Nuclear 4.0 | The Small Modular Reactor Revolution

once hailed as the harbinger of cheap clean energy nuclear power seems to constantly stumble on its path to affordability the industry Shackled by Monumental costs and Perpetual delays now finds itself lagging behind even alternative energy sources but amidst the Gloom glimmers of Hope are starting to emerge in the form of compact agile nuclear solutions that could fit on the back of a and deliver power straight to your doorstep but is this the same old story or is there something truly new here to comprehend the promise of modular reactors I want to First grasp the fundamentals of nuclear power in its current predicament from there we're going to navigate to Innovations Poise to rejuvenate the industry and the challenges that they have to surmount but first I want to talk about big nuclear reactors and why they suck to do that though I need to start with something a little bit easier Nuclear Physics yes I've used that joke recently to Nuclear Physics 101 today we're talking about nuclear fision the breaking apart of heavy unstable nuclei to produce energy not to be confused with nuclear fusion a technology that also doesn't work yet but for different set of reasons the heart of a nuclear power plant is its fision reactor most nuclear reactors use enriched uranium as fuel a material that is surprisingly common in Earth's crust it is mined crushed and leeched from the bulk material using sulfuric acid to produce this known as yellow cake which is about 80% uranium oxides and is surprisingly cheap hovering around $200 per kilo or about 4% the cost of printer rink however only about 0.7% of this uranium in yellow cake is isotope uranium 235 which is the most file isotope of uranium meaning it readily undergoes fision when bombarded by neutrons enriching uranium involves separating the uranium 235 from the majority uranium 23 eight these materials though only differ by their masses so the only way to separate them is by a system called gas centrifuging essentially relying on the fact that heavier things are harder to change the direction of so if we add material into a spinning system heavier objects are flung out wider than lighter ones now this makes it sound way easier than it actually is this is the reason that although uranium is everywhere most countries can't create nuclear weapons of uranium 235 because of how hard and how slow that separation and enrichment process C is to actually get right conventional reactors typically use low enriched uranium around 3 to 5% of uranium 235 you can also get high assay low enriched uranium or Halo with enrichment levels between 5 and 20% and I always think it's amazing that just three tablespoons of Halo contains enough energy to provide all of the electricity an individual uses in their entire lifetimes once the fuel is enriched it can be used to produce energy through fision if a neutron impacts uranium 235 nucleus it typically causes the nucleus to split apart with one possible outcome being barium Krypton and three more neutrons being produced the useful part in this process is that these neutrons are emitted at really high speeds some of these will hit the surrounding reactor material or coolant heating it up the same way hitting an object with a hammer Heats it up this now heated coolant can be passed through a heat exchanger to a separate water Loop this causes the water in the secondary Loop to boil and turn into steam and be used to generate electricity in a steam turbine if however the neutrons don't hit the reactor but instead hit another uranium 235 nuclei this will cause another fision event releasing further neutrons that continue the process there's some really important math that happens here if one fision event causes exactly one more fision event the terminology for this is that the reactor has noncritical and will self- sustain its reaction happily reducing stable fision energy if however each fision event produces multiple fion events this is a runaway process the term is super critical and you've made something that's probably more like a bomb than it is an energy generator which brings us nicely to safety there are three primary safety mechanisms with many design considerations around each of them the first are control rods the simplest way to stop a nuclear reactor is to put a neutron absorbing metal rod between the uranium fuel bundles hey what is that it's an inanimate Boron rod these control rods used elements such as Boron or cadmium to absorb neutrons without decaying themselves reducing the neutron count in the reactor vessel and so lowering the fision rate and so the heat output of the reactor which brings us to coolant which could be water helium gas liquid or molten salts all pull heat away from the reactor preventing it from damaging itself which may compromise other Safety Systems and also allowing it to transfer heat into electric power generation systems which brings us to useful safety feature number three moderators such as light or heavy water or graphite by slowing down the speed of emitted neutrons these moderators slightly counterintuitively increase the likelihood that a neutron strikes a uranium 235 isotope this helps the reactor sustain a chain reaction or when moderators are moved fishion now occurs less often cooling the reactor down the Chernobyl disaster was a bit of a perfect storm of all these three Safety Systems not performing as expected the design of the control rods meant the reactor activity briefly increased rather than decreased as they were inserted causing a jump in power output of the reactor this power output superheated the water coolant forming gas bubbles within it the reactor design had something called a positive void coefficient meaning that as the gas r ratio around the reactor increased to the amount of water that was around it the reactor's power also increased leading to an explosion this explosion ignited the graphite moderator blasting radioactive materials into the atmosphere landing on the surrounding facility area and Community as you can see there are a lot of things that can go wrong when it comes to nuclear power so traditionally when trying to build a nuclear reactor to deliver grid scale power outputs the usual approach has been to deliver a large infrastructure project colossal power stations erected at ultimately staggering costs epitomized by Behemoth like the UK's size wellb or the USA's Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station but while scale May reign supreme in other domains such as wind and hydro nuclear at scale presents an interesting problem that has forced it into its own death spiral nuclear Energy's Ascent to dominance has perpetually loomed on the horizon never quite materializing now with the tides of favor shifting away nuclear power stands at a Crossroads teetering on the brink of obsolescence what catalyzed this fall from grace other than all of the explosions when wind solar or really even gas fail mostly it's a question of a blackout when nuclear power fails history has a small littering of events like Chernobyl Three Mile Island and Fukushima that have all Tau us this fails in a much larger and more concerning way as a result this very sensibly produced a cycle of heightened regulatory scrutiny safety protocols and other measures not seen to the same extreme in other Industries but this as a result turned building new nuclear plants into an increasingly bureaucratic political and costly operation what I found really interesting is that you can actually see this in the data thar Island partially melted down on March 28th 1979 this is a plot of the cost of reactor construction organized by construction start date against price and it shows a stark change the red circles are reactors that finished before the disaster and the brown circles are the ones that finished afterwards where a wave of Regulatory Compliance and other safety measures ballooned the cost of these facilities traditionally though even with sudden regulatory or safety barriers applied most markets Trend downwards in their costs due to continued Innovation economies of scale and lowering costs of adoption across marketplaces that they serve that is with the fascinating exception of nuclear while the levelized cost of energy of all other Technologies in the energy sector decreased between the years of 2009 to 2019 nuclear managed to increase its cost by 26% that's a trend that is only out embarrassed by the UK's inability to build new train lines part of the problem here is that the large scale nuclear builds are very difficult to scale each construction activity essentially becomes a bespoke project influenced by particular Geographic considerations like if you put it in a tsunami Zone reactor Choice fuel Choice cooling approach scale of energy production needed to serve the region local political hurdles the list is a long one underpinning that problem though is that human cooperation doesn't scale well so complex problem spaces become incredibly bureaucratic activities to solve racking up time and money this isn't a problem though in large scale wind solar or even gas plants because largely the individual elements are safe modular bought in bulk and combined together and with the risk well understood and practical to amarate the complexity space a theoretical 2D plane where most physicists live of how hard it is to build Solutions in these renewable Industries remains small and conquerable however they aren't the final answer because we will always need reliable sources of preferably clean Basel load power to complement intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar so we need a solution and we find here a really interesting counter Trend that talks to solving this point in nuclear though the data set is limited and that is what happened in France unlike most countries that diversify their nuclear reactor designs France limited itself to a small number of standardized reactors by a small number of companies which it then replicated across multiple sites often constructing multiple reactors on the same site allowing for shared resources and streamlining the construction process construction costs in France as a result have flatlined for the last 30 years and nuclear now provides 75% of France's energy and that brings us to a rule common to any one that builds software the 19990 rule the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time the remaining 10% of the code accounts for the remaining 90% of the development time yes that adds to 180% time the point here is how can we move nuclear out of the largely bespoke highly complex regime of building from scratch to the complexity space that is smaller and easier to conquer to a more modular scalable and cost efficient approach this brings us to SMR small modular nuclear it and getal letter reactors the buzz at the moment in the nuclear industry but are they the golden bullet small modular nuclear reactors as the name implies are nuclear reactors that are small in size and power output compared to traditional nuclear reactors typically producing less than 300 megawatt of electricity compared to the thousand plus megawatts of traditional reactor systems the design ethos behind an SMR is to move the industry towards manufacturability of reactors in factories rather than on site allowing for higher degrees of standardization across designs which should improve safety quality and price point once transported to site this should also offer shorter construction times and the possibility of upgrading capacity by bolting on additional reactors as needed we said though that the key consideration was safety in driving up the regulatory costs associated with nuclear build outs there are many different SMR designs coming to Market but I think it's interesting to look at a couple leaders in the pack to see how they reduce size in cost but retain safety the hopefully aply named Ultra safe nuclear Corporation or USNC sets out their plans more clearly than most and it's a multi-layered approach to avoiding meltdowns that starts with the fuel they use an increasingly industry standard approach to fuel sources of enriched uranium encased in millimeter size ceramic containers known as Treo fuel which they manufacture inhouse these fuel pellets are about the size of a walnut but contain the energy of 2,000 L of diesel each as fision reactions occur these shells trap the various radioactive nuclear fision byproducts inside these spheres are then contained in a silicon carbide Matrix which was nearly as hard as diamond with a melting point of 2,700 de C this prevents many of the failure Pathways of traditional fuel designs if the Matrix is somehow broken the ceramic sees inside add a second layer of protection to keep the fuel contained smrs also generally adopt passive cooling approaches or negative reactivity feedback systems that act as fail safes to prevent nuclear meltdowns in the event of power loss or damage to the facility USNC still uses control rods but it's designed so that the reactor becomes less efficient at higher temperatures their design also uses helium gas as a coolant which although is less efficient at cooling is a noble gas meaning that it doesn't react or corrode materials and importantly doesn't explode if ignited as the individual reactors output significantly less power than a large nuclear reactor around 10 to 45 megawatt they can be designed so that in the event of loss of cooling or even complete withdrawal of the control rods they can self cool just by thermally radiating their energy as heat the idea is by bolting together many small easier to make safe modules an energy generation facility can produced with a necessary output while operating in a much safer more reliable and ultimately cheaper regime and all of these things I've just said should lead you to believe that USNC seems really compelling as does the the thesis around smrs in general but the elephant in the room is well we still aren't actually seeing these things enter the marketplace why is that the other commonly heralded SMR company is new scale which self-reports to be the global leader and as of November 2023 they were the only American company with a design approved by Regulators their 77 megawatt design is conceptually similar to Conventional reactors helping it get to Market first but scaled down and immerse in a pool of water for emergency cooling but the problem across smrs is that the price point they keep on promising seems to creep on upward just like their big nuclear reactor Brethren starting with a high but still competitive quote to provide six reactors to Utah at a cost of $55 per megawatt hour in 2016 this drifted slowly up to $58 in 2021 before skyrocketing to $119 in 2023 this made it as expensive as conventional nuclear projects so after all of that clever engineering and modular design we seem to have ended up frustratingly exactly where we started most recently the blame for that cost grp has been attributed to inflation the general rise of cost and material needed in nuclear construction combined with the difficulty of sourcing Advanced nuclear fuels which are typically imported from Russia Renewables as you can imagine haven't faced such extreme price Rises creating further price disparity in November of 2023 new scale announced it was terminating its project in Utah even even though the department of energy had already approved $1.35 billion over a 10-year period to help subsidize the project even with that taxpayer money injection it failed to deliver on a fair cost of energy so rightfully the project was scrapped shortly after X energy another reactor developer called off a $1.8 billion deal to go public citing challenging market conditions and OKO another reactor designer backed by Sam Alman had its license application rejected in 2022 by regulators and subse quently lost a contract with the Air Force worth an estimated $100 million in 2023 so fascinatingly even with this clever narrative and ability to deliver these infrastructure projects in small modular designs they still encounter the classic teething problems of large nuclear reactors maybe reactor designers just need to think one step even smaller if removing the majority of bespoked parts required for nuclear was already achieved by smrs but the building of projects still lags and spirals out of control then you might be asking well isn't that it then for this industry but what if we could go one step further SMR projects like new scale are still billion dooll builds the geography Community stakeholders connection to the existing electrical infrastructure all need development collaboration planning and execution so how do we remove more of these from the equation what if we could turn up tomorrow with a fully realized nuclear reactor and plug it in where the power was needed that sounds crazy but it's exactly what a new Cass of nuclear called micronuclear reactors are trying to do already startups such as Nano nuclear energy and energy giants like Westinghouse are making the first attempts to develop reactors that drive up to sight and are ready to generate power on demand Nano nuclear energy are claiming their entire reactor will be able to fit on the back of a truck Westing House's evinci micro reactor will be similar but arrive in pieces on multiple trucks to be assembled and integrated into a grid in less than 30 days and now it's important to note here straight away that this isn't ridiculous as it might sound small nuclear power reactors have been used in nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for decades we have just never really seen them crop up in traditional consumer marketplaces Westinghouse intends to use the same Treo fuel in their system but instead of pumping helium through as a coolant a heat pipe will be used heat pipes are long thin tubes that passively transfer thermal energy from one end of the tube to the other reducing the number of moving parts means less complexity less cost and less maintenance the whole system is designed to provide continuous power for8 years after that it's driven back to the factory for refueling this removes a huge amount of the buildout required for things like concrete bunkers Control Systems roads and everything else needed for traditional power stations that don't actually get you generating power at yes the expense of maybe don't leave the keys in the ignition initial cost estimates are $90 million to10 mli per Reactor with aims at scale to deliver these units for $60 million each which yes this is a different application and produces much less power overall than a fullsize SMR site but the government subsidy alone for new scale project was over a billion dollars so micro reactors move us into comparatively an incredibly low cost to test these sorts of Technology capabilities what I want you to focus on here isn't necessarily these two companies that I've picked but rather the space in general and ask ourselves do these micronuclear reactors plug a gap that is otherwise very hard to fill the first indications from the market are currently targeting things like remote mining efforts that are off-grid I'm not actually sold these are the right play here to build out a solar farm for this application is around $600,000 per megawatt in the current market yes you also need batteries if you want the mine to operate at night and potentially a larger array as a result and maybe even backup generators but your goal isn't to use them if possible but assuming the mine is going to be operational and in the same place for a while there's enough accessible land around these installations for solar farms and solar continues to drop in price a mobile reactor to a static operation at a high cost I'm not sure ultimately wins some use cases that I think are maybe more interesting are disaster or emergency response groups yes maybe but I guess if you're turning up because the existing infrastructure has failed and you're here to turn the lights back on then you have to hope that the hurricane destroyed just the gas coal or other generators and didn't touch the power cables that connect the city and do you really want to send a nuclear reactor into an already destabilized environment maybe not I think the real application here lands on remote micr grids either islands that don't have space or unappropriate for solar or wind or for communities that are remote maybe in the northern hemisphere so receive less sunlight or maybe even really remote communities Westinghouse is also launching their Astro Vinci reactor providing between 10 kW to 100 kW to address the power needs of on orbit or lunar surface applications for moonshot Technologies maybe nuclear does make sense because of the long fuel lifetime practicality of maintaining a self-contained single reactor unit rather than an expansive array of solar panels say that also obviously would stop working for between 1.5 and 3.5 days at a time which is the length of a single night on the moon which would mean that doing something like running off batteries would be even more challenging during that period with all of these applications actually finding the one that works relative to what nuclear can deliver on is very challenging there is also not to help painfully little information about technical progress at the moment in these micronuclear reactors major industry players though like Westinghouse are making movements in this area and I think that really is worth paying attention to just as everyone else is still trying to speculate could this actually work I not sure we have an answer yet but we rarely do prior to these Technologies actually taking hold that's the really hard bit but also the fun bit when it comes to finding gaps for technologies that simply do not exist yet maybe these applications with these form factors and considerations are the key to finally unlocking the future of nuclear energy what do you think if you like this video I got a super cool opportunity to visit first light Fusion last year who are making a amazing approach to nuclear fusion Technologies essentially hitting a Fusion fuel with a projectile going 60 km/ second so that it implodes faster than it has time to explode go check it out wherever I've left the link probably down in the description down below leave me a comment with what you think about modular or micro nuclear reactors there is tons that I didn't get time to cover off all of which I'm really interested in as I start to learn about this space what if someone steals the thing that would be a nightmare as always thank you very much for watching I'll see you next week goodbye

Channel: Dr Ben Miles

Views: 228,043

Keywords: science, future, breakthrough

Id: ydeMrFcwA1o

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024