Out of Zion; Into Small Reactors

Nuclear Energy Insider has an interesting article up on the decommissioning of Illinois’ Zion facility outside Chicago. There are some details that suggest how this kind of work might be done relatively quickly:

The Zion decommissioning project will take considerably less time than originally planned because the cleanup will bypass one of the most laborious and time-consuming steps of taking down a nuclear plant. According to the New York Times, the project will bypass separating radioactive materials -- which must go to a licensed dump -- from nonradioactive materials, which can be deposited onto ordinary industrial landfills.
The NYT report says that the new strategy eliminates separating the two. Instead, anything that could include radioactive contamination will be treated as radioactive waste.

The article describes it as a 10-year project, which I assume includes moves like this one. There are 12 other shuttered plants in the United States that have not yet set decommissioning dates. It sounds like Zion may provide a model for developing ideas on how to decommission a facility more quickly and at less expense. The whole article is worth a read.
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Although comparing small reactors to iPads is a little silly, Margaret Ryan tries it out for a couple of paragraphs, then drops it in favor of a pretty good summary of the state of play for the, hmmm, tiny titans?

The Department of Energy has two cost-sharing programs, one that helps developed technology get licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and one to help newer technologies prove their concepts by building prototypes at DOE's Savannah River site. DOE just announced three partnerships for the latter program, with Hyperion Power Generation, Holtec International's SMR subsidiary, and NuScale Power.

The interesting thing about those prototypes is that they can be built without NRC licensing as demonstration projects. Small reactors, by the way, are those that produce 300 or fewer megawatts capacity.
Why have them?

Lyons said SMRs, generally under 300 MW, are the right size to replace coal plants being shut because of age and inability to meet modern pollution standards. However, under the Environmental Protection Agency's deadlines, most of those plants will be shut by 2017, and the SMRs that DOE will assist won't be ready to deploy before the early 2020s.

These timelines may or may not line up, but it isn’t only the older or dirtier coal plants these, um, mighty mites (?) can replace. Or the only niche for them.

TVA is already looking to move into the SMR niche. The company has an agreement with Generation mPower - a joint venture of Babcock & Wilcox and Bechtel. Together they plan to install up to six of GmP's 125- to 180-MW modules at TVA's Clinch River site, said TVA Vice President of Nuclear Generation Jack Bailey at an NRC conference March 14.

Maybe the best way to see the potential here is to say that they have a good many plausible potential uses, as TVA shows – the marketplace for them just isn’t developed yet, though there seems a decided hunger for them in a number of potential areas. It’s way too early to even class them as niche items.
This NEI page offers that they would be good fits to provide “free electricity in remote locations where there is little to no access to the main power grid or … process heat to industrial applications.” The page has lots more good information on these, uh, diminutive dervishes? All right, maybe the iPad idea isn’t so bad.
The Zion facility.

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

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