Posted on 01/22/2020 1:14:26 PM PST by Red Badger
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Bespoke car maker Rolls-Royce is advancing research on nuclear small modular reactors.
Rolls-Royce's staid reputation as haute luxury belies its legacy of innovation in aerospace and other engineering.
Modular reactors are easier to manufacture, making costs both lower and more predictable.
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Rolls-Royce has taken a sharp right turn, from making million-dollar luxury sedans to researching cutting-edge nuclear small modular reactors (SMRs). Modular reactors are au courant in energy technology, and Rolls-Royce joins startups and governments around the world in trying to shrink the footprint and increase the safety of nuclear energy.
With its SMR design, which is "just one-tenth the size of a typical large-scale reactor site," a pressurized water reactor is enclosed with robust safety layers that are still far smaller in volume than the reactor space in a traditional nuclear plant. The reactor is oriented vertically, so gravity helps to move the hot and cold water around. Despite its much smaller size, the reactor will produce an expected 450 MWe, compared with 600 MWe at each of the two reactors at the existing Dungeness B plant in Kent.
Since the late 1800s, the Rolls-Royce company has engineered electronics and machinery, including engines for airplanes, automobiles, and ships. The car business—where Rolls-Royce handmakes extreme high-end luxury vehicles only—is the tip of an experimental iceberg that goes back over a century, although the company has sold off some of its more interesting arms of business in recent years.
Today, it’s pushing for SMR technology in a series of new power plants around the U.K. Rolls-Royce is known for handcrafted vehicles, but it’s worked to revolutionize tooling and manufacturing in its nitty gritty engineering arm. The company says its approach to SMRs is motivated by how modular manufacturing can save a great deal of resources and money, making cutting-edge nuclear an option even during the twilight of England’s existing nuclear plants. The last of these traditional plants will be offline by 2030.
Rolls-Royce’s illustration of its Reactor Coolant System Rolls-Royce
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By relying on predictable, relatively portable nuclear reactors, manufacturers can standardize how much these nuclear plants will cost and therefore how much the energy they make will cost, Rolls-Royce says. In the U.S., nuclear power plants are often a complex nest of tax subsidies. This is a big change from the heyday of nuclear, when plants had to incentivize to the places where they sought to build.
The predicted first two sites of Rolls-Royce SMR plants are in northern England and Wales. One site is home of an interminably delayed nuclear project, and the other a decommissioned nuclear plant. In a way, this technology is a case of the “faster spaceship” problem: Traditional nuclear projects launched sometimes decades ago are so complex and hard to finalize and pay for that a lightweight startup project can lap them many times over.
What are the advantages of an SMR plant over a traditional nuclear plant? Well, proponents say almost everything about modular reactors is an improvement. Rolls-Royce in particular says that manufacturing many small reactors at once saves money and overhead compared with “a stand-alone bespoke major project.” That, in turn, enables “a predictable programme from first concrete to commissioning in just four years, including 500 days on site for the modular build.”
Among the U.K.’s existing nuclear plants, the shortest build time was eight years and the longest was nearly 20. Rolls-Royce’s modular construction time is in line with the U.K.’s earliest (and now long-retired) original Magnox plants, which took four years each to get on the grid.
These SMR plants sit somewhere on a continuum between a traditional handmade Rolls-Royce car and an Ikea bookshelf, hopefully bringing together the best aspects of both—and with no Allen wrenches.
These are designed with no chance of melt-down. And they can be buried in the ground so no terrorist can get to them.
The problem with big nuclear facilities is that major costs are needed to implement safety systems and backups and backups to the backups...
This is because they are designed to extract the the majority of power from the nuclear material. They run hot and ‘on the edge’.
If they designed them so as to only extract 50% (for example) they would not need to run so close to the edge that you risk meltdown. In fact they could be designed so they could NEVER melt down.
Then you could build 2 at 50% that would be safer than 1.
How about a Molten Salt Reactor?
ttps://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/molten-salt-reactors.aspx
It was proven in the 60s; however it was abandoned because it didn’t produce fissionable waste. It is much safer and could result in a much more resilient power grid.
Why do we have flying boats but not flying cars ?
I barely remember back in the late 1950s when it was suggested automobiles be designed with small nuke reactors that never use gasoline.
It could be done very easily.
But won’t.....................
LOL!..........................
What we need is a population, both domestically and globally, who don’t act like scared little girls when the “N” word is mentioned.
Wow! I always liked color coded pipes on models. Impressive
I was always told that the problems that plagued current full size reactors came form the scaling up as compared to the reactors for naval vessels, but then this oversimplifies the problems.
What really killed the nuke industry was the one-off designs that led to massive cost overruns. Most commercial operators didn’t see any real cost savings/benefits unless they built multiples of the same plant design side by side, side. This came about from solving the problems during the construction of the 1st plant and applying those changes to the next plant and so on.
There should be mandatory standardization of the plant design regardless if it a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) or Pressure Water Reactor (PWR).
Greta won’t approve this. Neither will American dems.
“If I owned a Delorean I would only use it from time-to-time.”
Groan! :)
Thorium reactors are the answer.
Or better yet, what Tesla did with the Pierce Arrow back in the 30’s.
One can dream.
“Why do we have flying boats but not flying cars ?”
For the very same reason you chop a tree down, then cut it up.
we put them in submarines dont we ??
The really cool thing is that the constructors build them like that!
And they can be buried in the ground so no terrorist can get to them.
More annoying gen-x or millenial “journalism”... RR was split into two companies more than 45 years ago. The cars are now a division of BMW; the part that makes lots of turbine-based stuff is quite distinct.
New reactor technologies not only allow for "walk away" safe designs that naturally cool down even if the reactor loses coolant flow, but also designs that can use spent uranium-235 fuel rods and even plutonium-239/240 from dismantled nuclear weapons as nuclear fuel in addition to widely available thorium-232 (found anywhere there is rare earth mining). Unlike solar and wind power, these new reactors aren't subject to the whims of nature in terms of power generation, which could make truly massive-scale electrification possible for things like electric motor vehicles, trains powered by overhead electric power and truly massive scale seawater desalinization to turn vast amount of deserts into arable land.
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