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Part 1 of 2 Parts
Small modular reactors (SMR) are getting a lot of press recently. They are defined as fission reactors that produce three hundred megawatts or less of electricity. Allison Macfarlane is the Director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She was a former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the U.S. She says that she has a lot of unanswered questions about the molten-salt technology that would be used to construct one type of SMR that would be made in New Brunswick, Canada.
Moltex Energy is pitching the technology because it believes that it is key to its business case. This is because they are planning on using some of the nuclear waste from the Point Lepreau Generating Station and reducing the long-term cost and radioactivity of the waste that remains. However, Macfarlane said that no one has been able to prove that it is possible or viable to attempt to reprocess nuclear waste and achieve a lower cost and risk for spent nuclear fuel waste.
Macfarlane said, “Nobody knows what the numbers are, and anybody who gives you numbers is selling you a bridge to nowhere because they don't know. Nobody's really doing this right now. … Nobody has ever set up a molten salt reactor and used it to produce electricity.” Macfarlane said that she could not comment specifically on the Moltex technology because the information that they have released so far is too “vague.” She added that she felt the general selling pitch for molten-salt technology is questionable. She said, “Nobody's been able to answer my questions yet on what all these wastes are and how much of them there are, and how heat-producing they are and what their compositions are. My sense is that all of these reactor folks have not really paid a lot of attention to the back end of these fuel cycles,” in reference to the long-term risks and the costs of securely storing nuclear waste.
The Point Lepreau nuclear power plant is New Brunswick’s most important generating station. It earns about fifty thousand dollars an hour when it is operating. Moltex is one of two companies in Saint John promoting SMRs as the next logical step for nuclear power generation in the province. They are also pitching SMRs as a low-carbon alternative to using fossil fuels to generate electricity.
Moltex North Canada CEO Rory O’Sullivan said that Moltex’s molten-salt technology will allow it to economically extract the most radioactive portions of the existing spent nuclear fuel from the Point Lepreau Generation Station. Currently, the waste is stored in pellet form in silos near the power plant and is inspected on a regular basis. The Moltex process would remove under on per cent of the material in the spent nuclear fuel to power the Moltex reactor. O’Sullivan said that the remainder of the spent nuclear fuel after the extraction would be less radioactive for a shorter period of time.
Existing plans for dealing with spent nuclear fuel in Canada are to build a permanent geological repository where the waste can be stored. The repository would have to be able to keep the spent nuclear fuel secure of hundreds of thousands of years. O’Sullivan said that extracting and removing the most radioactive parts of the spent nuclear fuel would reduce the storage time to a few hundred years which would significantly reduce the cost. He said, “The vast majority will have decayed within a couple of hundred years back down to regular natural levels.”
Please read Part 2 next