Sandia National Laboratory’s team has announced their new reactor design. The output is projected to be in the range of 100 to 300 megawatts of thermal power sized at “about the size of half a fairly large office building,” as the press release puts it.
Sandia has now joined the market for the small factory production reactor market with a smaller scale, economically efficient nuclear reactor that could be mass-assembled in factories and supply power for a medium-size city.
Tom Sanders leads the Sandia research team, whose goal is an exportable, proliferation-resistant “right-sized reactor.” The small reactor concept is now developed to an integrated design that incorporates intrinsic safeguards, security and safety. The proposal offers a way for possible export sales of the reactor to developing countries that do not have the infrastructure to support large power generation. The smaller reactor design decreases the potential need for a country to develop an advanced nuclear regulatory framework.
Gary Rochau, a Sandia team member explains the reactor design includes an integrated monitoring system that provides the exporters of such technologies a means of assuring the safe, secure, and legitimate use of nuclear technology.
The reactor system is built around a small uranium core submerged in a tank of liquid sodium. The liquid sodium is piped through the core to carry the heat away to a heat exchanger, which is also submerged in the tank of sodium. In the Sandia system, the reactor heat is transferred to a very efficient supercritical CO2 turbine to produce electricity. This form of heat management is considered “passive” in as much as a meltdown isn’t chemically practical.
The Sandia “right-sized” reactors are breeder reactors, meaning they generate their own fuel as they operate. Thus they are designed to have an extended operational life and only need to be refueled once every couple of decades, which also helps alleviate proliferation concerns.
Sanders says, ‘[The reactor core is replaced as a unit and] in effect is a cartridge core for which any intrusion attempt is easily monitored and detected.” The reactor system has no need for operator fuel handling.
The reactor technology needed for the smaller fission machines has been demonstrated through 50 years of operating experimental breeder reactors in Idaho. Sanders points out, “Sandia operates one of three nuclear reactors and the only fuel-critical test facility remaining in the DOE complex. It is the nation’s lead laboratory for the development of all radiation-hardened semiconductor components as well as the lead lab for testing these components in extreme radiation environments.”
Team member Steve Wright is doing research using internal Sandia Laboratory Directed Research and Development program funding. The “right-sized” reactor is expected to operate at efficiencies greater than any current designs, ultimately giving the reactor the greatest return on investment.
About 85 percent of the design efforts are completed for the reactor core. The team is seeking an industry partner through a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA). The CRADA team will be able to complete the reactor design and enhance the plant side, which is responsible for turning the steam into electricity.
The lure is “It could also be a more practical means to implement nuclear base load capacity comparable to natural gas-fired generating stations and with more manageable financial demands than a conventional power plant,” says Sanders. The cost projections suggest the cost could get down to $250 million once in factory type production.
Small rectors must be on the minds of utility managers. Los Alamos and now Sandia have designs competed and nearing completion. But, the experienced gorilla is Babcock & Wilcox with their mini reactor design.
Sandia is one of a group in the hunt for a reactor approval by the regulators. One competitor, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. knows as Rod Adams says, “Our biggest hurdle, [is] the multi-year licensing effort with the NRC that requires the applicant to pay approximately $60-100 million in fees to the US government.” A barrier to development, or a solid wall, it’s a fee that begs justification and serious Congressional review. Such a fee structure distorts research in massive ways, leaving ideas, skills, and education littering the field.
Hyperion Power Generation was the first to publicly discuss its technology, which licensed the technology out of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. They’re building the hot tub-sized reactors that can generate about 27 megawatts of power and/or 72 megawatts of heat. The reactors are designed for outlying communities, but could be assembled into arrays. Report have it that Hyperion might just go outside the U.S. for manufacturing, due to that fee problem taking the scientific, management careers, production jobs, cash flow, taxes and plant construction investment elsewhere. One can hardly blame them.
NuScale has a prototype reactor that relies on electricity (rather than nuclear fuel) to heat a passively cooled water-filled envelope. Backed by in part by venture capital firm CMEA, NuScale currently is preparing its application for design certification. It probably won’t submit the application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency until mid-2011 and it will take about three years for the agency to review it. NuScale’s idea is to build 45-megawatt modular reactors and then assemble them in arrays to construct plants that can provide 1 gigawatt of power, about the upper limit for existing transmission connections.
Former Microsoft scientist Nathan Myhrvold, operator of the “think tank-like” company Intellectual Ventures has spin out a company called TerraPower that will develop nuclear reactors ranging in size from a few megawatts to a gigawatt. TerraPower says it can load its reactor with un-enriched fuel and seal it up for 30 to 60 years. Of late TerraPower wants to experiment with thorium instead of uranium.
But the surest player today is Babcock & Wilcox (Robert Bryce interviews Chris Mowry of Babcock & WilcoxAbout Modular Reactors) whose reactor is in the Sandia size range as well. They are one of the most prominent contractors in the nuclear business. We’ve looked at their design before, and it’s sure to be in any buyer’s list.
All this is backdropped by the fusion people. Pushing the Congress, regulators and the market with hard data for designs is the thorium fuel groups. But the problem isn’t money, customers, designs, fuel, radiation or proliferation.
It’s that damnable fee plugging up an entire research, development, construction and production industry offering the lowest priced power of any source on earth.
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