Dive Brief:
- The November demise of the Carbon Free Power Project is not the end of the road for light-water small modular reactors, Idaho National Laboratory Director of Reactor Systems and Design Youssef Ballout said in a May 23 presentation at INL Media Days.
- NuScale’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission-certified SMR design is “still alive and well” and drawing interest from customers in Europe and Asia, while 300-MW light-water SMR designs developed by Holtec and Westinghouse look promising, he said.
- “My prediction is SMRs are not going anywhere,” Ballout said near the end of a far-ranging discussion with two other INL scientists that touched on the lab’s role in early nuclear reactor development, its ongoing fuel and reactor experiments and the future for conventional and advanced nuclear power.
Dive Insight:
NuScale and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems agreed to terminate the 462-MW Carbon Free Power Project last year after determining that it would not reach its 80% subscription target on time. The project was to be hosted on INL’s 890-square mile campus near Idaho Falls.
In early 2023, NuScale increased the target price for power produced by the CFPP from $58/MW to $89/MW amid what it called a “changing financial landscape for the development of energy projects nationwide.” Potential subscribers balked at the higher prices, leading to the subscription shortfall and eventual cancellation.
Future SMR projects could fare better with “guaranteed customers” like data centers, which may need multiple modules to serve their power needs, Ballout said in response to an audience question.
“Cost is part of it, but not all of it,” he said.
In an earnings call earlier this year, NuScale touted its selection as the technology partner for Standard Power, an infrastructure as a service provider that plans to develop nearly 2 GW of SMRs to power hyperscale data centers in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The “Advancing the Future of Nuclear Energy” session at INL Media Days also featured updates on INL’s next-generation reactor experiments, which Ballout said help validate designs for advanced reactor companies without testing facilities of their own.
INL plans to have DOME, a first-of-its-kind advanced reactor test bed housed in a repurposed breeder reactor facility, ready for testing in 2026, INL said last year. A second advanced rector test bed facility, LOTUS, could be operating by the end of 2027, INL said.
INL also plans to support microreactor testing by the end of 2027 for DOE’s MARVEL project, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Project Pele and Oklo’s Aurora design, according to a presentation slide. But the project timelines are “notional” and “sometimes shift to the right, and that’s okay,” Ballout said.
INL expects the first LOTUS user to be the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment, a partially DOE-funded, Southern Co.-led initiative to demonstrate molten chloride fast reactor, or MCFR, technology developed by TerraPower. The six-month project will conduct “about 16” specific experiments as a stepping stone “along the way to commercialization” of the technology, said Nick Smith, INL special reactor concepts manager.
MCRE is important because the technology requires liquid salt fuel, a “brand-new fuel form” not used in any existing commercial reactors, Smith said. INL is working to develop an MCFR component and fuel supply chain as well, with the installation of a fuel salt synthesis line expected by the end of this year, he added.
INL hosted testing of another novel fuel form, tri-structural isotropic particle fuel, or TRISO, as part of its support for Project Pele, INL Special Reactor Concepts Manager Justin Coleman said. That testing helped validate TRISO’s enhanced safety profile, which enables the development of portable microreactor assemblies small enough to fit in a shipping container, Coleman said.
Project Pele aims to develop reliable, highly autonomous and lower-risk microreactors that can be deployed in remote locations while reducing the military’s reliance on diesel fuel, Coleman said. The concept harkens back to the 1950s, when the U.S. Army had five portable microreactors, Coleman noted.
“History tells us the way the future may look,” he said.
Responding later to an audience question, Smith and Ballout sounded cautiously optimistic about future conventional reactor projects in the United States.
With construction crews fresh off work on the Westinghouse AP-1000 design at Georgia Power’s Vogtle 3 and 4, “it seems like a good idea” to finish construction on the unfinished V.C. Sumner project, Smith said, while cautioning that “as time goes on, it becomes less likely that there’s an economic case to do that.” Co-owners South Carolina Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper halted work in 2017 on the project’s twin reactors amid escalating costs.
Georgia Power’s Vogtle 4 reactor cost less to build than Vogtle 3, “and the next one will probably be even cheaper,” Ballout added.
