Imagine a nuclear reactor the size of a school bus, built on an assembly line and delivered to operators on a flatbed truck.
This is General Atomics’ vision of a safer, more efficient fission machine that could go 30 years without refueling and reduce daunting startup and equipment costs that have plagued plants like the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
G.A., as it’s known in the business, believes it can deliver such a reactor and is jockeying to win some of the $452 million in development money being handed out by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Getting there would mean prying a raft of researchers and safety regulators away from a lifetime of work refining the dominant nuclear technology, water-cooled reactors that use steam to drive turbines and generate electricity.
“There are times in human history where technologies come along that have the potential of changing the game,” says John Parmentola, senior vice president at G.A.’s Energy and Advance Concepts Group. “The Department of Energy has a choice: It can either continue to fund technology that hasn’t changed very much in 50 years or it can take a bold step to a possible new path to nuclear energy. That is a major decision point.”
Industry insiders already have high hopes for smaller, more foolproof reactors that could be mass produced and cheaply installed.
Climate-change concerns are providing new impetus to make emissions-free nuclear plants more viable, despite problems with storing nuclear waste.
The nuclear sector’s center of gravity has shifted abroad, meanwhile, challenging U.S. influence over regarding nuclear proliferation, safety and fuel control.
China, where 28 nuclear plants are under construction, is moving from imported nuclear engineering to home-grown technology.
The new General Atomics entry, dubbed the Energy Multiplier Module or “EM²,” sets out to shrink the reactor vessel to a 35-foot tall cylinder, weighing 530 tons, that would be stowed underground.
EM² would operate at 850 degrees Celsius, more than twice the temperature of typical water-cooled reactors that make up the U.S. fleet.
That fast-neutron configuration can squeeze vastly more energy from the fuel supply.
The core would be cooled by helium, with the inert gas flowing through adjacent turbines to make electricity.
That eliminates the complex steam works associated with water-cooled plants. Gone too are massive heat exchangers like the generators linked to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station’s early retirement in June.
Each reactor could power a city of 330,000.
“This is very simple,” says Parmentola, front man for the General Atomics proposal. “I go from the heated medium and drive a turbine, directly. That’s the most efficient way of doing it.”
Above all, he said, the design is geared toward making cost-competitive electricity in an age of abundant natural gas.
In the early decades of nuclear power, water-cooled reactors quickly grew beyond a gigawatt in size — powering more than a million homes each — to achieve new economies of scale.
That paradigm is on trial in Georgia and South Carolina with the construction of four large reactors — the first built in the U.S. in 30 years.