The plan was to store nuclear waste deep under Yucca Mountain, where there ain’t much around.
OK, with all the (spent) fuel and (geo)politics talk out of the way, we come to the real obstacle to nuclear proliferation in the U.S.: It’s too damn expensive to build a nuclear power plant. The infamous recent example is the expansion of Plant Vogtle, a Georgia project in which two new reactors could come online this year after six years of delays and $20 billion in cost overruns. The $33 billion tab is more than double the original cost projections. Dr. Magdalena Klemun is a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and previously studied the economics of nuclear power at MIT. She says American issues with delivering nuclear power plants on time and on budget are tied to increasingly stringent safety requirements—no bad thing—and declining construction productivity that’s hit across industries, but has hit nuclear particularly hard.
“Any onsite construction project is always prone to issues with the management of the construction team, issues with the supply chain, the on-time delivery of different materials and components,” Klemun says. But with nuclear, “every single screw that you place requires documents before that plan where exactly it is to be placed, and then documents after that confirm that everything has been done exactly right.” These projects suffer from ballooning “soft costs” on the worksite. More than that, because we essentially stopped building nuclear power plants for decades, we might have lost a step.
Dabbar’s view is slightly different. “‘On time, on budget’ is something that has not been a part of the culture of the nuclear industry,” he says. “To a reasonable degree, many people in the industry just assumed everything was going to be significantly over schedule and over budget. It’s a little bit like you’re building a home and your contractor gives you a price, but they just immediately think that it will never work and you’re going to have to pay double. Well congratulations, it’s almost certainly going to be double.”
Plant Vogtle’s expansion was lauded as the rebirth of nuclear power in the u.s., but things haven’t quite gone to plan.
This has understandably freaked out local utilities and scared away the kind of capital investment that could get these projects off the ground more often. “If you’re a power company CEO and you’re looking at various types of power plants to go build, a lot of executives [who backed nuclear plants] have been fired, and companies go into bankruptcy,” Dabbar says. And it’s not new: “If you go back to all the other nuclear construction cycles in the U.S., there’s one bankruptcy after another. This isn’t just Georgia and South Carolina. There was Public Service in New Hampshire and El Paso Electric, and Long Island Lighting went into bankruptcy and disappeared.” Large nuclear projects often feature “very, very poor controls over the construction, budget, and schedule.”
At the Department of Energy’s National Reactor Innovation Center, director Ashley Finan says work is underway on construction technologies that will bring down costs. “We’ve built prototypes of steel bricks, which some people say is a Lego-type approach to concrete and steel for nuclear.” She adds they’re also looking at how a best practice from the tunneling industry, “vertical-shaft boring,” could bring down cost and time. But other large civil engineering projects have some of these same problems, Dabbar says, and he believes there’s a solution that harkens back to his days on a nuclear submarine: build them smaller.
Instead of a giant 1,200-megawatt reactor, you could have four 300-megawatt reactors on the same site. With Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) we have the advantage of building much of them in factories, with standardized processes that tamp down on the cost overruns and delays. “This is where all the ex-Navy people have come from for years,” he says. “The Navy takes Small Modular Reactors—better known as just a nuclear reactor for a submarine or an aircraft carrier—built at a central location, primarily in Virginia near Roanoke. Then they put them on a semi truck, and they ship them off to the shipyard and they weld it in. A very significant portion of the whole reactor is made at a factory someplace and shipped. Navy reactors are delivered on time and on budget into submarines and aircraft carriers all the time. It’s actually a very well-honed machine.”
What if instead of a big, hulking, site-specific nuclear power plant design, we had a standardized design for a reactor that’s a quarter or a tenth the size that we could manufacture in a factory and ship to a site, where it could be installed in a process closer to what we have for nuclear subs and aircraft carriers? If we need more power than one reactor can provide, we could stack several on a single site. In one model, we could plug these things into former coal plant sites and use the transmission infrastructure already in place to connect them to the grid quickly. There are also plans for “microreactors” that are even smaller than the SMRs. They could power a single large facility, like a hospital, or a remote community on their own. This might freak you out, but keep in mind that many of these new advanced reactor designs have inherent safety features that allow them to power down and eliminate danger without even much human intervention.
Now just imagine we’re cranking these out in factories and shipping them wherever they’re needed around the country. In fact, you don’t need to imagine: on Tuesday, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved an SMR model from NuScale. An individual reactor will produce 50 megawatts on its own, but it can be stacked in groups of four, six, or twelve. The assembly line changed everything for a reason. We need one for nuclear power plants, because we need nuclear power.
Source: Esquire.com
