You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap
The nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations surveys the economic and political landscape of nuclear energy in an article, Challenges for Nuclear Power Expansion, written by Toni Johnson.
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If a nuclear plant produced liquid hydrocarbon rather than electricity, and had the same heat-to-product efficiency of 33 percent, a 1 GW(oil) plant would make 15,000 b/d. That's rather small by, for instance, marine oil production platform standards.
It is unreasonable to suppose that when ground is broken for a nuclear motor fuel plant 25 years hence, its owners will see fit to take the same very small steps into the motor fuel market as nuclear developers historically have had to take into the electricity market. Bites of 1 to 5 million barrels per day are the sort of bite they are going to want to take, if the fuel they are making is one that typically comes in barrels.