A week before the Preakness and two weeks after the Kentucky Derby, it was an atomic horse race in Baltimore. Reactor vendors trotted out their technologies at the ELECTRIC POWER Conference & Exhibition in sessions that filled the nuclear track’s 96-seat room at the Baltimore Convention Center.
The reactor makers were also soliciting help from the audience for offers of supply chain items (in short supply) and engineering talent (in even shorter supply). It was deal-making time extraordinaire.
Big three in a race for market share
The favorites in the race for new U.S. reactors were all the usual suspects. The Westinghouse AP1000 pressurized water reactor (a scale-up from the already-approved AP600, which attracted no buyers), with a design certificate in hand from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), is in the starting gate against two substantial rivals.
Perhaps the most formidable is the General Electric-Hitachi brace of boiling water reactors: the already-NRC-blessed advanced boiling water reactor (ABWR), which has NRC design certification, and the GE economic simplified boiling water reactor (ESBWR), a passive design now under NRC design review.
The selling point of the Westinghouse and GE reactors is that they are departures from past designs. The new horses on the track all rely on passive features—gravity and thermal circulation—to simplify their designs and reduce pumps and valves and piping in both normal and emergency cooling nuclear plant environments.
Then there is AREVA’s evolutionary power reactor (EPR), a pressurized water reactor (PWR) based on well-understood Framatome technology. Plants using the EPR (one currently over budget and behind schedule) are under construction in Finland, and another is just beginning construction in France. This plant design, argue its proponents, is the real deal; it’s under construction today. There are no surprises. They hope.
The competing technologies, argue the AREVA advocates, are paper reactors; there’s little practical knowledge of how they will work. The AREVA plant, which has yet to win U.S. design certification, is, the sales folk aver, simply an evolutionary extension of previous PWR designs. It is the peanut butter-and-jelly reactor. Fewer pumps and pipes, but still recognizable.
Westinghouse and GE are fervent in their marketing rebuttals. Their designs, argue GE and Westinghouse, are far superior. They aren’t evolutionary, but revolutionary, and a whole lot better. They employ features known to improve safety and cut costs over conventional systems, using gravity and natural, thermal circulation. Engineered safety features are out; passive reactions to problems are in.
The next new thing
The dark horse, charging from the rear, is the pebble bed modular reactor. This is a “Generation IV” machine in the industry’s nomenclature, meaning that it’s even further from reality than the new class of reactors (see “Developing the next generation of reactors” in POWER, April 2008).
But it is promising, based as it is on high-temperature helium-cooled technology that was quite successful in Julich, West Germany, in the 1980s (at a very small scale). Unfortunately, around the same time, the technology failed at a commercial scale (300 MW) in the U.S., at the Fort St. Vrain plant in Colorado. Investors are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a test of a 400-MW thermal reactor in South Africa. Let’s watch this experiment.
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