By Abhinav Parameshwar, Contributing Writer
Reps. Jason Altmire and Tim Murphy are advocating for a new generation of miniature nuclear reactors that can potentially power neighborhoods. The duo unveiled new legislation, designed to facilitate the development of small nuclear reactors, during a press conference at Westinghouse Electric Company’s headquarters in Cranberry, PA last Friday.
Their proposal, packaged as the Nuclear Power 2021 Act, calls for the manufacture of two small nuclear reactors by 2021 to be funded partially by the federal Department of Energy. The plan is part of their efforts to allow Western Pennsylvania to play a bigger role in the energy legislation that is expected of Congress this year.
Altmire described the act as being based on the Nuclear Power 2010 program (created in 2002 to encourage the private sector to develop nuclear power plants), which he says gave a kick-start to the nuclear power industry. “It provided for loan guarantees and financing and permitting that was not available before,” he said.
“The safe expansion of new nuclear technology must be a part of any plan to win back our energy future,” said Congressman Murphy. “While companies like Westinghouse are pushing the boundaries of newer and better technologies, government can help by making the process much more efficient without sacrificing safety. Any opportunity to provide more ways to power our economy and create more high paying jobs for Americans must be pursued, and this legislation puts us on that path.”
Altmire made it a point to endorse Westinghouse’s work and capabilities. He described the company as being a world leader in this technology and one that is “pushing the boundaries”. Westinghouse has designed a small modular reactor that would shrink nuclear operations to one capsule about 90 feet tall and could be within miles of an industrial plant, military base, or neighbourhood to be powered revealed Dr. Aris S. Candris, president and CEO of Westinghouse Electric Company.
“You could put them anywhere,” Altmire said of the reactors. “You don’t need to be by a large source of water.”
Altmire. who introduced the measure last year to no avail, anticipates higher gasoline prices to improve the environment for energy legislation.
Scrutiny of the nuclear industry has intensified, however, since a March 11 earthquake triggered a tsunami that knocked out cooling systems at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, causing the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986. Following this disaster, public support in the US for developing nuclear energy sources in the U.S. dropped to a low of 43%, slightly lower than it was immediately after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 according to a CBS News poll.
Naturally, the current concerns about nuclear energy came up in the conference. “You can’t pretend Japan didn’t happen,” Altmire said, but he added that the smaller reactors would use the same safety mechanisms as the company’s larger ones, including a passive cooling system that can douse overheated reactors with water stored inside the chamber. Altmire went on to further reassure listeners; “There is less power being generated, there is less heat, it doesn’t need to be near water, so a lot of the things that would give people concern about the nuclear industry because of what happened in Japan are taken care of with the smaller design.”
Small reactors have many unique and attractive features. They could help a greater number of utilities develop nuclear generation capabilities, because they can be built and fuelled more quickly and at a much lower cost than large reactors. In addition, they have the potential to create thousands of jobs in the region.
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Small modular solid-fuel reactors are a significant advance and will help to usher in a nuclear renaissance, but a liquid-fueled reactor is an even better design. Specifically, liquid fluoride thorium reactors, or LFTRs.
Nuclear power isn’t the problem. The problem is with the reactors we’ve been using to produce it. If the reactors at Fukushima had been LFTRs, they wouldn’t have had a disaster on their hands.
Liquid-fuel reactor technology was successfully developed at Oak Ridge National Labs in the 1960s. Although the test reactor worked flawlessly, the project was shelved, a victim of Cold War strategy. But LFTRs have been gathering a lot of attention lately, particularly since the events in Japan.
A LFTR is a completely different type of reactor. For one thing, it can’t melt down. It’s physically impossible. And since it’s air-cooled, it doesn’t have to be located near the shore. It can even be placed in an underground vault. A tsunami would roll right over it, like a truck over a manhole cover.
Imagine a kettle of lava that never boils. A LFTR uses liquid fuel⎯nuclear material dissolved in molten fluoride salt. Conventional reactors are atomic pressure cookers, using solid fuel rods to super-heat water. And that means the constant possibility of high-pressure ruptures and steam leaks.
LFTRs don’t even use water. Instead, they heat helium to spin a turbine for generating power. So if a LFTR leaks, it’s not a catastrophe. The molten salt will “pool and cool” just like lava, for easy containment, recovery, and re-use.
LFTRs burn Thorium, a mildly radioactive material as common as tin and found all over the world. We’ve already mined enough raw Thorium to power the country for 400 years. It’s the waste at our Rare Earth Element mines.
LFTRs consume fuel so efficiently that they can even use the spent fuel from other reactors, while producing a miniscule amount of waste themselves. In fact, the waste from a LFTR is virtually harmless in just 300 years. (No, that’s not a typo.) Yucca Mountain is obsolete. So are Uranium reactors.
LFTR technology has been sitting on the shelf at Oak Ridge for over forty years. But now the manuals are dusted off, and a dedicated group of nuclear industry outsiders is ready to build another test reactor and give it a go.
Will it work? If it doesn’t, we’ll have one more reactor to retire. But if it does work⎯and there is every reason to believe that it will⎯the LFTR will launch a new American paradigm of clean, cheap, safe and abundant energy.
Let’s build one and see.