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Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Small Nuclear Power Plants

Atomic Show #287 – Darren Gale, VP Commercial Operations, X-Energy talks about Xe-100

November 12, 2020 By Rod Adams 2 Comments

X-Energy is the lead recipient for one of two industry groups selected to receive $80 M in Department of Energy (DOE) funding as part of a public-private partnership program to demonstrate advanced nuclear power plants on an aggressive time table.

Its primary partner in the endeavor is Energy Northwest, which currently owns and operates the Columbia Generating Station in eastern Washington. Energy Northwest will be the owner and operator of the demonstration power station, which will consist of a four-unit installation of X-Energy’s Xe-100 high temperature gas cooled reactor.

Each unit is designed to produce 80 MWe, resulting in a power station output of 320 MWe.

Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program

The award is part of the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which also includes two additional development pathways with longer horizons. The $80 M in FY 2021 funds is a down payment that will provide funds for completing detailed design work and beginning the licensing process.

Future appropriations will be required to complete the projects; the funding opportunity announcement for the program included an award ceiling of $4 B to be shared among three different development pathways.

For Atomic Show #287, I spoke with Darren Gale, X-Energy’s Vice President for Commercial Operations. Darren is the company executive with direct responsibility for executing the company’s contract with the Department of Energy and delivering on the promise to design, license and construct an advanced nuclear reactor power plant.

The ADRP has an aggressive target date for beginning to deliver electricity to the grid is the end of 2027. During our conversation, Darren explained how his company is positioned to deliver on its promise.

Xe-100 Design history

We spoke about how X-Energy has been working on its high temperature pebble bed reactor design for more than a decade. X-Energy was founded in 2009 by Kam Ghaffarian, a successful entrepreneur who founded Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies (SGT) in 1984. Dr. Ghaffarian remains the owner of X-Energy, but is being joined by additional investors.

The design is mature and the company has been engaging with the NRC for several years. It expects to be able to submit a license application within the next year or two; part of the uncertainty includes determining the most appropriate and streamlined licensing pathway.

The Xe-100 is a helium-cooled, high temperature pebble bed reactor that has a number of similarities to the Chinese HTR-PM. They share a common heritage tracing back through the South African HTGR program and to the German AVR demonstration reactor.

As Darren explains, the Xe-100 includes a number of refinements in its fuel design and in its fuel handling system that enable more efficient fuel use.

Another design difference is that each Xe-100 reactor/steam generator modules are connected to its own Rankine cycle steam turbine. In the HTR-PM design, two reactor/steam generator modules feed a single larger turbine.

The 80 MWe power output selection was influenced, in part, by the availability of off-the-shelf steam turbine power plants. Unlike light water reactors, the Xe-100 will produce steam at temperatures (565 ℃) and pressures (16.5 MPa) used in modern supercritical steam systems.

Like the HTR-PM, Xe-100 reactors are continuously fueled while operating, eliminating the need to schedule refueling outages. There will still be a need to periodically shut down the reactor for inspections and steam turbine maintenance. X-Energy expects that there will be more requirements during the early years of operation while the company and the regulator gain experience and understanding of operational effects.

Eventually, though, the company expects to achieve somewhat higher than average availability than conventional reactors that require unavoidable outages for refueling.

Project location

The project will be built in eastern Washington at WNP-1, a site that was licensed for construction of a nuclear power plant in 1975. Using a site that has already been reviewed and approved for use as a nuclear plant greatly reduces the amount of time and effort required for long lead time environmental impact reviews, seismic surveys, and site pre construction surveys.

Though the original plant was never completed, certain civil structures, including a water intake system and pump house were completed before the project was cancelled. Darren explained that the existing infrastructure at the site would require refurbishment, but it enables a more rapid timeline than a greenfield.

Employment opportunities

X-Energy is in the hiring mode. The Xe-100 team head count is approximately 50. Some of the necessary tasks will be completed by contractors. But Darren expects that the permanent team will expand to include 200 or more people within the next year or two.

Most of the project design work is taking place at X-Energy’s Rockville headquarters, but current restrictions related to COVID-19 have required some creative uses of remote work, multiple buildings, and video conferencing. As a result of the learning that has come with that experience, X-Energy will be somewhat flexible in allowing some employees with key skills to work from remote locations.

The Xe-100 demonstration project is an exciting opportunity for advanced reactor designers and supporters to turn ideas and concepts into functioning equipment that generates real power and heat.

I hope you enjoy this episode and participate in the comment threads, especially if you have questions that are not addressed. As you will hear towards the end of the show, Darren expects to be able to return several times during the course of the construction project.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/AtomicShowFiles/atomic_20201111_287.mp3

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Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Gas Cooled Reactors, Graphite Moderated Reactors, New Nuclear, Pebble Bed Reactors, Podcast, Small Nuclear Power Plants

Economy of Scale?: Is Bigger Better?

August 14, 2020 By Rod Adams 21 Comments

It is possible for engineers to make incredibly complex calculations without a single math error that still come up with a wrong answer if they use a model based on incorrect assumptions.

Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This notion is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged.

When Westinghouse, General Electric and their international competitors first learned that uranium was a incredible source of heat energy, they were huge, well established firms in the business of generating electrical power. Each had made a significant investment in the infrastructure necessary for producing central station electrical power on a massive scale.

Experience had taught them that larger power stations could produce cheaper electricity and that electricity from central power stations could be effectively distributed to a large number of customers whose varying needs allowed the capital investment in the power station to be most effectively shared between all customers.

Their experience was even codified by textbook authors with a rule of thumb that said that the cost of a piece of production machinery would vary by the throughput raised to the 0.6 power. (According to this thumb rule, a pump that could pump 10 times as much fluid as another pump of similar design and function should cost only four times as much as the smaller pump.) They, and their utility customers, understood that it was much cheaper to deliver bulk fuel by pipeline, ships, barges, or rail than to distribute smaller quantities of fuel in trucks to a network of small plants.

Just as individuals make judgements based on their experience of what has worked in the past, so do corporations. It was the collective judgement of the nuclear pioneers that the same rules of thumb that worked for fossil plants would apply to nuclear plants.

Failed Paradigm

There have now been 110 nuclear power plants completed in the United States over a period of almost forty years. Though accurate cost data is difficult to obtain, it is safe to say that there has been no predictable relationship between the size of a nuclear power plant and its cost. Despite the graphs drawn in early nuclear engineering texts-which were based on scanty data from less than ten completed plants-there is not a steadily decreasing cost per kilowatt for larger plants.

It is possible for engineers to make incredibly complex calculations without a single math error that still come up with a wrong answer if they use a model based on incorrect assumptions. That appears to be the case with the bigger is better model used by nuclear plant planners.

For example, one assumption explicitly stated in the economy of scale model is that the cost of auxiliary systems does not increase as rapidly as plant capacity. In at least one key area, that assumption is not true for nuclear plants.

Since the reactor core continues to produce heat after the plant is shutdown, and since a larger, more powerful core releases less of its heat to its immediate surroundings because of a smaller surface to volume ratio, it is more difficult to provide decay heat removal for higher capacity cores. It is also manifestly more difficult, time consuming and expensive to prove that the requirements for heat removal will be met under all postulated conditions without damaging the core. For emergency core cooling systems, overall costs, including regulatory burdens, seem to have increased more rapidly than plant capacity.

Curve of Growth

Though the “economy of scale” did not work for the first nuclear age, there is some evidence that a different economic rule did apply. That rule is what is often referred to as the experience curve. According to several detailed studies, it appears that when similar plants were built by the same organization, the follow-on plants cost less to build. According to a RAND Corporation study, “a doubling in the number of reactors [built by an architect-engineer] results in a 5 percent reduction in both construction time and capital cost.”

This idea is extremely significant. It tells us that nuclear power is no different conceptually than hundreds of other new technologies.

The principle that Ford discovered is now known as the experience curve. . . It ordains that in any business, in any era, in any capitalist competition, unit costs tend to decline in predictable proportion to accumulated experience: the total number of units sold. Whatever the product (cars or computers, pounds of limestone, thousands of transistors, millions of pounds of nylon, or billions of phone calls) and whatever the performance of companies jumping on and off the curve, unit costs in the industry as a whole, adjusted for inflation, will tend to drop between 20 and 30 percent with every doubling in accumulated output.

George Guilder Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise Updated for the 1990s, ICS Press, San Francisco, CA. p. 195

In applying this idea, however, one must realize that the curve is reset to a new value when a new product is introduced and that there must be competition in order to keep firms focused on lowering unit costs and unit prices. In the nuclear industry, new products in the form of bigger and bigger plants continuously were introduced, and, after the dramatic rise in the cost of fossil fuel during the 1970s, there was little competitive benefit in striving for cost reduction during plant construction.

When picking the proper size of a particular product, the experience curve should lead one to understand that high volume products will eventually cost less per unit output than low volume products and that large products inherently will have a lower volume than significantly smaller products.

In the case of the power industry, it is very difficult to double unit volume if the size of a single unit is so large that it takes a minimum of 5 years to build and if the total market demand is measured in tens or hundreds of units.

Engines vs Power Plants

The Adams Engine philosophy of small unit sizes is based on aggressively climbing onto the experience curve. If a market demand exists for 300 MW of electricity, distributed over a wide geographic area, traditional nuclear plant designers would say that the market is not yet ready for nuclear power, thus they would decide to learn nothing while waiting for the market to expand.

In contrast, atomic engine makers may see an opportunity to manufacture and sell 15 units, each with 20 MW of capacity.

Depending on the distribution of the power customers, there might an opportunity to produce 150 machines, each with 2 MW of capacity. Though 2 MW sounds small to power plant people, 2,000 kilowatts is enough electricity for several hundred average American homes.

Though it sounds incredibly far fetched to people intimately involved with present day constraints regarding fissionable material, that same market might even be supplied with 1500 machines producing 200 kilowatts each. That is enough power to supply a reasonably sized machine shop, farm or apartment building with electricity. It might even be supplied by 15,000 machines producing 20 kilowatts each, or enough for a small group of cooperative neighbors to share. Current gas turbine technology begins at the 20 kilowatt level.

With the completion of each engine, the accumulated experience of design, production and engine operation will increase and provide opportunities for cost reductions.

There is plenty of competition and incentive for this cost reduction since there are dozens of fossil fuel engine makers who currently serve the need for power in smaller markets.

If the producers of Adams Engines are successful at providing the existing market need, the traditional nuclear suppliers may never see a demand build up for 1000 MW, and they may never even start on their own learning curve.

Note: This article originally appeared in the May 1996 issue of Atomic Energy Insights, when it was still a paper newsletter. It addresses numerous questions about small and micro reactors that are still being frequently asked today. For those questions, it is worth republishing. For historical reasons, I’ve decided not to change anything.

Filed Under: Atomic Insights May 1996, Nuclear Cost Data, Small Nuclear Power Plants

Atomic Show #278 – Micro-Modular Reactor (MMR) project partners USNC, GFP and OPG

June 21, 2020 By Rod Adams 14 Comments

Global First Power (GFP), Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) recently announced that they had formed a joint venture called Global First Power Limited Partnership. That venture will build, own and operate an installation called the Micro Modular Reactor (MMR™) at the Chalk River Laboratories site. Mark Mitchell and Eric MGoey […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Atomic Entrepreneurs, Business of atomic energy, Gas Cooled Reactors, New Nuclear, Podcast, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Transcript: Atomic Show #278 – Micro-Modular Reactor (MMR) project partners USNC, GFP and OPG

June 21, 2020 By Rod Adams Leave a Comment

Atomic Show #278 transcript, lightly edited for clarity. Intro music (00:15): Rod Adams (00:21):This is Rod Adams and it’s time for Atomic Show show number 278. Yes, these Atomic Shows are coming almost regularly these days. I guess it helps to have not only myself, but all of my guests, working from home. Today I […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Atomic Show Transcript, Gas Cooled Reactors, International nuclear, New Nuclear, Small Nuclear Power Plants

Atomic Show #277 – Simon Wakter, pro-nuclear engineer in an ambivalent country

May 30, 2020 By Rod Adams 1 Comment

Simon Wakter is a strongly pro-nuclear engineer in a country that passed a referendum officially phasing out nuclear energy since several years before he was born. He has to round up to be called a thirty-something. Simon works in the nuclear energy branch of AFRY, a well-established 17,000 employee, all-of-the-above. engineering company that recently adopted […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Atomic history, Atomic politics, Podcast, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Atomic Show #276 – HolosGen Claudio Filippone and Chip Martin

May 19, 2020 By Rod Adams 18 Comments

HolosGen has attacked the nuclear power plant cost and schedule challenge from the opposite direction chosen by many nuclear reactor developers. Claiming to be agnostic about the reactor specifics – as long as it produces reliable heat in a small-enough configuration – HolosGen founder Claudio Filippone decided to focus on radical improvements to the “balance […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Atomic Entrepreneurs, Gas Cooled Reactors, Podcast, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

What exploded in Russia on Aug 8? My estimate is a (chemical) booster rocket for a nuclear powered cruise missile.

August 23, 2019 By Rod Adams 37 Comments

A cruise missile with a nuclear reactor heated turbofan engine and a liquid fueled booster rocket is the most likely description of the Russian developmental weapons system that exploded while being tested on August 8. It’s likely that the explosion occurred during maintenance or fueling operations on a barge floating off shore and not during […]

Filed Under: Gas Cooled Reactors, International nuclear, Nuclear Aircraft, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Project Pele – Part II. Enabling technologies

April 20, 2019 By Rod Adams 26 Comments

Building mobile nuclear power plants will be a challenge, but successfully meeting the challenges could alter the future trajectory of the energy and fuels supply industry. That is one of the largest and most consequential sectors of our modern, mobile, industrialized economy. There are no guarantees, but compared to many research and development projects, Project […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Gas Cooled Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

ML-1 Mobile Power System: Reactor in a Box

February 1, 2019 By Rod Adams 11 Comments

This is a modest update of an article first published in November 1996. DOD’s recent issuance of an RFI for mobile, modest power output atomic power systems shows that the challenges that were clearly described in 1963 have not been addressed – yet. Now is a good time to start addressing them. The ML-1 experimental […]

Filed Under: Army Nuclear Program, Atomic Insights Nov 1995, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Technical History Stories

Fission heated gas turbines address MIT Future of Nuclear challenges. Easier, straighter, less costly path

September 20, 2018 By Rod Adams 57 Comments

Addressing Recommendations of MIT Future of Nuclear Energy In a Carbon Constrained World The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a world renowned institution that has produced thousands of highly educated engineers and scientists. It is generously supported by foundations, corporations and governments. In 2003, the MIT Energy Initiative, began publishing a series of reports […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Gas Cooled Reactors, Graphite Moderated Reactors, New Nuclear, Pebble Bed Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

NuScale announces a major step in the NRC’s review of its passively safe SMR

January 10, 2018 By Rod Adams 74 Comments

NuScale, a leader in the increasingly competitive field of advanced nuclear reactor design, has announced that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reviewers issued a document that formally agrees that their design does not require any electrical power to achieve safe shutdown. It’s difficult to explain the importance of that regulatory position. People with experience […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, New Nuclear, Nuclear regulations, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Urenco, Bruce Power Sign MOU To Develop U-Battery for Canada

January 8, 2018 By Rod Adams 5 Comments

Urenco, Bruce Power and AMEC NSS Limited recently announced that they had signed an MOU to cooperate in the design, licensing and development of Urenco’s U-Battery micro nuclear system for the Canadian electricity and heat market. The U-Battery contains a 10 MWth nuclear heat source that can be configured to produce either 4 MWe plus […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Gas Cooled Reactors, International nuclear, Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

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