Imagine you’ve just been made the CEO of a critically important company. Congratulations.
Your first act as the big boss is to build a new
factory to keep on making that essential thing you produce.
You’ve found a great location, the architect has drawn up plans
and the contractors are ready to break ground, but there’s just one problem …
Because of various international events your country is facing an energy crisis – and the
electricity you need to power your factory is going to cost a lot more than you planned for.
The company could crash, nobody would be able to buy that thing you make and you could be run out
of town by an angry mob! Kill the monster!
You need carbon-free power and fast. But what can you do? You could build wind and solar
facilities but they’re a bit intermittent and as every Tomorrow's Build viewer knows,
you need decent battery storage for that.
A coal fired power plant is out of the question and let’s just
say a lack of gas is what caused the problem in the first place.
It looks like you’re running out of options. But the one thing you
definitely wouldn’t choose to do is build a nuclear power station right?
Well if that sounds ridiculous then keep watching
my curious CEO… it might not be quite as strange as it sounds.
As you might expect, building a nuclear power station is a pretty big deal.
Take Hinkley Point C, a new nuclear power station under construction in
south west England, and the first to be built in the UK for decades.
The plan was announced in 2010 but construction didn’t start until seven years later. Then after
a series of pretty expectable delays, the site isn’t due to come online until 2028.
The cost of that project has doubled to a staggering £32BN and it’s being paid
for by a multinational consortium of French and Chinese companies.
So, yeah, quite a big deal.
Why is it so expensive? Well, a plant like Hinkley Point,
is a utility scale power station that should power around 6 million homes.
That means it’s big, which means it needs a huge plot of land and
a huge construction project to build it.
Because of the sheer size of the project it would be impossible to make nuclear power scalable in
the same way as solar power is, where if you want more energy, you just install more solar panels.
But what if the nuclear power station didn’t need to power millions of homes
and instead just needed to power your factory?
Well then the power station could be much smaller. And if it’s smaller,
that means it could be cheaper, which means you could create more of them.
And while you’re at it you could start to build things on a production line.
Enter Last Energy, the commercial spin off
of today’s sponsor, the Energy Impact Centre. It’s a US startup that’s trying
to revolutionise the nuclear industry through the power of standardisation.
For the last 20 years, the oil and gas has pioneered modularisation, standardisation … The
nuclear industry never adopted this technology, and so that's the core innovation of last energy
is bringing the … the Lego like kit of modules to the nuclear industry in order to address the
true challenges the industry has always faced, which is time and cost to deploy.
Now, before we get too far into it, a quick science lesson.
Basically there are two main ways to get nuclear power: fusion and fission.
Fusion works by collecting the energy released when you fuse two atoms together. It’s the same
process that powers the sun and the stars, but here on earth we haven’t yet figured out how
to replicate it for the masses. That’s what research projects like ITER are trying to do.
Fission on the other hand works by splitting two atoms apart. We’ve been using this process for
decades, and it makes up about 10% of global energy production today.
That’s what we’re talking about scaling up.
Here’s how it works: Last Energy has one standard design which everything is built to.
It starts with a standard 20 megawatt pressurised water reactor.
There’s nothing particularly special about this,
it’s the kind of reactor that keeps around 300 power stations around the world running.
All the other elements needed to turn nuclear fission into electricity like turbines,
cooling fans, control room, are then manufactured in a factory in Texas.
A housing is built to contain everything and the whole package is sent off to site.
Crucially, everything is designed to fit into a standard shipping container,
which can then go pretty much anywhere on earth.
This is kind of what makes Last Energy unique,
instead of reinventing the wheel it’s reinventing the way wheel’s are made.
We're probably the only next gen nuclear company that uses only off the shelf technology and that
includes the reactor core… We've repackaged the whole thing, just like you would with
a smartphone where they also use off the shelf chips and screens and batteries in order to come
up with a product. And that's essentially what we're doing. We productized nuclear,
rather than taking on a science project. Once the kit of parts reaches its destination,
very little construction work is needed. A trench is dug for the
foundations and then the whole station is laid out on prefabricated steel trusses.
This might be more expensive than using a traditional concrete structure,
but the goal is to make it quick and easy to deploy.
In just three months to be precise …
Concrete is a structural material that's cheaper on a structural loading basis than steel might be,
but it requires onsite speciality labour which can slow down the construction process. And our
calculus showed that the risk of construction overrun by having more onsite activities didn't
justify the cost saving by using a cheaper structural material. So we have a fully steel
structural power plant that we're able to entirely build in a factory setting
and then only have to do the final bolting in order to be able to assemble it on site.
Their plants may be small, with each one providing
enough energy to power something like a small factory or a data centre,
but if more power is needed more plants can be easily built right next to each other.
Once up and running the power can go straight to the customer
or routed through a national energy grid.
Each power plant has a lifespan of about 40 years. Every six years a
new reactor module with fresh fuel is installed to keep the whole thing
running - a little bit like adding a new battery when the old one runs down.
But just how safe is it? How vulnerable could a power station be to cyber attack,
meltdown or physical threat?
We use a one way diode essentially for single direction communication, and so
there's no way to access the plant computers from off site. But the notion of safety in
the nuclear industry is often misunderstood. This industry is often branded as hazardous,
and I don't like to perpetuate that. Yes, of course you have to worry about contamination
issues and you got to control your radiation. That's a given. But when it comes to creating
a hazard for human health, the industry is not the villain. It's often portrayed to be in the media.
But who’s actually going to buy this? Remember how you’re a CEO of a company with an energy problem?
Well you’re not the only one.
Due to … well known events, Europe’s energy supply is
not exactly stable and there are plenty of businesses looking for a way ahead.
Two of the early countries to show serious
interest in our product were industrial off takers from Romania and from Poland.
So these include off takers such as automotive factories, chemical pulp and paper, cement,
glass and data centres. What they're looking for is energy stability. They want to know what
they're going to pay for power moving into the future. And they want energy security as well,
especially in these uncertain times in Europe, where you don't know not only what the price of
energy will be, but if you can even access it. That is untenable for a factory and
needs to be running 24 seven all the time and have power to deliver their product.
The first of these new power plants is due to come online in 2025,
after which Last Energy plans to scale up production to full speed.
So, someday soon when you’ve got your factory up and running, you can relax knowing you’ve got
all the power you need to make your customers happy and keep the mob at bay. Good work boss!
This video was sponsored by Energy Impact Centre, you can learn more about securing
a clean energy future in the link below. There’s also the chance to dive deeper into Last Energy
and the other topics on our channel over on The World’s Best Construction Podcast – available now
wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, if you liked this video and you want to learn
more about where construction is headed, make sure you’re subscribed to Tomorrow’s Build.