NuScale Power and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems announced Wednesday that they've agreed to terminate the small modular reactor Carbon Free Power Project, or CFPP.
"Despite significant efforts by both parties to advance the CFPP, it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscription to continue toward deployment. Therefore, UAMPS and NuScale have mutually determined that ending the project is the most prudent decision for both parties," NuScale and UAMPS said in a press release.
[...] The project, which was expected to be the first commercial SMR in the U.S. faced rising costs. In January, NuScale raised the target price for power from the SMR to $89/MWh from $58/MWh, citing a "changing financial landscape for the development of energy projects nationwide."
Despite the termination of the CFPP, NuScale President and Chief Executive Officer John Hopkins said Wednesday during NuScale's Q3 earnings call that the company is focused on deploying its SMR modules and is "poised to expand into new markets, applications and capabilities." Hopkins highlighted a number of other partnerships and projects, including plans to develop two NuScale VOYGR-12 power plants that will have a combined capacity of nearly 2 GW and power nearby data centers in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
"Though there are risks to any project, the CFPP presented unique challenges that NuScale does not expect will be replicated with other customers," Diane Hughes, vice president of marketing and communications at NuScale, said in a statement to Utility Dive.
Industry groups expressed disappointment but understanding of the decision.
"Innovation — particularly in new technologies — is defined by fits and starts. And innovation in next-generation nuclear is no different," a spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute said in an email.
Previously: First Major Modular Nuclear Project Having Difficulty Retaining Backers
Related Stories
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Earlier this year, the US took a major step that could potentially change the economics of nuclear power: it approved a design for a small, modular nuclear reactor from a company called NuScale. These small reactors are intended to overcome the economic problems that have ground the construction of large nuclear plants to a near halt. While each only produces a fraction of the power possible with a large plant, the modular design allows for mass production and a design that requires less external safety support.
But safety approval is just an early step in the process of building a plant. And the leading proposal for the first NuScale plant is running into the same problem as traditional designs: finances.
The proposal, called the Carbon Free Power Project, would be a cluster of a dozen NuScale reactors based at Idaho National Lab but run by Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS. With all 12 operating, the plant would produce 720 MW of power. But UAMPS is selling it as a way to offer the flexibility needed to complement variable renewable power. Typically, a nuclear plant is either producing or not, but the modular design allows the Carbon Free Power Project to shut individual reactors off if demand is low.
But keeping a plant idle means you're not selling any power from it, making it more difficult to pay off the initial investment made to produce it and adding to the financial risks. Further increasing risk is the fact that this is the first project of its kind—the NuScale website lists it as "NuScale's First Plant." All of this appears to be making things complicated for the Carbon Free Power Project.
(Score: 5, Troll) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday November 12 2023, @03:30PM (21 children)
There are few things scarier than letting for-profit corporations install radioactive hotspots all over the place in a country that has such poor track record of regulating dangerous industries, and is also the biggest target for international terrorism on the planet.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 12 2023, @05:50PM (16 children)
We developed a combo MRI radiotherapy device that really wanted to use Cobalt 60 as the ionizing radiation source (emits high energy photons, not steered by the magnetic field.). But, hospitals aren't high security sites and having that much Co60 would make a tempting component of a dirty bomb, so instead they developed a linear accelerator based device that throws fast electrons at your tumor on a curve ball route.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday November 12 2023, @06:03PM (15 children)
Protons also. [cancer.net]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 12 2023, @07:36PM (14 children)
Proton therapy was in the field in 2005 as a device that required multiple floors of a building. It was supposed to be "better controlled" than the much cheaper linacs using electrons, protons don't penetrate as deeply or generate as much scatter reactions. I haven't looked back at the literature now that it has been used for almost 20 years, I suspect like most novel radiotherapy modalities, it has marginal benefits in certain circumstances.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Sunday November 12 2023, @08:07PM (11 children)
I believe, IIRC, one of the downsides is that it requires many treatments, one per day, so like 30 days of schlepping to wherever the treatment center is.
I'm a big fan of CyberKnife. 4 years ago my (now late) dad had a really bad tumor in a vertebra- L5 iirc. He'd had a herniated disc and surgery like 30 years ago, so he thought it was just that "acting up". I didn't know at the time, but he was taking up to the max acetaminophen (4G) per day, and even then the pain was unbearable for him.
I got him into CyberKnife. 3-5 treatments they said, decided to spread it out to 5. As they said, the first treatment _all_ of his pain was gone.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 12 2023, @08:42PM (10 children)
Cyberknife is good for some things (IIRC it's LINAC, multiple beams to concentrate damage on the tumor.)
Cyberknife in the brain isn't a great thing, if you know someone who needs that kind of treatment research a bit about Necrotic Fringe (common side effect, nasty as it sounds - it spreads...) Also research MRI guided thermal ablation. No Necrotic Fringe associated with thermal ablation, and they can reach all the same sites...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday November 12 2023, @10:25PM (9 children)
It may be LINAC, but it's one beam from a fairly small head that moves in 3D arcs all around the pt. Special combo CT+MRI is used to map tumor to sub-millimeter precision. System somehow "watches" so pt can move a bit and computer keeps beam on target. They claim it's very indicated for brain tumors.
Which dovetails into a very sad story of a quite young person (early 20s) who died a few weeks ago- not from the brain tumor, but from the surgical attempt to remove the tumor.
A good friend of mine does R&D at a sensor / transducer company. I forget when, at least 10 years ago he told me about making some very tiny transducers (piezo ceramic) - exciters- smaller than a grain of rice- that can be laparoscopically threaded into a tumor, including transurethrally for prostate, to cause ultrasonic heating of a tumor.
In Canada they were (are?) doing ultrasonic tumor heating using multiple focused external beams. It has some successes. My non-MD hunch is that done in conjunction with other treatments you'd get much higher success rates.
BTW, several recent medical news stories talking about very new cancer treatments, including unlocking some of the defenses cancers have against the immune system.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2023, @01:39PM (8 children)
>System somehow "watches" so pt can move a bit and computer keeps beam on target.
I worked on a competing system that "watches" in real time during therapy using MRI. Very good for lung cancer where the tumor is constantly moving. If you've got something that needs treatment that doesn't move much compared to the reference target tattoos they put on, an external tracking system is much cheaper - and therefore accessible - than an MRI guided radiotherapy system which needs a dedicated MRI.
>They claim it's very indicated for brain tumors.
It was the best thing going around the turn of the century. I've got a skewed perspective because the thermal ablation system I worked with (years after MRI guided radiotherapy) was heavily used to correct necrotic fringe left behind by CyberKnife procedures in the brain. I honestly have no idea what the rate of incidence of necrotic fringe is, but anectotally I've run into two friends of friends/relatives who initially got the CyberKnife then not very much later had necrotic fringe problems leading to early death and not fun symptoms along the way.
> it's one beam from a fairly small head that moves in 3D arcs all around the pt.
Yeah, it's not like Venkman, Stanz and Spengler are there firing intersecting beams all at once - most machines are single source with multiple vectors into the target applied sequentially during a treatment session.
>a very sad story of a quite young person (early 20s) who died a few weeks ago- not from the brain tumor, but from the surgical attempt to remove the tumor.
15ish years ago we met an amazing couple who lost their daughter in her early 20s to resective brain surgery for epilepsy. It was "standard of care" at the time, but these things happen sometimes - quite often when you're digging in the brain. These days the same MRI guided thermal ablation used for tumors can also be used for epilepsy surgery with MUCH lower side effect rates (including death.)
>ultrasonic tumor heating using multiple focused external beams.
Yeah, small hole for a fiber optic probe is good, no hole at all for ultrasonic sounds better- if they can focus the energy sufficiently on-target.
>It has some successes. My non-MD hunch is that done in conjunction with other treatments you'd get much higher success rates.
The thing about MRI guided thermal ablation is that the MRI is measuring tissue temperatures, in 3D resolution just as good as the imaging signal (image comes back as the magnitude of a compelx vector, temperature change is the phase change of that signal...), so... you've got a temperature-history right up to the current second while you're heating. There were existing models for tissue damage from heat exposure that they transferred for use in the brain, apparently quite successfully. The software I worked on basically showed the surgeon an outline of the "cooked to death" zone which they would continue heating/expanding until they had covered the entire (MRI identified) tissue to be ablated. It is very good at "getting the bad stuff" without getting much, if any, of the stuff you don't want to damage - which is excellent for brain use. Theoretically it could be applied all over the body, but practicalities of medical practice and reimbursment mean it is being developed pretty much exclusively for brain use for the foreseeable future.
Now, if your disease isn't just solid mass tumor(s), and you need to catch a bunch of diffuse cancer over a wide area, that's what Chemo is about. Not fun, but the alternative is zero fun... tough choice sometimes.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday November 13 2023, @06:10PM (1 child)
Wow, thank you for all that. You really know this stuff. I forget- had you ever considered med school?
I've mentioned before that in the mid-90s I worked in EEG. Epilepsy stuff was our main market, including systems with up to 256 channels and electrode arrays that were tucked into folds in the brain to help pinpoint areas needing resection. Sorry to anyone reading this if it grosses you out. Yes it's pretty extreme and only done in extreme cases. We didn't make the electrodes, but did make the preamps and everything else.
Thank you also for the info on necrotic fringe. I'll research that some more. I'm sad to hear of that happening. I'm sure it's no consolation to anyone who experiences the complex ups and downs of medical treatment, side effects, including bad ones, but to some extent all of that information goes into the learning process which refines and advances medical treatments.
(Joking) how about some more CyberKnife to kill the necrotic fringe?
Joking aside, I've always wondered about using cancer-causing radiation to kill cancer. Well, of course it comes down to shades of grey. Nobody lives forever, and the cancer will kill you very soon, but the radiation might give you several more years.
I wasn't aware that thermal ablation could be used on brain tumors. Speculating that brain tissue is most sensitive to thermal damage, so you'd want to heat the tumor quickly and shut off. Reminds me of some kinds of soldering where you want a pretty hot iron, but do not linger with the heat.
Thanks again for the info and all you've done and do to help advance medicine.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2023, @06:42PM
>I forget- had you ever considered med school?
I had shaky hands worse as a kid than I do now mid-50s. I had terrible handwriting like an M.D. but, the shaking hands wouldn't go over well in that position - plus, in my estimation, the working hours of a practicing M.D. suck.
> how about some more CyberKnife to kill the necrotic fringe?
It wasn't my area of concern, but I believe they had less than satisfactory results with that... pretty much if you get it once, you'll get it again. Another thing, 3D plots of Cyberknife "kill zones" look a little like a ninja star to me, and I've never seen a tumor like that, so by the time you've got the tumor you've also had serious impact on little spikes of healthy tissue around it.
>using cancer-causing radiation to kill cancer.
Tumors are easier to kill with radiation than healthy tissues, so sometimes that comes out o.k. but... The optimistic estimates I heard from practitioners in the field was that most cancer resulting from therapy exposures doesn't manifest for 20+ years, and when it does you can usually treat it again (at least for more income, not sure if it does any good for the patient.) Of course, one of those practitioners was a PhD advisor, and one of his students doing a thesis on dose measurement up and died of a rare blood cancer at age 24, just after finishing all his work in and around therapy devices measuring dose. All the practitioner could say on the topic was: "it's just one of those weird random things we can't explain..." I believe in coincidence, and certainly that young man's death is no proof that his thesis got him killed, but if I had to bet on the most likely cause of his rare blood cancer.... repeated exposure to radiation believed to be safe would be high on my list of environmental triggers.
>you'd want to heat the tumor quickly and shut off
You do want to get the tumor hotter than the surrounding healthy tissue, the session I attended ran the laser-heater for about 2 minutes per target IIRC. That patient had a series of 3 solid body tumors more or less in a line, so they put the probe through them all, then drew the fiber tip back to hit each one in turn, kind of sliding it along the longer sausage shaped one while it ran.
>all you've done and do to help advance medicine.
Thanks for the compliment, it always feels like a tiny bit at the time, but that's how progress is made.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday November 17 2023, @09:46PM (5 children)
My first wife dies at about that age from epilepsy. She had not yet had brain surgery. Three anecdotes now; it's not clear we have any conclusions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 17 2023, @10:34PM (4 children)
Oh, there's a big conclusion here: Epilepsy sucks, big time. Most of the treatments for epilepsy also suck, but as compared to epilepsy itself - most of them are at least worth a shot.
Also: recent advances in MRI guided thermal ablation beat having a surgeon dig around in your brain with a scalpel in just about every way imaginable.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday November 18 2023, @01:07AM (3 children)
That was a year I seemed to be surrounded by epileptics -- my wife, one of my students and mu post-doc supervisor. Quite a few.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 18 2023, @05:10AM
I think the overall rate is around 1/100, so there are generally a lot more epileptics around than you know about...
The photo-sensitive variety runs more like 1/10,000 people which is pretty small, but still if you think about the number of people who go to a movie or a shopping mall or whatever... it's more common than most people know.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 18 2023, @05:19AM (1 child)
And, by the way, so sorry to hear about your wife... we all die eventually, but it's hard to lose somebody close to something like epilepsy.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday November 20 2023, @12:06AM
That was about 50 years ago. And Karen was strobe-sensitive.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Monday November 13 2023, @09:22AM (1 child)
I have worked with a lot of folks studying proton therapy, on the beam physics side of things. I am not a doctor.
Proton therapy is a nice option because protons tend to go through stuff until they reach lower energy, at which point they stop very rapidly. So all the proton energy is deposited in a small 3D spot in the tumour. Electrons deposit energy continuously so they dump energy along the full path; the energy is deposited in a long "cylinder" of dose and irradiates lots of healthy tissue on the way. Generally proton therapy is just better, but protons need to be much higher energy to get sufficient penetration. This means a much bigger accelerator is required, so the cost goes up. Clinically, one has to balance the improved treatment regime vs the increased cost, and no doubt considerations like the number of treatments and so on also play a big role, so electron therapy also gets a look in.
ps: The "energy deposition along the path" issue can be mitigated by pointing the beam from many different directions, so many surrounding tissues are slightly irradiated and the tumour is heavily irradiated. Generally tissues are better at healing a small amount of radiation than a large amount of radiation. This can be done with protons as well as electrons.
Detail:
Proton energy deposition happens in the "Bragg peak". Energy deposition is caused by knocking electrons off atoms (ionisation). At high energy the protons are just too fast, and don't perturb distant atoms much; at low energy they have a much bigger chance of knocking electrons off because they perturb atoms even a long way from the proton. So the probability (cross-section) for ionisation goes up at low energy and the energy deposition also goes up. The energy deposition relationship is called the "Bethe-Bloch" relationship. Electron energy deposition proceeds by a different mechanism altogether - at high energy we get an "electromagnetic shower", where electrons make gamma rays that in turn make electron-positron pairs that make more gamma rays etc etc. It's a much messier process. Further reading in this review article:
https://pdg.lbl.gov/2019/reviews/rpp2018-rev-passage-particles-matter.pdf [lbl.gov]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 13 2023, @01:14PM
Yeah, in 2006 I was working with that Co60 source company, so gamma ray -> electron showers were the main mechanism we were looking at (in an MRI field...)
Around 2013-14 I worked with an MRI guided thermal ablation company, no scattering, dose delivered where you put it (with a fiber optic probe), and the MRI shows you in real time how hot you are making the tissue, so you can cook to perfection without overheating tissue you want to preserve. Very nice for brain work, and the thermal deposition probe is the size of a biopsy needle.
A lot of practical care is about access, protons are expensive and the sites are correspondingly sparse... can't cure your cancer if you can't get an appointment for treatment... MRI guided thermal ablation is a little better, but it's still new and growing - albeit somewhat slowly. There's also a device that uses ultrasound to do the heating while watching on MRI... all in all I'd rather never need any of them, but the thermal approaches have a lot of appeal - particularly if I'm not half dead already when needing treatment.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Se5a on Sunday November 12 2023, @08:57PM (3 children)
You should read Slide Rule by Nevil Shute if you really think the government is a better option for large projects like this.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday November 12 2023, @09:07PM (2 children)
The public sector managing nuclear installation is far from ideal for many reasons, but it's BY FAR preferable to greedy corporations cutting corners on security to post a better quarter and slightly higher returns for their shareholders.
If you don't believe me, ask yourself if the Deepwater Horizon accident would have happened if it had been managed by a public company. It would probably have been poorly managed and not very efficiently, but I highly doubt it would have wreaked the utter devastation and misery unleashed by BP's recklessness.
I don't want a nuclear Deepwater Horizon, and it's certain to happen one day with a nuclear BP company running the show.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday November 13 2023, @01:48AM (1 child)
Keep in mind the huge problems with that: utter incompetence, considerable immunity to lawsuits, and regulators and managers are on the same team.
We don't have to wonder [wikipedia.org].
[...]
Emphasis mine. I'll note that the oil released into the environment was similar in each spill (after taking into account the oil recovery efforts following Deepwater Horizon) with about 3 million barrels released in the Ixtoc I spill and 4.1 million [theguardian.com] barrels in Deepwater Horizon.
Let's consider my observations: governments aren't selected for their ability to run oil rigs while the "profit motive", combined with fines and lawsuit costs, is a way to select for more competent oil companies, it's much harder to sue a government than a business and the government has vast resources (taxes) that it can throw at problems without having to improve anything - a business can be destroyed by a bad accident while government can continue unphased, and regulatory capture is automatically baked in to any scheme where the government both runs and regulates the nuclear plants.
We've already had two large nuclear accidents of that sort, one private and one public. The private one wasn't the one where they hid the accident until they couldn't. The private one was also due to a magnitude 9 earthquake not a mundane safety test/experiment that went way out of control.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2023, @05:52PM
Fair point, both sides can be corrupt.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by oumuamua on Sunday November 12 2023, @08:17PM (1 child)
When your SMR costs the same as China's full scale 1.2 GW reactor you are in trouble on the international market. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/11/small-modular-reactors-are-a-shrinkflation-failure-with-nuclear-energy.html [nextbigfuture.com]
To make SMRs workable you'd have to do a leap of faith and build the SMR factory that would turn them out as fast and cheap as cars but no one wants to risk it.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday November 13 2023, @09:28AM
UK government is quietly pushing SMRs. They are a bit quiet about it for political reasons
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/small-modular-reactors-competitive-technology-selection-process [www.gov.uk]
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/great-british-nuclear [www.gov.uk]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Monday November 13 2023, @12:21AM
Mochovce 3, a VVER-440/213 took up commercial operation a few weeks ago. Block 4 is scheduled for next year. They've been building it on and off since 1986 when they were still communist. To put things in perspective, Germany decided in 1990 to shut down Greifswald, which, for Blocks 5 (had just gone critical) and 6 (finished, but not yet loaded) was the same type as Mochovce 3/4. (Blocks 1-4 were the older, less safe 440/230 variant).
I guess the Russians offer a better deal than NuScale, but I'm a bit surprised that it isn't a big news that the Slovaks pay them serious money for it. Also, I wonder if they have a service contract and/or use third-party fuel rods, I once read Westinghouse said they could make some of which they guess they're compatible enough... yikes.
(Score: 1) by cautious_reception_8 on Tuesday November 14 2023, @07:56AM
NuScale was all about doing the old, steam-bomb-waiting-to-happen water-cooled, shit-where-they-eat solid-fueled V1.0 nuclear energy, but *smaller*.
There are better options now.
For example, look up Copenhagen Atomics: That's a waste-can-be-removed, no pressure molten salt fuelled and cooled reactor, using heavy water as a moderator and reflector (doesn't get anywhere *near* as hot as the fuel does). Which they are already designing for mass production.
Whole nuclear reactor cell fits in a shipping container. Needs just a industrial crane-shed type industrial building to run a bunch in parallel, and have space for storing units whilst they wait for recycling. No high pressures, and no risk of steam-explosions. Unconditionally stable.
Or maybe subcritical accelerator-driven nuclear waste-burner is more your thing?
In that case, you'll want to watch shine fusion. Yes: fusion, although actually directly generating power from it is a long stretch goal, certainly nothing they need to achieve to do well. They're focused on making fusion neutrons for other applications - including power by burning up long-lived radionuclides (which is totally able to be small, modular and safe).
Currently, they have a photo of making so much fusion, you can see the Cherenkov radiation within the ~6ft radius water neutron shielding tank. This is electrostatic accelerator driven fusion, which is really the only type that actually works - just don't ask for fusion power gain yet, please. But if you're just using it to catalyse fission of subcritical masses, then you don't need fusion power gain anyway, and can still make engineering power gain work.
Given honestly infinitely superior options available (definitely not the 'travelling wave' reactor: An un-recyclable can of mess if ever I saw one), it is a good thing this re-tread of obsolescence approach is already ending.