sunblock said:
Small, maybe about a nuclear carrier size or a little larger, reactor should drastically reduce the problems.
You don't know the power of a carrier reactor - they are NOT that small!
An installation of that type should take an area about the size of two houses, with open land around it for security.
One of the problems is that your exclusion area around the reactor doesn't scale
with power. As long as you need to set aside an exclusion area - you might as well
get the most for it. This augers for a LARGE reactor not a small one.
This type of installation can pretty much be developed off-site and trucked in except the buildings of course. With a few of these up and going it should get pretty standard. This should reduce building and operating costs drastically.
No big cooling towers, no large complex, etc.
Those big cooling towers are one of the MOST cost-effective parts of a nuclear
power plant. You have to brush up on your physics here. Suppose you have a
given demand for power. You can either meet that demand with one large power
plant or 10 smaller ones. If you go the small power plant route - the smaller amount
of heat that needs to be dumped will necessitate that you use a rather small forced
circulation cooling tower. So you end up expending [ i.e. "wasting" ] some of your
power in running the forced circulation for the cooling tower.
If you have a large heat load - then you can use the natural circulation of those big
hyperbolic cooling towers. With the big heat load you can get the waste heat to
drive its own cooling flow.
Building big towers like that is not very expensive. Although they may be large -
they are not very complex.
Think carrier or submarine size.
Maybe submarine size - but carrier reactors are fairly large.
The carrier U.S.S. Enterprise is powered by 8 submarine sized reactors - and even
at that it doesn't have the power of the Nimitz class carriers.
This just might jump-start the industry. There will be problems but that's what nuclear engineers are for.
Small county size nuclear reactors for electrical power just for that county might work.
The experience of small county sized reactors in the past has been VERY POOR!
The idea of community sized reactors has been tried before - the Piqua, Ohio plant
for example. Or even a moderate sized city like Sacramento trying to run its own
power plant Rancho Seco.
The problem is that you need a LOT of expertise in running and managing these
facilities. Small operations just don't have the type of quality "corporate knowledge".
It takes a lot of money to get and train the best cadre of operators and managers.
It's not a job for a small operation - NOT if you want to do it RIGHT!
SMUD - the Sacremento Municipal Utility Districts operated Rancho Seco which
was a single unit installation that was a twin of the dual reactors at the Oconee
plant operated by Duke Power.
At the time, Oconee was one of the BEST performing reactor plants - it routinely
was at the top of the NRC list in terms of capacity factor. Rancho Seco was a twin
of these units and could have achieved similar performance. Alas, SMUD just didn't
have the expertise to operate Rancho Seco as efficiently as Oconee did. They didn't
have the people and expertise.
Again it's a problem of amortization. If you have a cadre of good people capable of
making good decisions concerning plant operation - you'd like to be able to use those
people to make good decisions for more than one plant - and to have those good
decisions and practises give you the most power. Again - that augers for a LARGE
plant; not a small one.
Maybe some of the nuclear engineers out there might take another shot at this. Feasibility, advantages, disadvantages.
The past experience for nuclear plants, as well as ANY complex industrial plant is
that LARGE plants operate better and more efficiently than small plants.
Additionally, large steam cycles - the steam turbine cycle - operate more efficiently
in large systems than in small. The use of more reheat stages, etc which are cost
effective in large plants give you better thermodynamic efficiency than one can
realize in a small thermodynamic steam cycle.
Small plants have only one advantage - you lose less output when the plant goes
down unexpectedly. However, with properly managed large plants - that's not a big
problem.
When a new nuclear power plant is proposed - the operator is going to have to go
through all the hurdles of licensing the plant. More than likely there will be intervenors
and years of court battles. After all that - a 100 Mwe power plant goes into operation.
If you need 1000 Mwe - you've got 9 more identical battles to fight. If you build the
1000 Mwe plant - you fight the battle once.
Even in engineering, or should I say ESPECIALLY in engineering - you realize
"economies of scale".
You've made a lot of assumptions as to where the problems are - such as the size/cost
of buildings and land and cooling towers. Those aren't the problems. In fact, those are
are rather mundane non-problems. If you want to make concrete suggestions as to
how to best proceed - I would suggest researching what the real problems are that
have stymied the nuclear industry; instead of making a bunch of assumptions.
Summarizing - small plants are NOT a good idea.
Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist
