Between signing an executive order earlier this year creating a road map for next generation nuclear power and a conference this past week focusing on a return of nuclear power to New Hampshire, with the focus being on Small Modular Reactors, it shows New Hampshire is serious about bringing modern nuclear technology back to the state and to greatly expand its power generation capacity.
The traditional look of nuclear power generation, with the big cooling towers, will most likely not be what next-generation nuclear energy looks like in New Hampshire.The idea behind the use of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) is that they wouldn’t be expensive to build like the previous generation of nuclear power plants like the existing plants in operation, like the one in Seabrook, New Hampshire. The would be built on an assembly line, then transported to the build site, installed, tested, licensed, and turned on. Plants like Seabrook took many years to build, in some cases due to delays caused by lawsuits by anti-nuclear organizations and hostile state legislation that destroyed funding mechanisms that greatly increased the costs of construction. (Seabrook was plagued by both of these problems which caused the original price of $800 million to balloon to $6.2 billion and bankrupted the utility company building the plant.)
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Small modular reactors were among the topics being discussed at the conference this week.
"This technology, we believe, could provide a real savings going forward," said Jared Chicoine, commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Energy. "When it comes to development, we believe we're a few years away from that, but New Hampshire is taking the steps to investigate what this could mean for us in the future."
New companies like StarCube are working on advanced portable microreactors. StarCube CEO Bill Spellane said it could be some time before such technology is deployed in New Hampshire.
"There's some policy decisions that have to be made," he said. "The ISO New England queue is three to five years long. We are looking to deploy our first reactor in a slightly different way before 2030."
There are skeptics when it comes to next-generation nuclear. Some like its potential to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, but they worry about how expensive it is to produce this kind of power.
Nuclear power, at least here in New Hampshire, won’t be pursuing the old One Big Nuclear Power Plant model as it’s too expensive and take too long to build. SMRs can get the job done much more quickly and at a much cheaper price per megawatt-hour. The SMRs aren’t using “your grandfather’s nuclear technology”. (I have found that a lot of folks who are against nuclear power think we’ll b e building plants using technology from 60 years ago!) The new Generation III and Generation IV reactor technology is better, safer, and cost less money to build, operate, and maintain. Some of them can even use ‘depleted’ nuclear fuel from the older Generation II nuclear power plants for fuel which helps get rid of the nuclear waste problem.
Seems to me we should look more deeply into this across the nation.