As I have mentioned here and there, I have been a supporter of nuclear power for a long time. While public sentiment about nuclear power became quite negative in the 80’s and 90’s and construction of new nuclear power plants ended decades ago, attitudes and opinions about nuclear power have been shifting. This is particularly true as new generations of reactor designs have come out and some, such as those used in newer US Navy nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, have begun operating.
While a lot of people have been pushing the use of ‘renewable’ energy sources, they have major drawbacks with some of them being that they are a lot more expensive than proponents claim, take up a considerable amount of land area for the amount of power they generate, are not readily dispatchable because of their intermittent and weather dependent operation, do not have the promised service life and require a lot more maintenance than promised.
The beauty of nuclear is that it is generally available 24/7/365 regardless of the weather, time of day, or time of the year. The one downside, at least to the old style Generation II reactors, was that they took a long time to build, cost a lot of money to build, particularly when “do overs’ are ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which requires changes to portions of the plants that have already been completed, and such changes could also mean that two reactors built side-by-side using the same design would not be identical because the NRC mandated changes. However the new nuclear power plant designs, specifically the reactor designs, are easier, faster, and much less expansive to build, with most of them being built in factories and trucked to the construction site for final assembly. These are the so-called Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, that are the future of nuclear power. Another plus to these new designs is that many of the are what are called “Walk Away Safe” since those designs do not used a high pressure cooling loop and cannot melt down. Instead, they use a system that operates at atmospheric pressure and in a number of cases, uses convection to circulate the coolant rather than pumps. If there are no pumps, there are no worries about pump failures. (Yes, this is an overly simplified picture of the more modern reactor designs, but I didn’t want to get too deep into this during this post. It is something I will delve into in a follow-on post next week.)
The nice thing about these SMRs is that they can be built to provide a specific amount of generation capacity up to about 300MW. The smallest SMR design I’ve read about generates about 15MW of electrical power. The beauty of the wide range of capacity designs means they can be installed almost anywhere depending upon the need and surrounding infrastructure. The can be clustered together to provide a total output equivalent of the older Generation II plants, meaning 800MW to 1500MW. Or they can be dispersed across a wide area in various locations which would not require a lengthy and expensive construction timetable. It could be one reason some companies planning on building hyperscale data centers are investing billions to develop and build SMRs to power their data centers. Both Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have done so, with Gates investing in TerraPower and Bezos in X-energy. Excess electricity capacity can be sold to the utilities, assuming utilities don’t buy some of those same SMRs to add to their overall generation capacity.
One thing that helps as that we are seeing some states deciding their future is nuclear. New Hampshire’s governor, Kelly Ayotte, has been pushing for a nuclear renaissance here and sees SMRs as the way to go. Goodness knows we could use a less expensive means of generating electricity here.
