Post Meeting Report Platts Nuclear Energy – February 17-19 Held in Bethesda, Maryland
I was fortunate enough to attend a sampling of sessions at the Platts Nuclear Energy 2010 meeting held in Bethesda, Maryland from February 17-19. Due to other commitments, I missed the first day, but I did make it to a series of insightful talks by key participants in the resurgent nuclear energy plant construction industry. It is an advantage to be just a Metro ride away from a lot of key conference locations in Washington.
Aside: Since there are 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States today (1.7 times as many as in France, the next closest competitor), producing between $40-80 BILLION worth of electricity, I have recently decided to stop talking about a Nuclear Renaissance. We never really entered anything like the Dark Ages, even though we are a bit rusty when it comes to building new plants and major components. End Aside.
February 18, 2010
Mike Wallace, Chairman Unistar Nuclear Energy, gave an inspiring talk that focused on all of the good things that have been put into place in the past few years to enable the nuclear construction industry to begin flourishing again. He told the audience to remember Tuesday, February 16, 2010 as an important date in the history of the nuclear industry. That was the day when President Obama made a speech announcing the awarding of conditional loan guarantees to the Southern Company and establishing a clear policy of support for new nuclear power plant construction. Mr. Wallace expressed appreciation to President Obama for “several really significant policy statements:”
Wallace also reminded the crowd that the announcement was accompanied by two important actions – awarding the loan guarantee to Southern Company and increasing the size of the pool for loan guarantees by a factor of three. He encouraged anyone who thought that their company was in line for some of those additional dollars to make sure that they were fully prepared to take advantage of the opportunity.
Bryan Dolan, Vice President, Nuclear Plant Development Duke Energy Corporation, talked about his company’s preparations for new plants in both South Carolina and Ohio. He emphasized the importance of decarbonizing the generation of electrical power and the need to modernize the electricity generating fleets to ensure reliable service well into the future. He described his company’s generating assets and the mix that makes up their current capacity – 49% coal, 20% natural gas and oil, 19% nuclear and 12% hydro. Then he gave a very important statistic – with just 19% of its CAPACITY, nuclear represents 50% of the ELECTRICITY that Duke sells every year.
Aside: That is an example of why it can be so frustrating for nuclear energy supporters when they get into discussions with renewable advocates like Amory Lovins or Joe Romm. They insist on talking about the installation rate of generating capacity of sources that only produce their rated capacity at lucky times of the day. The real need is to generate reliable energy at the time that it is needed, not the time that the weather says it is available. End Aside.
During his talk, Dolan described some of the regionalization partnerships that his company is pursuing to introduce new capacity in smaller increments that more closely match the rate of load growth. One of the challenges facing large, established utilities like Duke Energy, is that adding capacity in increments of 1200 or 1600 MWe all at once means that the capacity growth is “chunky” compared to the demand growth. The year before the new capacity is introduced, the reserve margins could be getting quite narrow; for several years after introduction, there will be a lot more capacity available than demand.
I took that opportunity to ask a question:
Adams: It was interesting to hear you talk about adding capacity in smaller increments. On the front page of the Wall Street Journal today (Thursday, February 18) there is an article about the mPowerTM reactor from B&W. Do you have any comments the ability of 125 or 140 MW plants to add capacity in smaller increments?
Dolan: We support the efforts to develop small, modular reactors. It is a long road, but we think it is a key option that we will continue to explore. As an industry, we have priorities and I think that NEI has testified to that very well on the Hill.
- We need to support our operating fleet number one.
- We need to solve the waste issue.
- We need to be very successful in deployment of our Gen III reactors.
- And we are very interested as well in moving small modular reactors forward.
It is attractive for a lot of reasons presented in the Wall Street Journal. Its attractive to us, but we also do recognize that it’s a long road ahead.
Ashok Bhatnagar, Senior Vice President Nuclear Generation Development and Construction, Tennessee Valley Authority talked about how his company restored Browns Ferry Unit 1, the six year payback of that investment, and how TVA has restarted construction on Watts Bar Unit 2, a partially completed plant whose initial construction period was suspended in 1988. That unit was still under a construction license using the old Part 50 two step licensing process with construction done under one license and operation permission granted by a license that will be awarded following reviews of the construction process and testing completion.
Bhatnagar also spoke about the process that TVA has instituted for making all of its long term planning choices. He described how the company has gone through a process with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to restore the construction permits at the Bellefonte site from a status of “terminated” to a status of “deferred”.
Bellefonte was originally sited with a capacity to host four large light water reactors; two projects were started and achieved significant portions of completion (Unit 1 at 88% and Unit 2 at 58%) before being suspended in 1988 under the regime of S. David Freeman. Due to short-sighted decisions to sell off some of the equipment at the sites when their license was initially terminated, the partially completed units are currently assessed at about 55% complete for Unit 1 and 35% complete for Unit 2.
With a reduction in power consumption with the current economic recession, TVA has some time to make its construction decisions, but it is currently evaluating the cost effectiveness of several combinations of completing the existing plants or building new AP1000 reactors from the ground up. The options range from completing just one of the existing units to completing both of them plus building new new units of the AP1000 design.
February 19, 2010
There was a special breakout session titled Small Reactors – Timeliness and Cost Projections for Development which was listed in the meeting agenda as being aimed at covering the following items
- Advantages of small reactors
- Design features
- Progress in development
- Where the work is being done
- Cost factors compared to conventional reactors
- Licensing issues and timelines
There was a well chosen panel for the session, with Deborah Deal Blackwell, Senior Vice President of Hyperion Power Generation, Daniel Breig, Director of Project Development of Southern California Edison (offering a potential customer perspective), Michael Shepherd, Vice President of Business Development of Babcock&Wilcox Modular Nuclear Energy, Paul Lorenzini, President and Chief Executive Officer of NuScale Power, and Michael Mayfield,
Director, Advanced Reactor Program, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
All of the speakers gave concise presentations of their project’s current status. Deborah Blackwell talked about the expressions of interest in their “nuclear battery” from people with significant power needs but no access to grid connections, military bases, and mining/resource recovery applications. She talked about Hyperion’s ability to tap some of the best brains on the planet at Los Alamos National Laboratory and about its selection of uranium nitride fuel with lead bismuth coolant.
Michael Shepherd gave a good talk that built upon some of the excitement generated by the Thursday edition of the Wall Street Journal which contained a front page article about its project. He described how the mPowerTM has aspects of both PWR and BWR technologies, how it will be installed below grade to avoid any issues associated with aircraft impact, how it will have the ability to operate for 5 years between 10 day refueling outages, how it will have the option of either air (125 MWe) or water cooled (140 MWe) condensers, and how it will be able to store 60 years worth of used fuel inside the containment. Mike had been showing off the model for the mPowerTM on the day before the session, so it was good to hear again how all of the design decisions are being made.
Paul Lorenzini provided perhaps the most details about his project’s status, testing program, and cost estimations. NuScale’s Chief Technical Officer, Jose Reyes, is a former NRC regulator, so it was not surprising to me to hear how the program has been taking advantage of the scale test facility at OSU to validate the codes used for its safety analysis.
NuScale’s reactor modules bear more than a passing resemblance to the mPowerTM on the outside, or perhaps I should say it the other way around, since the NuScale was announced first. However, there is a significant difference in philosophy – NuScale has a goal of extreme simplicity by using a natural circulation system that has no pumps at all, while B&W has determined that the approximate tripling of plant capacity (from 45 to 140 MWe) within the same envelope is worth the additional initial cost and slight increase in complexity. It will be interesting to see which design wins more customers or which kinds of customers make each different selection.
Lorenzini also provided a surprising amount of detail and confidence in a cost estimate of $4,000 per kilowatt capacity based on a 12 unit order on a single site for a total of 540 MWe capacity and $4,400 per kilowatt capacity for a six unit order with the installed infrastructure to expand to 12 units at a later date. That estimate was based on actual vendor quotes compiled by Kiewit Power Constructors, the company that NuScale is using as their EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) contractor. At those prices, NuScale will be a competitive option.
Mike Mayfield of the NRC was the final presenter in the session and there was a bit of playful kidding about putting the regulator last. His talk was quite good, however, and described how the Advanced Reactor Program is structured, how applicants need to interact with the regulators to keep them from being surprised, and the importance that the Commission places on compliance with federal statutes. (The current priority, by law, for the Advanced Reactor Program is the NGNP project.) He provided a list of topics that the NRC is already working on to enable the consideration of small modular reactors including fee structure, emergency planning zones, source terms, manning requirements, Price-Anderson considerations, and secondary power sources.
The session on small reactors was only scheduled to last 75 minutes and there was very little time left when the speakers finished. The room was quite full, considering the fact that it was the last session of the conference. However, there were only two questions or comments from the audience. (You know how it is in a room full of people ready to go home for the weekend; peer pressure keeps the number of questions down.) Here was my contribution to the discussion:
Adams: My name is Rod Adams and I write for Atomic Insights. In light of not surprising the regulators, one of the things I want to add to your list is the idea of a license for a reactor that does not have a site. Because some reactors around the world do move around. One of the potential applications for small reactors is reactors that can move to wear the power is needed and when the power is no longer needed they can be moved somewhere else.
Aside: At that point Paul Lorenzini said – its nice to put a face with the name. I read Atomic Insights all the time. That made me flush with a little proud embarrassment, but I did remember to say thank you. End Aside.
Since I made a comment but did not really ask a question, Mr. Mayfield did not respond. He found me after the session to offer some courses of action and international organizations that need to be involved in the process of determining how to license a reactor that might move across borders. We had an informative chat. Then it was time to get back to work.
I’m pretty sure that the mPower design is older than the NuScale design, at least in concept. The mPower reactor is based on a design for a maritime reactor that was developed by Babcock and Wilcox many years ago. Recall that B&W built the reactor for the NS Savannah.
S. David Freeman was also GM of SMUD when Rancho Seco was closed.
Interesting article, Adams. TVA has been jerking the public around, about 8 million people, for a very long time. Its huge unsustainable debt makes it impossible to play any kind of free-market role (it does mess up the market though) in the planning, construction and operation of nuclear reactors. And that is because the TVA IS the federal government. Other than loan guarantees which make things a bit less risky as a business undertaking, the federal government should not warp or squelch the entrepreneurial spirit of the electrical energy industry. And that the TVA does. Ironically, the federal government explicitly does not back up TVA’s indebtedness.
TVA is a strange animal and I’ve written quite a lot about it. See my site http://norsworthyopinion.com , bottom of left column for my latest.
Ernest Norsworthy
Brian – I have a technical manual in my library from the NS Savannah. There are enough major differences between the mPower and the NS Savannah, which had external coolant pumps, pressurizer, external steam generators, etc. that it is not fair to give that plant credit as establishing precedent. There is no doubt that B&W has a much longer history in light water reactors than NuScale, but I am pretty certain from good sources that they were not thinking much about commercializing any modular light water reactors as late as three years ago. In fact, I think I can point to the exact date when the thought started swirling again after a lengthy period of dormancy. If my guess is correct, I was actually in the room when that happened.
Rod – Oh no, I’m not saying that mPower is a copy of the NS Savannah’s reactor. No, mPower is essentially a design that B&W was working on well after the Savannah was taken out of service.
I’m getting this information from people who actually worked on this design back in the day and from a presentation that I saw, which given by the CEO of B&W Modular Nuclear Energy, LLC.
At one time, B&W was thinking about commercializing modular light water reactors for maritime applications, and they had done a significant amount of work on the design. Market conditions changed, however, and the ideas were shelved. When small reactors began to become a hot topic again, they dusted off the old designs and … voila … mPower was born.
You don’t think that B&W simply pulled this design out of thin air in such a short period of time, do you?
Brian – I do not think we are disagreeing at all. The mPower is most definitely an idea that has been swirling around B&W for many years. What I am trying to say is that there was no active project within the company to pursue any of their shelved designs up until about three years ago. They had some internal discussions going about how they might reenter the commercial nuclear market but had not really seriously considered going small. The company that has just recently begun using the B&W name again – they operated for a long time under the name of BWXT – is actually just a portion of what used to be B&W. The commercial arm that built reactors like TMI was sold off to Framatome back in the 1990s, but there was a national security reason for splitting the company and keeping part of it operating under US based ownership.
The mPower design has been refined quite a bit in the past few years, but it was a design that had a long history before it got put on the shelf and languished for well over a decade.
Your phrasing “when small reactors began to become a hot topic again” is interesting to me. I prefer NOT to use the passive voice, but will refrain from assigning credit for that decision.
Oops – time flies when you are old. Looks like the actual date was Jan 23, 2006, which was 4 years ago, not three.
Rod – I don’t think that we disagree either.
My phrasing was deliberate, particularly the word “again.” The nuclear community is not immune to fads and fashion, and the concept of modular reactors has been popular in research circles before. I, for one, hope that the current interest in small, modular reactors is not just another passing fad.
So, if one was to look at the design docs from the Savannah, one could get a pretty decent idea of how the mPower works?
I wish there were more publicly accessible docs (or at least docs available) that I could cite to do basic articles on the mPower like I did for the Hyperion module. B&W appears to be playing their cards very close to their chest – even NuScale has more stuff about what’s going on.
This diagram is especially interesting.
http://www.babcock.com/products/modular_nuclear/images/reactor_assembly.jpg
B&W’s docs say that it uses PWR fuel…but they don’t say it’s a PWR… I can see from the diagrams that doesn’t have circulation pumps, at least non-integral circulation pumps, and as far as I know, it appears that there are several steam generation loops. Or more precisely, there’s a short preheating HX loop near TAF on the exterior of the reactor, and then what I think is a superheating loop above the preheating loop. Also, the RPV is way, way too long for it to be a pure PWR. PWR RPVs are short and squat, or at least those that I know of are. Those dark blue thingamabobs between the lower loop and the upper loop seem to either be steam dryers? Or maybe they’re pumps? Further, could the exterior flow of the upper of the RPV come from the interior flow of the lower RPV? And the exterior part of the lower RPV – which has the preheating loop – could it be connected to the interior part of the upper RPV? That would explain the blue parts. They would be steam dryers? And the middle section would be a flow-diverting manifold or plenum or something like that?
I have a feeling that something weird is going on here in the design that might be interesting.
I can think of several possibilities:
1. The mPower has an integral steam generator in the RPV, therefore steam comes (indirectly) out of the RPV;
2. it has boiling in the RPV, and is thus an indirect cycle BWR – but why would anyone allow primary boiling…wait…if you were to have an integral primary, it just might behoove you to allow primary boiling just to get rid of LOC modalities and work with much higher pressures and temperatures in the RPV, as the RPV is a stronger, integral unit? Plus, if boiling is allowed, this would provide for circulation within the reactor.
3. it is a combination of 1 and 2;
4. it generates supercritical steam?
Or perhaps it’s something else that’s entirely wacky, and maybe I should go to bed?
Another possible rationale for allowing boiling within the primary – coolant circulation speed directly correlates with reactor power in BWRs. As void clearance rates go up, power increases. This allows BWRs to be controlled from 30% to 100% of power without moving control rods. This gives one of the major advantages of BWRs – the ability to use a deionized water chemistry and thus avoid the use of borated neutron absorber to control reactivity. Avoiding use of borated neutron absorber is a good thing, as it lowers corrosion concerns.
Dave – I had a chat with Michael Shepherd of B&W at the Platts Nuclear Energy meeting and listened to his presentation. As a bit of background, Mike has recently come to B&W from GE, where he spent a career working on BWR’s.
The mPower is a system designed by people who have taken lessons and concepts from both branches of the LWR family. It does not have a pressurizer, pressure is controlled by maintaining a steam bubble at the top of the pressure vessel. It does not use dissolved boric acid for reactivity control. It does use circulation pumps at power, but has sufficient natural circulation flow to remove decay heat. The steam supply system is all contained in the single vessel – there are integral steam generators where feed water comes in and steam goes out. There is a small amount of superheat in the steam. The fuel assemblies are standard PWR type fuel, only shorter. (6 feet in length.) There is a flanged connection that allows the top of the system to be lifted off during the refueling event that is necessary every 5 years. There is no designed fuel shuffle, the entire core is replaced and set aside inside the containment. Same burn-up limits as a standard PWR. Enough space is provided for 60 years worth of used fuel storage.
The integral NSSS eliminates the piping break LOCA potential. (This is the same with the NuScale, by the way.)
There is some amount of load following capability, but the best economics come in a base load mode. (That question was asked and answered during the session.)
Aside: it isn’t that frustrating when debating types like Romm or Lovins. You can have a certain amount of fun calling them on their planet killing BS. They aren’t sincerely debating a position and its time to dismiss them to their faces. They say climate change is the problem civilization faces, yet they want to stand in the way of ongoing operation and future expansion of what the authorities they say they recognize, for instance the IPCC, says is a low carbon baseload power source equal to solar or wind when it comes to emissions. They say MIT are the experts yet MIT directly contradicts what they say about how expensive nuclear is, and the cost of new nuclear is their #1 debating point. Their arguments are of such low quality they can be told they aren’t serious. Given that they say the climate situation is so dire, someone advocating an expansion of nuclear can tell them to come up with a better explanation of their case or tell them they should get out of the way. End of aside.
New Energy Tribune article: shale gas way overhyped; proponents now questioning viability:
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=3266
Rod – thanks for the update and the tweets in real time.