4 ms·

Mini-nuclear plants. 1100 megawatts. These are completely in disagreement. Terrapower focuses mostly on large plants to power an increasingly urban world. The m

Mini-nuclear plants. 1100 megawatts. These are completely in disagreement. Terrapower focuses mostly on large plants to power an increasingly urban world. The media has gotten that Terrapower does small reactors wrong for over a decade.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> 1100 megawatts Isn’t that smaller than the average power plant?
- rgbrenner 8y ago
  there are 99 nuclear reactors operating in the US, producing about 100,000mw. So about 1000mw/ea. Many of the plants in the US have more than one reactor.. but you can see on this page, plant capacity/units is about 1gw/ea [edit: corrected, thanks], and many of the single reactor plants are about that size also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_nuclear_power_stations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_nuclear_po... Note, that page has the largest plants.. about ~45. There are only 61 in the US. So there are a few smaller ones not in the list. If you built a 1100mw reactor, it would be ~#42 largest plant.
  - taf2 8y ago
    Isn’t this not about size of energy produced but rather the physical size of the reactor?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    *1 GW each. A small reactor is under a few hundred megawatts. A micro reactor is on the order of tens of megawatts. It's quite hard to make economic reactors below that.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Some Russian satellites went into space with two to a whopping six kilowatt reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A). The Americans in contrast only got a 500 watt reactor into the sky, and it failed after 43 days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A).
      - acidburnNSA 8y ago
        Yes but when you aren't allowed to use highly-enriched (weapons-grade) uranium it's a different story. And space is a much different story for economics. Out there, fully enriching your fuel probably makes sense because weight is so expensive. My comment was limited to terrestrial reactors.
- 7952 8y ago
  1100 MW is big enough that you would need to connect to the high voltage transmission network. This will require you to build the station close to an existing line with capacity, or spend millions on your own cable.
NickNameNick 8y ago
Does anyone know how big this thing is, physically? If you can put the reactor vessel, and associated 'hot' parts into a 40ft Iso container, and ship it cross country for installation/recycling, that might improve on the economics of existing reactors. If you can't do that, I'm not sure how it's going to be cheaper than other options.
- gh02t 8y ago
  It's pretty compact, the whole reactor is about the size of a large house IIRC. Putting the whole core in a container and shipping it off is pointless, though- it's designed to operate for many decades and uses a continuous refueling process. They're also designed to be able to get really high utilization of fuel and not produce much waste. This design is very different from current commercial plant designs. Operating costs are also not the problem for nuclear plants, they are dirt cheap to run relative to their energy production. It's the upfront capital cost of building a large plant that makes them uneconomical currently, which is why smaller-scale designs like this one are appealing. Edit: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-as... is informative regarding the economics.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    The commercial versions of these are bigger than that. Economies of scale are still very much at play in nuclear due to the unique regulatory and supply chain issues, as well as how much not-highly-enriched fuel you need to go critical. But some folks working on nuclear farms (fields of small nukes with one security force) are dreaming of interesting new options. Regarding economics, there are lots of reactors in the USA that have their capital cost completely paid off but they're still expensive because of high Operation and Maintenance costs. A lot of this is expensive retrofits and added security costs post 9/11. More of it is that cheap natural gas in deregulated markets has brought electricity prices way down and therefore electricity sales revenue way down. This is why some nuclear plants in the US are shutting down early before their lifetime is up. It's a great tragedy because these plants are massive carbon-free baseload electricity sources. Nukes in the US make 60%+ of the carbon-free energy of the country.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> 1100 megawatts Isn’t that smaller than the average power plant?

rgbrenner 8y ago
there are 99 nuclear reactors operating in the US, producing about 100,000mw. So about 1000mw/ea. Many of the plants in the US have more than one reactor.. but you can see on this page, plant capacity/units is about 1gw/ea [edit: corrected, thanks], and many of the single reactor plants are about that size also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_nuclear_power_stations_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_nuclear_po... Note, that page has the largest plants.. about ~45. There are only 61 in the US. So there are a few smaller ones not in the list. If you built a 1100mw reactor, it would be ~#42 largest plant.
- taf2 8y ago
  Isn’t this not about size of energy produced but rather the physical size of the reactor?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  *1 GW each. A small reactor is under a few hundred megawatts. A micro reactor is on the order of tens of megawatts. It's quite hard to make economic reactors below that.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Some Russian satellites went into space with two to a whopping six kilowatt reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A). The Americans in contrast only got a 500 watt reactor into the sky, and it failed after 43 days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A).
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      Yes but when you aren't allowed to use highly-enriched (weapons-grade) uranium it's a different story. And space is a much different story for economics. Out there, fully enriching your fuel probably makes sense because weight is so expensive. My comment was limited to terrestrial reactors.
7952 8y ago
1100 MW is big enough that you would need to connect to the high voltage transmission network. This will require you to build the station close to an existing line with capacity, or spend millions on your own cable.

NickNameNick 8y ago

Does anyone know how big this thing is, physically? If you can put the reactor vessel, and associated 'hot' parts into a 40ft Iso container, and ship it cross country for installation/recycling, that might improve on the economics of existing reactors. If you can't do that, I'm not sure how it's going to be cheaper than other options.

gh02t 8y ago
It's pretty compact, the whole reactor is about the size of a large house IIRC. Putting the whole core in a container and shipping it off is pointless, though- it's designed to operate for many decades and uses a continuous refueling process. They're also designed to be able to get really high utilization of fuel and not produce much waste. This design is very different from current commercial plant designs. Operating costs are also not the problem for nuclear plants, they are dirt cheap to run relative to their energy production. It's the upfront capital cost of building a large plant that makes them uneconomical currently, which is why smaller-scale designs like this one are appealing. Edit: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-as... is informative regarding the economics.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  The commercial versions of these are bigger than that. Economies of scale are still very much at play in nuclear due to the unique regulatory and supply chain issues, as well as how much not-highly-enriched fuel you need to go critical. But some folks working on nuclear farms (fields of small nukes with one security force) are dreaming of interesting new options. Regarding economics, there are lots of reactors in the USA that have their capital cost completely paid off but they're still expensive because of high Operation and Maintenance costs. A lot of this is expensive retrofits and added security costs post 9/11. More of it is that cheap natural gas in deregulated markets has brought electricity prices way down and therefore electricity sales revenue way down. This is why some nuclear plants in the US are shutting down early before their lifetime is up. It's a great tragedy because these plants are massive carbon-free baseload electricity sources. Nukes in the US make 60%+ of the carbon-free energy of the country.