Nuclear powerMini-nuclear power plants may pull the nuclear industry out of a tight spot

Supporters of nuclear powers argue that mini-nuclear power plants offer the best hope for a struggling industry. These plants produce less energy, but they cost less, will be faster to build, and have less potential for a disaster.

A typical nuclear plant costs between $10 and $15 billion to build. It produces 1,000 to 1,400 megawatts of electricity.

Fox news reports that the Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) produce about one-sixth the power of a regular plant, and costs between $1-2 billion each.

Bill Johnson of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) says the new technology has potential.

“On a big plant you would like about 300 acres. Here you can actually build the plant on about 40 acres,” Johnson told Fox News. “So it’s a lot less land use, it’s a lot less water use, easier to build transmission lines to it. The small economy of scale may actually be helpful to us.”

Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS), a watchdog organization, opposes SMRs and is critical of the federal government’s pledge of $500 million toward developing the technology. The group says that SMRs will join a long long list of expensive failures in the nuclear industry.

“There are a lot of cost questions that we don’t know anything about, and it just seems like this is not going to happen without it being just incredibly expensive. So we don’t want to keep putting taxpayer dollars into this idea that may or may not happen,” Ryan Alexander, president of TCS, said. 

The TVA wants to be the first utility company to build a SMR plant near the Oak Ridge Laboratory, but the process has already hit a few snags. TVA was expected to apply for a construction permit last year, but that application has been delayed until 2015 at the earliest. 

Experts believe the reactors should be built in groups of two, generating a total of 360 megawatts, which is about the same as a coal-fired unit. Supports of the smaller plants believe these will provide a great replacement for coal-fired plants, which President Obama wants to shut down as part of his climate control initiative.

“Small modular reactors are all about taking the risk out of the equation for nuclear,” Christofer Mowry, president of Babcock &Wilcox’s (B&W) mPower division told Fox News. “And that’s what the industry wants — they want to de-risk nuclear. They like nuclear because nuclear offers what no other source of energy does, which is basic, reliable, clean energy.”

B&W is already ahead of the pack with its mPower design, which incorporates several systems into one unit. The unit is built in a factory, then shipped to the site. Officials say the system is more cost-effective and reliable, and it comes with updated safety systems.

“What we did was we actually analyzed the events of Fukushima as they occurred and laid it against the mPower design shortly after the event happened,” Jeff Halfinger, chief of technology development for mPower told Fox News. “And mPower would have ridden out of Fukushima.”

Supporters of SMR’s believe the small units make good economic sense, especially if the technology is exported overseas. 

“This is a way that keeps us in the industry in an innovative way, keeps our leadership in an operating space. I think it has great potential not only in the energy space but internationally,” Johnson said.