While greens are clamoring for more unreliable wind and solar, nuclear is about to make a big leap forward with the recent Pentagon approval of the first microreactor. Here is a technical summary from the U.S. Office of Nuclear Energy.
Microreactors are factory-built, plug-and-play reactors.
They can be used to power military bases, disaster recovery efforts or remote locations where traditional infrastructure doesn’t exist.
These mini reactors can provide between 1-20 megawatts of thermal energy used directly as heat or converted to electric power.
They fit on the back of a semi-truck and will not require a large number of people to operate them.
Microreactors can integrate seamlessly into distributed grids to complement renewable power and are expected to run continuously for about 10 years without refueling.
Once the core is spent, they can be exchanged for a new one.
Features
Microreactors are not defined by their fuel form or coolant. Instead, they have three main features:
- Factory fabricated: All components of a microreactor would be fully assembled in a factory and shipped out to location. This eliminates difficulties associated with large-scale construction, reduces capital costs and would help get the reactor up and running quickly.
- Transportable: Smaller unit designs will make microreactors very transportable. This would make it easy for vendors to ship the entire reactor by truck, shipping vessel, airplane or railcar.
- Self-adjusting: Simple and responsive design concepts will allow microreactors to self-adjust. They won’t require a large number of specialized operators and would utilize passive safety systems that prevent any potential for overheating or reactor meltdown.
Benefits
Microreactor designs vary, but most would be able to produce 1-20 megawatts of thermal energy that could be used directly as heat or converted to electric power. They can be used to generate clean and reliable electricity for commercial use or for non-electric applications such as district heating, water desalination and hydrogen fuel production.
Other benefits:
- Seamless integration with renewables within microgrids
- Can be used for emergency response to help restore power to areas hit by natural disasters
- A longer core life, operating for up to 10 years without refueling
- Can be quickly removed from sites and exchanged for new ones
Most designs will require fuel with a higher concentration of uranium-235 that’s not currently used in today’s reactors, although some may benefit from use of high temperature moderating materials that would reduce fuel enrichment requirements while maintaining the small system size.
The U.S. Department of Energy supports a variety of advanced reactor designs, including gas, liquid metal, molten salt and heat pipe-cooled concepts. American microreactor developers are currently focused on gas and heat pipe-cooled designs that could debut as early as the mid-2020s.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I was surprised to learn in my reseach on this topic that there are at least several dozens and perhaps a hundred designs of these. Some have fuel cycles as long as 30 years. The real trouble is that the Pentagon has only a certain amount of sway with NERC, and licensing them for civilian use may take a decade. Then as the green blob uses lawfare to fight siting, when can we expect the first functioning model?
Rolls Royce and Bill Gates/Warren Buffet both have designs, RR are working on a prototype, not sure exactly where the Gates/Buffet team is with their design, but it looks like the race is on.
See my comment on that topic here.
Beta.
It is amazing that no one knows about NuScale. Could it be due to shameless self promotion of RR and Bill Gates?
The one advantage for NuScale is they are building on a US nuclear testing site, not of land controlled by local politicians, and have an approved design.
The advantage RR has, is they are tightly connected with the UK government.
The advantage Bill Gates has is crony capitalism and his Democrat party connections.
Thee are something like 70 small nuclear projects on the go. Nuscale Natrium, Rolls Royce are the ones that spring to mind. But I read the nuclear news regularly and every week a new initiative seems to be launched
How many will I need to get 1.21 Gigawatts?
3 Rolls Royce units should do that
Although it might be tempting to think these micro reactors would work for commercial electricity generation, they would really be too expensive because they don’t put out enough power to make a return on the investment, except possibly at the 20MW level.
SMR (small modular) reactors are better for commercial use because they will still manufactured on an assembly line, transported piecemeal on trucks or by rail and are 20 to 100MW per reactor and they can be configured with x2, x4, x6, or x8 reactors. A number of US and international companies have designs that are in the process of being built or going through the approval process.
The military wants these micro-reactors because they want every military base to have its own power and not be reliant on the local, relatively unreliable electric grid. And they can always keep existing diesel generators as a backup. For them cost is not the issue and neither is security (its surrounded by soldiers) or insurance (none needed). The main issue is reliable power, any time, all the time that is hard for an enemy to knock out. Our electric grid is fragile enough that whole regions of the country could be put in a black out with the right targeted strikes. And it’s going to get less stable and more fragile as more utility wind and solar are added.
I think we simply do not know what the price or applications will be. For example a container ship running a 50MW reactor able to cruise at 30-40 knots without worrying about the cost of bunker oil – or its pollution – could be very interesting.
Down at 5MW you are almost looking at a semi truck.Or train locomotive.Or tank…
Leo, that’s one thing that is not clear. How scaleable down are these little beauties?
Are we going to start seeing these in Fiat 500s? Is there a lower limit? I suppose that, and as you mentioned, we don’t know the price, the price might set the lower bounds. Some thigs get more expensive the smaller they get.
These are intriguing. I’ve always thought of nuclear as BIG. Small has so many possibilities.
When shipping by Semi-truck, will the trucks use DEF in their diesel engines to reduce PM air pollution on the way to the disaster?
Until a US president by executive order using the same basis as Brandon for many of his orders declares use of DEF unnecessary due to cost, etc.
I drive many miles on the highway so my truck never needs to regenerate/clear the exhaust system. Anyone who has needed to do that knows the waste of diesel while the regeneration process is running.
Terrific potential — and the fact that the US Military will support development for their own selfish reasons means that development will be quicker.
This goes along with the Small Modular Reactors movement that have the same plug-and-ply feature, but are substantially larger and can power small cities — and in multiples, large cities.
What a stupid statement! Kit P thinks Kip H has never usaed a slide rule.
Before calculators, engineers used slide rules.
Problem: How many BWR or PWR do you need for 300 million homes each with a potential of 1 to the power of 10 to the sixth.
Answer: 300 and I did not get my slide rule out.
How about adding micro reactors to the mix?
Answer: 300 and I did not get my slide rule out.
Why? 1,000,000 + 1 = 1,000,001 so you get the same answer using a slide rule because micro reactors have zero p0totential. Another way of writing zero is 0.000001
Kit ==> No idea what you are talking about.
How about adding 3 million micro reactors to the mix?
Cost benefit analysis – watts per dollar – is all that counts.
Gimme a 20KW reactor for my house at less than $10,000 that lasts 60 years without refuelling. And I will bite your hand off
LENR is coming to market if they can get funding. Clean Energy Technology Company // Brillouin Energy
A very instructive read about nuclear power and its great future: ‘Atomic Accidents’ by James Maheffey.
Renewables require at least 15 days of 100% backup power to avoid shutting down the system and killing lots of people.
Any system capable of taking on the entire base load demand can OBVIOUSLY HANDLE all of the Power Generation ALL THE TIME… making the more expensive Renewables redundant and unnecessary.
Leaving Out the question of Back-Up power for Renewables is worse than just outright lying…it’s Criminal…and any Engineers signing off on these systems should be held liable for all damages.
Making any claim that “Renewables are Cheaper” is patently false…They REQUIRE building, maintaining and operating 2 entire Power Generating Systems…with the Renewable portion being the most EXPENSIVE — Ask the Europeans how much their cheap Renewables are costing them…as thousands of Pensioners perish in the cold this coming Winter.
‘Renewables require at least 15 days of 100% backup power to avoid shutting down the system and killing lots of people.’
no it doesn’t
Absent RELIABLE BACKUP GENERATION, I would say nearly 6 months of backup in northern climes.
LAKKY K SIDERS is of course correct about reliable, dispatchable generation being all that is needed, and that unreliables are a total waste of resources.
The added cost of unreliables are just a regressive increase in the cost of “energy” that hits the poorest the worst.
So, as I have asked you before griff, why do you HATE poor people so much?
Correct, it requires at least 30 days
My home is on a flat bed truck. I make electrity for my motor home with a 800 watt $88 generator.
My MH uses a 300 hp Cummins diesel to get from point A to B. On 6 very expensive 22.5 inch semi tires. Like safety related rubber components in a nuke plant, tires age out after 5 years.
Like with EV, what is the cost of added weight on things that do not last very long.
Some things are not practical. And never will be.
regarding cost: Historically, SMRs are much less economical to build and operate than the large light water power plant reactors of the last half century. I have long thought this is entirely due to the NRC regulatory overhead / licensing regime. Appears we are about to finally get a little bit of actual data.
My poorly uninformed guess is whatever their cost, that cost will be way below wind and solar, which is all we need for an actual opening bid. Cheers –
Nothing wrong with put more than one in an area! Add 10-20 units and you’ve got a serious power supply!!
10 to 20 SMR at 77MWe gross, yes, 10 to 20 micro reactors at 1to 20 MWe gross, not so much.
SMRs for grid scale use will be as big as we can make em, in a factory, and still not need active cooling under fault conditions. 500MW seems to be the golidlocks power
Why no mention of Nuscale? The first nuclear SMR maker to get across the regulatory finish line. Odd. The article was about Nuscale without mentioning Nuscale.
Lactobacillum Bulgaricum.
Henry the Eighth.
Giraffe.
The NuScale SMR is geared to serve the commercial utility market. See my comment here on the current status of the NuScale project as compared with the TerraPower effort.
These microreactors make a lot of sense, except since they have a nuclear component, they’ll automatically be denounced and rejected by the environmentalists.
What do they do with the spent fuel? It will be highly radioactive for many years. Currently the spent fuel rods are stored onsite at the plant in pools. and they have to be kept covered with water for many years.
The US government passed legislation to TAX all nuclear power output customers to provide for the storage of the spent fuel. The legislation was written by Democrats, a promise never kept, what a surprise.
Yucca Mountain was designated the ONE repository for the spent fuel. Designs for storage/transportation casks were completed and tested to withstand high speed train engine impact. A tunnel was bored through Yucca Mountain off which the casks were to be stored, I have been there. The national repository never happened.
You can trust Democrats just as far as you can throw them.
Yes there are plans which have never been put into effect. The bottom line is that they are still kept onsite. So who will maintain them for many years into the future? That’s a big question for the conventional plants. But I think there would be many more of these micro plants. So there will be many more storage sites to be maintained.
Pools for a few years to cool down, and then concrete silos for a few decades. Then possibly, reprocessing. This stuff should never be ‘discarded in any way. It’s far too valuable.
Good comments, empty article.
Big Green will fight cheap and abundant energy to the death. Their goal has always been pricing energy so high that economic and population expansion is thwarted.
If only fossil fuel companies had any cash or influence at all, the poor wretched thinks
1-20 Megawatts is peanuts. The average (not peak!) power consumption in UK is 11000MW so you are going to need maybe 20000 of these generators to power the country if they were running flat out. In reality you would need 50000.
There is this this called the economy of scale, which says that you are better off making a few bit things than thousands of smaller ones. It is cheaper, takes less people to run and uses less resources.There are people who think that anything big is bad and local/smaller is magically better. They usually are not successful in anything they do.
I don’t think that can be right as an average?
anyway daytime weekday summer power demand is around 30 to 35GW over working day… winter 40 to 49GW, winter peak just over 50 for a few evening hours
Sounds good. But how quickly will they be able to ramp-up and ramp-down electricity production?
The way many electricity markets are now being regulated suggests this is critical to profitability. When the the usual suspects (wind and solar) fall off a cliff then the on-demand generators are able to shaft retailers up the wazoo. Sideways. With a Camel.
A nuclear plant that can do the same would be a goldmine. Base-load and on-demand increase. It’s a power shift from the (retail) buyers to efficient competition among the sellers. That will translate into cheaper electricity for consumers, n’est pas?
Naval nuclear reactors (sub, and Carrier) do fast ramp-ups on a dime, else they’d be no good.
Are the reactors in the US nuclear navy military secrets? They sure do have a long history of accident-free operation; seems like that design would fit this niche very well.
It was US policy to freely share the peaceful use of nuclear power. As result allmost all commercial nuke plants are LWR like navy plants..
So not a military secret.
I was navy nuke officer and later was SRO certified on large commerical plants. The navy on a needed reactors small enough to fit in the hull of the ship.
The same people who built those, scaled he reactor up to make small commercial plants. Then bigger ones and bigger ones. My last one was 1600 MWe in China. A second one is now running at that site with room for many more.
So it is a matter of scale. If you need a small amount of electricty go to Harbor Freight, Slap a radiation warning decal on it and Griff, Skip, and Leo will not know the difference.
The Pentagon isn’t the NRC so don’t look for these anytime soon. Not to mention the fact that the fuel production infrastructure doesn’t exist yet for the more highly enriched fuel that this reactor needs. Also, I expect that the cost for these micro reactors are probably at least 3 to 5 times more expensive on a megawatt electric value versus an 1100 MWE regular reactor.
Especially if they follow the trend of the SMR which was just actually approved by the NRC. It provides 50 megawatts electric, which means you need 20 of them at 1.5 billion each to equal one regular reactor. That’s 33 billion. Not counting interconnects or site preparation. Or you could maybe buy the Russian version for 750 million a pop. Either way, extremely expensive. Not happening anytime soon. Don’t hold your breath.
Oh, by the way, why don’t you go on to nuclearPower.org which is the website of the nuclear power industry where they’ll show you that there’s not enough production of uranium in the world to meet the current demand of the 400 operating nuclear reactors.
Oh wow! I just read the actual links in the article. I actually like your website Anthony. I believe that humans are not affecting the climate to any degree as stated by the climate doomsayers. I also 100% agree with you that almost all of the temperature stations around the world are cited poorly. I mean just look at the one in Hawaii that’s between runways at an international airport. That being said, you wrote an article about a micro reactor that’s been chosen to be used as a test reactor at a test facility in Idaho. That means it may possibly go into production after NRC approval for commercial use sometime around 2035.
Oh and as far as non-reliable renewable energy it produced more electricity actual production not nameplate capacity in 2021. Then nuclear did. Go look it up. You know I’m right 20.2% versus 18.9 %
There’s been a lot of thought about this for some time: https://alaskapublic.org/2018/11/21/nuclear-power-in-alaska-experts-say-its-not-as-far-fetched-as-you-think/