Small Is Beautiful: Nuclear Industry Pins Hopes on Mini-Reactors

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Since 2006, the US government has championed the GNEP project, which it hopes could meet the growing energy demands of developing countries. Under GNEP, the nuclear powers would ship complete mini-reactors with sealed reactor cores to developing countries. The plants would be designed to operate without maintenance for close to 30 years. After that, they would simply be returned, like empty deposit bottles, to the country where they were manufactured.

The United Kingdom, France, Canada, China and Japan are among the GNEP donor nations. Countries like Jordan, Kazakhstan and Senegal have shown interest in the small reactors. In return for receiving the plants, they would pledge not to engage in reprocessing or uranium enrichment.

Critics are horrified. They fear that fissile material could end up in the wrong hands all too easily. "Anyone who ships this stuff all over the world shouldn't be surprised if it comes back in the form of dirty bombs," says Greenpeace expert Jim Riccio.

Physicist Edwin Lyman agrees, saying that it is preferable to concentrate the technology in only a few places. "I am concerned about exporting these plants to countries that have no experience with nuclear energy and where there are security concerns and corruption."

Reusing Old Reactors

Critics are also concerned about the plans of Akme, a Russian company. The firm, which was established in December 2009, engages in the typically Russian practice of reusing old equipment: It intends to convert a reactor used in Soviet nuclear submarines into a civilian reactor.

The project is extremely controversial. The reactors operate with relatively highly enriched uranium, which is more easily used to build bombs. In addition, they are cooled in a toxic lead-bismuth alloy.

In addition to safety and security concerns, there are doubts about the mini-reactor's economic efficiency. In the United States, the costs of licensing a nuclear power plant alone range from $50 million to $100 million. In addition, strict safety requirements make small reactors disproportionately more expensive than larger plants.

This leads physicist Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado to believe that small reactors will "never be competitive." Reactor manufacturers expect to see costs of between $3,500 and $5,000 per kilowatt of installed power for the dwarf nuclear power plants. The same value ranges from $900 to $2,800 for coal power plants and $520 to $1,800 for natural gas power plants. Even wind turbines can be built for $1,900 to $3,700 per kilowatt.

'Not a Sign of Economic Health'

The nuclear industry expects CO2 emissions trading to make nuclear technology, which is largely climate-neutral, more competitive soon. "But the same also applies to hydroelectric power, wind and solar energy," says Lovins.

"The nuclear industry is desperately trying to make itself look vital," says the professor. "But government loan guarantees are not a sign of economic health, just as blood transfusions are not a sign for medical health."

Fans of the new miniature reactor world aren't allowing the grumblers to spoil their mood. Instead, they are developing bolder and bolder projects for the future. For example, nuclear scientist Tom Sanders and a team at the Sandia National Laboratory are developing a reactor that would cost only about $250 million at a planned production rate of 50 reactors per year. Liquid sodium cools the uranium core of the plant, which resembles a sort of replaceable cartridge.

TerraPower, the company Bill Gates has invested in, is working on a so-called traveling-wave reactor. In this type of reactor, the fission zone travels slowly through an elongated fuel core. Plutonium is bred from depleted uranium and then immediately burned off. The engineers rhapsodize over the system, saying that this "wave of fission" could generate electricity continuously "for 50 to 100 years without refueling or removing any used fuel from the reactor."

Is it the holy grail of nuclear engineering? The traveling-wave reactor still doesn't exist outside supercomputers. TerraPower has just entered into a joint venture agreement with Toshiba. The two companies plan to move forward together with the development of a mini-nuke future.

Renewable Energy

The Japanese might already be finding proof of their capacity for innovation in Galena, the town on Alaska's Yukon River, if only they hadn't run into problems with approval for their "4S" reactor.

For now, the residents of Galena have turned to another innovative energy source, paid for with subsidies from Alaska's renewable energy fund: wood-burning stoves.

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• Part 1: Nuclear Industry Pins Hopes on Mini-Reactors
• Part 2: Old Reactors Returned Like Empty Deposit Bottles