Klein's invitation to industry to form a technical working group, to have dialog with the regulatory agency, on licensing issues for small reactors is an opportunity for manufacturers of both marine and land-based reactors. One of the absolute advantages of marine applications is the certainty the engineers needed to maintain the reactor will be available "on site."
I have serious reservations about the willingness and sanity of a nuclear engineer located in Galena, Alaska.
On the other hand, in a separate piece on small reactors, I suggested that market centers located sufficient distance from major cities might be able to get off the price escalator of fossil fuel electricity by setting up their own small reactors at 45 MW. This size unit could provide electricity for up to 90,000 people.
http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2008/...rket-
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Well low priority is better than no priority at all I guess.
AS for a nuclear engineer willingness to be located in North, you might be suppressed dj Lots of people I know went up as engineers on contracts and fell in love with the place, never to return.
I suspect that when the push to build new reactors gets up to speed, the attractiveness of small units will increase as they will have smaller lead times and use a different resource base. Also those markets that small nuclear would serve best really haven't given this sort of power a good look yet. As the general apathy towards nuclear fades, this will change.
Modularity has always been one of my favorite ideas. Making a big thing from a lot of little things has been the key to success in many fields. For example, the software industry has perfected this concept to a high degree and would not exist in its absence.
If specified properly, a small modular reactor can be the answer to flexible nuclear power. A small reactor has many advantages that are maintained even when it is used in a large cluster.
The super computer built from many PC processors is a standard IT approach these days.
If the interfaces, controls, and outputs are well designed, everything works smoothly, whether it is for a single module or a many module configuration.
With modularity, you can have small, a little bigger, pretty big, and huge, all in one design package. You can power New York City or Smallville all with the same hardware.
The MIT reactor design is my favorite.
Can’t the powers that be see the advantage in such an approach?
Or can it be that I am not thinking straight, which is very possible.
I think the designers of small reactors should not even worry about the USA market. As the NRC said it takes them 4 years to approve a large plant with a design that has already been approved.
Plus there is far more opportunity in the developing world. For example islands in the Indonesian archipeligo. Or remote mine projects around the developing world. Or countless remote cities not connected to a developed power grid.
aa2 - My philosophy is more like that expressed in the old song "New York, New York". If we can succeed in getting licensed in the US, we can sell to the entire world.
The smaller, simpler machines that are possible when you reduce the core heat production to a level that can be made safe without forced cooling should not take 4 years to license. There is simply not that much detail to review. Even if they do, it would be worth the effort.
The other potential benefit of small reactors is that they can be made small enough and cheap enough to be able to completely tested, not just modeled. The current NRC regulations assume that no one would ever test the design basis accident, but if the plant can be constructed for a few tens of millions, it might be a reasonable step. That is especially true when the designers are confident that nothing bad will happen to the machine.
Testing to the design basis has already been done for reactors like the AVR, the IFR, and the HTR-10. I am pretty sure that Kirk Sorensen's LFR proposals can accept that kind of scheme, and I know that Adams Engines plans to go in that direction.
One more thought about the US market, especially places where the power is expensive. Americans like to use electricity and are used to paying for it. People in remote areas often have learned to get by without it and may not be the best early adopters. (Sure, it is easy to learn to like electricity, but learning to put it in your monthly budget is another story.)
It makes sense, I am also a big fan of small reactors. I figure it wont' need such advanced parts like piping able to handle extreme pressure. It also seems in the world far easier to quietly add a bunch of small additions than to do one giant one.
I feel you might be looking at the world economy in a 20th century way with America as 'the standard of the world' and where new technologies are brought out. Which there still is a lot of truth to. But when I look around I see the advanced nuclear projects happening in different parts of the world. For example a breeder reactor in Russia, and plans for the 200mw HTR-PM to start construction in China in 2009. And again in Russia those floating nuclear reactors.
Now that I think about it you mention the demonstration costs.. I guess you could pursue both paths with financial backing and international contacts. Heck you might hook up with some insanely rich Russian industrialist who can afford to back you or a similiar idea.
aa2 - most insanely rich Russians have close ties to the oil and gas industry and might not be interested in what we plan to do.
Those Russian floating reactors are really nothing new and they have been promised for many years. It also looks like their progress is nothing to get excited about:
http://www.bellona.org/articles/...08/
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Rod, You might recall that I argued in a series of May posts in Nuclear Green, that small, mass produced reactors like the PBR and the LFTR are the keys to lowering the cost of nuclear power construction. One of the major problems with the big reactor approach is that the things take so long to build and they are so expensive. I argue that 10 small reactors would cost less to manufacture in a factory and set uo, than one large on site assembled reactor would.
http://
nucleargreen.blogspot.com...01_archive.html
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