![]() ![]() With similar projects rising in China and Russia, the company is riding a global wave of interest in SMRs. The design is now working its way through licensing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the company has lined up a first customer, a utility association that wants to start construction on a plant in Idaho in 2023. Spun out of nearby Oregon State University (OSU) here in 2007, NuScale has spent more than $800 million on its design-$288 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the rest mainly from NuScale's backer, the global engineering and construction firm Fluor. To make their reactors cheaper, the engineers plan to fabricate them whole in a factory instead of assembling them at a construction site, cutting costs enough to compete with other forms of energy. To make their reactors safer, NuScale engineers have simplified them, eliminating pumps, valves, and other moving parts while adding safeguards in a design they say would be virtually impervious to meltdown. "If I just scale down a large reactor, I'll lose, no doubt," says Reyes, 63, a soft-spoken native of New York City and son of Honduran and Dominican immigrants. For about $3 billion, NuScale would stack up to 12 SMRs side by side, like beer cans in a six-pack, to form a power plant.īut size alone isn't a panacea. Whereas a typical commercial reactor cranks out a gigawatt of power, each NuScale SMR would generate just 60 megawatts. Reyes and NuScale's 350 employees have designed a small modular reactor (SMR) that would take up 1% of the space of a conventional reactor. Jose Reyes, a nuclear engineer and cofounder of NuScale Power, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, says he and his colleagues can revive nuclear by thinking small. Globally, nuclear power supplies just 11% of electrical power, down from a high of 17.6% in 1996. So even as global temperatures break one record after another, just one nuclear reactor has turned on in the United States in the past 20 years. Most important, with new reactors costing $7 billion or more, the nuclear industry struggles to compete with cheaper forms of energy, such as natural gas. Nations also continue to dither over what to do with radioactive reactor waste. The public continues to distrust it, especially after three reactors melted down in a 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. However, in most of the world, the nuclear industry is in retreat. Advocates say nuclear reactors, compact and able to deliver steady, carbon-free power, are ideal replacements for fossil fuels and a way to slash greenhouse gas emissions. The features of different safety characteristics of MSR power plant are reviewed and assessment in comparison to other solid fueled light water reactors LWRs.CORVALLIS, OREGON-To a world facing the existential threat of global warming, nuclear power would appear to be a lifeline. In this paper, a historical review of the major plant systems in MSR is presented. As the only liquid-fueled reactor concept, the safety basis, characteristics and licensing of an MSR are different from solid-uranium fueled light water reactors. MSRs meet many of the future goals of nuclear energy, in particular for what concerns an improved sustainability, an inherent safety with strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, stable coolant, low pressure operation that don not require expensive containment, easy to control, passive decay heat cooling and unique characteristics in terms of actinide burning and waste reduction, while benefiting from the past experience acquired with the molten salt technology. In the recent years, there has been a growing interest in molten salt reactors, which have been considered in the framework of the Generation IV International Forum, because of their several potentialities and favorable features when compared with conventional solid-fueled reactors. Traditionally these reactors are thought of as thermal breeder reactors running on the thorium to 233U cycle and the historical competitor to fast breeder reactors. Molten salt reactors (MSRs) have a long history with the first design studies beginning in the 1950s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
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