Small modular reactors (SMR) are in the news a lot these days. SMRs are designed to produce three hundred megawatts or less of electricity from nuclear fission. They will be built in modules in factories and shipped to the site where they will be assembled and operated. NuScale Power of Portland, Oregon just submitted a twelve thousand page application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license the manufacture of the first commercial SMRs in the U.S.

      The NuScale SMR design is a sixty-five foot self-contained reactor that uses enriched uranium for fuel. The NuScale SMRs will be built in a factory and shipped via truck, train or barge to their operational sites. Idaho National Laboratory would be the first customer for the NuScale SMRs. The plan is to build twelve fifty megawatt SMRs and immerse them in a cooling pool with eight million gallons of water.

        The facility at the INL would be owned by Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) which is an association of forty-five small utility companies in seven Western states focused on obtaining carbon-free energy sources. It will take years to plan and build the INL facility. The U.S. government is providing funding for planning and site development at INL. The U.S. government is supporting and encouraging the development of SMRs. New legislation has been passed by the U.S. House of Representative to make it easier to license SMRs.  

       Los Alamos County (LAC) in New Mexico is considering the purchase of a low power NuScale SMR. The model being considered would deliver sixteen megawatts of electricity. Eight megawatts would be used by residents and businesses of the county and eight megawatts would be used by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. LAC is a member of the UAMPS which is involved in the Idaho National Laboratory project. LAC has allocated fifty thousand dollars for a preliminary study of SMRs. County officials say that this is a very preliminary look at one of many possible future sources of low-carbon energy for the county.

      LAC currently gets most of its power from hydroelectric projects on Abiquiu Lake and El Vado. It also gets a small amount from solar energy. The county wants to be carbon-neutral by 2040 and sees SMRs as one way of achieving that. The U.S. Department of Energy is expected to pay fifteen million dollars towards the research and planning phase of an SMR for LAC. Another seven and a half million dollars would come from NuScale with a final seven and a half million dollars from UAMPS for a total of thirty million dollars. The Department of Energy wants to have a low power SMR built and is willing to help with the upfront cost of the LAC SMR towards that end. There are “off-ramps” along the road to having an operational SMR in LAC if the county eventually decides that it does not want to have an SMR.

       Supporters of SMRs for LAC point out that they are safer than conventional reactors because they shut down automatically if cooling systems fail. They are also cheaper to dispose of when their operational life is over. Critics in LAC point out that there are still security concerns and issues with disposing of spent fuel with SMRs. The critics would rather see the money invested in solar energy.

 

 

We are creeping closer to the apocalypse, according to a panel of scientists and scholars. Scientists has moved the ‘Doomsday Clock,’ a symbolic countdown to the end of the world, to two and a half minutes to midnight.  usatoday.com

Nuclear power could play a significant role in Poland’s energy supply, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The use of nuclear, it said, would enable the country to boost its electricity generation capacity from clean energy sources while strengthening its energy security. world-nuclear-news.org

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is inviting contributions to its new inquiry into priorities for nuclear research and technologies. In 2011 the Committee investigated whether the UK’s research and development (R&D) capabilities were sufficient to meet the country’s nuclear energy needs in the future, ensuring a safe and secure supply of nuclear energy up to 2050. world-nuclear-news.org

Plans to begin spent nuclear fuel removal at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, hit by a devastating post-earthquake tsunami in March 2011, has been postponed to sometime after March 2018, Japanese media are reporting. nuclearstreet.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

       Back in 2015, I blogged about a supposed new Russian underwater drone with a nuclear warhead called “Ocean Multipurpose System: Status-6”. The plans for the drone were glimpsed in a Russian government video, suggesting that it was a deliberate “leak.” The basic idea was that the drone was fast and fitted with stealth technology that would make it impossible to detect. It would be brought near the coast of an enemy such as the U.S. and released. The drone would proceed undetected to close to the coast and release a torpedo with a nuclear warhead. The torpedo could run right into a busy port at sixty-five miles an hour and explode, contaminating hundreds of square miles and millions of people. Recently, it has been reported that the “new” drone system may not be so new after all.

       Nuclear submarines have been around for many decades. The U.S. Nautilus was launched in 1955. The Soviet Union launched the K-3 Leninskiy Komsomol in 1958. The Russians have forty-five operation nuclear submarines. So the idea of using a nuclear submarine as a delivery system for a nuclear weapon in not new.

        The U.S. developed remote-controlled underwater drones in the 1960s. They were used to find shipwrecks, check underwater cables, and for a variety of other uses. Britain worked on underwater drones in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, Germany, Sweden, China, the U.S. and Russia and other countries are all developing and deploying underwater drones for a variety of purposes. Many of the drones are used for civilian application but military drones are also being developed. Once again, underwater drones are hardly new developments.

         Stealth technology for use in water has been under development since the 1980s. A variety of techniques has been created that can make an underwater vessel difficult to detect by sonar. However, the new techniques are certainly not capable of rendering a drone “impossible to detect.” The use of underwater stealth technologies while in constant evolution cannot be classified as a “new” technology.

         Torpedoes have existed since the mid-1800s. The Russians developed a super-cavitating torpedo in the 1960s and it is still in service today. It has a special nose assembly that creates a bubble around the torpedo. This allows the rocket engine to propel the torpedo to speeds of two hundred miles per hour because the torpedo never actually touches the water. So the idea of a torpedo that travels at sixty five miles per hour being particularly fast is just absurd.

        There is not a lot of information about the warhead on the drone. It could be a conventional nuclear warhead. Some say that it might be a neutron bomb that could kill millions of people. Neutron bombs have been around since the 1980s. Other reports say that a conventional explosive could be wrapped in Cobalt-60 to spread radioactive contamination over a wide area. The idea of such a “dirty bomb” has been around since the discovery of radioactive materials in the late 1800s and the understanding of the adverse effects of radiation on human health first realized in 1927. Not one of these warheads is a new concept.

        While the Pentagon has stated that the Ocean Multipurpose System: Status-6 is a real Russian weapon, none of the technologies involved are new. The Russians may have combined old technologies into a new weapon that they are adding to their arsenal but any other major Western nation could easily duplicate such a weapon from well known technologies. And while underwater stealth technologies exist, they are not as perfect as implied by news stories on the Russian Ocean Multipurpose System: Status-6. Ultimately, there does not appear to be much reason for all the excited publicity about the system (including my original blog post). It is likely that the Russians allowed images of the system to “leak” specifically to alarm potential enemies.

Russian Ocean Multipurpose System: Status-6 “leaked” plans:

 

A British pensioner alleged to have stopped a nuclear convoy by sitting in the middle of the road has appeared in court. Brian Quail, 78, presented himself in Dumbarton Sheriff Court, West Dunbartonshire, earlier today charged with breach of the peace. dailymail.co.uk

Russian nuclear company Rosatom has denied reports that it’s officially made a bid for South Africa’s nuclear power plan, but admits it’s still interested. ewn.co.za

Rattled By Pakistan? India is slated to test launch an intermediate-range nuclear-capable ballistic missile at the end of the month. thediplomat.com

The threat of a strike by U.K. nuclear workers has been put on hold after an agreement to hold further talks in a row over pensions. belfasttelegraph.co.uk

 

 

 

 

       Dealing with spent nuclear fuel is a serious problem from nuclear power plant operators across the world. Spent nuclear fuel is filling up the cooling pools at nuclear power station around the U.S. When a reactor reaches the end of its life and needs to be decommissioned, disposing of the spent fuel is a major task. The U.S. government identified Yucca Mountain as the site for a spent fuel repository in 1987 and the U.S. promised to have the repository operating by 1999. However, the funding for the project did not come through until 2002. IN 2009, the project was canceled over environmental and political concerns. The soonest that the U.S. will have a national repository for spent nuclear fuel is now estimated to be 2050.

       Without a national spent fuel repository, the choices have been to shut down a plant and leave the spent fuel in the pool for several decades before removal, shut down the plant and move the fuel to onsite temporary storage in dry casks after a seven year cooling period or shut down the plant and move the spent fuel to an offsite temporary dry cask storage facility after the seven-year cooling period.

       Holtec is a major manufacturer of dry casks for temporary spent fuel storage. They have developed a proprietary neutron absorbing material called Metamic-HT. Metamic-HT is an aluminum boron carbide metal matrix composite. It is used to construct spent fuel baskets for their new line of dry casks. The spent fuel baskets made of Metamic-HT are friction welded which produces superior welds to other techniques. Metamic-HT spent fuel baskets have ten times the thermal conductivity of conventional stainless steel fuel baskets. This permits the spent fuel to be moved from cooling pools after only a two and a half year cooling period as opposed to that current seven-year cooling period that is required before spent fuel is removed from the cooling pool.

      Holtec has just announced that they have developed what they are calling a “proto-prompt” decommissioning process which they claim could be used to decommission a closed nuclear power plant in about five years. This much faster than current decommissioning practices. The new Matamic-HT material is one of the developments that makes the new decommissioning process possible. Holtec said that industry concern over the possibility of loss of water causing zirconium fires in cooling pools at closed nuclear power reactors was one of the motivations for developing the new process to speed up decommissioning.

        Entergy announced last fall that it was going to decommission the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant several decades sooner than original estimates. Holtec dry cask technology will be used to speed up the timetable. Holtec has announced that it will submit all necessary documents to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to secure a permit for an interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in New Mexico on land that is being acquired by their partner, ELEA LLC. The HIGH-STORAGE Consolidated Interim Storage Facility will be able to accept spent nuclear fuel retrieved from retired nuclear power reactors. 

Beijing is moving advanced ballistic missiles which are capable of hitting the US to its north-eastern frontier with Russia, according to media reports, amid suggestions that the weapons were revealed in response to Donald Trump’s “provocative remarks” towards China. telegraph.co.uk

The UK government has highlighted the role of nuclear power among its responses to a report by the Energy and Climate Change Committee. The parliamentary committee published its Third Report of Session 2016–17, The energy revolution and future challenges for UK energy and climate change policy, last October. world-nuclear-news.org

The US House of Representatives – the lower chamber of the United States Congress – has approved a handful of bipartisan bills from the last session of Congress that aim to bolster research on advanced nuclear reactors, allow for more challenges at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and change rules for federal efficiency standards. The Advanced Nuclear Technology Act of 2017 was passed by voice vote on 23 January. world-nuclear-news.org

Lawmakers introduced a bill in both houses of Congress Tuesday that would prevent the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a congressional declaration of war. A policy that was long debated — but never seriously pursued — during the Obama administration has now become anything other than abstract after the election of Donald Trump. nuclearstreet.com