Do small nukes have big potential?

Big plants, big price tags, big opposition: When it comes to nuclear power, small isn’t usually the operative word. But an Oregon startup is working to bring nuclear power down to size, while tackling two of the most oft-cited oppositions to atom power: cost and safety. Corvallis-based NuScale Power says its small, modular nuclear reactors include passive safety systems and a scalable model that could work for both facility-scale and utility-scale projects.

Its technology, developed at Oregon State University with the help of federal funding in the early 2000s, may be poised to ride a wave of new support for nuclear power. President Obama directed about $40 million to a small nuclear reactor program in his 2011 budget request, while energy secretary Stephen Chu has called small modular reactors “one of the most promising arenas of nuclear development.”

Sustainable Industries talked with NuScale Power co-founder and CEO Paul Lorenzini, an attorney and nuclear engineer, about why he thinks small nukes have such big potential. 

SI: You’ve said that nuclear power used to be thought of as the “Darth Vader of energy policy.” But you’ve also said there’s been a recent shift in attitudes. Can you elaborate on how and why that might be happening?
PL: Stewart Brand probably put it best. He said it all changed with global warming. ... When we confronted the issue of climate change, people realized that we need non-carbon sources of energy, especially baseload energy. … And there are only three major sources of baseload energy. Two of them are carbon based—coal and natural gas—and one of them is non-carbon based and that’s nuclear. … I think most people have looked at this and realized, if you’re going to have a sustainable, non-carbon energy future, you’ve got to include nuclear power in the mix. 

SI: What are the hurdles to getting new plants built and online?
PL: There are really two hurdles. The first is getting approval from the appropriate regulatory agencies, primarily the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), especially for the first plants. The second hurdle is the financing required, especially for some of the larger plants. Nuclear power plants are cheap to run, relative to other resources, but expensive to build. It’s that front-end cost that is the difficult financial barrier. I think there’s an expectation that once the first plants get built, [investors] will continue to be more confident about the cost, and costs will be in the ranges where loan guarantees won’t be required. But it’s the uncertainty associated with building the first plants that are always the barrier.

SI: Can you elaborate about the uses of NuScale’s reactors? What are the possible applications for both individual reactors and multi-module facilities?
PL: If you look at the development of small reactors … until about two years ago they were primarily thought of as generating loads in developing countries and remote locations. … There are small countries throughout the world that don’t have the infrastructure to build a large plant, so small nuclear plants for them are very attractive. Originally, small nuclear plants were designed as a way to use [nuclear] in places where large plants wouldn’t work. As we looked at commercializing this design that was developed at Oregon State, we realized that we could take those small modules and cluster them together to make a large plant and approach the construction of larger plants in a different way that would remove or reduce the financial risks.
So, today when you look at small reactors, it really is a technology that is going to reach both into the domestic market for relatively large utility applications and in the developing and small countries for smaller grids. In addition to that, you can look at using them for desalination. One of the things we could do with our plant … is to use it during the day to produce electricity and use it at night to [power] a desalination plant.