December 13, 2019—There’s some real good news for the U.S. economy today. NuScale, an Oregon company that is developing a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR), has passed the next stage of review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As this blog has reported before, the mass development of nuclear power is a critical component to bringing the productivity of the U.S. economy out of the doldrums, and thus bringing us into a new era of prosperity. High-speed rail, modernized water systems, the space program, and many other components of an economic recovery program depend upon generating huge amounts of electricity that are way beyond our current capacity. Nuclear represents a leap in productivity that will allow us to get there, as well as a step on the way to the development of thermonuclear fusion.
NuScale’s design for an SMR has now gone through four phases of review. It still has to go through stages 5 and 6. According to the company’s press release, the Oregon-based company is partnering with the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as other companies. It has received support from Congress.
As I outlined in a post approximately one year ago, the promise of SMRs lies not only in their safety design, but in the fact that the United States still has the industrial capacity to produce them assembly-line fashion. Over the past 40 years, the heavy industrial capability for producing a standard-sized nuclear reactor (measured in hundreds of megawatts or over 1000) has been dismantled. But a small reactor of 12 to 50 megawatts could be produced in assembly-line fashion, and provide a flexible means of providing power outside major urban areas, including hard-to-reach regions.
The United States is not the only country working on SMRs, and some in the industry are seeking to motivate investment in NuScale on the basis of “beating the competition.” Such peaceful competition has a huge positive payoff for the human race, and can only be encouraged. Thus NuScale’s progress with the NRC is most welcome news.
The NuScale press release can be read in full here.
Tags: nuclear power, NuScale
Nancy, as I think I’ve said previously, we, as a matter of national
economic interest, should be investing heavily in the development
and deployment, both at home and abroad, of Thorium-fueled, low-
pressure, high-temperature Molten Salt Reactors! Two of the bene-
fits of this reactor is its high temperature (700+ degrees C.), which means it can power a stupendously highly efficient Brayton cycle gas
gas turbine to drive an electrical generator, and needs no water for a
coolant, but only air, making it a great choice for the dry U.S. west!
Jim, I think we can use a mix. There are places these small reactors can go that larger plants cannot. If you want to write something on thorium for publication, please do.