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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.
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(Score: 2) by dx3bydt3 on Wednesday August 03 2022, @11:48AM (1 child)
I spent a few minutes on their website, I wanted to find out how much output a "small" nuclear reactor was able to produce. The only figure I came across indicated a 462 mW, 6 module potential facility in Romania.
Small scale nuclear power makes a lot of sense on paper, but I would imagine there will be as much or more public push back to having a few of these in the neighbourhood as we currently see with wind farms.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 04 2022, @04:56PM
Check their technology overview page: https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/technology-overview [nuscalepower.com]
250MWt, 77MWe(gross)
I think the plan is usually to use a cluster of these rather than a single larger reactor. Still just one facility, but taking a reactor offline for some reason has a much smaller impact. As does the worst-case scenario of a catastrophic reactor failure, since each reactor is much smaller, and it's vanishingly unlikely that anything (short of sabotage) would cause more than one reactor to fail catastrophically. And the relative simplicity of replacing a reactor if it develops a fault makes it less likely that such things will be papered over to keep the profits flowing until something goes so seriously wrong that it can't be hidden - which I personally consider to be the greatest danger with nuclear reactors.
Though, as cost, reliability, and reputation improve I would not be surprised to see single-reactor plants start popping up in out-of-the-way places.