Small Reactors and Closed Minds

Here’s a novel suggestion from Stephen Bainbridge: President Obama has a ready source of nuclear knowledge in the government that could turn its attention to the industrial sector:

The Navy already operates dozens of small nuclear reactors in aircraft carriers and submarines, with an outstanding record of safety and reliability. They have an established training program that churns out nuclear-capable officers.

By analogy to the Army Corps of Engineering, we could create a Navy Corps of Nuclear Engineering. It would build and operate dozens of small nuclear power plants around the country. To address security concerns, the first plants would be built on military bases, where the garrison can provide security. Licensing costs would be cut because the government would own and operate the plants.

We can imagine any number of problems with this idea, but many points to Bainbridge for having it. We haven’t heard anything this ingenious in awhile. Be sure to read the rest; we don’t agree with all of his assertions and assumptions, but it’s very interesting.

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Bainbridge’s focus on small reactors finds an echo in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Oleg Deripaska, the chief executive of Basic Element, a Russian industrial holding company. Basic Element appears to invest in a number of companies, but since the government controls the nuclear industry through Rosatom, presumably not a lot of opportunity for him there. But lack of opportunity doesn’t mean lack of ideas:

The small- and medium-sized reactors now in development could help meet energy needs in the more remote areas of the world. They don't run on fossil fuels so their location isn't constrained by access to oil, gas or coal. Nor do they require the expensive infrastructure of national electricity grids.

These new reactors are a further improvement on everything we have learned about reliable, safe and value-for-money power generation. They remove safety problems associated with operator error and equipment failure. Their working lives will be much longer than past reactors thanks to advances in fuel technology, coolants and metal alloys. We also stand on the edge of a breakthrough with new fast reactors that can reuse fuel and leave little waste.

Babcock & Wilcox and other companies working on small reactors must be quite happy that some of the promotion work is being done for them, but we have to admit, these reactors have caught the imagination of a lot of observers. The hard part’s still to come: licensing a couple of designs and building the first units.

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Although mostly an introduction to a link elsewhere, this post from Michelle Malkin caught our eye:

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama purported to reach across the aisle by endorsing a “new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants”…before pushing cap and trade.

The nearly $4 trillion budget he released today exposes his nuclear lie.

It zeroes out funds for the besieged Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility in Nevada — one of the few, prominent Obama campaign pledges that he looks like he’s actually fulfilling.

This encapsulates why we don’t engage partisan blogs here much. Nothing Malkin says represents an argument or point-of-view – there’s just a determination not to give an inch to a disliked politician (or political view.)

If the nuclear industry has had a good argument – and it has – it would have done itself a disservice by treating seemingly hostile politicians as dismissible or somehow, no matter what they say or do, implacably wrong. Avoiding such a stance has helped the industry while opening minds. Partisan blogs and news outlets (seem to) aim to close minds. And closed minds are the bane of policy development.

A Closed Mind by Alta Alberga.

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...

NEI Nuclear Notes

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