12 ms·

Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

218 points by wanderingmind 3y ago

nukeman 3y ago
Seriously? I’m insanely pro-nuke, and work in the nuclear sector, but Westinghouse should really focus on their AP1000. They’ve already got deals in place with several countries, and now that they’ve got them running in more than one country, there might be a chance of bringing costs down some. The light water SMR market is getting crowded rather fast. They’re competing with both GE (and their BWRX-300) and NuScale (with their modular designs).
- Animats 3y ago
  This seems to be a smaller version of the AP1000. Nice big containment vessel. That's a good thing. Fukushima had an undersized containment which failed, and Chernobyl didn't have much of one at all. Three Mile Island had a good containment vessel, and so their meltdown damage was contained. Some of the "small modular nuclear reactor designs are built on the assumption that they don't need a full scale containment vessel because nothing can go that wrong. That may not be a good assumption. There's a lot to be said for large amounts of steel and concrete around reactors.
  - evilos 3y ago
    Which SMRs don't have a full scale containment vessel?
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      None, although I think some (NuScale?) save money by sharing pressurized containment volume among multiple reactors. Just hope you don't see multiple correlated meltdowns. Containment vessels could also be made smaller if steam filtering were used instead of planning to just contain and condense it. I don't know if any SMRs plan to do this.
      - evilos 3y ago
        As other poster mentioned, each nuscale module is fully self contained. Not only that, but they've modeled every module having a simultaneous scram in a 12 module plant, and modeled that the water level was lower than nominal. Still walk away safe.
      - Animats 3y ago
        NuScale's containment vessel is a metal cylinder around the reactor.[1] Each reactor has its own containment vessel. It's just slightly larger than the reactor, like Fukushima and Peach Bottom. Here's a good drawing.[2] No user-serviceable parts inside. The building is not a containment. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1535/ML15355A411.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1535/ML15355A411.pdf [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/image.jpg?id=25574195 https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/image.jpg?id=2557419...
- BMc2020 3y ago
  Didn't the PRC buy 4 AP1000s and then start building their own knockoff? (not pirated so much as that was one of their demands and Westinghouse accepted)?
  - mandevil 3y ago
    Anything bigger than 1600MW, Westinghouse doesn't get a licensing fee for it getting built. So they are building 1600MW size right now.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Given the track record of AP1000 construction, who do you think would ever order one? I don't see a future for this. If somebody thought it was a feasible design for construction in Western countries, they could buy the half completed sites at Summer for a song. I also think 300MW is too big. It's not really small enough to get the supposed benefits of small and modular. The entire nuclear industry appears to be off its rocker when it comes to designs that are possible to construct for any reasonable amount of money. They bungled the AP1000 so badly that it bankrupted Westinghouse, and there's no reason to believe that they learned enough from the experience to do better next time. It's all terribly depressing, and completely soured me on the possibility of nuclear for the next 20-40 years. And in 20-40 years, look at how far storage, wind, and solar will have developed. It's unlikely that my nuclear will ever be a dominant energy source.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    The whole industry, and its fan base, has descended into overt magical thinking. It is sad, and not a little ridiculous.
  - m4rtink 3y ago
    Some older plant blocks were in the 300-500 MW range so I guess you could replace them with this ?
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Those older plants in the US have been shut down because they can't even earn back their operating costs.
  - dirtsoc 3y ago
    What's sad is that it's mainly the US that has problems with this. China has managed to bring multiple of this reactor design to fruition while the US still screws around with building just two. I live in Georgia and the almost decade of overruns and corruption are being about to be paid for by Georgia Power customers via rate hikes.
- alliao 3y ago
  SMR is being sold as smaller thus inferring smaller mess when disaster strikes but I don't see that anywhere can you shed some light on whether it's safer? perhaps the smaller containment meant it can be constructed to a higher threshold?
  - jabl 3y ago
    Smaller tends to mean it's easier to make things like passive emergency cooling systems (e.g. using convection and gravity), so you're not dependent on the diesel gensets actually starting when they're really needed.
- DarkNova6 3y ago
  maybe for the immediate future. But their best prospects by far lie in their LFR (Lead Fast Reactor) concept. Lead is such a superior concept for reactor design and neutron economy, and mostly held back by the pace in material science.
timerol 3y ago
These are pretty big SMRs - 300 MWe, compared to 77MWe from NuScale. Definitely an iteration of reduced size from their 1 GWe model, as opposed to a "as small as reasonable" design. It's cool that they call out 15 MWe / min "load following" capability. Ramping up and down in response to renewables will be an important function of any nuclear reactor installed today.
- nomel 3y ago
  > 15 MWe / min "load following" capability I know nothing of nuclear. What sets this rate? Is it some system level thermal gradient limitation? Or maybe the complexity of the safety around the movement?
  - jandrese 3y ago
    Mostly it is the half lives of the reaction products, sometimes the half lives of the decay products or intermediate products. Ramping up and down was historically somewhat difficult, famously one of the contributing factors to the Chernobyl accident was the reactor having been turned down to a very low level on the previous day. You have to be careful not to accidentally poison your reactor during the day when the solar farms are chugging out megawatts only to not be able to ramp up in the evening when the sun sets.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Part of it is also that whole system have large amount of "inertia". We are talking about megawatts of power. First in heated water and then passed through a massive turbine. This whole process carries for a bit. And you want it to run the grid and not the other way around.
    - nomel 3y ago
      > And you want it to run the grid and not the other way around. As simple as it is, this really blew my mind. I never considered that all the plants need to work together, as a system, each with "inertia", but all without ringing/oscillations. Thanks, I'll need to dig into this deeper! I can only assume that having grid batteries can really clean things up.
rgmerk 3y ago
Some history might be worth going in to here. The AP1000 design was an evolution of an earlier design called the AP600. The AP600 conceptual design apparently didn't find any customers because the economics of it were unappealing compared to larger reactors. In a nutshell, if you're going to build a huge containment building etc etc etc, it doesn't cost (in theory) that much more to go even bigger and get more power out of it. So why SMRs? It turned out that because you were building so few AP1000s, and building them with different workforces each time, that there was very little learning going on. Some bright spark seeing what's gone on in other industries had the bright idea that if you could build a nuclear reactor in a factory, and increase the number of units built and minimise the amount of work done on site, you'd start getting learning rates and economies of scale that easily outweigh the lower inherent efficiency of a smaller reactor. At 300MW, this reactor seems to be too big to be "back of a few trucks" construction, and thus you still have the bespoke construction project issues, and sufficiently small that the construction costs of 4 of them are likely to be much higher than one AP1000 (the AP1000 actually puts out about 1100 MW).
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  You would think it would be economical to just move the work force around with the projects. You get the talent, but built in place.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    It's harder to find quality people who are willing to relocate their family every time a job is finished.
    - rgmerk 3y ago
      To be fair, in a lot of cases you'd probably build multiple units on the same site which would get you some learning effects. But compared to wind, solar, and batteries...
    - prpl 3y ago
      Do you know many pipe fitters?
gnabgib 3y ago
Discussed 9 hours ago, 140 points, 99 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35816789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35816789
- scythe 3y ago
  Highlight of the thread, IMHO, from 'beefman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35818261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35818261 >Not small, modular, or new. But certainly a decent reactor. They clearly want something to slot in against the GE BWRX-300. But they would probably be better served by going all-in on their eVinci reactor, which is small, modular, and new >https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/evinci-microreactor https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/evinci-mi...
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Tiny reactors like that have been suggested for remote locations, like mining sites, but they make little sense. Renewables + batteries + diesel would be cheaper.
daydream 3y ago
Have they sold any of these to anyone yet?
- credit_guy 3y ago
  Of course not, they have to get first the approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They estimate this would take 3 years. I don't find that unrealistic, since it's based on an existing (i.e. approved) reactor design, AP1000. NuScale got their approval last year, and they applied in December 2016 [1]. So about 6 years for a design submitted by a new company with no prior experience whatsoever. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-activities/nuscale.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...
exabrial 3y ago
How do I write my state to buy one?
evilotto 3y ago
There's no "Add to cart" on the page. What kinda online store are they running?
- SysWiz 3y ago
  My thoughts exactly.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  I like how there’s a contact form at the bottom where you can presumably write something like “one nuclear reactor, please.”
derefr 3y ago
Question about SMRs generally: does the fact that random private companies can apply to buy one of these, mean that nuclear reactors are now basically "state-secret free" as a technology? Or are there still state secrets, but they're all in the e.g. uranium enrichment part of the pipeline — that buying one of these gets you no closer to seeing — rather than in the reactor design?
- scythe 3y ago
  Building a nuclear warhead requires assembling a large sphere (ish) of material well above critical mass faster than it can explode. Only then does the chain reaction efficiently consume a lot of fuel before it breaks up (inertial confinement). Usually, you need to use explosives to blast the different pieces of fuel into each other. This requires very accurate control of the explosions that ignite the warhead, and is where the secrets are. A nuclear reactor uses fuel juuuust barely above critical mass so the reaction is slow. It's a very different thing. Producing the fuel is just basic centrifuge isotope separation, which has many non-fission applications.
  - febusravenga 3y ago
    > juuuust barely above critical mass Interesting. Everyone says that nuclear reactors are safe and material can't be used to build bomb, how are we ensuring that were always only tiny bit above CM... And this bit doesn't grow unexpectedly. As laic, i see many failure modes, starting with simple accidents in handling of rods or bad storage
    - Wildgoose 3y ago
      It's actually just below Critical Mass. (For obvious reasons). You need sufficient fissile material to provide the increased neutron flow generating heat which you can use to power generators, but you have to then extract that heat efficiently to prevent your nuclear core from literally melting.
  - YakBizzarro 3y ago
    well, not really. the fuel in typical reactor is lowly enriched uranium (LEU), meaning that only a small percentage of the fuel is actually fissile (ie. it breaks when interacting with one neutron and release energy). So no, it can't get sustain an exponentially growing reaction chain in any condition, since neutrons are absorbed by the non-fissile part of the fuel
blakespot 3y ago
I need one.
TheDudeMan 3y ago
Reactors are not small enough until they are rolling off an assembly line.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  They don't have to be small to roll off an assembly line. France: https://twitter.com/Mangeon4/status/1632627857837924352 https://twitter.com/Mangeon4/status/1632627857837924352 Florida: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
TheDudeMan 3y ago
Too big.
nimrody 3y ago
This is small: https://www.radiantnuclear.com/ https://www.radiantnuclear.com/ Yes, I understand it isn't comparable (1.2MW). But portable doesn't require construction. Surely something in-between can be built?
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  If you like that one, you'll also love an actually-operated version of this: ML-1 from the 1960s. It operated out in Idaho at the National Reactor Testing Station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1
  - cduzz 3y ago
    That article is _hilarious_ "Extensive shielding was omitted in favor of a personnel exclusion zone of 500 feet (150 m) while in operation"
GolfPopper 3y ago
Time to quote the late Admiral Rickover, again, who described the AP300 in quite a lot of detail back in 1953. [1] "An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: 1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." 1. https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
Gwypaas 3y ago
This is the nuclear industry's third attempt at "SMR". It is what they bounce to when the large-scale reactors get too expensive. "THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS" https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
tibbydudeza 3y ago
We could use it here in South Africa. The bulk of our power comes from coal fired plants but due to the low quality coal for cost reasons and thus high sulphur and lack of preventative maintenance it results in boiler tube leaks nearly every week. Some of our plants are at the end of their lives and their replacements are no better off due to corruption and a malady of technically incompetent builders (looking at you Hitachi South Africa). 7000MW out of commission so we get daily power cuts for half the day. Those like myself who have the ability just install home solar systems for some measure of sanity while most companies are using diesel standby generators for their infrastructure. Walking into the office park and you can hear the chugg chugg and smell the fumes.
- _djo_ 3y ago
  South Africa almost got something similar, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). Well ahead of its time and excellent technology, with Westinghouse involved as a partner at one point and having bought some of the IP. [0] If only that had been continued. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Pebble bed reactors have problems. The fuel is more expensive to fabricate, activated dust comes off the pebbles as they abrade each other, the pebbles can crack and jam, and the volume of the spent fuel is high, increasing the cost of dealing with it.
- botanical 3y ago
  We'd need 23 of them. Depending on the cost, it would be better than nothing. Currently, I think it costs R10 mil to generate 1MW through solar; so R70 billion with solar.
psychstudio 3y ago
Nit: it's "Modular"

218 points by wanderingmind 3y ago

Seriously? I’m insanely pro-nuke, and work in the nuclear sector, but Westinghouse should really focus on their AP1000. They’ve already got deals in place with several countries, and now that they’ve got them running in more than one country, there might be a chance of bringing costs down some. The light water SMR market is getting crowded rather fast. They’re competing with both GE (and their BWRX-300) and NuScale (with their modular designs).

Animats 3y ago
This seems to be a smaller version of the AP1000. Nice big containment vessel. That's a good thing. Fukushima had an undersized containment which failed, and Chernobyl didn't have much of one at all. Three Mile Island had a good containment vessel, and so their meltdown damage was contained. Some of the "small modular nuclear reactor designs are built on the assumption that they don't need a full scale containment vessel because nothing can go that wrong. That may not be a good assumption. There's a lot to be said for large amounts of steel and concrete around reactors.
- evilos 3y ago
  Which SMRs don't have a full scale containment vessel?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    None, although I think some (NuScale?) save money by sharing pressurized containment volume among multiple reactors. Just hope you don't see multiple correlated meltdowns. Containment vessels could also be made smaller if steam filtering were used instead of planning to just contain and condense it. I don't know if any SMRs plan to do this.
    - evilos 3y ago
      As other poster mentioned, each nuscale module is fully self contained. Not only that, but they've modeled every module having a simultaneous scram in a 12 module plant, and modeled that the water level was lower than nominal. Still walk away safe.
    - Animats 3y ago
      NuScale's containment vessel is a metal cylinder around the reactor.[1] Each reactor has its own containment vessel. It's just slightly larger than the reactor, like Fukushima and Peach Bottom. Here's a good drawing.[2] No user-serviceable parts inside. The building is not a containment. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1535/ML15355A411.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1535/ML15355A411.pdf [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/image.jpg?id=25574195 https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/image.jpg?id=2557419...
BMc2020 3y ago
Didn't the PRC buy 4 AP1000s and then start building their own knockoff? (not pirated so much as that was one of their demands and Westinghouse accepted)?
- mandevil 3y ago
  Anything bigger than 1600MW, Westinghouse doesn't get a licensing fee for it getting built. So they are building 1600MW size right now.
epistasis 3y ago
Given the track record of AP1000 construction, who do you think would ever order one? I don't see a future for this. If somebody thought it was a feasible design for construction in Western countries, they could buy the half completed sites at Summer for a song. I also think 300MW is too big. It's not really small enough to get the supposed benefits of small and modular. The entire nuclear industry appears to be off its rocker when it comes to designs that are possible to construct for any reasonable amount of money. They bungled the AP1000 so badly that it bankrupted Westinghouse, and there's no reason to believe that they learned enough from the experience to do better next time. It's all terribly depressing, and completely soured me on the possibility of nuclear for the next 20-40 years. And in 20-40 years, look at how far storage, wind, and solar will have developed. It's unlikely that my nuclear will ever be a dominant energy source.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The whole industry, and its fan base, has descended into overt magical thinking. It is sad, and not a little ridiculous.
- m4rtink 3y ago
  Some older plant blocks were in the 300-500 MW range so I guess you could replace them with this ?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Those older plants in the US have been shut down because they can't even earn back their operating costs.
- dirtsoc 3y ago
  What's sad is that it's mainly the US that has problems with this. China has managed to bring multiple of this reactor design to fruition while the US still screws around with building just two. I live in Georgia and the almost decade of overruns and corruption are being about to be paid for by Georgia Power customers via rate hikes.
alliao 3y ago
SMR is being sold as smaller thus inferring smaller mess when disaster strikes but I don't see that anywhere can you shed some light on whether it's safer? perhaps the smaller containment meant it can be constructed to a higher threshold?
- jabl 3y ago
  Smaller tends to mean it's easier to make things like passive emergency cooling systems (e.g. using convection and gravity), so you're not dependent on the diesel gensets actually starting when they're really needed.
DarkNova6 3y ago
maybe for the immediate future. But their best prospects by far lie in their LFR (Lead Fast Reactor) concept. Lead is such a superior concept for reactor design and neutron economy, and mostly held back by the pace in material science.

timerol 3y ago

These are pretty big SMRs - 300 MWe, compared to 77MWe from NuScale. Definitely an iteration of reduced size from their 1 GWe model, as opposed to a "as small as reasonable" design. It's cool that they call out 15 MWe / min "load following" capability. Ramping up and down in response to renewables will be an important function of any nuclear reactor installed today.

nomel 3y ago
> 15 MWe / min "load following" capability I know nothing of nuclear. What sets this rate? Is it some system level thermal gradient limitation? Or maybe the complexity of the safety around the movement?
- jandrese 3y ago
  Mostly it is the half lives of the reaction products, sometimes the half lives of the decay products or intermediate products. Ramping up and down was historically somewhat difficult, famously one of the contributing factors to the Chernobyl accident was the reactor having been turned down to a very low level on the previous day. You have to be careful not to accidentally poison your reactor during the day when the solar farms are chugging out megawatts only to not be able to ramp up in the evening when the sun sets.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Part of it is also that whole system have large amount of "inertia". We are talking about megawatts of power. First in heated water and then passed through a massive turbine. This whole process carries for a bit. And you want it to run the grid and not the other way around.
  - nomel 3y ago
    > And you want it to run the grid and not the other way around. As simple as it is, this really blew my mind. I never considered that all the plants need to work together, as a system, each with "inertia", but all without ringing/oscillations. Thanks, I'll need to dig into this deeper! I can only assume that having grid batteries can really clean things up.

rgmerk 3y ago

Some history might be worth going in to here. The AP1000 design was an evolution of an earlier design called the AP600. The AP600 conceptual design apparently didn't find any customers because the economics of it were unappealing compared to larger reactors. In a nutshell, if you're going to build a huge containment building etc etc etc, it doesn't cost (in theory) that much more to go even bigger and get more power out of it. So why SMRs? It turned out that because you were building so few AP1000s, and building them with different workforces each time, that there was very little learning going on. Some bright spark seeing what's gone on in other industries had the bright idea that if you could build a nuclear reactor in a factory, and increase the number of units built and minimise the amount of work done on site, you'd start getting learning rates and economies of scale that easily outweigh the lower inherent efficiency of a smaller reactor. At 300MW, this reactor seems to be too big to be "back of a few trucks" construction, and thus you still have the bespoke construction project issues, and sufficiently small that the construction costs of 4 of them are likely to be much higher than one AP1000 (the AP1000 actually puts out about 1100 MW).

jay_kyburz 3y ago
You would think it would be economical to just move the work force around with the projects. You get the talent, but built in place.
- jandrese 3y ago
  It's harder to find quality people who are willing to relocate their family every time a job is finished.
  - rgmerk 3y ago
    To be fair, in a lot of cases you'd probably build multiple units on the same site which would get you some learning effects. But compared to wind, solar, and batteries...
  - prpl 3y ago
    Do you know many pipe fitters?

gnabgib 3y ago

Discussed 9 hours ago, 140 points, 99 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35816789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35816789

scythe 3y ago
Highlight of the thread, IMHO, from 'beefman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35818261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35818261 >Not small, modular, or new. But certainly a decent reactor. They clearly want something to slot in against the GE BWRX-300. But they would probably be better served by going all-in on their eVinci reactor, which is small, modular, and new >https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/evinci-microreactor https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/evinci-mi...
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Tiny reactors like that have been suggested for remote locations, like mining sites, but they make little sense. Renewables + batteries + diesel would be cheaper.

daydream 3y ago

Have they sold any of these to anyone yet?

credit_guy 3y ago
Of course not, they have to get first the approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They estimate this would take 3 years. I don't find that unrealistic, since it's based on an existing (i.e. approved) reactor design, AP1000. NuScale got their approval last year, and they applied in December 2016 [1]. So about 6 years for a design submitted by a new company with no prior experience whatsoever. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-activities/nuscale.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...

exabrial 3y ago

How do I write my state to buy one?

evilotto 3y ago

There's no "Add to cart" on the page. What kinda online store are they running?

SysWiz 3y ago
My thoughts exactly.
asdfman123 3y ago
I like how there’s a contact form at the bottom where you can presumably write something like “one nuclear reactor, please.”

derefr 3y ago

Question about SMRs generally: does the fact that random private companies can apply to buy one of these, mean that nuclear reactors are now basically "state-secret free" as a technology? Or are there still state secrets, but they're all in the e.g. uranium enrichment part of the pipeline — that buying one of these gets you no closer to seeing — rather than in the reactor design?

scythe 3y ago
Building a nuclear warhead requires assembling a large sphere (ish) of material well above critical mass faster than it can explode. Only then does the chain reaction efficiently consume a lot of fuel before it breaks up (inertial confinement). Usually, you need to use explosives to blast the different pieces of fuel into each other. This requires very accurate control of the explosions that ignite the warhead, and is where the secrets are. A nuclear reactor uses fuel juuuust barely above critical mass so the reaction is slow. It's a very different thing. Producing the fuel is just basic centrifuge isotope separation, which has many non-fission applications.
- febusravenga 3y ago
  > juuuust barely above critical mass Interesting. Everyone says that nuclear reactors are safe and material can't be used to build bomb, how are we ensuring that were always only tiny bit above CM... And this bit doesn't grow unexpectedly. As laic, i see many failure modes, starting with simple accidents in handling of rods or bad storage
  - Wildgoose 3y ago
    It's actually just below Critical Mass. (For obvious reasons). You need sufficient fissile material to provide the increased neutron flow generating heat which you can use to power generators, but you have to then extract that heat efficiently to prevent your nuclear core from literally melting.
- YakBizzarro 3y ago
  well, not really. the fuel in typical reactor is lowly enriched uranium (LEU), meaning that only a small percentage of the fuel is actually fissile (ie. it breaks when interacting with one neutron and release energy). So no, it can't get sustain an exponentially growing reaction chain in any condition, since neutrons are absorbed by the non-fissile part of the fuel

blakespot 3y ago

I need one.

TheDudeMan 3y ago

Reactors are not small enough until they are rolling off an assembly line.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
They don't have to be small to roll off an assembly line. France: https://twitter.com/Mangeon4/status/1632627857837924352 https://twitter.com/Mangeon4/status/1632627857837924352 Florida: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html

TheDudeMan 3y ago

Too big.

nimrody 3y ago

This is small: https://www.radiantnuclear.com/ https://www.radiantnuclear.com/ Yes, I understand it isn't comparable (1.2MW). But portable doesn't require construction. Surely something in-between can be built?

acidburnNSA 3y ago
If you like that one, you'll also love an actually-operated version of this: ML-1 from the 1960s. It operated out in Idaho at the National Reactor Testing Station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1
- cduzz 3y ago
  That article is _hilarious_ "Extensive shielding was omitted in favor of a personnel exclusion zone of 500 feet (150 m) while in operation"

GolfPopper 3y ago

Time to quote the late Admiral Rickover, again, who described the AP300 in quite a lot of detail back in 1953. [1] "An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: 1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." 1. https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

Gwypaas 3y ago

This is the nuclear industry's third attempt at "SMR". It is what they bounce to when the large-scale reactors get too expensive. "THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS" https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

tibbydudeza 3y ago

We could use it here in South Africa. The bulk of our power comes from coal fired plants but due to the low quality coal for cost reasons and thus high sulphur and lack of preventative maintenance it results in boiler tube leaks nearly every week. Some of our plants are at the end of their lives and their replacements are no better off due to corruption and a malady of technically incompetent builders (looking at you Hitachi South Africa). 7000MW out of commission so we get daily power cuts for half the day. Those like myself who have the ability just install home solar systems for some measure of sanity while most companies are using diesel standby generators for their infrastructure. Walking into the office park and you can hear the chugg chugg and smell the fumes.

_djo_ 3y ago
South Africa almost got something similar, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). Well ahead of its time and excellent technology, with Westinghouse involved as a partner at one point and having bought some of the IP. [0] If only that had been continued. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Pebble bed reactors have problems. The fuel is more expensive to fabricate, activated dust comes off the pebbles as they abrade each other, the pebbles can crack and jam, and the volume of the spent fuel is high, increasing the cost of dealing with it.
botanical 3y ago
We'd need 23 of them. Depending on the cost, it would be better than nothing. Currently, I think it costs R10 mil to generate 1MW through solar; so R70 billion with solar.

psychstudio 3y ago

Nit: it's "Modular"