The small physical size helps with safety in various ways. How confident can people be as to the safety of these plants?Ī: The nuclear battery designs that are being developed are exceptionally robust that's actually one of the selling points for this technology. Q: You talk about potentially having such units widely distributed, including even in residential areas to power whole neighborhoods. Nuclear energy can be viewed as a product, not a mega-project. The nuclear battery is deployed quickly, say in a few weeks, and it becomes a sort of energy on demand service. Deploying these nuclear batteries does not entail managing a large construction site, which has been the primary source of schedule delays and cost overruns for nuclear projects over the past 20 years. This provides several benefits from an economic point of view. It's so small that the whole power plant is actually built in a factory and fits within a standard container. This nuclear battery concept is really a different thing because of the physical scale and power output of these machines - about 10 megawatts. So, it's an improvement over the traditional plants, but it's not a game changer. These could be assembled from factory-built components, but they still require some assembly at the site and a lot of site preparation work. Earlier proposals have looked at reactors in the range of 100 to 300 megawatts of electric output, which are a factor of 10 smaller than the traditional big nuclear reactors at the gigawatt scale. What makes this proposal for nuclear batteries different?Ī: The units we describe take that concept of factory fabrication and modularity to an extreme. Q: The idea of smaller, modular nuclear reactors has been discussed for several years. Buongiorno to describe his group’s proposal. Strategic Command - have dubbed these small power plants “nuclear batteries.” Because of their simplicity of operation, they could play a significant role in decarbonizing the world’s electricity systems to avert catastrophic climate change, the researchers say. The authors - Jacopo Buongiorno, MIT’s TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering Robert Frida, a founder of GenH Steven Aumeier of the Idaho National Laboratory and Kevin Chilton, retired commander of the U.S. These proposed systems could provide heat for industrial processes or electricity for a military base or a neighborhood, run unattended for five to 10 years, and then be trucked back to the factory for refueling and refurbishment. Much as large, expensive, and centralized computers gave way to the widely distributed PCs of today, a new generation of relatively tiny and inexpensive factory-built reactors, designed for autonomous plug-and-play operation similar to plugging in an oversized battery, is on the horizon, they say. We may be on the brink of a new paradigm for nuclear power, a group of nuclear specialists suggested recently in The Bridge, the journal of the National Academy of Engineering.
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