Nuclear News

On September 1, 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington was observing sunspots when a bright flash—a solar flare—erupted from the sun’s surface.

Unbeknownst to Carrington, the solar flare was accompanied by two large expulsions of magnetically charged plasma, what is now known as a coronal mass ejection. That plasma traveled 150 million miles in just 17.6 hours before slamming into the Earth’s magnetic field, inducing strong electrical currents under the Earth’s surface that today could impact electrical circuits across a significant area of the planet.

Washington state has trouble on the horizon—trouble with its electrical grid. Trouble as in not being reliable. Trouble as in big risks of rolling blackouts.

The trouble stems from attempts to decarbonize our society. Getting rid of coal, oil, and gas in generating electricity is the low-hanging fruit, but just getting rid of them without a realistic plan to replace them will do more harm than good.

Amy Roma

Flipping on a light switch and knowing that the power will come on is a luxury. While it sounds like a simple act, it is achieved through deliberate government policies that ensure our electricity comes from a mix of sources, some of which are continuously operational—such as nuclear and gas—and some of which only operate at certain times—such as wind and solar. If any one source is unavailable or overly expensive, another source needs to deliver on demand. Diversity of energy sources ensures the grid is able to adapt and recover from changing conditions so that we can always flip the lights on.

While grid resilience—the grid’s ability to anticipate, absorb, and recover from major disruptions and rapidly restore electric service in their wake—is a matter of paramount importance, the source diversity required to achieve this is at risk. For power grids relying on renewables, supply and demand hang in a balance based on time of day and weather.

With funding from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the International Atomic Energy Agency is working to help developing countries scale up their cancer care capacities in radiotherapy, the agency said. A multilateral development bank, IsDB works to improve lives by promoting social and economic development in 57 member states and Muslim communities around the world.

Helion Energy, based in Everett, Wash., today announced an agreement to use its first fusion power plant to provide electricity to Microsoft. Constellation, which operates 21 commercial nuclear reactors in the United States, will serve as the power marketer and will manage transmission for the project.

The Department of Energy yesterday announced the awarding of $22.1 million to 10 industry-led nuclear projects, including two aimed at expanding clean hydrogen production and one at advancing a microreactor design. Other projects selected for funding are focused on addressing nuclear regulatory hurdles, improving existing reactor operation, and facilitating new advanced reactor developments.

Abstracts for all 10 projects can be found here.

Savannah River National Laboratory and Augusta University have announced a new agreement that formalizes a long-standing partnership and expands on a shared mission to address global security issues.

A recent multinational survey of attitudes toward nuclear energy has found widespread public support for advanced nuclear technologies in countries around the world, according to the 50-page report The World Wants New Nuclear, released yesterday by nongovernmental organizations ClearPath, Third Way, Potential Energy Coalition, and RePlanet.

The report is based on a large-scale online quantitative survey across three continents, among 13,500 members of the general public. Nationally representative samples were surveyed for each of eight nations—France, Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—between November 2022 and January 2023.

Meredith Angwin

When my book Shorting the Grid was published in 2020, many described it as “alarmist.” Most people in the United States took grid reliability for granted. Sure, there were always power outages during storms, but weird things like “rolling blackouts” only happened in California.

Public perception is changing, however. Part of this change is due to the major February 2021 blackout in Texas, as well as the grid emergencies during December 2022. People became aware that their own grid could have problems, and not just the usual power-line-fails-in-a-snowstorm type of problems. For example, last December, the service areas for Duke Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority in the southeastern U.S. experienced rolling blackouts. Grid operators had to take emergency measures. The Midwest, Texas, and New England experienced near misses with grid trouble. In other words, most of the country was at risk of rolling blackouts due to one relatively short winter storm.

The Great Lakes Clean Hydrogen Hub coalition (GLCH) has submitted an application for funding from the $8 billion Department of Energy program authorized by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to support the creation of regional clean hydrogen hubs, nuclear plant owner/operator Energy Harbor announced on May 2.

Nuclear power is the single largest source of clean energy in the United States, but how can the value of “clean” be measured? Two recent reports by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, respectively, measured the clean energy benefits of nuclear energy in different ways: the benefits to human health from the air pollution avoided and the future economic value of avoided carbon emissions.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a method of using augmented reality (AR) to create accurate visual representations of ionizing radiation, and that technology has just been licensed by Teletrix, a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based firm that develops simulators to train radiological workers and radiological control technicians. ORNL announced the news on May 4.

The main construction phase for Unit 3 at Egypt’s El Dabaa nuclear power plant project has begun, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation Rosatom announced last week.

On December 20, 1951, researchers used energy produced by Experimental Breeder Reactor-I near Arco, Idaho, to illuminate four 200-watt lightbulbs. Since then, utilities have built commercial nuclear power plants in the United States almost exclusively to generate electricity. This has worked well alongside other power generation and transmission infrastructure—large oil- and coal-fired, natural gas turbine or hydroelectric plants, and a relatively simple electrical grid designed to deliver reliable power.

Humanity is now embarking on an epic and complex energy transformation across the grid, industry, and transportation. Renewables like wind and solar are contributing an increasing share of carbon-free electricity to the grid, but that contribution is variable and hard to predict—sometimes those sources produce more electricity than the grid needs, and sometimes less.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

This month’s Nuclear News takes a look at nuclear’s reliability as an energy source, along with its contributions to the overall resiliency of our electricity grid. Capacity factors in the U.S. remain at an all-time high, and nuclear’s strength in maintaining a functional electricity distribution system in times of stress, whether by storm or war, is gaining public acceptance and appreciation.

Earlier this spring, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hosted its first in-person Regulatory Information Conference (RIC) since the onset of COVID. Though well organized and informative, it was easy to sense the frustration of attendees—over things like the stringency of the NRC’s proposed Part 53 regulatory framework for advanced reactors and the perceived lack of preparedness for the coming onslaught of license applications. There was a general sense, as one friend put it, that the commission is “wrapped around the axle of administrative procedures and precedents.”

At a virtual press conference this morning, Westinghouse Electric Company president and chief executive officer Patrick Fragman announced the launch of the AP300 small modular reactor, a 300-MWe, 900-MWth single-loop pressurized water reactor based on the company’s larger AP1000 unit. Fragman was joined at the conference by David Durham, president of energy systems for Westinghouse, and Rita Baranwal, the firm’s chief technology officer. The company also released a short video introducing the AP300 on YouTube.

Two South Korean financial institutions—the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation (K-Sure) and the Export-Import Bank of Korea (KEXIM)—have signed pacts with Holtec International and Hyundai Engineering & Construction (a Hyundai Motor Group subsidiary) to provide support to Holtec’s SMR-160 projects around the world, the American firm announced on May 2.

Here is a recap of industry happenings over the past month:

ADVANCED REACTOR MARKETPLACE

Site selected for Xe-100 SMR deployment

Dow and X-energy have announced that the first commercial deployment of X-energy’s Xe-100 advanced small modular reactor will be at one of Dow’s sites on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Previously, Energy Northwest’s Columbia nuclear power plant in Washington state was the expected location for deployment. Energy Northwest has said it still hopes to deploy an Xe-100 SMR before 2030.

X-energy also announced that it is building a regional fleet management, monitoring, and training facility called the Plant Support Center–East in Frederick, Md., to support the deployment of its SMRs.

Georgia Power has announced another key milestone for the Vogtle nuclear expansion project near Waynesboro, Ga.—the completion of hot functional testing at Unit 4. This achievement marks another significant step toward commercial operation for the Generation III+ AP1000 reactor, which is projected to enter service late in the fourth quarter 2023 or in the first quarter 2024.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Department of Safeguards recently qualified Savannah River National Laboratory to produce microparticle reference materials that can be used to evaluate measurement quality in support of the Network of Analytical Laboratories (NWAL) and the IAEA’s verification mission. SRNL announced the development on April 25.