Pat, we have a reactor trip on Unit 5. Containment is isolated. Demon water is isolated. CVCS
is isolated. DHR is in service. And pressurizer heater trips has occurred. All safety functions
are green. Understand. We've got a reactor trip on Unit 5 and all safety functions are green.
That's correct.
Ryan, can you take over the plant response to Unit 5?
You're in the middle of a simulated reactor trip. Something happened
that’s causing an emergency shutdown.
Ryan I have acknowledged the alarms. Understand
that you've acknowledged the alarms. This demonstration took place at NuScale, a next
generation nuclear power company that wants to operate a string of up to 12 small reactors
from a single control room. And their new model might just revive the nuclear power industry.
When you think nuclear, you might imagine a plant like this: enormous cooling
towers, generators, steam billowing out the top. They’ve been a part of our energy
mix for decades all working to harness the power of splitting uranium atoms. Or in other
words: Nuclear power, to put it simply, is the most complicated way to boil water. What
you’re trying to do is to take the energy that’s produced by splitting uranium nuclei
and convert it into steam. That steam then goes to a turbine which turns a shaft which
then turns a generator to produce electricity.When the splitting happens, it produces radioactive
materials. Much of the nuclear plant is really focused on trying to make sure that these
radioactive materials never escape out into the biosphere.
There are hundreds of reactors
boiling water across the globe, and you might actually be living near one. But the nuclear
industry today is experiencing some major shifts. The 3 Mile Island and Fukushima disasters
prompted countries like Germany and Switzerland to dismantle their nuclear power infrastructure.
Despite efforts from Russia and China to kick-start new projects, global construction is currently
on a down-swing. Here in the U.S., aging reactors are retiring, and Westinghouse, one
of the biggest names in nuclear, recently filed for bankruptcy.
The argument the nuclear
industry used to make is that even though nuclear power plants are expensive to build
they are cheap to operate and therefore profitable. That equation has changed in the last seven
or eight years. There have been a combination of two things that have been happening. One
is that as these plants’ age, the cost of keeping them operational has been increasing
because simultaneously and more importantly, the cost of alternative sources of energy
has declined dramatically. The second thing I would say is that, the argument used to
be, oh, we’ve learned a lot from mistakes in the past. We will be able to lower the
cost and how fast these reactors are built, and that has not happened. The South Carolina
project was so expensive, the company pulled out of it after spending about $9 billion,
that's essentially been abandoned.
The Georgia plant is now running at around $25 to $27 billion, compared to
a few billion dollars that was the initial expectation. I think the result of that is
nobody in their right mind should be thinking about building another large nuclear plant in the country.
It’s a tough situation, especially with reports of rising CO2 emissions
and calls for alternatives to meet climate goals. And that’s where these next generation
reactors enter the conversation for multiple countries.
Hoping to solve the problems of cost and scale, this new nuclear fleet are called SMRs or
Small Modular Reactors. Small in this context just means it’s producing less
than 300 megawatts of electricity. The plants that were being built in South Carolina, the
ones being built in Georgia generate about 1,100 megawatts of electricity. Modular means
that you can make these things in a factory. You're manufacturing all your high quality
components in parallel you're doing all your civil construction on site. You’re making
the pool, you’re building the building. And then when the buildings are done, you transport
the modules to the site and you install them. Beyond these two there’s really nothing
that constrains you about the design of the reactor. There are literally dozens and dozens
of SMR designs. Portable nuclear power has a back to the future feel to it. Pursued since
the Cold War, several designs have found their way inside nuclear submarines and university labs.
After decades of attempts,
SMRs haven't been the mainstream source of power for local communities just yet,
but that might change with NuScale.
This all started with a project that was funded by the Department of Energy
back in 2000. We were working with the Idaho National Laboratory at the time and we came
up with this concept for something small that could be built in a factory. So inside our
modules, we start off with the containment vessel. It's about 76 feet long and 15 feet
in diameter, it’s big cylinder. Inside that containment vessel the reactor vessel
houses the fuel, the steam generator. It's a helical coil steam generator. Everything
you need for power to produce steam is inside that one little vessel. Now the containment
and the reactor vessel sit underwater below ground. And you can add on, two, three up
to 12 modules in a single pool. So it's scalable because you don't have to add them all at
once, you can do them in increments. Each module will produce about 60 megawatts electric.
If you think about homes, it's somewhere around fifty thousand homes would be powered by one
module. There aren't any additional cooling pumps or generators that could fail in an
emergency, a lesson learned from previous disasters. Because a key element NuScale
really emphasized with us, is safety. Passive safety really describes the ability to perform
a safety function without power. For our design, the reactors will safely shut themselves
down without any operator action or computer action, without any AC or DC power, and they'll
remain cooled for an indefinite period of time, without the need to add water. When
you lose power, the control rods actually fall into the reactor vessel into the core
and they're held up normally by electromagnets. So you lose power, they disengage and they
fall. So you go from two hundred megawatts thermal to about 10 or 11 megawatts in a second
or so. If you look at the control room here, you'll see that a lot of things that we do
really don't require operator action at all. All the procedures come up on the screens
themselves and they help you execute the procedures, and they’ll help correct you if you make
a mistake it's a smart control room. Which all seems quite miraculous — to have a nuclear
control room run mostly on its own. NuScale’s timeline has more tick marks ahead. Their
plant operations are still just on paper or at prototype stage. They’re aiming to turn
on their first commercial plant near the Idaho National Laboratory by 2026, which brings
the project full circle. We finished our design certification application. It's a
pretty comprehensive checklist, so application alone was 12,000 pages. We're on track to
get this design certified with the final safety evaluation report coming out in September
of 2020. So, that’s the target. And within their application, NuScale is asking the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a different kind of zoning boundary. In the United States,
there's a requirement that you have an emergency planning zone around your plant and that zone
is a 10 mile radius. The reason we can request a smaller emergency planning zone is because
of the very high level of safety that we offer. If we go back to their animation, the reactor’s
sitting in a pool that’s below ground with a biological shield on top of that and in
a seismic category which is earthquake proof, hurricane proof type building.
In our analysis, we show that we don't exceed regulatory doses under
the worst case accident conditions at the site boundary so that changes the game significantly in
that we can be in closer proximity to population centers. If you have an SMR and it has an
accident, it would have less amount of radioactive material to disperse it would have less energy
to disperse. These are laws of physics in certain complicated circumstances that are
hard to predict in advance. If you think about the kind of accidents we’ve seen in the
past it is almost always been a bunch of circumstances which nobody had envisioned. If you’re
thinking about the community and you go and say, “Look, we want to build this nuclear
plant near you but there is a small chance that something might go wrong it’s quite
possible you might have to leave your house and never come back because it’s going to
be contaminated with radioactivity. How do you feel about it?” Quite a few people would
say, “No, I don’t think I would want that. Despite this risk potential, the hundreds of reactors
operating worldwide have had a pretty safe track record, and overall have caused less
loss of life than coal or natural gas. The design & safety of future reactors in the
US are assessed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But there’s some context to
this agency that bears keeping in mind: The NRC’s fortunes, in a sense, depend on the
industry that it is regulating. If the nuclear industry were to essentially shrink and vanish,
the NRC would essentially have to vanish too. The NRC and NuScale have been talking to each
other for years now and trying to say, “Okay, here's our rules. Here's how you interpret
these rules. Here's how we can modify our design. All of which does not seem to me to
be a thoroughly independent process. There’s been a reported history of regulatory capture
in the nuclear industry, but it shouldn’t come as any surprise. What entity other
than a state government can take on the capital and risk associated with investing in nuclear?
Government funding does play an important part. The question, of course, to ask is whether
the government should be spending its money on this pursuit. Of course, that’s a different
question. The new nuclear power movement is appealing to governments who see the potential: One
module could produce 60 million gallons of clean desalinated water per day. So a 12 pack
would be enough to provide all the water needs for a city the size of Cape Town South Africa.
On the flip side, SMRs could exacerbate pre-existing geopolitical tensions.
China has said they are also developing SMRs. The first place that they want to deploy are on
these deserted islands, in the South China Sea that are in disputes. If you’re concerned
about proliferation, then SMRs are not small in any meaningful sense. With these forces
ahead, eyes will be on NuScale as they work to reshape the industry and roll out what
they are betting on to be a smart, scalable model of nuclear power.
Their hope is that a safer design, an automated control room, and other key features will overcome the hurdles
that caused previous ventures to fail. However, there are still open questions over nuclear
waste, protecting against proliferation, and how a truly passive nuclear plant operates
in real time. But until this
model is put to the test, the ultimate question for nuclear - of whether smaller really is
better - remains an open one.