Why This Small Nuclear Reactor is Actually Winning
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
- The GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 has been the sleeper design in the SMR market. But while other companies grab headlines, GE has been signing contracts. Let’s take a look at why this design is quickly becoming the new small nuclear reactor of choice around the world.
This video explores the BWRX-300 and why it stands out in the crowded small modular nuclear reactor market.
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Chapters
0:00 A Crowded SMR Market
1:38 Unassuming Design
5:57 Worldwide Deployment
7:15 What Does This Mean for the Future
8:51 Success Breeds Success - Věda a technologie
Right now, nuclear construction has the reputation of being over-budget and over-time. SMR's have also been criticized for being more expensive per kilowatt, than large reactors. But at this point, it may not matter. If GE can do a repeatable smooth process for continuous nuclear construction, on budget, on time, ... reliably deliver ... my hat off to them. (My preference is still passive safety, and factory manufacturing, as a minimum, to regularize the whole process.)
That's because the nuclear industry has stalled since Chernobyl, with much less plants being constructed, the technical knowledge was lost and it became more costly... That's why some countries want to make big projects, to rebuild the industry
Nuclear is dead in America because it is possible for opponents to throw one obstacle after another delaying both construction and final permitting. the time delay between allocation of money to revenue generation pushes return on investment from adequate to zero and then negative.
@@joechang8696 exactly. Abolish the EPA
150,000 SMRs in the world to stop carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.
All the Dictators ? ?
Uranium ore exports to every country's nuclear industries ?
@@joechang8696 Yes - They need a champion high up in the government to help keep progress occurring.
2. It uses uranium fuel rods that are currently approved and monopolized by GE and Hitachi. No additional regulatory consent is needed. This is a stupendous advantage.
monopoly is an advantage? they didn't teach this at school back in the day...
It is not licensed by the NRC
@@user-mc7ez6lm4x Yeah. That sounds like a huge burden to whoever purchases the reactor. There needs to be standardization. Not a bunch of propriety bullshit. Not to mention GE doesn't have the greatest track record (Fukushima Daichi). If I owned a company and wanted an SMR to power something, I'd hard pass on GE's design. I'd rather go the route of nuscale, rolls royce, or some other SMR design from a more reputable company
@@breakfast7595 Ge also di TVA browns ferry. Is has the worest record of the TVA Nuclear power plants, It uses Ge mark 1 the worest design in the whole world
The fuel is only a small portion of the price of nuclear energy anyways.
In 1976 I met a GE engineer that told me about a reactor that would fit inside a shipping container and would run unattended for 40 years. We talked about building them where they would set on the ends and used as columns in entrance gates for a town. Or set up as industrial art. I think one unit would power 3,000 homes.
Copenhagen atomics is developing that.
@@MrRolnicek I think that is a great product to develop. I hope it soon becomes cost effective to sell to the public..
@@morelanmn EVERY silver bullet to solve climate change is a great product to develop. Although right now the only 2 options we know of are grid scale capable batteries and nuclear power (and I guess room temperature superconductors).
But yea, Copenhagen specifically are fast becoming my favorite nuclear design. I preferred Elysium because they are MUCH more production ready but there's so many delays with everything nuke that Copenhagen might actually squash all the bugs before anyone is allowed to actually start building anything and in that case they are the better design overall.
Small nit. The Nuscale SMR is the first SMR design ever approved by the NRC. They are currently getting an uprated version of the design approved and plan to build that version (77 MWe vs 50 MWe) for their first customer (UAMPS).
Recent news include some deal with Indonesia.
Bigger nit. BWRs circulate radioactive water through the entire power cycle (turbine, condenser, feedwater) resulting much more expensive maintenance due to safety protocols.
Yes but as they said this guy is in Europe not US under NRC.
@@trobinson14kc how’s that relevant to this?
@@abcddef2112 Yea easy to get paper deals saying ‘we will buy your reactor”. Only hype until they get a regulator to approve turning first shovel of dirt.
Good development but it is not just emmissions free elctricity that is needed. The big challenge is replacing the emmissions dense industrial process heat associated with for example chemical, cement, brick, synthetic fuel and metallurgy industries. High temperature reactors using molten salt, pebble beds, thorium fuel etc offer great advantages here. Such reactors also tend to be radiologically and thermally more efficient significantly reducing plant size as well as reprocessing and waste issues.
I'm Canadian, knew our CANDU's were being retired, but I still hadn't heard about the BWRX-300! Great information!
It's a shame about the CANDU's they're great reactors, proliferation machines but great reactors.
Gen 4 reactors, please...
Yeah, active safety isn't an improvement.
No they first should sell something.. eh outdated.. as 'new'. Just scaled down it and ... yep... sell it as revolution. But truth is that this is a mall vs tiny shop near by... who is going to win? )
@@maksimmuruev423 Make it smaller so the disaster is also smaller.
Interesting. I'm sure some will be built; but not sure they will dominate; especially with the recently announced Westinghouse AP300 due to its ability to tap into the AP1000 supply chain and construction experience (and GE has not built a new nuclear unit in decades and no one knows what it will actually cost); whereas at this point essentially 6 AP1000's have been built, 2 abandoned during construction, and 8 more have been ordered with some of them under construction already.
Looking at the history of the EPR in Europe and the "nuclear revival" in the USA about a decade or so ago leads to questions on how many of these will actually get built.
For the record; The US NRC has at this time the following approved reactor designs (per:
- Boiling Water Reactors: ABWR, ESBWR
- Pressurized Water Reactors: System 80+, AP600, AP1000, APR1400
US Utility Companies had selected sites and gotten site and combined construction and operating licenses (COL) for 14 of these reactors (2 ABWR's, 2 ESBWR's, 10 AP1000's) at 8 different sites.
6 US Utility Companies had gotten Early Site Permits which allowed the start of construction before the COL was approved (and construction was started at some of those sites). By the way this is what I call "Shovel ready" - not that an initial design has been completed which has not yet been reviewed and approved by the regulator (hint: designs often change somewhat during the review process).
Only 4 AP1000 reactors were started in the US, with 2 being abandoned 2/3 way though. Vogtle 3 is now operating and Vogtle 4 should be operating in another year. Meanwhile the Chinese built 4 AP1000s with minor cost and construction delays and started them years ago (the Chinese had been building other nuclear power plants and had current working knowlege of what was needed and how to do it).
The European experience with their EPR followed a similar pattern (lots of people wanted to build one) - and the 1st started construction in 2005 and came online in 2021 after 16 1/2 years of construction. I was soon shut down for problems and was restarted in April 2023.
The second one (Flamanville) started construction in 2007 and is not yet finished due to problems.
China built 2 of them (Taishan 1 & 2) with both cost and construction delays (9 years to get online).
Hinkley Point (United Kindom) is also experiencing major delays and cost increases with their 2 EPR's.
Framatome/EDF has admitted that there were major design issues with the EPR and are now working on a revised EPR-2 design (meanwhile the Chinese ordered 6 more Westinghouse AP1000's in 2022 because of how well they operate).
Even regulatory approval does not mean the plant will work well.
So I am skeptical of how successful the market will be for the BWRX-300 will be. GE-Hitachi could not estimate the construction cost or timeline of the ESBWR when several utility companies wanted to build them (who had COL's in hand) which was a key reason those units never moved into construction. I'm not sure how well they can estimate the cost of the BWRX-300. Also, regulation approval of the design is a several year process (at best) - especially for equipment that has never been built. The fist plants will be "initial one time construction" plants which are always much higher cost than with experienced construction and when a supply chain has produced multiple items before.
The Westinghouse AP300 might get through the regulatory process faster as it uses major components from the AP1000 (with 5 units operating and a 6th close to operating; and 8 more units ordered or under construction). It makes a lot of difference during approval when you can use already licensed and proven in operation components.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. The BWRX-300 might do well. It may also be like the EPR, which after 6 units no one is interested in building again, and it might be that only a few - or none - are finished due to various problems.
I have a lot of personal experience working in the nuclear power industry... I'm pro nuclear power; but, realistic about how difficult it is to go from concept to design to regulatory approval to construction - and to a well running and operating power plant that will provided many decades of reliable and cost effective service.
I believe that the AP1000 is the only new western reactor design to get past those hurdles... The just announced AP300 uses a lot of the same major components and the same control system as the AP1000. I believe its going to be a very strong competitor to the BWRX-300.
Sure hope so. The issue that plagues nuclear is the exact same that plagues US high speed rail for example. We just can't get any god damn consistency in program commitment.
We start them, companies lining up like crazy to finally get something going, we then default to whoever has current political decision-making in his/her back pocket, hire completely clueless construction companies that consistently fuck up reactor construction, and when problems inevitably crop up we either put the thing on half or order it's complete destruction. We plaster everywhere on MSM how nuclear has failed and will never work, and we wait for everyone to have forgotten how to build anything that isn't a solar farm or a fossil fuel plant before trying again.
I totally agree with this view. The BWRX-300 based on a Technology that went nowhere. Whereas the AP 1000 is proving itself as it has reached the Nth of a Kind Stage, and so there is a lot of knowledge how to build them.The AP300 will leverage this knowledge, whereas the BWRX-300 will have all the problems of a first of a kind, that originally Plagued the EPR [eg Flamanville ], and the AP 1000 [ Vogtle, V.C. Summer]. For this reason, I believe that the AP-300 will take the the market from the BWRX-300.
After VC Summer and Vogtle who in their right mind would want a Westinghouse reactor. And there is no such thing as economies of SMALL scale
@@clarkkent9080 You do realize that 4 AP-1000 power plants were built on time and on schedule in China by companies experienced in nuclear construction.
China has been so impressed in how well the AP1000 runs that it recently ordered 6 more AP1000 units. Those will also be built on time and in budget.
The overwhelming overruns in the USA were because the USA no longer had contractors or the worker base that understood nuclear construction. They literally had to dismantle and reconstruct major portions of the USA projects because they didn't construct them correctly the 1st time.
There is a known learning curve vs plant cost curve. IF the same contractors and key worker base in the USA buid another set of AP1000 units the construction cost will be half of the cost of VC Summer and Vogtle, the next set half of that. And sets after that will be essentially at a very economical rate. Sorry, like many things experience matters; and both the USA and Europe totally lost the knowledge base of how to build nuclear plants.
Also that loss of knowledge base will also affect any SMR reactor design as well. All those people talking about how you can use normal industrial construction practices and techniques are full of BS. Only the best of the workers (top 25% of workers) ever adjust to nuclear quality control methods and approach.
Nuclear construction is totally different than normal industrial and commercial construction practices. The nuclear construction practices developed because of all the problems from the construction practices and processes that affected the plants built in the 1950's - 1980's.
My view is that the USA is totally short-cutting itself by not investing in redeveloping the necessary nuclear construction knowledge base. Yes that will cost money. But, so does everything else.
@@perryallan3524 First, while the Chinese AP1000s took significantly less time than the American counterparts, they were NOT built on time and China is not known for providing accurate data on the cost. And the reactors that China is now building are copies of the AP1000 and they will NOT be compensating Westinghouse for stealing the design.
The VC Summer and Vogtle units were built by utilities who have been operating nuclear reactors for decades and by experienced construction firms. That is the best the U.S. had to offer.
The issue with nuclear construction in the U.S. is NOT because they don't understand nuclear construction. It is because U.S. industry does NOT provide what the project is paying for and really does not seem to care. The rework you cite was the "build modules in a factory" concept that people still claim will reduce costs and yes those modules had to be disassembled and rewelded at the site because they did not fit together and many welds were sub par.
Another example: a U.S. steel mill was paid a premium to provide specific rebar to be used in a critical safety system enclosure. When construction began installing the rebar it snapped when bent. That project had to be stopped and many work hours lost until another contract could be let to another mill to produce the correct rebar. There was no time to litigate so the first mill was paid and their rebar was scrapped because it could not be sold for liability reasons.
In the southeast, storms are common and every time a storm was approaching, outside work was stopped and untold work hours lost. The last few months of the Vogtle project was delayed due to what was described as shoddy construction work but was actually sabotage to keep that gravy train going . Scores of project workers were let go every week when they failed random drug tests. Bet that don't happen in China.
The VC Summer and Vogtle plants used union labor which in general are much more experienced in building to code. A welder is a welder, a pipe fitter is a pipe fitter, an electrician is an electrician. It is not a question of experience but it is construction not caring and building to Walmart or Amazon warehouse standards. I believe they know what should be done but just don't care and experience will not change that.
I worked in the nuclear industry for 40+ years at 5 different facilities and I do agree with your statement that workers do not adjust to the nuclear standards. Close and almost mean nothing. It must be built exactly to spec and using exactly the components specified. The U.S. did not have enough construction manpower to construct both VC Summer and Vogtle. Even after VC Summer shutdown, Vogtle construction was short staffed.
Figure out how to get more people to go into a construction career and actually give a $hit about the quality of their work and maybe in 20-30 years the U.S. can build more nuclear plants. However, the U.S. is moving to establish new electrical generation capacity that is needed now and we cannot wait for nuclear to get its act together
The Monticello Nuclear Plant iin Minnesota is a BWR 3. It took 4 years to build, was completed in 1971 and still operates today. If logistics are properly worked out on these projects, similar build times should be expected. Monticello was built before the internet or personal computers. Once they get one built of this revision, construction of the rest should go smoothly. This may be a pragmatic partial solution to global warming.
Ten years ago Monticello was upgraded at a huge cost, just so that it could keep producing electricity at a higher cost than sustainable wind or solar power. It simply cannot compete on an economic basis, never mind that nuclear energy produces waste products and is risky both for health and national security reasons. Nuclear is dead -- why are we wasting more money on it?
I agree with your comments on build times etc. As an engineer I suggest you research global warming to see if CO2 is the problem it's made out to be. As a clean alternative to fossil fuels, I agree nuclear is the way to go.
@@s.a.3882 It is a big part of the problem, so less co2 is always nice.
@@s.a.3882 huh? wdym see if global warming is a issue? it obv is hello what
The US built about a dozen reactors starting construction late 1960s, build time 3-4 years, all under $1000/KW, todays $, good safety records. The all began construction under the AEC regulator. Monticello, Point Beach, Oyster Bay, Nine Mike 1, etc. BWR and PWR.
The light water reactors proposed today are similar light water designs, but the regulatory involvement is far different. ALARA, LNT, aircraft impact.
After working 29 years at both GE and Westinghouse plants the BWRX-300 sounds like a great solution sounds like a great fix for clean energy.
A corection, it snot a GE reactor, its a GE-Hitatchi reactor. GE-Hitatchi is diffrent from GE. While both GE and Hitatchi did make BWR prior to the merger, the BWRX-300 is pretty much a downscale of ESBWR that in turn is a generation upgrade of ABWR-II that in turn is a upscale of ABWR that originate in the Hitatchi-Toshiba cooperation prior to GE invested in Hitachi... While yes if you go back a bit more GE was one of the original supplier of BWR to Japan.
The $/kW is not as important as the build speed. Because of the long time to recoup the cost, even just the interest during building can stack up significantly. The actual dollar value of the reactor is there for second most important to the build speed. Its sort of the core of the economics behind SMR. Even if they are more expensive, they may still be more economical.
The generation 4 shift is not yet. generation 3++ will have something like a decade head-start of gen 4, and even when gen 4 will start coming of the assembly line, the mere volume might still give gen 3++ an advantage for a decade more
All throughout the video the reactor is shown as GE Hitachi.
He says GE for brevitys' sake.
@@TheRealBozz well yea, but its kind of strange saying GE, when its originally a Hitachi product.
GE and Hitachi have really not fully integrated before the last couple of years.
Also GE is a totally different company from GE-Hitachi...
Its like.. Well .. Volvo and Volvo, two totaly different companies that have the same name due to history
@Science in Engineering I'm going to guess, by your nick, that you are a minutiae kind of guy. You are asking for specificity where, conversationally, there is no need for it. This is not a white-paper and I doubt the OP is a nuclear scientist, nor is he pushing a nationalistic or corporate agenda.
How many homes can 300 MWe's power?
@@JayForsure 300k
I love the ideas. I worked on building a conventional large plant back around 1970-71 that is still generating a few percent above its stated design output 50 years later. Oh, GOSH, that plant's costs spiraled as the protesters' lawyers' suits forced redesigns. Personally, even though (or particularly because) I know the failure-points they designed the plant to work through, I wouldn't hesitate to live next door to the aging girl.
Now a lot of those protesters are wishing they hadn't held up the research and set back the development of newer, safer designs. Help! The planet is melting!
Yep. The dozen (20?) US light water reactors that started construction around 1968 under the US AEC were the best combination of cheap, fast to build, and safe that the world has seen, anywhere, up to today. Build time from start to commission and online in 49 months, with actual site construction 2 years, cost
@@Nill757"within 10 years energy will be too cheap to meter"... the power companies may enjoy that idea, barely, but the oil, auto and bunches of other industries do not enjoy it.
@@leechowning2712 Yes France had a large oil fired power fleet until the 80s. The nuclear buildout there obliterated the entire fleet of oil plants in a dozen years. That’s never happened anywhere else, anytime. I imagine some oil and coal interests noticed and would do what they could to insure it never happens again. Same goes for large solar and wind industries today.
@@Nill757 we would not be discussing EVs right now if the electric bill for a house was a flat fee... you would not be able to sell gasoline. Diesel trains and boats? With SMRs for all? Yeah forget that. Literally, go down the list... every major industry now is linked to oil. It is like water in that Jackie Chan movie... when you and a few friends control it all money is the least of your worries.
Swede here. I wish we were among the countries ghat have made a technology selection. So far any serious actor is in the “thinking about it phase” and most proposals are PR stunts, like a server company proposing to put one in downtown Stockholm.
This definitely sounds like an ad for GE/Hitachi.
The BWR was developed by the Argonne National Laboratory and General Electric (GE) in the mid-1950s. The main present manufacturer is GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy.
Great content, keep it up.
An early lead can be good, but eventually you're surpassed by better designs.
I suspect that won't hurt GE because they're ultimately leveraging existing R&D rather than starting from scratch. They may then deliver something better in their next generation that, optimistically, could beat designs currently in development.
Are they too early in SMR? Probably not, as long as they're already thinking about their next generation and leveraging their experience in this generation.
Also honestly we need more reactors and we need them now.
Since the public opinion was successfully swayed against all form of nuclear as being expensive, high maintenance and dangerous.
Dangerous was never true ever in it's history but people just pretend it is. And high maintenance/costs is almost entirely derived on the sticker price of the most massive and missmanaged projects, ususally by comparing them with subsidized solar or wind with it's capacity factor artificially inflated to 100% instead of the expected 12 to 36%.
We need reactors right now because we won't get any of the far better MSRs if they all get shot down during the project development and planning phase.
SMRs can be used to install generating capacity slowly as needed when demand grows, and with factory-built, transportable units.
@@tobyw9573*Can* be, if they are small enough, but the subject of this video (BWRX-300) is not small enough to have truck-transportable or, it looks to me, factory-manufactured parts. That's probably why it's projected to be relatively expensive. OTOH, no one has actually made a factory for ~50 MW reactor components yet, so it's hard to say how much it will actually cost!
I think you were spot on. Time will tell.
I think the IMSR by Terrestrial Energy has the best features for an early SMR partnered with Oak Ridge the site of the original thorium reactor. Crawl before you run... the IMSR uses uranium and focus on the safety and affordability of an SMR. Next stop Thorium ❤
Since Terrestrial Energy is located in Oakville, ON, I was surprised that Ontario went with the BWRX-300. I guess they can get the construction finished before more of the old CANDU reactors need to be retired.
I like the direction that Terrestrial Energy is going by featuring industrial heat output, not electricity production. Uranium is actually a better fuel in this type of reactor than thorium. It makes it a cheaper and simpler reactor.
The only approved small reactor in the US is the NuScale SMR, it was approved in Feb 2023 by NRC. The GE design is not available for construction in US.
That’s the US. If it wants to continue being regulated by the No Reactors Constructed agency, let it. A couple SMRs are already running in the world, and hundreds of small naval reactors have run for generations, safely.
Excellent content. What about Rolls Royce's SMR - the one they originally designed for submarines?
Everything made outside of BRICS is the same cost-effciency grade as a Rolls Royce car - Super Exencive. Only anti-people governments as that of poland or estonia spend tax payers money on such a toy.
Not got a customer yet. Still active though, forming consortiums etc, to break into markets. But running on UK govt money which runs out in 2024. So need a firm order soon.
The firm's military reactor business though has a secure order book, with recent Aussie submarine announcement going for Rolls Royce.
Rolls Royce not all that great, if it were the Us navy would use it
@@dknowles60 It is more difficult to pass bribe money unnoticed internationally between developed states. This gives the home team a big advantage in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the United States.
@@dknowles60 Your statement _"Rolls Royce not all that great ..."_ does not follow from _"...if it were the Us navy would use it"_
The US military do not use key components made outside the USA. For example, the "re-engine-ing" of the B52 is going to Rolls Royce (RR) because RR agreed to manufacture the engines in the USA. IIRC that USA plant is a collaboration with an existing, established, US based manufacturing company. The engine is not new, it is a well established, tried and tested RR engine. That is a very different situation from a brand new product.
If I were RR, I'd want to build several reactors, under very close control and supervision of RR staff _before_ agreeing to build them in the USA. So, an order for RR's reactors from the US Navy would need to be big to justify the risk and cost. Further, the better US-based companies to collaborate with are competitors.
So, not likely to happen.
Best Wishes. ☮
I think the time is now for building reactors. There will be more designs, but GE-Hitachi is going to dominate for awhile.
This is extremely good news!
I live 5 minutes from the OPG site and i see a constant stream of dump trucks leaving the site full of fill from the huge hole they excavating at the site. Very impressive.
From an engineering perspective, since this uses proven technology and ready to go, its a solid solution. Plus anyone committing now could pay a small fee to assist in the reactors already under construction, in return for feedback on design improvements.
Did your $/KW include the cost of connecting to existing power distribution networks? Dropping a SMR as a direct replacement for existing coal plants effectively eliminates the need to build the power network connection. It's a "plug and play" replacement for old generator.
This is 1940’s technology. It’s time to invest in thorium molten salt reactors which were developed and tested in the 60’s by Alvin Weinberg at oak ridge.
Sure. All you have to do is invent materials that will not corrode over a reasonable service life.
You will also need to invent reliable ways to remove part of an active molten core for fission product removal, introduce fresh fuel, and deal with xenon and krypton escape.
The accumulation of high-cross-section actinides will also be an issue.
Probably another thirty years of development to sort these things. Get cracking.
China and India are working, I have heard, on molten salt reactors. The nice feature of molten salt is that they are breeder reactors and will burn almost any fuel, even spent nuclear waste. Also, thorium, as a fuel, is abundant. I think the major issues are materials for containment. Hight temperature containing a corrosive molten salt. My guess is that the problem can be solved. Let us hope. One of the features of SMRs is that they can be installed in a factory setting. This allows for a hydrogen plant to have its own power source. Go hydrogen.
My stock in GE hopes so, and I didn't even know about this project. Think I'll go buy some more.
This is a step in the right direction but it may only be a transitional step,
The goal should be to have a reactor that burns up almost all of it's fuel so there is much less nuclear waste and can achieve efficiencies on the high 90% range. Reactors that operate at low pressure can be a lot less expensive to build and control.
I would like to know what the efficiency of this reactor is and at what pressure will it operate?
They haven't published anything in the public documentation, but if it follow's GE's previous design that it is based on (ESBWR), the main system pressure should be around 1050 psia. Overall thermal efficiency would also be expected to be similar at ~33%. Not revolutionary for sure, but reasonable.
I wish that they’d switch all shipping ships over to nuclear power. I would think they they could make a design that would “shotgun” the fuel into the ocean if someone attempted to tamper with the reactor, to reduce if not prevent the risk of proliferation.
I agree. The right size and the right design to hopefully get nuclear moving forward.
Good video 🎉
China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment on Aug. 2 2022 gave Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) the green light to commission the experimental 2-MWth thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR-LF1) at the Hongshagang Industrial Cluster, Wuwei City, Gansu Province. If successful, the TMSR-LF1 could pave the way for development and construction of a larger demonstration facility by 2030, as well as construction of a TMSR fuel salt batch pyroprocess demonstration facility to realize thorium-uranium cycle usage by the early 2040s.
I was on the fence for a while. You finally convinced me. I'm ordering 3 BWR-X300s, one for each of my houses. 🥳
Can you share where you found the table at 2:46?
A couple of follow-up questions Atomic Blender: 1. How much does this reactor cost on average; 2. How many homes does this 300 reactor power in the US. I tried to search for these answers, but I got a large range of answers that seemed unreliable. thanks for the video.
Power consumption in the US is 1.2 kW on average. At 300 MW would power around 250000 homes. The reactor average cost cant be calculated until at least 10 units are built, it will be around 1 billion, but usual cost overruns could make it twice as much.
Optimistically this will be $3500 per kW. That is the cost to build, you still need to purchase nuclear fuel on a regular basis, perform costly maintenance, and dispose of waste. Compare that with solar (less than $900 per kW) or wind (less than $1500 per kW). You might say nuclear is "small footprint" but do the geometry. Assuming nobody wants to live within 2 miles of the nuclear plant, that gives you a circle with 12.5 square miles area. That is a lot of solar panels.
1stly just because people aren't living there doesn't mean the land isn't used. The space is still an issue for solar and wind farms.
2ndly, why do you assume people would not live within x radius of nuclear power plants. Plenty of people already live littetally next door to nuclear plants.
3rdly solar has a capacity factor of only 24.9% (compared to nuclear's 92.5%) what this means in pracitcal terms is even if every kwh of solar engery is stored or used immidately it can only produce 6 mwh for every 21 mwh per year a nuclear power plant of equal megawattage.
4thly, nuclear is cheaper when you account for every factor. According to the institute for energy research nuclear costs 33usd/mwh while solar costs 88.7usd/mwh.
5thly nuclear power stations last longer than solar farms. About 3 times longer infact.
6thly both your cheap up front costs and the more expensive total costs for solar are only at their levels because government provides 50 times the subsidies per mwh.
7thly when you factor in the large batteries wind and solar need to be ale level out their electricity supply for the whole day, wind and solar have the same initial investment cost as nuclear (despite shorter service lives)
If we were serious, we would just start building Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. Proven design. Reasonable power output. PWR, so none of the downsides and higher maintenance of BWR.
SMRs only make sense if they are really Small, and Modular. Small enough to be built on a factory assembly line and shipped to the destination site, and the site is built to take a dozen or more side by side. This has all of the issues with a large plant, but without generating the power output of a large plant. The one thing it seems perfect for is replacing existing coal plants. Build it on site next to an existing coal plant and bring the 300MW on line tied to the same transmission equipment. Bonus points for making decommissioning of the old plant conditional on the new plant being commissioned.
Then the question is, which is better, the BWRX-300 or an AP300?
"shipped is better than perfect" applies to nuclear reactors as much as it does to the software industry lol
💥!
Solving the metallurgical and fuel handling problems of molten salt reactors will provide huge future dividends.
Yes, it could. Of course, the timeframe requires that this be solved in a matter of very few years.
I think GE has the right rock here. I work in the industry and I strongly believe this deaign could gain traction. And the more orders ot gets, the cheaper the parts and the cheaper the parts, the more orders it will get.
The BWR is a great design to begin with. Definitely the safest, due to simplicity and the lack of large circulation loops in the latest designs.
Nice.
IMHO, we need to do all the things. This shouldn't be a "let's just do BWRX-300s everywhere". We should be doing these less ambitious designs AND continuing to work on the more ambitious ones. Then let the competition sort it out. We need more fission and more geothermal. There's a crunch coming in the next few decades as countries and states start to get enough renewables without having viable energy storage or smartgrids when they're going to start having problems and will realize the importance of baseload power generation. Renewable advocates like to hand-wave away the problem of storage and it's dishonest because storage was always the bigger problem, and most countries have just punted, preferring to use natural gas peaker plants.
If you look at successful examples nuclear isn't really working in the way free market does. The most successful reactors seller Rosatom from Russia is 100% backed by the state and is doing great. Private sector is simply too small to do it, beside being more corrupt than big system having built numerous reactors for cheap and in time.
I like your comment about base load problem because very few people understand what it means, how much will cost parallel ele. infrastructure for failed renewables. Isn't geothermal only possible in certain countries? We had green party talking about it until engineers explained conditions in the country are not right for it.
This is bigger than the small hospital reactors that Freeman Dyson spoke about in his interviews? What are the main differences in principle apart from size between this and the ones Professor Freeman Dyson favored which he said were 100% safe ?
Theoretical physicists often think things are safe because they are theoretically safe. :) In reality, you have to actually build something, and monitor it with real zeal, before you know what can go wrong. Frequently these kinds of things come down to tiny details that would be totally glossed over in any high-level estimation of the safety or economics of a reactor. One example: hydride embrittlement
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickering_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Incidents
While I am a fan of Nuclear, are there any improvements in spent fuel storage or recycling? Is it simply on-site storage and kicking the can down the road waiting for Thorium reactors to breed or recycle its fuel?
Long-term waste policy is usually the role of national governments. Private companies can suggest ideas, but nobody seems to want to seriously deal with it, at least in the US. Thorium and breeder reactors are more efficient in their fuel, which would generate less overall. But the existing volume of waste isn't enormous anyway. It's mostly a policy issue.
I thought the united states basically said uranium is abundant and we will not be engaging in recycling it with breeder reactors and what not? Now this was a few years ago when I heard this, so it may well have changed but. My understanding was just store it away, it is not that much at a time any way
Any sense of the LCOE for the BWRX-300?
Uk Parliamant this year has budgeted for more nuclear power to be built with a big emphasis on SMRs its going to be really interesting to see if this is going to help our current energy crisis. People seem to forget that while nuclear is expensive it pays for its self in the longhaul. France has the largest nuclear energy sector in europe and by far has the best energy bills in europe and possibly the world. Simply becuase they have not once backed down nor have they made their sector privately funded. I hope the UK will see the light and its looking like we are slowly. Im liking the uks emphasis on nuclear.
“while nuclear is expensive”
Was not in France in the 90s. Not in Korea, China, most of Japan, most of Germany and not even for a dozen reactors built in the US late 1960s. Appears the tech itself need not be expensive, but politics can make it so.
@@Nill757 it takes a long time for nuclear reactors to pay for themselves which is why they are expensive. But yes politics gets in the way
@@ashleygoggs5679 “long time”
For some. Those are the ones you hear about. Many others, no. Some Reactors, esp small ones, have been built in two years, great safety record. The enormous solar and wind industry and its mouthpiece NGOs are telling everybody they can that any and all nuclear takes a long time.
@@Nill757 no, they do take a long time. when your looking at a project that takes 10 billion to make as an estimated cost its natural that its going to take years for a nuclear facility to pay back its building costs.
Listen im a nuclear advicate, but im not going to down play the very real problems nuclear has. Yes political problems cause the costs to escalate which is another problem in of itself.
But if you want you can provide examples of plants that go 100% according to plan and budget if you want. As someone who works in construction i think you will struggle to give me evidence of this as even when im working on smaller jobs there are always problems that escalate and faltering the overall costs. Building work intrinsically has a problem with infalting costs due to circumstances unforseen.
So please, if you want to be a smart ass do share projects that stay on budget, do share projects that become profitable less then a decade after being 100% operational. I think you will struggle, but i will gladly change my mind if you can provide real scientific data and proof of what your arguing for.
@@ashleygoggs5679
In the US, see about a dozen reactors built starting late 1960s. Costs didn’t explode until the new regulator in the1970s. For example:
Point Beach WI. 2xPWR, total net nameplate 1182 MW. Built 3 years starting 1967, online 1970. Build cost about $850M, in 2023 $, or about $720/KW capex. It’s still running, has 60 year license and asked for 80 year which will get. About 30GWh/day or about $1M revenue/day.
Others with similar price under $2000/kw build time 3-5 years include:
Oyster Creek, NJ
Surry 1,2 Va, $1200/KW 4yr
Nine Mile Point 1
Dresden
Indian Point 2,3 $1500/KW 6-8yr
Etc
Korea
Built 22 reactors between 1980 and 2010, overnight capital cost for all of them under $3000/KW, avg $2500/kw, todays $.
France
About 40 of their reactors built 1975-1990
does this cost per KW includes full decomission and cleanup operation after the expected service time ?
I agree with everything in this video. The electricity market is huge and this type of reactor will not go out of date. The rest of the energy market needs high industrial heat and that's where gen. IV reactors will thrive and actually supersede any and all PWRs. It appears that Terrestrial Energy in Canada will be the first and their first customers just want the cheap industrial heat they produce. If that goes well, the market for cheap industrial heat is bigger than the electricity market.
Either way, the future for nuclear and by extension, humanity is bright, so bright, ya gotta wear shades.
There are some projects for super critical reactors, just the supercapasitors are too expensive but a necessary part to get the short-bursted power of these reactors. 😁😁😁
"In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
This universal truth applies to all systems.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future".
Thanks, there are so many SMRs, can you compare NuScale, X-energy, Terra power and Holtec etc.?..
Where can I buy one?
2:24 wait are you saying Westinghouse abandoned the AP300? Or are you referring to another design?
The problem with BWRs is that they contaminate the steam cycle, making the Turbine Building radioactive. This increases operating cost. Having worked in the industry since 1985 and having worked at two BWRs for over 20 years - I would take a PWR over a BWR just for the reason that the Turbine Building is clean in a PWR. We shall see. I do believe that nuclear needs to be part of the energy equation in the future.
What sort of radioisotope contaminants do you see in hot turbine buildings? (I only know the theory and we know how it goes when we rely on theory...)
You never mentioned Rolls Royce who are actively pursuing using their simple option and modular design ? The UK government say they are considering 16 plants?
1 Module = 1 Football field.
Nothing Small about that.
Not going to be putting it in an abandoned Mall parking lot either.
But, politicians are stuck thinking in terms of Baseline power, and 30MWe per unit is too small for impact.
Great article!
You are talking about the correct matters.
The real economics.
It *does* seem small to those of us who grew up around the Darlington and Pickering power stations. They are on fairly big pieces of land, which seem unlikely to be using for anything other than power production/transmission. If you want power produced inside a town of 30,000 people, or on a small island, this 300 MWe reactor is not on your menu.
Boiling water reactors. Spraying radioactive water on turbine blades seems like a bad idea.
It's not that hard to predict whether the reactor will go over budget and over time. Here's how you do it:
Is the reactor built as a civil engineering project? If no then you just buy it from a factory at the cost it's stated and it won't go over budget. If yes then:
Look at how much over budget and over time other civil engineering projects go and add another 2 layers of buerocracy from all the nuclear on top of that and you have a reasonable estimate.
And today Westinghouse announced their AP300 SMR.
I believe the use of TRISO fuel has become essential in a modular reactor of the future, because it remove the risk of radioactive leakages and core meltdowns...
The cost of TRISO is astronomical for utility scale reactors. For submarines and aircraft carriers, and for RTGs at future lunar and Mars colonies, it's the way to go.
SMR's still need people guarding them, protection against terrorism and protected save nuclear transports.
That is all relativly more expensive for operating small reactors.
The biggest issue we have here is convincing the government that a nuclear power station is a good idea, regardless of it's size. If they want electric eutopia then nuclear power stations are the only way forward. Our grid will collapse in its current form if electric vehicle useage gets high enough.
we need them outside of earth like on the moon or for space propulsion outside of earth's orbit
When is the completion of the competition expected. Will it be announces as bronze, silver and gold medals.
When listening to a talk about nuclear reactors, it can be disconcerting to hear the phrase "it boils down to this"...
A coolant that expands a thousandfold does mean it's less safe than one that doesn't, don't lie.
Can you buy stock in GE Hitachi ?
How are they planning to harden these units from terrorist attack/theft of radioactive material? Unlike any other generation source the potential to do enormous harm is vast.
I think it will take a large and robust nuclear industry to take on novel reactor types. There's too much technical and regulatory risk with molten salt etc.
Robust industry and a not-captured regulator.
How much revenue is 300MW able to yield, based on average electricity costs? How long could it take for an SMR to pay for itself, given the costs of establishing and maintaining?
2:40 - aa.....uhm.... one, Westinghouse quite successfully builds SMRs: they are called A4W for Nimitz class carriers. CANDU - as it was - could ALREADY work on 'nuclear waste'. Also, for 'S'MR 1GWt/300MWe is bit on high side.
1 billions will become 4-5 billions, at 300MWe output they could as well build 1,4MW plant. One big plant instead of 4-5 smaller plants is easier to maintain, control, take care of various risks like jet hitting them, GE boiling water reactors was also partially opened at Fukushima, etc.
Nuclear engineers were pretty clear about problems with SMRs, if GE manages to sell many i will be happy to see things moving.
I feel like I've just watched a 9 minute advertisement.
Combine small scale nuclear with stored hydro😮. Run your nuclear at a constant rate, pumping water at lower demand and using the hydro as a peaker supply.
Why drown another valley somewhere die hydro, when a reactor or two could be ramped to cover the peak?
Can the GE design be further down-scaled into a micro reactor, or is this as small as it goes?
You will still need containment systems in the event of a steam leak. Those are big and bulky. That's why molten salt reactors can be possibly miniaturized as they run at atmospheric pressure and doesn't need a containment system.
GE's BRWs were at Fukushima. How did that go? Steam is generated by water in contact with the fuel elements themselves & leaves primary containment to the turbines. Compare to Three Mile Island's accident.
“how did that go”
3 reactors totaled by aftermaths of tsunami, and… nobody killed by radiation.
Fossil fuels tied up in everything else, and they kill people everyday.
Very old design compared to a much later design with many lessons learned. The BWRX-300 is designed to cool itself convectively without powered pumps. The powered pumps (and heat sinks associated) were the Achilles heel at Fukushima Daiichi that did not let them shut down safely during a tsunami. (Tsunami caused by an earthquake on a fault never expected to generate an earthquake that big.) This safety in the face of a station blackout may actually be a reasonable price to pay for the fact that the turbine hall is a (briefly) radioactive space.
I concur, I'm not a nuclear engineer but the segregation and redundancy of a PWR just instinctively seems to me to be inherently safer than a BWR. Due to the much higher specific heat of water vs steam, BWR having phase change INSIDE what's essentially a single primary element strikes me as being MUCH riskier vs a PWR with fully liquid state primary with multiple redundant heat sinks. Of course LOCA can be fatal for both but I'd imagine a PWR inherently has a much greater safety margin in an accident, and the primary stays inside the containment building pretty much no matter what happens.
5:34 that ? that is the same reactor vessel as the fukusima has using ? Looks like to me.
Fukushima failed because their emergency generators were below sea level. It wasnt a flaw in GEs reactor design. Rather a flaw in site layout.
How dows a BWR integrate with variable power generation of renewables?
Hopefully no way. By the time we build these we will be over this solar wind madness hype.
Baseload generation. We keep them at a constant burn to meet the minimum required output. At the least we can take the baseload stations that are coal fired offline and switch any others to peaker plants that rapidly spool up to meet any demand shifts. It would result in a significant reduction in pollution output.
@@lukacsnemeth1652 maybe it's hype but the build rate of wind, solar, and utility scale battery storage is exponential. The power utilities are loving the benefits of batteries, they respond instantaneously to power demands, they keep the grid nicely synchronized, and they enable storage of excess generation for usage later. Hmmm, billions being invested by the smartest people on the planet. Sure it's all hype. All the way to the bank.
@@KendallAuel LCOE is a lie, EROEI is king. All the big wind firms are in the red for the past 3 years. Wind solar and batteries are resource intensive they can only grow exponentially until mining grows exponentially. Any meaningful battery storage is out of feasiblity range. And dont even get me strated on the "smartest people on the planet" stuff.
Seems like linking this kind of reactor with Thorium would be a no-brainer.
Does it require a containment building? Is there only a single source for the reactor vessels? What measures are necessary to mitigate the risk of contaminating the local environment from leaks from the turbomachinery?
(1) In that situation, you scram the reactor and stop generating, hoping to halt further heat production and contain coolant so there will be no releases. Note the passive cooling design for these BWRX-300s, meaning they can't suffer the problems that Fukushima Daiichi suffered in a grid outage.
How long would it take to build a BWRX 300 and get it running?
5-15+ years, i would say 10 years as conservative time but most likely far more.
why aren't they working on thorium reactors?
When it comes to Nukes… KISS- Keep It Simple Stupid- Applies!
Problem is it operates at to low of a tempature to store power as heat. This makes the reactor a poor choice for when there is a large fluctuation in power needs. In fact I think this type of reactor needs to be operated at a steady output or reaction killing elements can build up and require the reactor to wait several days to restart. Not a good system where the grid has allot of intermittent renewable power sources on it.
Baseload
@@daniellarson3068 providing baseload is becoming less and less profitable. When most of the nuclear plants in the country were built electrical payments were based on the amount of investment in the plant and were not varied on when the power was produced. Because of this payment structure large baseload electrical generation with high capital cost were profitable. This is no longer true in that payments for electrical generation have been deregulated resulting in poor profits for baseload power plants. The problem being that renewable power sources are profitable at really low reimbursements since their cost of producing power when they are doing it is very low. So when these renewables are producing power any baseload power plant is going to be losing money during these times. So ideally any high capital cost power plant will need to be producing most of its power when electrical prices are high when the renewables can't. This is why future nuclear plants will need to be able to load follow and store their power to be able to output it at times when it is most profitable to put it onto the electrical grid. Currently the best nuclear candidates for being able to do this are high temperature reactors where heat can be stored in molten salt each storage tanks to produce electricity when prices are high. This high tempature heat also having secondary uses in industrial applications as another source of income for a nuclear plant.
@@stanleytolle416 Sounds like it is not a rule of nature, but a rule of men. In fact, it sounds like the rules are rigged against nuclear plants. Hopefully, Poland, Estonia and Canada are smart enough when they build their BWR X plants to not follow the regulatory rules of the US.
It sort of reminds me of the Richard Feynman quote - "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
@@stanleytolle416 Interesting. Thanks for explanation.
@@stanleytolle416 at some point the game will likely switch back again. Right now there is no incentive to invest in anything other than low cost to produce renewables. But this is making the grid less reliable. At some point the regulators (or the market) will have to prioritise the supply of reliable power again.
Do the BWRX reactors still use solid solid fuel rods ? My understanding is that this format is only around 5% efficient and that the rods then require hazardous handling, dismantling and that storage of the unspent fuel is long winded and long lived. Is this correct ? Is it also true that Molten salt reactors (Liquid Flouride Reactors) can burn 95% of the radioactive fuel and the 'waste' is less radioactive and is 'hazardous' for a much shorter period ?
All true (I'm unclear on the total efficiency but with uranium that would depend on where you start counting from.) OTOH, do you know the total volume of spent fuel that we'd have to deal with by the end of the plant lifetime? It would literally all fit in my home office here. The yearly consumption fits under my desk. Ontario has been running much bigger plants since 1971 and we are not having trouble keeping spent fuel cool and secure.
The BWR--300 can be successful if it is built on time and on budget. The first ones will prove the idea for the rest.
Do the RITM-200/400 reactors!
Westinghouse makes a similar AP-300. I don't have a clue how they compare.
Everybody's new product, coming soon, is always better than anything available today.
And as you know, sometimes it actually is.
General Electric has been selling the same reactor for 70 years one designed for a nuclear submarine that has always been the problem
Thank you for the information on the BWRX 300 reactor and now I see some of the flaws in it's design. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but Nuscale (I own the stock) is truly modular with contracts signed for long lead components - built in a factory. At 77MWe per module 4, 6 or 12 modules can be linked together totaling 308MWe, 616MWe and 924MWe respectively. While the first version at UAMPS is running over projected cost, as sales ramp up increased volumes will lead to lower costs.
I live in Oregon. not far from the headquarters. NuScale will be worth zero dollars in the next few years. Delays, delays, delays and not at all competitive against any kind of clean energy solution. Bailouts from Bill Gates and the DOE only go so far.
@@KendallAuel Nuclear doesn't compete with renewables, it competes with coal and gas fired plants (and large capacity storage, which we can't do very well yet). It will still be difficult to compete with those on economic terms, but given the drive for zero-emissions power, we might not have a choice.
It also keeps, and maintains the uranium fuel production supply companies in place, and money rolling in. A 2% fuel efficiency is a very large kick in the shorts, especially for the price you pay for that fuel.
I think this is a big money push for big money companies scrambling to make more money and keep the old war machine companies employed. ThorCon is growing, has sold reactors, and is cheaper than coal, and can be shipped anywhere in the planet that has water access. Which is next to a majority of the population of the earth. And still has better efficiencies than uranium fuel reactors.
was GE involved in the design of fukushima?
If you can manage SMR, so you can manage large one
SpaceX starship will need a SMR to keep the fuel cold and the people warm. A car size SMR built in a factory would be a world beater.
I am all for nuclear power and small reactors but they need to be even simpler and designed by engineers with common sense. Fukushima used GE's boiling water reactor which had no method of adding water after the power failure and flooding of the
Backup generators. They did not even have a 2 1/2" fire hose connection which fire trucks could pu.p in water from a fire hydrant! They use air operated valves which were unnecessarily complex that operators could not open or close valves. GE's engineers should have been pit in prison.
Three Mile Island had a stuck valve that did not even have an indication whether it was open or closed. Operators did not even know how much water was covering the rods. The engineers should have had a simple sight glass gauge as backup.
Unfortunately GE has the lead in its ancient, vad design boiling water reactors only because they were approved decades ago by regulators who do not make the effort to look at newer and better designs such as the molten salt reactors.
Equally important, regulators need to demand simpler designs to reduce operator error, stronger backups, and limiting designs to engineers with COMMON SENSE.
Yup. I are a dumb eng - gin - eeyor . But I remember 3 mile island when they didn’t even know they had not water BUT STEAM! in containment!! There was an indicator that could have told them so if they had a steam chart handy. But it was hidden in the back of the panel. For me, that was a Yougottabekiddingme moment. We gotta have nuke power but we don’t need to build a kluge to get there. This video was too slick anyway.
SMR are extremely pricy per MW and that down to basic effect of scale, that why we went form 100 MW in 50' to more than 1000, and this market being crowded is spelling its own doop if there was one world wide adopted SMER then it just might be cheaper than big ones dude to effect of volume
Nuclear power is already extremely cheap on a lifetime basis, the issues are raising the sheer volume of capital, and an amortization period measured in decades. SMR aims to solve both these problems, even if overnight cost per KW is higher than GW scale plants. Of course the real problem is neoliberal economics/politics, which demands private capital as a matter of faith, which itself demands shorter ROI than asset life. If we were purely concerned with getting the lowest cost per MWH, achievable by amortization being correctly aligned with asset life, we would simply build GW scale reactors directly financed with government debt, just as the Chinese are doing, and European countries used to do up to the late 70s.
@@enemyofthestatewearein7945 they are cheap after amortization and even then not so much EDF wanted piece cap to be 120 euro.
SMR you are omitting the fact that all things being equal the bigger reactor cost less per MW basis than the small one effect of scale. What in theory can SMR do to rescue astronomical prices is the effect of volume, but with already dozens of SMR in some phase of development none of these companies will reach this effect, as every nation will choose their national design
@@simon2493 I'm not sure which EDF project you refer to but Hinkley C has an amortization of 30 years. Given that it's a 60 year + asset you can (aproximately) cut the cost in half, and it was funded at 9% with private finance vs 2-3% for government debt. Dieter Helm estimated that 70% of the overnight cost is financing, and only 30% is the actual build cost. On scale effect for SMR etc I agree, my point as above is that SMRs only make any sense at all due to poor financing for larger projects. However I think the point of the article is to emphasize there may be winners that achieve some scale. Most types will never make it off the drawing board.
The more the merrier😊. The cost will fall as quantities and competition ramp. This is inevitable when most countries realise that no amount of money for solar, wind and batteries can deliver more than around 50% reliable baseload.
Regions without numerous powerful rivers will certainly need to work on those concerns, but that is not Ontario. With a few of these BWRX-300s and an array of short / long duration storage (and dynamic response == demand reduction) we can have it all and burn no fossil fuels. Same for Quebec, BC, Washington, Oregon, and probably New York thanks to hydroelectric power from Newfoundland and Quebec.
This will be a game changer for nuclear proliferation.
How so? It does not look like a breeder reactor to me. Am I wrong?
@@TaiViinikka dirty Bombe at least. Can be extremely nasty. Think terrorism.