three and November 2022 for unit four.”

It's much more useful than you think.

Nuclear power provides 10% of global electricity, but to stem climate change the world is going to need far greater amounts of clean and reliable energy, the International Atomic Energy Agency says in a short film it published today. To tackle climate change, 80% of all electricity will need to be low carbon by 2050. //

Several countries are developing small modular reactors (SMRs) and one has already been built in Russia, it adds, referring to the floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov.

Rebecca Casper, mayor of Idaho Falls in the USA, said SMRs can "integrate beautifully and seamlessly with wind, with solar, with some of those other sources that are maybe intermittent but that are also carbon-free". Nuclear power is "the key," she adds, “that makes all of that other desirable alternative energy possible because alone it just can't sustain a growing population."

How green is nuclear power and what are the other options? //

Nuclear is good for the environment. Nuclear is bad for the environment. Both statements are true.

Why is it good? Nuclear power is planned to be a key part of the UK's energy mix.

The key benefit is that it helps keep the lights on while producing hardly any of the CO2 emissions that are heating the climate.

CO2 emissions come from traditional ways of creating electricity such as burning gas and coal.

From America's smallest nuke sub to Russia's floating power plant.

It's a huge step toward the energy holy grail. //

Plasma is volatile, and particles that escape the sun-hot plasma stream react with the materials that enclose the tokamak. This stops the plasma fusion reaction because the temperature falls out of the effective zone, but more importantly in Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s also wildly dangerous for the reactor itself and everything around it.

The PPPL team found that while boriding—literally, coating with boron—helps to keep plasma in the right reaction state, the existing method is too dangerous. Nuclear scientists use diborane gas, which is made of boron and explosively flammable hydrogen. To use it, these scientists must stop their tokamaks completely, introduce the gas, then leave again because of the flammability. At PPPL, they thought there must be a better way.

To make the process just as effective, but far safer, the PPPL team tested the use of both pure boron and boron nitride powders. The powders are inert, meaning they don’t react with anything or catch fire. The researchers applied the powders by injecting them into the tokamak while it was running, which is another method improvement over diborane gas. Once inside, the powder worked the same way the gas did: It kept the temperature in the high performance zone, which keeps the plasma more stable and prevents scraping the sides of the tokamak’s chamber.

The Netherlands' Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group (NRG) has completed a major milestone irradiation test of molten nuclear fuel salts in its High Flux Reactor at Petten 37 mi (60 km) north of Amsterdam. The first test of its kind since the ones carried out at Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the 1960s, its purpose is to learn more about the safe operation of a future Molten Salt Reactor (MSR).

States, high technology costs, slow demand growth, and competition from natural gas and renewables have dampened the prospects of building new, large nuclear reactors.

Georgia is currently building the only new conventional nuclear power plant in the country, which is five years behind schedule and nearly double its original cost estimate. All other plans to build large nuclear facilities in the U.S. have been abandoned for economic reasons.

Re-establishing an economically competitive domestic nuclear industry in America will require taking a different technology approach. Small and micro reactors offer such a solution, but the sector struggles with regulatory barriers and a lack of construction experience, according to a new paper from The Breakthrough Institute, the R Street Institute and Clearpath. //

Small and micro reactors, defined in the paper as reactors under 10 megawatts thermal, come with less risk than their larger counterparts. They rely on economies of multiples rather than economies of scale, which makes their design simpler and upfront costs more manageable. They also target niche applications — including off-grid and industrial — allowing for the technology to compete in the near term, without going up against mature generation technologies in wholesale markets.

These units are two to three thousandth the size of a typical commercial reactor, with the ability to supply electricity to around 2,000 households. This is significantly smaller than the next generation of research reactors being tested around the country. NuScale Power, for instance, builds 60-megawatt units designed to operate in six or 12 packs. Because of its size, micro reactor technology should be licensed in a process that recognizes “the very minimal risks such tiny reactors pose,” the paper argues.

The world’s first small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) have started delivering electricity to a coastal town in Russia, firming up their potential for use in small power grids in geographically

A new technique developed by researchers at MIT uses shock waves to remove radioactive contaminants from nuclear reactor wastewater.

Called shock electrodialysis, the cleansing process separates waste products from the power plant's coolant system for disposal, while the water can be recycled instead of replaced. //

Originally invented to remove salt from seawater, the process uses a deionization shockwave in a tube of water to push electrically charged ions into a charged porous material that acts as the tube's lining. The upshot of this is that, if the ions consist of the desired element for disposal, they can be selectively filtered out of the coolant water flow, which can amount to 10 million cubic meters of water per year for a large reactor. //

So far, the technique has been used to remove 99.5 percent of the radioactive cobalt and cesium from simulated wastewater that also contains boric acid and lithium, which are left behind. This means that up to two-thirds of the water can be recycled. The process is scalable and MIT says that it can not only be used to clean reactor cooling systems, but also for large-scale applications like removing lead from drinking water. //

The research paper, which was authored by professor of chemical engineering at MIT Martin Bazant, graduate students Mohammad Alkhadra Huanhuan Tian and postdocs Kameron Conforti and Tao Gao, is published in Environmental Science and Technology.

A new generation of reactors will start producing power in the next few years. They're comparatively tiny—and may be key to hitting our climate goals. //

NuScale uses a light water reactor—by far the most common type of reactor in commercial nuclear power plants—but that’s about where the similarities end. NuScale’s reactor is 65 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter, and is housed in a containment vessel only slightly larger. About the size of two school buses stacked end to end, you could fit around 100 of them in the containment chamber of a large conventional reactor. Yet this small reactor can crank out 60 megawatts of energy, which is about one-tenth the smallest operational reactor in the US today. //

They’re safer, in part because they are small enough to sit in underground pools of water. If a reactor leaks, the heat can slowly diffuse into the pool. That also means the reactors could be built closer to the places where their power is needed, without the 10-mile safety buffer a conventional plant must have.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been reviewing NuScale’s design since 2016; if the commission gives its blessing, the company can finally start building the first commercial reactor of its kind. The review process is brutal—NuScale submitted a 12,000 page technical application—and will likely stretch on for at least another year. But the company has already secured permission to build its first 12-reactor plant at the Idaho National Laboratory //

The Department of Energy is also interested in microreactors, a “plug and play” nuclear plant that usually generates less than 50 megawatts of power. Whereas small modular reactors are better suited to industrial processes and other large power loads, microreactors are ideal for smaller needs like powering a remote military base or keeping the lights on in an isolated Alaskan community //

In the US, the push for small reactors has prompted some changes to the regulatory environment to help companies get a first small reactor online at a federal facility by 2027. But small reactors will still need to prove they can be cost-competitive,

Federal go-ahead for Florida reactors could start a chain reaction. //

You probably haven’t heard about a recent regulatory decision that will reduce carbon emissions because it doesn’t follow the green template of controlling private industry and suppressing economic growth.

Last week the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the first time extended a nuclear plant’s license so it can operate for 80 years. The decision for the Turkey Point reactors in south Florida could encourage other plant owners to apply for renewals and extend the viability of the leading carbon-free energy source.

Fluid Fuel Reactors
Edited by
JAMES A. LANE, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
H. G. MacPHERSON, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
FRANK MASLAN, Brookhaven National Laboratory

Copyright © 1958 by

ADDISON-WESLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC.
and assigned to the General Manager
of the United States Atomic Energy Commission

On 2018-11-16 (November 16 of 2018)
the U.S. Department of Energy
owner of Fluid Fuel Reactors copyright
granted Gordon James McDowell
nonexclusive license to republish
and prepare derivative works.

"Th" is a series of videos about thorium, molten salt reactors & nuclear energy. It exists as a YouTube playlist, which I update to always contain the freshest chapter iterations. "Th" is also an App for iPhone & iPad and Google Play App.

► Wondering what is thorium? Start here with a quick thorium summary: Increasing energy demand. The Challenge of intermittent power sources. Thorium's relationship to heavy rare earths. The energy density & abundance of thorium.

http://thoriumremix.com Today's nuclear reactors can not completely fission their uranium oxide fuel rods, nor fission the transuranics produced during power generation. This waste stream is examined, and compared to that of a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (Th-MSR) in which solid fuel rods are avoided entirely.

In a molten salt reactor, transuranics are not created at all. And the fission products can be partitioned, thanks to the fuel being in liquid form. This avoids the challenge of fission poisons appearing inside the solid uranium oxide fuel rods.

Nuclear waste is only "waste" because it has not been separated. United State's 70,000 tonnes of nuclear waste is in a particularly difficult form for reprocessing... it is in solid form, trapped in fuel rods.

As today's nuclear industry looks to build more durable fuel rods (to withstand higher temperatures, xenon gas, and not react with water), the flip side is spent fuel will be trapped in tougher-and-tougher enclosures. This does not bode well for recycling. Instead, dissolving the fuel in molten salt offers both improved reactor safety AND easier recycling of fission products.

Why Nuclear Power Should Be Defended"
This speech was given in Los Angeles on March 15, 1980.

Dr. Beckmann's newsletter archives are available at:
http://www.accesstoenergy.com/
Since September 1993, AtE has been written by Arthur B. Robinson.