For the first time, U.S. officials have approved a small nuclear power plant design.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission [(NRC)] on Friday approved Portland-based NuScale Power's application for the small modular reactor that Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems plans to build at a U.S. Department of Energy site in eastern Idaho.
The small reactors can produce about 60 megawatts of energy, or enough to power more than 50,000 homes. The proposed project includes 12 small modular reactors. The first would be built in 2029, with the rest in 2030.
NuScale says the reactors have advanced safety features, including self-cooling and automatic shutdown.
"This is a significant milestone not only for NuScale, but also for the entire U.S. nuclear sector and the other advanced nuclear technologies that will follow," said NuScale Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Hopkins in a statement.
The cooperative pushing the effort will next need to submit an application to the NRC for a combined construction and operating license and expects this to be ready within two years.
Also at Ars Technica.
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An unnamed contributor wrote:
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.
[...] Once complete, the certification is published in the Federal Register, allowing the design to be used in the US. Friday's announcement says that the NRC is all set to take the publication step.
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.
Previous stories:
First Major Modular Nuclear Project Having Difficulty Retaining Backers
US Gives First-Ever OK for Small Commercial Nuclear Reactor
The US Government Just Invested Big in Small-Scale Nuclear Power
Safer Nuclear Reactors on the Horizon
The historic move is a step on the long path ahead for nuclear power:
The U.S. has just given the green light to its first-ever small modular nuclear design, a promising step forward for a power source that remains controversial among some climate advocates but is experiencing a popular renaissance.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the design, which was published Thursday in the Federal Register, from NuScale, an Oregon-based reactor company. The publication of the design in the Register allows utilities to select this type of reactor when applying for a license to build a new nuclear facility. The design would be able to produce a reactor about one-third the size of a usual reactor, with each module able to produce around 50 megawatts of power.
[...] Just because a design is on the books doesn't mean that it's smooth sailing for the industry or that all our grids are going to be powered by carbon-free nuclear electricity in a few years. NuScale is currently working on a six-module demonstration plant in Idaho that will be fully operational by 2030; the company said this month that its estimates for the price per megawatt hour of the demo plant had jumped by more than 50% since its last estimates, in an uncomfortable echo of ballooning costs associated with other traditional nuclear projects. Small modular reactors still produce nuclear waste, which some environmentalists say is a concern that can't be overlooked as the industry develops.
Previous stories:
US Regulators Certify First Small Nuclear Reactor Design
First Major Modular Nuclear Project Having Difficulty Retaining Backers
US Gives First-Ever OK for Small Commercial Nuclear Reactor
The US Government Just Invested Big in Small-Scale Nuclear Power
Safer Nuclear Reactors on the Horizon
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 04 2020, @11:58AM (3 children)
That's better than fusion by half, twice as likely to actually happen. (2x0 = what?)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday September 04 2020, @03:44PM
Wait, is that the new math, isn't the answer always 2 or was it 5? No, no, 3 sir! 3! Wait, no, I think this one is a trick question.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Saturday September 05 2020, @05:19AM (1 child)
A small one can only make a small problem right??
But seriously, this 50k is BS. It should handle 300k at night and to help charge of the grid batteries; not be the sole power source. Hell, let them compete on the grid along with everything else and take away the subsidies and watch it die before it can begin. This is not going to be profitable without tons of graft; I don't think going smaller isn't going to help much.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 05 2020, @12:14PM
50K is fine, hell I'd like to see neighborhood scale capsules that only supply 5K homes - in a city+burbs of 1M people you'd have 200-250 capsules distributed across the region. Our local 1M population is spread across ~1000 sq mi, so that would be one capsule every 4 square miles on average (more in the dense areas, less in the rural spaces), so your transmission lines would only need to be a couple of miles from source to consumer, less than a mile in the urban areas. Knocking the grid offline should be damn near impossible with that much redundancy.
Now, when we all start driving electric everythings, those batteries are basically going to need a 100% grid capacity upgrade to handle the "just got home, need to charge up before we go out tonight" surge (unless we end up WFH permanently due to COVID). The grid should also transform to take advantage of the battery capacity online to bank solar or whatever other "pulse" power sources are available - that's more than just slapping an inverter into every garage.
But, with a capsule installed for every 5K homes - those capsules are going to have to be basically 100% self secure without human attendants. Maybe train (and fund) the local police to adequately respond to tamper calls - video monitoring should be able to cut down on prank triggering of the cop callouts, but still there's an issue if 1000 people "flash mob" the city's capsules all at once (using 4 man teams) it will be hard to tell which ones have the real potential to jack-hammer through 2' of poured concrete before the cops get there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday September 04 2020, @02:12PM (10 children)
60 megawatts is small...
Give us 20 kilowatts, one for each home, right there in the basement. You get free hot water too.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @02:26PM
I need 1.21 Jiggawatts!
-Marty
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 04 2020, @05:01PM (6 children)
60 megawatts is probably a sweet spot for distribution and redundancy - each one can serve 50,000 homes, so install one per 40,000 homes and let the distribution grid handle downtime-outages, but still avoid the need for long distance distribution lines.
Also: you know they're going to require 24x7x366 live onsite security personnel, they don't scale down very well.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday September 04 2020, @05:18PM (5 children)
Yeah, the fear factor is a big barricade to progress. Just put one of those Amazon doorbell cams on the gate and feed the video to the cop station
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 04 2020, @08:14PM (4 children)
We were building a radiotherapy system for cancer treatment, and had good reason to want to use Cobalt60, but the DOE gets skittish about letting mere hospitals have isotopes like that which might be used to build a dirty bomb...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday September 04 2020, @09:08PM
Yeah, I see their point. I would much rather die from a clean bomb
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Saturday September 05 2020, @05:15AM (2 children)
If you ban isotopes only the bad guys will have isotopes!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 05 2020, @12:01PM (1 child)
I think it was in Colombia where a hospital threw away some Co60 and kids found it in the dump - it makes a cool blue glow...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @12:49PM
brazil, and it wasn't the kids who discovered the substance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident [wikipedia.org]
but the spirit of what you're saying is true (and technically one child was given some of the dangerous substance to play with precisely because it had a nice glow).
(Score: 2) by dak664 on Saturday September 05 2020, @11:33AM (1 child)
Probably less than 30% thermal efficiency without a cooling tower, so around 200MW thermal. That's not a bug, it's a feature: enough to heat 10,000 homes!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Saturday September 05 2020, @03:16PM
They should pipe that hot water underneath the streets and sidewalks to stay snow and ice free all year long. With nuclear, we can all live like kings, for mere pennies.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @02:19PM (28 children)
The modular reactors are light-water reactors, which are the vast majority of reactors now operating. But modular reactors are designed to use less water than traditional reactors and have a passive safety system so they shut down without human action should something go wrong.
Key features of this system include a high-pressure containment vessel immersed in a large pool of water and a passive emergency core cooling system that relies only on gravity-driven convection of the coolant and conduction of heat to the containment vessel surface.
Sounds like old school reactor tech in a swimming pool.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @02:26PM (20 children)
Yea...I was hoping this was going to be Thorium finally getting put to use. Still, it sounds like incremental improvements, rather than a running and hiding from big bad nuclear. Let's just hope this unmeltdownable reactor doesn't hit an iceberg, because that'd set us back decades yet again.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 04 2020, @05:06PM (16 children)
Thorium requires a whole "moonshot" worth of infrastructure development, just like Plutonium did but without the boom potential in the output stream, so guess who's not ready to foot even a little bitty part of the bill for Thorium development but would gladly fund 100% for Plutonium?
These types of reactors were designed, discussed, and implicitly approved 30 years ago - management flak at the NRC seemed to actually believe they would be "online within the next 10 years" back in 1990. I'm binning this news with: world peace, negative population growth, environmental sustainability, economic equality, flying cars, moon colonies, and all that other good stuff that everybody in the 1960s knew was coming "real soon now."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @05:29PM (5 children)
Actually, the fertility rate is below replacement or not that far from it already in most of the world.
The one standout is Africa:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @06:03PM
You need to watch this
https://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/doubling-down-with-the-derricos/ [tlc.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 04 2020, @08:19PM (3 children)
I'll respond with my standard f-you and that horse you rode in on. The planet is still adding 75 million humans a year, that's not negative population growth, and your projections are just about as valid as Right wing COVID response predictions.
If you are intending to build a wall around Africa and start slaughtering people inside, then, sure, we're _almost_ there. There are a million equally unpalatable ways that we're _almost_ to ZPG. ZPG isn't even good enough, really - if we want to live comfortably, without the 99% having to eat bug paste after the next economic blip, we are going to need to back down from 7.5B.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday September 04 2020, @09:51PM
Right wing response to COVID would have been 1. close borders. No right wing exists and if it does it does not actually rule. Given the track record of national socialists, it's good. If OTOH consider right also the generically conservative christian anti globalization anti plutocracy and anti zionists, then... no right wing exists either. You might consider the corporativists, jew-friendly, barking at immigrants without actually fighting them not to upset the oil drenched arabs, those do exist.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @10:08PM (1 child)
Are you too dense to understand the difference between acceleration and velocity?
The trend every year is generally for lower fertility rates. Eventually, you reach a sub-replacement fertility rate. That means less people as the older age cohort dies off.
As I said, Africa right now is not decelerating. The rest of the world mostly is. If that's not enough for your humanity hating heart, maybe you should lead by example.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 05 2020, @01:57AM
I'll re-iterate: past performance is no guarantee of future results. We have been grinding down on fertility rates with unsustainable levels of shiny entertainment and creature comforts for the economically strained lower-middle classes of the developed world. It works because more children mean less air conditioned square footage under roof per person in a family, less free cash to splurge on YOUR toys. If/when the Marie Kondo mind bomb goes viral and people realize that they don't need so much square footage to store so much expensive junk because it simply does not spark joy in their lives, we could just as quickly shift back to 3, 4, 8 children per family, God knows the 3500 square foot middle class McMansions have the space to easily accommodate that many people, if the people in charge aren't obsessed slaves of fashion spending $1400 on a new phone every 18 months, $6 per person per day on designer coffees, $60,000 for a backyard swimming pool they use an average of two evenings per year, etc.
Deceleration is a great first derivative, but it hasn't touched decreasing numbers in a LONG time. Meanwhile, average energy consumption IS on a meteoric acceleration curve.
I love humanity, I hate to contemplate the future suffering that will result from a economically advanced global population of 12 billion people, or even 6 billion. Humanity came from, and thrives in, a diverse ecosystem; one which we are destroying with accelerating speed on a global scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction [wikipedia.org]
If you hope to placate the other 6 billion people on the planet with similar Faustian bargains of shiny enticements to trade their reproductive urges for, said shiny enticements are going to need to undergo a 90% energy and waste production reductive transformation as compared to what worked for the last 50 years in the West. Better insulation and solar power aren't going to be enough to make that cut.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Friday September 04 2020, @08:09PM (9 children)
>negative population growth
We already have NPG in developed nations, including the US. Nations that have immigration only have increasing population because of immigration and Japan (probably SKorea too) doesn't like immigration so much so their population is declining. China's population is also declining now; the 1-child policy accelerated it, but now that people there have money and a middle-class lifestyle, they don't want a bunch of kids. Kids are too much money and trouble in modern society, so people just aren't bothering, as as other nations raise their standards of living, they're experiencing the same thing.
>world peace
Things are looking kinda unstable these days, but if you look at how many people are living in war-torn countries, or getting killed in conflicts, over the last 120 years, I think you'll find that the world is overall getting more peaceful. Of course, a major conflict between nuclear powers could derail this trend.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 04 2020, @08:29PM (2 children)
Except for that niggling little fact that US population continues to increase, yes: due to immigration, but that doesn't make a damn bit of difference when you want to lay on the beach and it's wall to wall people. When my grandparents moved to Florida, Florida population was 2.8 million. Today it's at 22 million and continuing to rise.
Double down on Donnie, get some walls built, then suffocate in the CO2 coming from Africa. It's a planetary problem, just because the U.S. has successfully brainwashed and economically oppressed a generation into not replacing themselves through procreation is a hair on the ant's posterior. The U.S. is only 5% of global population - and if we succeed in getting the rest of the planet to emulate US behaviors, we're going to need to decrease global population below 2B (way below) just to hold CO2 emissions at or below 2010 levels. Also, regarding reproductive behaviors: past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Since when? Post COVID? During the decades of 1-child, China's population increased 40%.
Overall, I agree, just as I agree that population growth is slowing - but slowing isn't really an acceptable solution in the long run. We can probably live with continually slowly decreasing wars, but if the solution it population growth is for people to live like U.S. residents - we're gonna need a lot less people than we have today, something that has never historically happened long term on a global scale - at least not since farming started.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 04 2020, @09:02PM (1 child)
Except for that niggling little fact that US population continues to increase, yes: due to immigration, but that doesn't make a damn bit of difference when you want to lay on the beach and it's wall to wall people. When my grandparents moved to Florida, Florida population was 2.8 million. Today it's at 22 million and continuing to rise.
You're talking about an entirely different issue here, which is internal migration. The population of FL has risen a lot since then because the population of the northeast has been declining while the population of the southern states has risen greatly: people have been moving south in general, and especially to Florida because of retirees, the homestead exemption, and also immigration from Cuba. So my point is still quite valid: people aren't having kids. If you want to see the opposite of Florida beaches, take a trip to Detroit, Buffalo, etc.: the populations of these cities have fallen dramatically since their peaks in the 50s. There's various reasons for this, both economic, and also climate (why would anyone want to live in a place with such lousy weather?).
just because the U.S. has successfully brainwashed and economically oppressed a generation into not replacing themselves through procreation is a hair on the ant's posterior.
How has anyone been "brainwashed"? When people have money and careers, they don't want a bunch of kids. This is particularly true for women, who are the ones who actually have to go to the trouble of gestating them, and then taking care of them while they grow up. So people like you whine about "brainwashing", but are you willing to actually put any work in to raise kids? Thought not. As for Africa, the same thing is happening there, slowly: as development increases, people have fewer children.
During the decades of 1-child, China's population increased 40%.
How much would it have increased without that policy? A lot more. And the 1-child policy didn't apply to everyone; rural people could have more, and they did. Now they've lifted the policy, and are finding it isn't having an effect, because people just don't want to have a lot of kids now that they aren't all subsistence farmers and can instead have decent jobs and live a middle-class lifestyle.
but slowing isn't really an acceptable solution in the long run.
It is when the outcome is plateauing at a stable population. However, I don't see this happening, because as we've seen, every place that develops enough turns into NPG, so eventually the plateau will turn into a downward trend, and that's always bad for economics. However, if they come up with life-extension technologies and therapies, this will change because it'll decrease the death rate to counter the decreased birth rate.
but if the solution it population growth is for people to live like U.S. residents - we're gonna need a lot less people than we have today
Now this is the real problem here: if everyone wants a big McMansion and giant SUV and wants to drive everywhere and get fat, then yes, that's not sustainable. Luckily, not everyone wants to live that way, as seen by the density of Asian cities where there's good public transit and things are close together and walkable. Personally-owned cars, in general, are just not scalable or sustainable: the infrastructure needed to support this lifestyle just takes up too much space and makes it impossible for a place to be walkable or for public transit to work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @10:14PM
Getting fat does not impact "the planet."
I am sure most of that is less exercise plus a lot of sugar, flour, and oil. All of this is produced cheaply and quite densely on farmland.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday September 04 2020, @10:00PM (5 children)
>I think you'll find that the world is overall getting more peaceful.
you are not going to win a war if you don't acknowledge being in one. The control you have over your life has been declining since the industrial revolution. The unit called family has been reduced to a meaningless word. The system is taking away everything that was available for free, building your house, digging your well, growing your food, repairing your stuff. And there is no political candidate that will revert this. Economy is morphing into social credit, thanks to the amount of fiat money. And so on. But you, given abortion stats, were already the lucky one.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday September 05 2020, @01:23AM (4 children)
So do aborted fetuses (fetii?) go straight to Heaven or what? Because if so, the logical course of action is to abort all current pregnancies, stop reproducing entirely, and blam, no more new souls having even a chance in hell, hardy-har, of having a chance at going to hell.
You catholics aren't too bright.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday September 05 2020, @04:47PM (1 child)
You don't live to go to heaven. You go to heaven because you've been alive.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 06 2020, @05:06PM
Answer the question, if you can. I bet you can't, mostly because you don't even know your own religion's history on the subject.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @06:19PM (1 child)
Neither was your response.
Try harder next time.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 06 2020, @05:05PM
So pick it apart and tell me what's wrong with it, bozo.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday September 04 2020, @08:01PM (2 children)
The way I look at it is: it's better than a coal-fired plant belching pollution into the air. Combine it with solar and wind and we can have carbon-free electricity, at the cost of having to deal with waste disposal, which is still a lot better than dumping the waste into the atmosphere (plus having mountains of polluted fly ash in the case of coal plants).
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Friday September 04 2020, @09:38PM
Solar and Wind are inadequate, as the don't provide a consistent base load, and there is no good way to store so much energy and release it. Nuclear cannot step down and ramp up production within hours during demand peaks. I addition, while modern nuclear has low chance of failure, when it fails it's catastrophic - it makes land unusable for a thousand years and risks contamination of water, animals, and radioactive material being carried outside the disaster area.
Now yes, we could use solar to pump a lake uphill and have it spin turbines on the way down. And that will power a small village for a couple of days. Unless it's winter.
Coal and gas ain't going anywhere. Nuclear is not the solution to replace them. Your cancerous coal ash has negative results, which are predictable, have non-disasterous failure modes, and are contained to a small area which doesn't have to be populated. Filtering ash it is also much easier than dealing with nuclear waste and risking chernobyl-level disasters. Or when someone sends a plane full of tnt into a nuclear plant, or a big earthquake that destroys the pool of water this reactor sits in.
Now, global warming is a problem that coal is worse at vs nuclear. While the energy produced all eventually turns to heat, efficiency of generating that energy is double for nuclear. There's also no CO2. But there literally is no other solution at the moment. And I'm ok with the earth warming, and Manhattan being underwater, and Alaska becoming the new California. We have many areas currently too cold to live in.
Now if you're talking a nuclear reactor deep inland, like Illinois - sure. But in California or in Japan - that's a sad joke.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Saturday September 05 2020, @06:53AM
Turn the waste into betavoltaic batteries.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @02:36PM (6 children)
American reactors have been able to shut themselves down automatically for decades. The moment they lose power to the core, the control rods fall in and the fuel rods fall out. There's nothing particularly new about that which wasn't possible decades ago.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Friday September 04 2020, @02:50PM (2 children)
What you describe is an active system. There are failure modes whereby the control rods are not dropped/etc.
High pressure water reactors have a passive system - if the water gets too hot, the density decreases so that the water becomes a worse moderator and the reaction slows.
Note this prevents the particular failure mode of "runaway nuclear reaction". Other failure modes, such as a meltdown, may persist; for example, IIRC, the failure at Fukushima was in the spent fuel storage facility, where active cooling was required to prevent the spent fuel getting hot enough to melt (meltdown). The excess heat led to the Hydrogen and Oxygen in cooling water to split and then recombine explosively, while the fuel also melted. This led to uncontrolled release of radioactive material, resulting in mild peril.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 04 2020, @09:20PM (1 child)
The other problems at Fukushima were: putting backup generators in a basement that flooded because of a tsunami, and putting the whole site too close to the coast where a tsunami could affect it.
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Friday September 04 2020, @09:41PM
They actually upgraded it to a passive system, which would have prevented the meltdown. They didn't enable it after installation. I'm literally not kidding.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Friday September 04 2020, @02:53PM (1 child)
I always had a problem with gravity. It only works if the center of gravity did not shift. Should it not be spring loaded? I am sure they thought of this, but spring loaded seems more likely to work even in case where the CG moves due to some bad things happening.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @03:46PM
And had enough of them to only use a partial set at any one time. The problem with springs is that given too much time sprung they can seize, bind, or otherwise lose their mechanical force. Given that this is a reactor that may be lasting 20+ years with little or no maintenance (if I am remembering correctly.) then spring failures during an event could be a critical failure. This could also be true for the gravity based design if either tolerances changed over the life of the unit, or as previously mentioned if its gravitational orientation changes such that the control rods relying on gravity failed to drop into place correctly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @11:20PM
Yes, control rods go in and reactor shuts down to a few percent of power for a few days.
It doesn't go all the way off.
This residual few percent, without cooling, is what causes a melt down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @04:22PM
Go all the way, don’t forget it’s idiocracy out there:
Unicorn Rainbow Magic Power Booster