by James C. Sherlock
Westinghouse, whose flagship AP1000 nuclear reactor is the American entry into the international market for large nuclear power plants, today announced a new reactor, called the AP300, which it claims will be available in 2027.
It will generate about a third of the power of the AP1000 reactor.
It is targeted at about $1 billion per delivered plant, well below the $6 billion plus for an AP1000 plant.
All of the technologies are already licensed by the NRC.
(comments below)
(comments below)
So, a layman’s questions:
The issues with nuclear power have been:
1. The waste generated remains radioactive and dangerous for a very long time.
2. In the case of failure, a huge risk is exposed as was the case in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima.
Do these new, small reactors bypass either of those risks?
Those questions are excellent.
I will try to answer them in an essay that will post at 5 PM so that all readers can share.
Radioactive material cannot be “cleansed” of its radioactivity except by the passage of time, or extraction/concentration of the radioactive component by other means. It can be recycled (for example, as the ‘inert’ material in nuclear fuel rods), or diluted and fixed for storage in, e.g., abandoned salt caves as the NRC has tried to do for years despite strong Congressional NIMBY opposition.
There are political horror stories about leaking barrels of stored waste triggering groundwater catastrophes, easily countered with certifiably-safe storage methods such as mixing the waste with sand and molding blocks of glass from the mix, blocks which are then stored at a concentration low enough to keep the temperature in the cave below the melting point.
Recycling sounds harmless enough but there’s another kind of risk, the creation of higher concentrations of radioactive plutonium from uranium. This concentration is increased by recycling. Plutonium like uranium238 can be used as radioactive fuel but also lends itself to separation from uranium by physical means in concentrations sufficient for nuclear weapons — so the U.S. has generally avoided the deliberate accumulation and recycling of plutonium fuel in so-called “breeder reactors.”
The SMR technology does not bypass these risks. It depends on once-through use of uranium fuel rods the same as the big “nukes.” The political will to build a “breeder reactor” and defend its byproduct from terrorists isn’t there.
But are SMRs as risky? No way. The risk, after all, is from a steam explosion caused by run-away heat accumulation, not from the fuel per se, and the heat accumulation in an SMR is much easier to control than through the massive cooling systems used in a traditional nuclear generating station.
I’ll leave the details of that explanation to JS but suffice it to say, the risks posited even from a bunch of the worst sort of nuclear disasters, complete with lingering radioactive poisoning, pale by comparison with the known public health impacts of coal mining and coal burning, or even the less-speculative lower-end estimates of the cost of climate warming over the lifetimes of our children. Just saying . . .
I have not seen pebble bed reactors mentioned in any of the the latest postings about developments in nuclear technology. This is one that I think has a lot of potential as a safe way to use nuclear energy.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/x-energy-developing-pebble-bed-reactor-they-say-cant-melt-down
I will post an article at 5PM that will list the DOE’s list of most promising technologies.
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