Does DOE’s Funding Announcement Mark the End of its Irrational Exuberance for SMRs? [View all]

[bananas]

http://allthingsnuclear.org/does-does-funding-announcement-mark-the-end-of-its-irrational-exuberance-for-smrs/

Does DOE’s Funding Announcement Mark the End of its Irrational Exuberance for SMRs?

Ed Lyman, senior scientist
November 21, 2012

On November 20 DOE finally announced that the Babcock and Wilcox Company (B&W) and its “mPower” reactor were the lucky winners of its Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for a cost-sharing program with industry for the design and licensing of “small modular reactors,” or SMRs. Although DOE had originally said the announcement would come in July or August, it decided instead to bury it on Thanksgiving week – not usually a time the agency releases news of which it is particularly proud.

And in fact, the real news is not that a grant was awarded to B&W – this was a near-certainty – but that there was only one winner instead of two. While the initial FOA specified the program was meant to fund “up to two” projects, the widespread expectation was that two grants would be awarded to the pool of four applicants.

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So what happened to the second grant? One can come up with two theories – either there wasn’t enough money left over once B&W took its cut, or the other applications had so little merit that DOE could not come up with a justification for funding them.

Of the other three applications, one may have been too similar to the B&W concept (the Westinghouse SMR). The other two, NuScale and the Holtec HI-SMUR, are novel designs that have no motor-driven pumps and depend entirely on natural circulation for cooling – frankly, a risky business in view of the uncertainties and challenges of injecting water into overheating reactors and spent fuel pools that were seen during Fukushima. And the credibility of the latter two proposals was recently damaged earlier this month when DOE directed the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina to stop using funds intended for environmental management to support their development at the site.

But ultimately, the decision may have come down to the commercial prospects for the technologies. ... Based on economies of scale, small reactors will produce more expensive electricity than large reactors, all other factors being equal. ...

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About the author: Dr. Lyman received his PhD in physics from Cornell University in 1992. He was a postdoctoral research scientist at Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and then served as Scientific Director and President of the Nuclear Control Institute. He joined UCS in 2003. He is an active member of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management and has served on expert panels of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. His research focuses on security issues associated with the management of nuclear materials and the operation of nuclear power plants, particularly with respect to reprocessing and civil plutonium. Areas of expertise: Nuclear terrorism, proliferation risks of nuclear power, nuclear weapons policy

Not mentioned in the article: because the electricity these things generate is so expensive, the main market for them is oil companies - which can use them to melt oil out of tar sands and shale rock.