Diplomatic tool?
Blackwell is not the only person bullish on the security-related aspects of building small.
Tom Sanders, president of the American Nuclear Society and manager of Sandia National Laboratories' Global Nuclear Futures Initiative, has been stumping for small rectors for more than a decade. American-made small reactors, Sanders insists, can play a central role in global nonproliferation efforts.
"Our role at Sandia is the national security-driven notion that it's in the interests of the U.S. to be one of the dominant nuclear suppliers," Sanders said.
While U.S. companies have been exiting the industry over the past decades as government and popular support for new construction has waned, Sanders maintains that strong U.S. participation in the nuclear energy marketplace would give diplomats a new tool to use with would-be nuclear powers.
"It's hard to tell Iran what to do if you don't have anything Iran wants," he explained.
Sanders said mini-reactors are ideal to sell to developing countries that want to boost their manufacturing might and that would otherwise look to other countries for nuclear technologies. If the United States is not participating in that market, he said, it becomes hard to steer buyers away from technologies that pose greater proliferation risks.
Sanders been promoting this view since the 1990s, he said, when he realized "we were no longer selling nuclear goods and services, so we could no longer write the rules." The domestic nuclear industry had basically shut down, with no new construction in decades and a flight of talent and ideas overseas.
There is a silver lining in that brain drain, though, he believes, in that U.S. companies getting back into the game now are less tied to the traditional, giant plants and are freer to innovate.
A feature that several of the new product designs share is that the power plants could be mass-produced in a factory to minimize cost, using robots to ensure consistency. Also, with less design work for each installation, the time to complete an order would be shortened and some of the capital and other costs associated with long lead times avoided, Sanders said.
Another feature he favors is building the plants with a lifetime supply of fuel sealed inside.
Shipped loaded with fuel, such reactors could power a small city for 20 years without the host country ever handling it. Once depleted, the entire plant would be packed back up and shipped back to the United States, he said, with the sensitive spent fuel still sealed away inside.
Sanders is working on a reactor design hatched by the lab with an undisclosed private partner. He believes it is feasible to build a prototype modular reactor -- including demonstration factory components and a mockup of the reactor itself -- as early as 2014, for less than a billion dollars.
A mini-reactor could ring up at less than $200 million, he said, or at $300 million to $400 million with 20 years of fuel. At $3,000 to $4,000 per kilowatt, he said, that would amount to significant savings over estimates of $4,000 to $6,000 per kilowatt for construction alone with traditional plant designs.
To get a design ready to build, Sanders is urging a partnership between the government and the private sector.
"If it's totally a government research program, labs can take 20 to 30 years" to finish such projects, he said. "If it becomes a research science project, it could go on forever."
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21 Comments
Add CommentMr. Sandia's Sanders is 1100% right, I think. Unites States already lost competative role in supplying thw world with safe Nuclear reators, big or small and smart. Why? Because we have been sleeping on this technology. Ironically, we have mad e tremedous progress in "killing" machine - armamnets and weapons etc!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith aggressive Government help we can do some seroius research into to dispoing the spent fuel safely. Why not blast the spent fuel into outer space to the sun, for example!
Ram
Why not use decommissioned nuclear submarine reactors for small city power?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMakhijani's thoroughly discredited propaganda refers to Frances current fuel recycling efforts which attempt to separate out the 98% unused fuel from the depleted materials to be reused in Generation 3.5 reactor fuel rods.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFast neutron reactors like Sandia's and the extremely successful Shippingport reactor shutdown by corrupt politicians in the early 80's use the discarded fuel rods as fuel itself and the waste product from these is small in volume, much more benign and of no use to 3rd world bomb makers. They also can use thorium for fuel.
Costs of these 95% load factor small reactors with under mass manufacturing techniques will be much less than solar/wind tech and are ideal to replace the boiler part of fossil fuel generators on site.
A nuclear submarine reactor plant is not suitable for such use, and a decommissioned one is worn out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEco's have stopped all nuclear construction in this country for over 20 years.
As to blasting nuclear waste into the sun, that is a dangerous and wasteful thing to do. At present space shots fail 1 out of 120 and cost over $10,000 per pound to launch. Deep sea trench subduction is the safest long term disposal that I know of, but the Eco's would foam at the mouth over that.
A nice idea but where will we get the Uranium from ? http://www.resourceinvestor.com/News/2009/4/Pages/Uranium-shortage-looming--PDF-.aspx. Using Plutonium would be a security nightmare
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo instead of fewer piles of radioactive spent fuel we will have many more smaller piles of spent fuel sitting around for hundreds or thousands of years ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a terrorists dream.
Me liek nuclear. Me liek glow in dark. Pretty!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHulk
I don't think putting negative labels on folks who disagree with your opinion will help.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFission reactors still have the inherent problem of storing their waste a very, very long time. While we may be able to place the waste in containment now, how do we guarantee that it will stay in containment that long? We're not solving any environmental problems with fission, we're merely deferring it. We need to put some of our creative energy into creating a permanent solution.
Alcohol, solar, geothermal, hydro all seem to be very viable solutions. Even if we can't fix it all now, blunting the demand is a huge step in the right direction. Ultimately, fusion is probably the right answer (since all of the above are derivatives of a nearby fusion reactor).
There is no need to store nuclear waste a long, long, long time. In reality we only need to store it a couple hundred years until we have a better solution. Storeing something 200 years is an engineering piece of cake. It may not be feasible to ship the waste to the sun now but do you really belive it would be hard to do 200 years from now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, what intellectual laziness. Blame the Eco's for all that went wrong in nuclear land. Do the terms 'spiraling costs' and 'project overrun' ring a bell?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh what intellectual laziness. Blame the Eco's. Without them, this world would be so fine. Disregard the fact that the US is a democracy and that, apparently, in the eyes of the democratically elected government(s), those Eco's were right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf there is anyone to blame for the nuclear disappointment, it is the nuclear industry itself. Do the terms 'spiraling costs' and 'project overrun' ring a bell?
Oops, sorry for the double post.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDeep sea trench in subduction zones are a viable solution, so when someone talks about long term storage being a problem, I dismiss their opinion, since they are blocking facts. Ships sink pretty reliably, never to return. If you don't know what a subduction zone is, perhaps you need to study up before you opine on such a technical and important subject.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTest
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese sealed fuel reactors are a great idea and worth serious consideration. Nuclear power is green, much more efficient than wind, solar, fossil and most importantly it's simply unavoidable. We need to spend a great deal of time, money and thought on Nuclear engineering ideas in the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about NO fission reactors--large, medium, or small?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientists are telling us that there is some chance we are as little as 10 years away from falling off a climate precipice with permafrost methane emissions and ocean acidification forming the leading edge of a very steep slope. We don't have time for wind. solar, geothermal, biomass partial solutions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe nuclear waste problem is solved with the consignment of waste to fuel for liquid metal fast reactors, like the one Sandia Labs has just designed and just needs political support to launch. To put the waste problem in perspective, we could just take all of it to the nearest coal plant and meter it slowly into the smoke stack. The nuclear waste would increase the coal plants already radioactive emissions by only a tiny percentage and wouldn't add any more lead, arsenic or mercury to the air. Or we could store the nuke waste under a half acre or so of the thousands of square miles of desert ,solar types were planning destroying forever by covering them with toxic solar cells.
DON"T EVEN TRY TO TELL ME ABOUT THE ECO"s!!!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am over 60 years old,and have paid attention. For nearly 50 years, every time someone ever tried to do any thing in this country there is a group of Eco's screaming bloody murder "no way, not ever". For every endevior there is an eco group with an army of lawyers against.
Fusion as is pursued at this time by the main stream is a very large dead end. has been for 50 years. Even GOD does not use plasma fusion to power the universe. 50 years ago practical plasma power generation was within 30 years. Now the number is within 50 years. The very last thing plasma wants to do is fuse. Even a hydrogen bomb is not a plasma fusion device.
Real atomic fusion uses an entirely different path.
No nuclear. You can make it the size of a pea and its radioactive waste would still be affecting life for millions of years. Its disgusting and way too long term.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWasn' this an idea that a San Diego company called General Atomics had years ago?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTchernobyl is supposed to have caused a mere 32 deaths. This is to forget the 900,000 workforce who shovelled highly radioactive material from the reactor and its immediate surroundings! Are a million Americans prepared to sacrifice their health if another 3-mile Island incident actually blows?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs reactors get older they get riskier as they get fragile. There are already too many to properly supervise. Scrap them before the already huge costs soar exponentially...