The Logan, Utah Herald Journal reports a major step in the development of nuclear energy:
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The U.S. Department of Energy, a Utah-based energy cooperative and a contractor that operates an eastern Idaho nuclear research facility announced an agreement Friday involving what would be the nation’s first small modular nuclear reactors in eastern Idaho.
The Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy announced the agreement with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems and Battelle Energy Alliance, the Energy Department contractor that operates the Idaho National Laboratory.
The energy cooperative has been working for several years toward building a dozen small commercial nuclear reactors at the Energy Department’s 890-square-mile site about 50 miles west of Idaho Falls in high desert, sagebrush steppe.
At 30 megawatts of power, Logan is the city with the largest commitment in the UAMPS project, but during a Nov. 6 Municipal Council meeting, Mayor Holly Daines expressed her desire for the city to at least scale back participation. Several council members countered at the meeting that they would like to see the city continue participation.
The reactors in question are being produced by NuScale Power. 2026 is eight years away. The barriers are more regulatory and legal than technological.
Contrary to what many people seem to believe at the present state of technology solar and wind power require standby power generation using some other means, generally fossil fuels. If you genuinely want to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere, you should support nuclear energy, particularly small module nuclear reactors.
I keep wondering about the economics of these things. In every industrial activity there is an economy of scale exponent, almost always between o.6 and 0.8. In general, if you double the size of something, the total operating and construction cost goes up by about 60%, so unit costs of the product fall as plant size increases. The typical size of conventional nuclear plants is about 1100 MW, and that is driven by the economies of scale.
It works backwards, too. 1100/30 is roughly 40, so we should expect figher unit kW cost of the smaller plants to be on the order of 10 to 15 times that of the giants. That’s about the cost differential of solar/wind vs. coal even without the required backups.
Maybe the electricity from the small modular plants is only 5 to 10 times that of the convetional, but it has to be larger. People will experience real sticker shock when they see their electric bills even if their bills only double.
Here’s what NuScale has to say about it. And here’s a post from Scientific American. Judge for yourself.
@Bob Sykes,
An interesting analogy from computers — the industry recognizes two different types of scaling; scale up and scale out. Scale up refers to making one computer super fast (like a mainframe), scale out is to add more commodity computers. The computing industry has found scale out to be more effective. Mainframes have their uses, but they cost a lot of money, so they require a lot of redundancies, which drive up the cost of the system, cost increases mean fewer units are sold, which leads to a vicious loop. For scale out, while each unit is less powerful, but more units means any one unit is not critical; so less redundancies is required; leads to lower costs. Also, scale up is tricky since it involves an “all or nothing” mentality due to the enormous costs, with scale out, you can adjust the investment depending on demand.
It seems this is what this company is making a bet on.
Considering the high cost of electricity transmission, it makes sense to spread small nuclear plants throughout the service area, just as food production is best localized rather than centralized. Just imagine the problems if Amerika had just a few centralized locations for gasoline pumps, Tesla chargers, ATMs or hookers!
“but more units means any one unit is not critical”
Interesting how that corresponds to biological reproduction.