First Plug and Play Nuclear plant approved

Long past due but glad to see it

First Small Nuclear Reactor Greenlit By US Regulators

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small nuclear reactor has been approved for certification by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Friday, which could make it the first of its kind to be approved in the United States.
It's been a long time coming. The certification process kicked off all the way back in 2016 and its design was approved two years ago by the NRC.
The small modular reactor (SMR), designed by Oregon-based nuclear reactor company NuScale Power, can be mass produced in a central factory and shipped to wherever they’re needed — which is both cheaper and less time-consuming than designing a custom nuclear reactor for each location.
At 65 feet tall and nine feet in diameter, the reactor is indeed pretty small — for a reactor, anyway — capable of outputting some 77 megawatt electrical units of power.
In fact, up to 12 of these bad boys can be chained together in a standard power plant configuration to produce a total of 924 MWe, according the World Nuclear Association, which puts it about on par with the average nuclear power plant.

 

Built uniformly in a factory and shipped to the site. Spread them around and reduce the need for additional power lines and increase efficiency of grid as you lose less power by reducing the distances the power has to be transmitted.

 

Technology | NuScale Power

FEATURES OF THE NUSCALE POWER MODULE

• No AC or DC power for safe shutdown and cooling: Modules safely shut down and self-cool, indefinitely, with no need for AC or DC power, operator or computer action, or additional water. This provides what is called an unlimited coping period—a first for light water reactor technology.
• Helical Coil Steam Generators (HCSG): The use of compact HCSGs provides a large heat transfer surface area in a small volume. The HCSG geometry has a very low pressure drop that serves to maximize natural circulation flow in the primary loop. The once-through counter-flow design enables the generation of superheated steam and good thermal efficiency using natural circulation flow.
• High strength steel containment immersed in the cooling pool: Acts as a heat exchanger to provide the means to transfer reactor heat to the reactor pool water to limit containment pressure, eliminating the requirement for containment spray systems for cooling. The containment vessel is submerged in the reactor pool, which provides a passive heat sink for heat removal under loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) conditions.
• Maintaining containment in a vacuum limits heat exchange during normal operation: Minimizes reactor vessel heat loss, limits oxygen content, prevents component corrosion and eliminates the requirement for physical reactor vessel insulation.
• Small, efficient core design limits source term: Our NuScale Power Module™ has 1/20 of the nuclear fuel of a large-scale reactor. Its small decay heat, inherent stability, and reactor physics eliminates fuel damage in all postulated design basis events, including those with failure of all control rods to insert. For postulated beyond design basis events, radiation from fuel damage is well below regulatory limits at the plant site boundary.
• Digital Instrumentation & Control (I&C): NuScale’s proprietary field programmable gate array digital I&C system provides comprehensive monitoring and control of all plant systems in a single control room. Control room layout and panel displays were designed using a state-of-the-art simulator and a comprehensive human factors engineering and human system interface evaluation program.

 

I have always wondered why we can power a nuclear aircraft carrier with one but we can't power communities with that same reactor. These are way past due. China has multiples under construction already

 

Provided it is done safely

 

Worldwide market when you can plug and play. Operators and security would seem to be obvious limitations but life in islands should change. Hawaii, USVI, Puerto Rico should have orders in already. Great carbon reduction, tremendously cheaper than current baseload energy costs. These, or similar, should put coal out of business. Not sure if there will be export restrictions on these. I'm sure Europe would love to have a few bout now.

 

When I say safely, I am referring to security of the material that could cause problems un the wrong hands or network isolation to prevent hacking. The engineering isnt in question, just the operations

 

Why no floating nuclear plants offshore from major population centers? Helps solve the separation and a big part of the security issue. If we can float and stabilize a monster windmill farm we should be able to lock one of these and a desal plant big enough to cool it offshore

 

This is a totally different animal wrt the facility