The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) will pay Babcock & Wilcox, a nuclear equipment company, to complete extensive design work and apply for permission to build a new kind of nuclear plant, a “small modular reactor,” at a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the authority and the company announced on Wednesday.
The two entities did not disclose the value of the contract, which will be paid in part by the US Department of Energy under a program to encourage nuclear innovation.
The announcement is a step forward in a program that advocates hope will develop a new class of nuclear plants that can be mostly built in a factory, shipped by rail or barge, deployed quickly and sold around the world, especially in places where the power grid could not handle a big plant.
Because the reactors are relatively small, the idea is that in an emergency they can be cooled with the natural circulation of water and heat, rather than by systems that require pumps and valves and that could be disabled by power failures or human errors.
The goal for Babcock & Wilcox is a reactor that can be operated by a relatively small control room crew, perhaps two operators, and meet security requirements with fewer guards.
Babcock & Wilcox mPower president Christofer Mowry said that existing big reactors rely on a “force on force concept,” with armed guards prepared to repel armed intruders, while the mPower concept was “force on concrete,” with a reactor that is housed under a concrete slab.
“That’s a lot easier to defend,” he said.
The reactor is intended as a direct challenge to natural gas generators, and it is intended to share two characteristics that make gas attractive.
First, the builders say they can be built quickly and be added onto later, so there is less risk of building too much capacity or running short.
Second, they are meant to do something that is difficult for existing nuclear plants but easy for gas: change power output rapidly.
Grid operators are increasingly challenged by having to integrate large amounts of power from wind farms and solar installations, which can experience surges or drops in output. Planners are looking for supply partners for those variable generators.
Mowry said his company wanted to have the first of two units in service at Oak Ridge by 2022, an aggressive schedule that he said was “eight years and change.”
The US Department of Energy could match costs up to 50 percent, depending in part on how much the US Congress allocates.
No one has built reactors of that size in the US since the 1960s, but the concept of reviving small reactors has been around in one form or another for 20 years.
Four giant reactors intended to be “passively safe” are under construction but few seem likely to follow soon.
Two years after Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi accident, in an era of low natural gas prices, the small reactor concept is the most popular one in the field.
The company has been lining up suppliers and completing design details.
However, small is a relative term — the vessel is 3.96m in diameter and 25.29m high.
The idea is for a 180-megawatt reactor, which is about one-sixth the size of new conventional reactors, but about the size of some old coal units now being retired.
“One of the impediments to new nuclear is the sheer scale of the financial commitment,” said Marc Chupka, an economist and consultant at the Brattle Group who specializes in electricity.
Building a small reactor is an attempt to sidestep that problem, but “it’s still going to boil down to money and the relative cost of these things,” which is unknown at present since no one has built one yet.
South Korea’s air force yesterday apologized for a 2021 midair collision involving two fighter jets, a day after auditors said the pilots were taking selfies and filming during the flight and held them responsible for the accident. “We sincerely apologize to the public for the concern caused by the accident that occurred in 2021,” an air force spokesman told a news conference, adding that one of the pilots involved had been suspended from flying duties, received severe disciplinary action and has since left the military. The apology followed a report released on Wednesday by the South Korean Board of Audit and Inspection,
Indonesian police have arrested 13 people after shocking images of alleged abuse against small children at a daycare center went viral, sparking outrage across the nation, officials said on Monday. Police on Friday last week raided Little Aresha, a daycare center in Yogyakarta on Java island, following a report from a former employee. CCTV footage circulating on social media showed children, most younger than two, lying on the floor wearing only diapers, their hands and feet bound with rags. The police have confirmed that the footage is authentic. Police said they also found 20 children crammed into a room just 3m by 3m. “So
About 240 Indians claiming descent from a Biblical tribe landed at Tel Aviv airport on Thursday as part of a government operation to relocate them to Israel. The newcomers passed under a balloon arch in blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, as dozens of well-wishers welcomed them with a traditional Jewish song. They were the first “bnei Menashe” (“sons of Manasseh”) to arrive in Israel since the government in November last year announced funding for the immigration of about 6,000 members of the community from the states of Manipur and Mizoram in northeast India. The community claims to descend from
‘TROUBLING’: The firing of Phelan, who was an adviser to a nonprofit that supported the defense of Taiwan, was another example of ‘dysfunction’ under Trump, a US senator said US Secretary of the Navy John Phelan has been fired, a US official and a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday, in another wartime shakeup at the Pentagon coming just weeks after US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ousted the Army’s top general. The Pentagon announced his departure in a brief statement, saying he was leaving the administration “effective immediately,” but it did not provide a reason or say whether it was his decision to go. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Phelan was dismissed in part because he was moving too slowly to implement reforms to
RSS