6 ms·

It sounds like a neat idea, and potentially safer(?). But I don't understand why they're claiming it'll be cheaper: > But one company thinks that by going smal

• maxerickson 10y ago
  The savings would likely kick in as they manufactured more and more of the vessels.
  • privong 10y ago
    > The savings would likely kick in as they manufactured more and more of the vessels. Maybe, but I would have thought that would have either factored that into the quoted cost estimates, or that they would have said something like "and similar future plants would cost X". (where X is lower).
    • Bluestrike2 10y ago
      Those cost savings won't be immediate, and will likely have to wait until production facilities are expanded once there are sufficient orders to warrant it. And not just immediate orders, but ones for a few years out as well.
      • privong 10y ago
        Sure, but surely they can make some sort of estimates, depending on quantities, typical economies of scale, etc. Of course, I don't know accurate they'd be in the end, but it shows they've thought about it in more detail than "oh yeah, it'll totally be cheaper later on."
  • jacobush 10y ago
    And they could cut on distribution costs (less power lines)
• sandworm101 10y ago
  I think the savings come from modulatization. The first reactor needs an expensive plant, but dropping in a second or third at the same location, into the same tank, would cost much less.
  • privong 10y ago
    > The first reactor needs an expensive plant, but dropping in a second or third at the same location, into the same tank, would cost much less. I don't think that explains it, based on the article. Each individual module produces 50 MW, so a 570 MW plant would already involve 11+ individual modules/reactors. So presumably the modularization effect is already taken into consideration for the cost estimate of the 570 MW plant.
    • jcoffland 10y ago
      I would expect a 22 module reactor to be cheaper per MW. How much cheaper is the question to ask. With out that information it's impossible to compare prices accurately.
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      Much likely depends on the customer. In the long term, i think they are targeting the military/facility market where a small reactor could provide heat without the expensive turbines needed to generate power. One of these could easily keep an airbase warm through an alaskan winter.
    • Animats 10y ago
      The USS Enterprise (the carrier, CVN-65, not the fictional one) had modular nuclear plants. It had eight submarine-sized reactors. Later US nuclear carriers had only two, larger, power plants. Although the military likes modularity and redundancy, the headaches of staffing and operating eight plants were not worth it.
      • xjwm 10y ago
        Very true. Important to note that the 8 plants also allowed for testing different combinations of pumps, steam generators, and other plant equiptment. Rickover got a testbed for future plants integrated into an operating carrier.
• giarc 10y ago
  This is pure speculation, but I wonder if by cheaper they mean simply cost, rather than cost per MW. Perhaps if you are going to build a traditional nuclear reactor, you might as well build the 1,150MW, $5 billion reactor, even if you only need 570MW. Thereby generating a bunch of excess energy that you need to sell and transmit somewhere else. If you are a special case (US military base, remote area) and you only want 1 or 2 NuScale modules, and therefore is cheaper.
  • acidburnNSA 10y ago
    I think you're right. There are few customers willing and able to bet the farm on huge nuclear megaprojects. The Small Modular Reactor concept emerged as a response to this. The massive nuclear buildouts are happening in China where the capital and patience exists and there's incentive to invest in hundreds of GWe of long-term sustainable clean-air baseload power. As a nuclear industry person, I wish NuScale very well. I just don't think they're targeting world-scale energy. The name of the game in nuclear innovation is to bring down costs while improving safety and minimizing proliferation and waste. Costs are dominated by construction (fuel costs are <10% of a nuclear venture because nuclear fuel is so energy-dense) so ideas like modularization and standardization are intriguing. Many nukes are built by assembling lots of pre-fab modules to try to take advantage of this. But sometimes the modules show up and don't fit together, costing more and causing long delays. So it will take a while for modular construction to be really figured out enough to make a big impact. For what it's worth, from my view one of the most exciting ideas is to build big nukes on big ships. Sounds crazy but hear me out. You construct in a shipyard which is very controlled and standardized so you can pump them out rapidly and cheaply with high QA. You park them 10km offshore of your customer and run underground cables so there are zero people in your exclusion zone for worst-case accidents. If something goes wrong, you're in the water so you can't run out of cooling and the protective fission product barriers always stay intact. You even design to let it sink, stay intact, and have a pre-planned recovery operation worked out. If you have a fleet of 20 customers, you can have one extra plant that relieves another to go home for maintenance and refueling, allowing very high capacity factors. Russians and Chinese are building nukes on ships already (mostly to power oil rigs and remote areas), and we know the navy nukes work great. Could be fun.
• Bluestrike2 10y ago
  The expected savings for small modular reactors (SMRs) are tied to construction and continuing operation costs. Better economies of scale would drastically alter the costs for the reactors themselves, but you won't see those until you're looking at orders for a few dozen units. That won't come about for a while, unfortunately. And there are still a lot of regulatory burdens to deal with that will slow initial orders. That said, SMRs are an incredibly exciting innovation in nuclear energy production. Until now, you've had to build at a large scale. Nothing else made sense economically, and most of the regulatory process presupposes such a scale, but it also limited the markets where you could build to larger ones. More flexible scaling (using multiple, smaller reactors to mix and match what fits an area's forecasted demand in the future) and a lower initial cost can make nuclear a more appealing option for more regions. Despite the higher cost per MW, SMRs are a lot more flexible compared to traditional nuclear power plants where--by definition--you have to build at a very large scale. SMRs can make nuclear a more appealing energy source for regions with lower electricity demand. And the initial costs are significantly lower even without better economies of scale. They might not be as efficient, but that's not the only factor involved in cost analyses. Remote areas, where traditional nuclear plants are way too large and transportation infrastructure necessary for other conventional energy alternatives isn't sufficient, are particularly appealing use cases. As for refueling, that depends on the reactor design. Various SMRs designs have refueling cycles of around ~1-10 years[0] (most are somewhere in the middle), and some of the small ones like Gen4's LMR are sealed with no on-site access.[1] It's shipped back to the factory for refueling. And while that sounds like a pain in the ass, it's much less of one than having to deal with storing spent fuel on-site. Those implications will also likely result in some major regulatory changes for SMR plants. 0. http://forumonenergy.com/2015/03/17/types-of-smrs/ http://forumonenergy.com/2015/03/17/types-of-smrs/ 1. http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/product.html http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/product.html