By RICHARD NEBELThis letter is in response to the Nuscale project, which has been discussed by Pete Sheehey (link), Cornell Wright (link), Aaron Walker (link), and George Chandler (link).
I’m splitting this into two letters, the first one being why Nuscale is not a very good idea and the second being what we at Tibbar Plasma Technologies (TPTI) are doing instead of Nuscale.
I have a Phd in Nuclear Engineering and I am very skeptical about this project. I’m not worried about the safety or the nuclear waste, but I am worried about the cost.
One of our associates at Tibbar Plasma Technologies is Keith Moser, who used to be the head of innovation at Exelon Corporation (the largest nuclear utility in the US). Several years back Exelon expanded their nuclear generating capabilities by buying up operating reactors for 5 cents to 10 cents on the dollar of their original costs. They no longer have capital costs on these plants, but rather only operating costs.
This approach worked well for several years, but over the past 3 years the revenue from their generating facilities has dropped from $2,000,000,000/year to about $300,000,000/year. They have been talking about closing both the Clinton power plant and the Quad-Cities power plant. Both natural gas and wind power are eating up their backside on generating costs. On windy days, Exelon is selling power at a loss.
If Exelon can’t make money when all they have is operating costs, how is NuScale going to do that when they have capital costs to pay off as well?
Furthermore, if you have multiple reactors you are probably going to need multiple operating crews. That will proportionately increase your operating costs. On top of that, this is a first-of-a-kind facility. You aren’t going to be able to take advantage of cost reductions from large volumes of reactors. Finally, to my knowledge there hasn’t been a single nuclear power facility that has come in on time and on budget since the early 1970s.
We at TPTI presently have a contract with the National Science Foundation for a very early stage advanced fuel fusion device (P-11B fusion). One of the things that the NSF asked us to do was to try to determine what the market for this might be if we could successfully make this device work. The question wasn’t will it work (which is an extremely difficult proposition), but rather if it worked would anyone be interested in it. So, we came up with a small, compact device which produced no neutrons, minimal x-rays, and had direct energy conversion yielding thermal efficiencies in excess of 90%.
Keith Moser ran this by a number of his colleagues in the nuclear industry. The answer was that they had no interest whatsoever even if we could do these marvelous things. Their number one criterion was “certainty of cost”. They have been burned twice by nuclear fission concepts (first by standard light water reactors in the late 70s and more recently by passively safe reactors during the “nuclear renaissance”) and they didn’t have the stomach for having this happen a third time.
That same rationale applies to the Nuscale reactors. The utility people think that Los Alamos county is out of its mind to be considering a project like this. If you doubt this, we will be happy to make some introductions for you and you can talk to them yourselves.
