When It Comes to Nuclear Power, Companies Should Think Small

Pajamas Media ^ | Jan. 31 | Will Collier

[AJKauf]

A few months ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted permission for initial site work to begin on new nuclear reactors in the United States for the first time since the 1970s. Georgia Power, a subsidiary of the gigantic Southern Company, plans to build the two new reactors at its Vogtle nuclear plant, near Augusta.

At first glance, I was all in favor of new nuclear construction. Among other reasons, it’s high time we stopped determining energy policy on the basis of a bad Jane Fonda movie. But as a Georgia Power customer — who’s already on the hook for part of the bill for the new facilities — I’m scratching my head a bit over both that price tag, and over the rationale for going back to the old model of massive, complex, and hugely expensive power plants.

The planned Votgle upgrade is estimated to cost around $14 billion, and each reactor will produce around 1250 megawatts of electricity (MWe). The new reactors will be added to two existing units which were completed during the 1980s.

The cost of those two original units, estimated at the time to be around $660 million, skyrocketed to nearly $9 billion in the wake of the post-Three Mile Island regulatory blizzard. That jump in costs, which was typical for the industry, effectively ended new nuclear plant construction for a generation.....

[HiTech RedNeck]

A Hyperion seems cheap enough at the price per kilowatt, but does that include the cost of installing one of the critters?

[ASOC]

Not just the China Syndrome (1979)
Not just TMI (1979)
ot the horrors of Chernobyl

But books

The Prometheus Crisis by Frank M Robinson and Thomas N Scortia —

Switching dramatically between post-disaster government hearings and the events leading up to it, this fictionalized scenario set at “the world’s largest nuclear plant in California” has an exceptional sense of pacing, drawing the reader into a tense technological page-turner not unlike Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1971). The Prometheus Crisis predates Three Mile Island by four years, and Chernobyl by eleven, and presciently foretells the tangled bureaucratic nightmare that occured along with the public panic in the real world of TMI and Chernobyl.

And other popular “Green” publications. So long as there is a vocal greeine sub-culture with greedy lawers at hand, nuke power is a non-starter.

Hell, we cannot even get a simple 40 sq mile coal strip mine opened up here...

[Bean Counter]

Imagine what a 25 Megawatt Hyperion reactor plant would do for a country like Haiti. A clean and relatively cheap power source like the nation has never had before.

I read some time ago that Northrop Grumman was going to be building a facility in Newport News Virginia to start making smaller commercial reactor vessels; not sure if they are Hyperions or not, but it seems the trend for nuclear power is smaller, not larger. Makes sense to me...

[Freedom4US]

I was always kind of disappointed Heathkit Radio Shack never made a lower-cost kit for DIY’ers. “Free Power! And, You Did It Yourself!” Kidding aside, are there engineering reasons why a small reactor couldn’t power a single household or maybe 30 to 100 homes?

[Bean Counter]

That’s exactly the point here I think, why build horribly expensive power plants with so much capacity instead a bunch of much cheaper units and spread them around.

Locally we have an old (WW I) Army ammo training ground (Camp Bonneville) that is still heavily contaminated with old (small) ordinance of all descriptions. The County has been trying to figure out what to do with that land for years, as well as find the money to clean it up. In my view that land would be perfect for a small plant like the Hyperion Power Module the article talks about.

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/index.html

Fascinating concept that makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons.

[driftdiver]

“Kidding aside, are there engineering reasons why a small reactor couldn’t power a single household or maybe 30 to 100 homes?”

There have been serious proposals for these but I don’t think they ever came close to being licensed.

[LiberConservative]

I might be a little more ‘green’ than most conservatives, but I love nuclear power. And the Hyperion looks AWESOME. Just the ticket to get more nuclear on line in the shortest amount of time.

[Rafterman]

There seems to be almost no technical information about the reactor design on their website, and nothing on Google, either. As a licensed reactor operator, I’m very leery of anything nuclear that doesn’t have any human oversight.