What if we could build a power plant that could provide electricity to tens of thousands of homes with zero carbon emissions? What if we could build it to have a footprint a fraction of the size of existing nuclear reactors? What if we could link a few of them together to make a power plant of virtually any size? What if we could build them in the U.S. and export them to our global competitors?
We can. Or, thanks to American innovation, we will be able to soon. Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are exactly the kind of groundbreaking technologies the United States needs to develop to play a big role in generating clean electricity, heat for manufacturing, and jobs for workers in the United States.
These reactors are smaller versions of traditional nuclear reactors that, using proven technology, can provide clean and reliable energy to businesses and consumers. SMRs have the flexibility to incrementally expand capacity at existing power plants. They can also add new capacity at U.S. military installations where independence from the grid is critical for the success of missions. Because these reactors can be cooled by air rather than water, they can more affordably supply baseload clean energy to arid cities in the West where water is at a premium. And because they can fit into a small structure and be sized to match the capacity of existing electrical infrastructure, SMRs provide a viable path to retrofitting old power plants.
To grow ourselves out of the Great Recession, we need technologies like SMRs. U.S. companies are developing the small reactors and readying them for deployment. When they are ready, SMRs will create a significant number of well-paying American jobs in manufacturing, construction and operations, as well as support services ranging from HR to accounting to deploy this new domestic source of clean energy. Just as importantly, SMRs will help create a new global market that U.S. companies will be poised to dominate.
Getting SMRs deployed should be a national imperative. To seize the global market, we need to make sure that there is domestic demand first. The Departments of Energy and Defense can serve as early adopters of SMRs to help drive down the initial cost of the technology. Over the longer term, the government should partner with the private sector to speed the development of next-generation SMR technologies that have broader applications.
The day when we can build a power plant that is scalable, has a small footprint, and generates clean energy is almost here. If we don't seize this opportunity to become the world's leaders in small reactors, other nations will. It's the choice between importing SMRs or building them in the U.S. for domestic and global markets. It's the choice between employing thousands of skilled American workers from Indiana, Michigan, and South Carolina, or employing workers from Shanghai and Ulsan, South Korea. This is one case where thinking small will bring big results.
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Much less waste, not as harmful, much less complex, and cannot be weaponized.
More: http://energyfromthorium.com/
You have all of those Uranium tailings to deal with as well as the Nuclear Radioactive Waste.
http://nuclear-news.info/
"THE NUCLEAR POWER DECEPTION..."
"Dangerous Thermonuclear Quest..."
"Carbon Free Nuclear Free"
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/10/arjun-makhijani-and-modular-small.html
Hugely promising technology in my view.
http://www.ratical.com/radiation/CNR/PP/chp3.html
http://www.ratical.com/radiation/CNR/PP/chp4.html
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/JWGcv.html
The reason is the little recognized potential impact of rising solar flare activity. A new eleven year sunspot cycle has begun.
Two solar threat events missed earth so far this year. According to NASA, if either had hit earth's geomagnetic field, 130 million Americans could lose power for protracted periods of time - perhaps several weeks - at a cost the first year of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.
Similar to the combined cost to date of both current wars!
See: http://www.aesopinstitute.org
The steps necessary to rapidly reduce dependence on the power grid can accelerate development of inexpensive, decentralized, green systems.
This opens a politically workable way to accelerate the development of cheap green power.
We need to focus on that objective. Why would anyone fight it? There is likely to be widespread support for what needs to be done.
Cheap green power can supersede the fruitless debate over climate change.
And effectively fight Global Warming, goose the economy, generate lots of jobs and reduce dependency on oil and unstable areas of the globe.
See Moving Beyond Oil, and Running on Water, on the same Aesop Institute website.
Both outline low cost alternatives that can power automobiles and trucks. Even better, future versions can become power plants when suitably parked. No wires needed.
Such vehicles may pay for themselves as investments!
A much better alternative than small nuclear plants!
Ironically, one new technology opens a path to generating cost-competitive power from nuclear waste on-site!
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/warzone/2009/02/supply-and-demand.html
link is older story (2009), but picture helps illustrate my point.
I now work for a company developing an SMR, so many people who come to comment here will simply dismiss my opinion as self interest or "shilling." Oh well, such are the burdens of pro-nuclear advocacy.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
My comments are my own and do not reflect the views of my day job employer.
Which SMR is yours? I am curious.
Are you guys public yet?
I have returned to my light water reactor roots. It did not hurt that the company's technical arm is located in a lovely area of Central Virginia that is about the same distance from my granddaughter and her family as Annapolis was.
Some plastics (e.g. polyethylene) and rubbers (e.g. polybutadiene) are actually easier to produce from ethanol than from petroleum. Ethanol can be produced from sugar, starch, or fiber. In Brazil, the two important polymers mentioned above are produced from sugarcane ethanol.
Also, we can produce the same aliphatic alkanes as found in petroleum by thermally decomposing any lipid-type feedstock (human/animal feces, plant oils, animal tissues, plastic, rubber, etc.) via hydrous pyrolysis. This industrial process essentially replicates the geological process that formed the fossil fuel deposits.
From there, the same processes used to refine petroleum (cracking, reforming, alkylation, distillation, etc.) can be used to produce all of the various inputs for what we currently call the petrochemical industry.
The resource cycle looks like this:
photosynthesis->biomass->carbohydrates+lipids->food+materials->waste
carbohydrates->paper+textiles->waste
carbohydrates->ethanol->fuel+plastics->waste
lipids->esters->fuel+plastics->waste
waste->gas+oil+charcoal->fuel+fertilizer+materials+chemicals
A large hydrous pyrolysis unit collocated with a massive Butterball Turkey processing plant in Missouri decomposes poultry organs into crude oil. It's just like fossil petroleum, except it contains essential no sulfur compounds or other contaminants that are usually found in crude oil.
24,000 coal-related deaths could be delayed or averted a year, just in the US, not to mention the fact that we could stop destroying our mountains.
First, we should use a few relatively large liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR) to breed fertile natural thorium (Th232) into fissile U233. Thorium is at least five times as abundant as uranium, and it is much more efficient to breed Th232 into U233 than to breed U238 into Pu239. Breeding fissile plutonium from fertile uranium has a very low neutron economy and requires more complicated fast neutron reactors.
Next, we load the U233 into many small hydrogen-moderated self-regulating power modules (HPM). These small reactors fit in a standard trailer and produce about 20MW (enough for 20,000 homes). They are designed to be buried underground and run for 10 years, then sent back to a LFTR plant for refueling.
This type of reactor doesn't use fuel rods or control rods and has no moving parts. The reactor is a sealed tub of powdered fuel packed around potassium-filled pipes that passively conduct heat from the reactor to a steam generator above ground.
The elemental U233 fuel is sub-critical until the reactor tub is pressurized with hydrogen gas. The hydrogen reacts with the uranium to form the more reactive uranium hydride, which achieves critical mass and initiated the chain reaction of nuclear fission. The reactor is deactivated by removing the hydrogen.
The steam generator cools the reactor while producing electricity according to demand. When demand is low, the reactor heats up to about 800C, at which point the uranium hydride is thermally decomposed into elemental uranium and hydrogen gas. The reactor goes sub-critical and cools as fission shuts down.
In this way, the reactor temperature is passively maintained at or below 800C without any active control or failure-prone cooling pumps. The reactor is self-regulating and inherently safe.
U233 has a much wider neutron cross-section and therefore a higher ratio of fission to capture compared to U235 or Pu239. This means that the thorium fuel cycle produces about 0.1% as much radioactive waste as the uranium fuel cycle, and the waste it does produce is less radioactive than natural uranium ore.
It's extremely difficult to make a weapon from the U233 bred by LFTR, even more difficult than producing a weapon from non-enriched natural uranium ore. The proliferation risk is very low.
India is the primary user of the thorium fuel cycle and has both fast neutron reactors and a newer LFTR facility for breeding U233. The United States successfully ran a LFTR-type reactor in the 60s and a thorium fast neutron breeder in the late 70s and early 80s, but we no longer have any operational thorium reactors.
Both the reactor tub and the heat pipes are sealed airtight. If a heat pipe is somehow punctured, the molten metal would rapidly solidify as it encounters the ambient temperature and plug the leak. The tub is very strong and extremely unlikely to leak. In the worst-case scenario, a hydrogen leak would passively shut down the reactor and release a small amount of radiation.
Properly design advanced nuclear reactors running the thorium fuel cycle are not something to be scared about. Coal boilers are scary. Hydraulic fracturing is scary. This is not.
We should, however, cease all mining and enrichment of raw uranium (U238/U235->Pu239) and switch to the thorium fuel cycle (Th232->U233). Thorium is substantially more plentiful than uranium, produces fewer and shorter-lived radioactive wastes, and carries no risk of proliferating nuclear weapons.
Let's face it, if we are to move away from a Fossil Fuel Economy, it will be Nuclear Power that enables us. If we are to persist as a species - with all our "other" impacts on the environment, there is no alternative.
Interestingly, if the claims made about Thorium are not fraudulent, Thorium will be the nuclear fuel - not Uranium.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html has some information on use of thorium to-date.