USDOE Issues Funding Opportunity Announcement for SMRs

The US Department of Energy (USDOE) issued a draft Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) this week, intended to support activities related to the design and licensing of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), defined as reactors with an electric output of 300MWe or less; which can be manufactured remotely, transported to point of construction, with on-site assembly largely limited to system integration of components for operation.

Importantly, the USDOE is interested in designs with passive safety (e.g., against consequences of a nuclear accident) as well as inherent safety (e.g., against natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, windstorms or floods), in addition to designs with long inter-refueling periods, low capital cost outlays, low maintenance and operating costs, and high proliferation resistance. The stated intention is to support up to 2 reactor designs through the USNRC design and licensing process, with the ability to be deployed ‘expeditiously’ being an important merit criterion. 2022, a decade from now, is the target year for commercial operation.

Proponents may choose to pursue licensing from the USNRC under either 10 CFR 50 or 10 CFR 52. Stakeholders are encouraged to form consortia, and proponents are encouraged to form design-centered working groups (DCWGs) across the supply and value chains e.g., SMR manufacturers, power utilities, local bodies; and the activities funded by USDOE are required to draw at least 50% of their total resources required, from internal sources. The total amount of funding available from USDOE is estimated to be $452 M, subject to Congressional appropriations. The current draft FOA will be issued in final form after feedback from, and consultation with, stakeholders.

Small and Modular Reactors

Small and modular nuclear reactors (those with a thermal power output below 200 MWTh) have become of strong interest, both in Canada and worldwide for a number of reasons. In Canada, the interest arises from the following sources:
(i) The need to replace the NRU (National Research Universal) reactor with another multipurpose research reactor, as recommended by the NRCan Expert Review Panel on Medical Isotope Production last year [Recommendation I, p. xi Executive Summary; also on p. 73 of the main body of the report]
(ii) The interest expressed by energy providers (as well as industrial users such as in mining and tar sands extraction) in off-grid electric and/or thermal process power in modular and scalable units - partly from remote siting considerations and also from emissions reduction considerations
(iii) University nuclear reactors for training and research
(iv) Reactors for dedicated medical radioisotope production.

Separately of the off-grid power reactor interest from resource extractive industries, there is also interest in small reactors as a possible solution for developing countries and first-time nuclear countries who have small or under-developed electric grids. They are also an attractive option for small gas- or coal- fired generating units as a direct replacement, where grid and transmission infrastructure already exist, as in rural areas of developed nations.

As well, the lower up-front capital cost of the smaller power reactors is a motivating consideration for the increased interest, as is the potential for upward scalability in total power output by addition of more units in a more graded manner. Given the lower radionuclide inventory as well as some passive safety features in some of the small reactor designs, they become of additional interest from both the safety and the proliferation-resistance standpoints.

Although some reactors have a thermal output as low as 20 KWTh, the 200 MWTh threshold is chosen to define the upper limit of 'small reactors' from the point of view of accumulation of the radionuclide inventory - which is much smaller below a threshold of 200 MWTh. As well, given that some reactors may have passive safety features, the balance of engineered safety requirements that are imposed could be different for smaller reactors than for large reactors. Consequently, it is possible to justify what has come to be called a 'graded approach' in the safety assessment of small reactors - a smaller reactor will have safety requirements commensurate to the relative risk, compared to a larger reactor, and not necessarily identical ones. This graded approach could reflect itself, for example, in the containment structure requirement, or in extent of the exclusion zone, where the regulatory requirement may not necessarily be identical to that for large power reactors.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) is currently in the process of developing regulatory & licensing guides and related requirements for small nuclear reactors based on these considerations, and will be holding appropriate stakeholder consultations, information sessions and technical workshops during the course of this year to disseminate information and solicit feedback before finalizing the requirements.

Postscript
US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu outlined the interest in small and modular reactors in his Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 23, 2010, a summary of his Congressional testimony of 3-3-2010.

In his 2011 budget request, President Obama requested $39 million for a new program specifically for small modular reactors. Although the Department of Energy has supported advanced reactor technologies for years, this is the first time funding has been requested to help get SMR designs licensed for widespread commercial use.

Right now we are exploring a partnership with industry to obtain design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for one or two designs. These SMRs are based on proven light-water reactor technologies and could be deployed in about 10 years.

Expanding on the likely advantages of small modular reactors, he said:

Small modular reactors would be less than one-third the size of current plants. They have compact designs and could be made in factories and transported to sites by truck or rail. SMRs would be ready to "plug and play" upon arrival.

If commercially successful, SMRs would significantly expand the options for nuclear power and its applications. Their small size makes them suitable to small electric grids so they are a good option for locations that cannot accommodate large-scale plants. The modular construction process would make them more affordable by reducing capital costs and construction times.

Their size would also increase flexibility for utilities since they could add units as demand changes, or use them for on-site replacement of aging fossil fuel plants. Some of the designs for SMRs use little or no water for cooling, which would reduce their environmental impact. Finally, some advanced concepts could potentially burn used fuel or nuclear waste, eliminating the plutonium that critics say could be used for nuclear weapons.
[...]
To achieve this potential, we are bringing together some of our nation's brightest minds to work under one roof in a new research center called the Nuclear Energy Modeling and Simulation Hub.

Update The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), the Energy Innovation Hub specific to Nuclear Energy, has been formed, with Dr. Douglas B. Kothe as Director. The Core partners are Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Idaho National Lab (INL), Los Alamos National Lab (LANL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), North Carolina State University (NCSU), Sandia National Labs, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), University of Michigan, and Westinghouse Electric Company.

The operational structure and mission statement of CASL explicitly incorporates the vision Prof. Chu has articulated, for example, of 'Bell Labs-like institutions which are mission-driven but solve fundamental problems as well'. See here.

In CASL Director Dr. Kothe's words, (CASL):

• Focuses on a single topic, with work spanning the gamut, from basic research through engineering development to partnering with industry in commercialization
• (creates) Large, highly integrated and collaborative creative teams working to solve priority
technology challenges
• Embraces both the goals of understanding and use, without erecting barriers between
basic and applied research (emphasis added).

A second Energy Innovation Hub also announced is the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), a partnership between Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory:

JCAP research will be directed at the discovery of the functional components necessary to assemble a complete artificial photosynthetic system: light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers, and separation membranes. The Hub will then integrate those components into an operational solar fuel system and develop scale-up strategies to move from the laboratory toward commercial viability. The ultimate objective is to drive the field of solar fuels from fundamental research, where it has resided for decades, into applied research and technology development, thereby setting the stage for the creation of a direct solar fuels industry.

Energy Secretary Chu on the Prospects for Carbon Sequestration

At the conclusion of the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum's 3rd Ministerial Meeting last week in London, the ministerial communique strongly endorsed the potential of carbon sequestration as a climate change mitigation technology, and urged member countries and other stakeholders to step up their efforts to research, develop and commercialize the technology on an aggressive timeline to 2020, calling for "many more" sequestration demonstration projects than are currently under way.

Carbon sequestration has unfortunately suffered from a rather narrow definition in the public perception, partly on account of one of its precursor technologies having arisen primarily in the oil sector, where enhanced oil recovery from existing fields was enabled by the injection of carbon dioxide directly into the oil fields. Being a heavier-than-oil supercritical liquid, carbon dioxide can force crude oil to the surface in oilfields where it would otherwise have remained trapped within geological formations. This version of carbon sequestration has come to be considered 'canonical' - while in truth, it is just a geological sequestration method, while there are also terrestrial-biologic and oceanic sequestration modes, among many others. Photosynthesis itself is a carbon dioxide sequestration technology (not yet mimicked effectively by human technology) and so are lungs, where gas exchange between blood vessels (alveoli) effectively separates carbon dioxide from blood supply and also replenishes it with oxygen!

In his letter to his ministerial colleagues, Secretary Chu further endorsed and encouraged the adoption of an aggressive timeline, importantly lending his considerable scientific prestige to a technology that so far had been viewed as somewhat tentative even by its proponents, going so far as to call for a deployment timeline to begin 10 years from now; cautioning also that success will not come easily, asking for a strong, highly focused R&D program, and making a 'call to action' to all US Department of Energy laboratories, as well as to corresponding organizations around the world. Secretary Chu's letter to his ministerial colleagues around the world follows his Oct 2, 2009 editorial in Science Magazine, where he outlined the arguments supporting a stronger push toward carbon sequestration technology directed to a scientific audience.

While work on carbon sequestration projects has been going on for the past while, it has so far been occurring on a more relaxed timeline and with a much greater degree of tentativeness. Secretary Chu's strong endorsement will undoubtedly increase the level of near-term effort and activity in the area, and spur the technology forward in the medium term, bringing it into the forefront of climate change mitigation options for the world community. Secretary Chu's letter also places sequestration technology in the middle of the power generation cycle - rather than at the very end. He formulates sequestration as a technology alongside such related others as cleaner oxygenated combustion as well as ultrasupercritical technology which, by using steam at higher temperatures and pressures, raises the thermodynamic efficiency of the power generation process, thus producing more power per unit of coal used, and contributing to a decrease in carbon emissions.

Secretary Chu also situates carbon sequestration more properly within the suite of climate change mitigation options - which would include economy-wide improvements in energy efficiency, conservation, as well as carbon-free generation of energy. Part of the challenge of assigning priorities (and funding) to different R&D options is also assessing the urgency of the sub-problem that the technology is designed to solve, relative to the intrinsic merit and state of development of the technology itself. What carbon sequestration can do, if successfully developed and deployed, is to cut the flow rate of carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere drastically, even while the energy generation mix remains roughly the same as now (as it will for at least the next couple decades). Deployment timeframes for energy generation options that significantly reduce emissions relative to the current mix are all a decade or more beyond (with the possible exception of wind turbines). Therefore, a technology that promises to cut the net emissions from the existing generation mix must be moved up the priority, effort and funding list. This is the judgment call that I see Secretary Chu as having made. The subtext is the realization that Climate Change itself is in the here and now; arresting the net flow of carbon dioxide is urgent; even while technologies such as solar or fusion that promise to reduce the gross flow in the future are aggressively developed. What this endorsement will also do is make the entire field of sequestration science more 'sexy', attracting physicists, biologists and chemists into the field, that is otherwise dominated by petroleum geologists or engineers.

Just prior to the Ministerial meeting, the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum added ten new R&D Projects to its portfolio, including one each in Texas, British Columbia and Alberta.

Postscript: After I wrote this post, I discovered a presentation by Prof. Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, FRS, on Energy Options. One of his slides particularly well illustrates the point I make above on carbon sequestration not being just a post-combustion technology, but being a suite of technologies potentially applicable before, during and after the actual combustion:

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu Speaks at MIT 12 May 2009

MIT President Susan Hockfield introduces US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who gave the Karl Taylor Compton Lecture at MIT, one of its most prestigious invited lectures. MIT's blurb to the video quotes Steve Chu in this talk: "Can we design a modern-day equivalent of Lincoln Labs or Los Alamos, focused on mission driven research, but also connected to fundamental research and the industrial world?". Steve Chu shows how all the great Nobel Prize winning work that was done at Bell Labs - all the people whose names you grew up hearing - Nyquist, Shannon, Penzias, Anderson, Bardeen, and many more - were actually trying to solve problems of quite an applied nature, but ended up revolutionizing their fields, making fundamental lasting contributions, that in most cases has been recognized by a Nobel Prize. (Chu himself was at Bell Labs at the beginning of his career, joining in the intake year 1977-78. Five people hired that year, including himself, are now Nobel Laureates.)

The talk is well worth hearing in its entirety. I really enjoyed it. There's both wit and wisdom in it, and aplenty. At one point Chu asks, for example: What does a Boeing 777 have in common with a Bar-tailed Godwit? A: They can both fly 11,000 km nonstop. (The B-t G is a bird that annually migrates from Alaska to New Zealand in the winter, and has 55% of its weight in body fat. Likewise the Boeing has 45% of its weight in jet fuel. The factoid is relevant to a point he makes about synthetic biology - using nature as an inspiration, but going beyond.)



One of the most impressive things about Chu is not only that he refocused his research toward Climate Change mitigation beginning 2004, but, partly in response, he has also increased his knowledge base in biology very significantly. Today, from biologically created fuels on the one hand, to artificial photosynthesis on the other, solutions to Climate Change mitigation inspired by biology are being actively researched. Chu emphasized in his talk that one of the reasons for the success of Bell Labs was the 'scientist-manager', who could quickly decide whether a given idea had merit or not - because he was a often a hands-on practitioner of the field himself. Chu clearly embodies this ideal.

Chu is an active Facebooker, and I salute him not only for the content he personally uploads there, but also for the infectious enthusiasm and compelling sense of mission he communicates to the world at large and to technically literate and younger audiences in particular.

Here's an earlier talk by Steve Chu when he was Director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, from back in 2005, on the same general subject of climate change science, possible biomimic solutions (both to sequestration and to energy production), and the culture of Bell Labs in the 1940s-1980s period:







And an even earlier talk given at UC Berkeley in May 2004, when he was still a Professor of Physics at Stanford: 'What can Physics say about Biology?'. This one is more technical, and is about how RNA transcription works at the sub-molecular scale. It is also about emboldening physicists to attempt answers to biological questions, and how ultimately, it might well be possible to explain life in terms of the 'jiggling and wiggling of atoms and molecules' (an old quote from Feynman that Steve Chu cites in the talk). Physics, he points out, is still young (only 400 years since Galileo) and the future of physics may well lie in biology. There is also the very faintest hint that climate change may be ultimately be stabilized by a biological solution, because he points out that the amplitude of temperature fluctuations on earth dropped markedly after agriculture was introduced. Cause and effect is not fully clear: for example, it could be that the temperature stabilization was exogenous, but made agriculture possible as a result. Equally, it is also possible that agriculture was a form of biological anthropogenic intervention that, operating on a large scale, stabilized climate, making life and civilization (and physics) possible. Here is the hint that if photosynthesis was properly understood as a 'physics problem', then an 'artificial photosynthesis' could be designed that could sequester (fix) carbon dioxide from the atmosphere more efficiently.