The desert west of Idaho Falls was once home to 50 reactors. Those
days are gone, but NuScale Power LLC has moved one step closer to its goal of building 12 small modular reactors generating 545 megawatts of power here by 2025.
NuScale announced Thursday that it has been selected as the winner of the second round of the U.S. Department of Energy’s competitively-bid, cost-sharing program to develop nuclear small modular reactor technology. As part of the award, NuScale will receive funding that will support the accelerated development of its NuScale Power Module™ SMR technology. NuScale will be required to match the Federal funds it receives, somewhere in the neighborhood of $226 million.
The regulatory hurdles are
formidable and the permitting process alone will cost $1 billion, said
Michael McGough, chief commercial officer for NuScale. A subsidiary of
Fluor, NuScale has had a prototype small modular reactor in operation
since 2003.
Compared to a typical pressurized water reactor of
1,000 megawatts, the advantage to a small modular reactor of 45
megawatts is that it is a "plug and play" proposition, McGough said.
Fluor
wants to market nuclear power plants to the world, which is why it
bought NuScale in October 2011. "They want to build power plants around
the world," he said.
It is possible that NuScale plants
could be going online abroad sooner than they might in the United
States. Now that this hurdle is cleared, they
anticipate having their design certification application --
typically a document of around 10,000 pages -- submitted to the NRC in 2015. The
review of that application would take 39 months, after which they need
to get NRC permission to build.
"There's lots of things you have to do, and you have to do them right," McGough said.
Unlike
traditional reactors, which rely on electric pumps to keep water on the
fuel rods to keep them from melting, NuScale's self-contained,
self-circulating reactors shut themselves down during a station
blackout.
As for the selection of Idaho Falls, it's a
case of going where you are wanted. "If the community won't support it,
you just shouldn't try," he said.
The Western
Governor's Association has had nuclear energy on its mind for the past
three years. New hydro-electric projects aren't in the cards, and new
coal-fired plants are out to the question. Wind and solar are
intermittent sources and heavily subsidized. That leaves natural gas and
nuclear for big baseline loads.
In June this year, at
its conference in Park City, the Association released its "State of
Energy in the West" report. One of the stated goals was to find ways to
accelerate introduction of small modular reactors into Western states.
Shortly
after that, NuScale announced the launch of the Western Initiative for
Nuclear, a demonstration project in Idaho to be built and owned by a
consortium of regional utilities including Energy Northwest and Utah
Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), the latter of which Idaho
Falls Power is affiliated with.
