NuScale will get the final approval nearly six years after starting the process.

On Friday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it would be issuing a certification to a new nuclear reactor design, making it just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US. But in some ways, it's a first: the design, from a company called NuScale, is a small modular reactor that can be constructed at a central facility and then moved to the site where it will be operated.

The move was expected after the design received an okay during its final safety evaluation in 2020. //

Small modular reactors have been promoted as avoiding many of the problems that have made large nuclear plants exceedingly expensive to build. They're small enough that they can be assembled on a factory floor and then shipped to the site where they will operate, eliminating many of the challenges of custom, on-site construction. In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur. //

The NRC will still have to weigh in on the sites where any of these reactors are deployed. Currently, one such site is in the works: a project called the Carbon Free Power Project, which will be situated at Idaho National Lab. That's expected to be operational in 2030 but has been facing some financial uncertainty. Utilities that might use the power produced there have grown hesitant to commit money to the project. //

C.M. AllenArs Tribunus Militumreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
Wheels Of Confusion wrote:

Would have been even better 20 years ago. But then again, so would EVERY non-fossil fuel-based power source being rolled out at scale. We're just so late on everything, and most of the blame lies with politicians allergic to governing and rich, subsidized industry allergic to changing.

If it can bring the cost of nuclear power down by an order of magnitude and reduce the lagtime between facility approval and initial production, it might have a legitimate place in the effort to eliminate CO2 pollution. A nuclear plant coming online start producing electricity in a couple years, while still scaling up to its full production levels as more reactors get built, also gives it a serious edge against other nuclear technologies in addition to fossil fuel plants, which are more or less 'all or nothing' projects //

raxx7Ars Legatus Legioniset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
itfa wrote:

Initial estimates have it within a few percentage points of natural gas in price per megawatt, both from the manufacturer and the operator of the first project these are supposed to go into.
Personally, I think this type of design has a far better chance of being on budget than traditional nuclear construction.
MegalodonArs Legatus Legioniset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
quamquam quid loquor wrote:
SMNRs are a fundamentally flawed technology. They don't benefit from efficiencies of scale and can't benefit from manufacturing economies of scale, because an SMNR is still more expensive than natural gas.

I don't follow this argument. Economies of scale come from regularizing construction by doing more in the factory rather than on-site, and from shrinking the size of a unit of generation until you're building enough of them to get good at it. We can see this from the fact that nobody builds gigawatt natural gas turbines, they build them to a smaller size and when they want a gigawatt they order a larger number of them. But as far as nuclear reactors are concerned, a gigawatt is about the smallest you can get. That seems like the wrong way to get good economics.

You need to build about 12 of the NuScale reactor to get a gigawatt, and it seems to me you're going to be a lot better at building them by the 12th unit than you will be with the 3rd or 4th larger reactor. But an entire country would be lucky to build 4 full size reactors reactors per decade so nobody gets good at it. //

ORcoderSmack-Fu Master, in traininget Subscriptorreply2 days agoreportignore user
ZenBeam wrote:
Here's hoping this pans out, and gives us one more low-carbon power source knob to turn, to use to replace higher carbon sources.

Do these have any capability to vary their power generation, trading lower output for a longer lifetime? If so, how much can they vary it?

They probably won’t be great at it- likely can bypass the turbines to load follow as necessary (like many current nuclear plants can), but it won’t help fuel life. Even if they load follow by lowering the power of the reactor, which is possible but slower, thanks to fuel damage it also probably won’t save much uranium.

Designs that will be better at this are Natrium, which incorporates thermal storage for load following, and molten salt reactors, which don’t have to worry about fuel damage.

Per megawatt (power) or per megawatt·hour?

The first would be pure fantasy.
There's no way the cost per MW of a pure steam cycle plant can get within a factor 3 of a combined cycle gas turbine plant no matter what heat source we use to boil the water.

The second I'm willing to hold my judgement. //