Maximizing Existing Nuclear Plants’ Output
Though no spades of dirt have turned on new nuclear power plant projects in the U.S. in decades, the contribution of the atom to U.S. power supplies continues to grow. That was the theme of the “Maximizing the Value of Nuclear Assets” session. How could this be?
One part of the answer is planned plant upratings, which add usable new capacity to existing power reactors. Exelon, owner of the nation’s largest nuclear generating fleet, plans to add 1,500 MW in uprated capacity by 2017. By 2017, said Exelon’s Sharon Eldridge, uprating activities will have “touched all of our units in one way or another.”
Nationwide, according to industry figures, some 3,500 MW of new nuclear capacity will appear in the U.S. in the same time frame through plant uprates. “We are getting more MW from existing power plants,” Eldridge said. “That comes through new technologies and materials and half a century of operating experience.” Exelon added 60 MW in new nuclear capacity in 2009 and has added another 50 MW so far this year.
Plant uprating is also a path to lower production costs, noted Eldridge, yielding lower costs per MW of generated electricity. That’s because the uprated plants require no additional operating personnel, and newer equipment means lower maintenance costs. So there is no overall increase in operating and maintenance expenses.
Big Plans for Small Nukes
As new, big iron looks increasingly problematical, many in the nuclear industry are reviving a long-standing interest in small and modular plants. The session on smaller reactors had a standing-room-only crowd.
The reasoning for the interest in little machines is straightforward: Smaller plants require less money up front and, presumably, enable faster in-service (meaning in-the-money) dates. Smaller machines also mean spreading the risk if demand does not materialize soon enough to justify gigawatt and larger investments.
It is clearly serious business. Several global companies are working on small, modular reactors, and the DOE is putting resources into the concept. The DOE’s main R&D thrust is the Gen IV program of new, large reactors, but the shop is looking at smaller, modular units, aimed mainly at export markets. Enough serious players in this market mean that smaller, more quickly deployable units will get a thorough vetting. Their success in the market is far from assured, however.
One market player is Hyperion Energy, a privately held company developing a small, modular unit using technology developed at the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. Another is Babcock & Wilcox (B&W), which is developing the “mPower” design (see photo). It is a 125-MWe module that would be built in a factory and then delivered to a site, with a four-plus-year fuel cycle and a containment completely underground. B&W claims the modules enable building a scalable plant of anywhere from 125 MW to 1,000 MW.
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| Banking on modular. Program Manager John Ferrara explained that Babcock & Wilcox is targeting the U.S. market with its small, modular mPower reactor, which it hopes to deploy by 2020. Source: POWER |
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