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Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

westinghousenuclear.com

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Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#2

Post by nukeman »

Seriously? I’m insanely pro-nuke, and work in the nuclear sector, but Westinghouse should really focus on their AP1000. They’ve already got deals in place with several countries, and now that they’ve got them running in more than one country, there might be a chance of bringing costs down some. The light water SMR market is getting crowded rather fast. They’re competing with both GE (and their BWRX-300) and NuScale (with their modular designs).

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#3

Post by timerol »

These are pretty big SMRs - 300 MWe, compared to 77MWe from NuScale. Definitely an iteration of reduced size from their 1 GWe model, as opposed to a "as small as reasonable" design.

It's cool that they call out 15 MWe / min "load following" capability. Ramping up and down in response to renewables will be an important function of any nuclear reactor installed today.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#4

Post by Animats »

nukeman wrote: post #2

Seriously? I’m insanely pro-nuke, and work in the nuclear sector, but Westinghouse should really focus on their AP1000. They’ve already got deals in place with several countries, and now that they’ve got them running in more than one country, there might be a chance of bringing costs down some. The light water SMR market is getting crowded rather fast. They’re competing with both GE (and their BWRX-300) and NuScale (…

This seems to be a smaller version of the AP1000. Nice big containment vessel. That's a good thing. Fukushima had an undersized containment which failed, and Chernobyl didn't have much of one at all. Three Mile Island had a good containment vessel, and so their meltdown damage was contained.

Some of the "small modular nuclear reactor designs are built on the assumption that they don't need a full scale containment vessel because nothing can go that wrong. That may not be a good assumption. There's a lot to be said for large amounts of steel and concrete around reactors.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#5

Post by BMc2020 »

nukeman wrote: post #2

Seriously? I’m insanely pro-nuke, and work in the nuclear sector, but Westinghouse should really focus on their AP1000. They’ve already got deals in place with several countries, and now that they’ve got them running in more than one country, there might be a chance of bringing costs down some. The light water SMR market is getting crowded rather fast. They’re competing with both GE (and their BWRX-300) and NuScale (…

Didn't the PRC buy 4 AP1000s and then start building their own knockoff? (not pirated so much as that was one of their demands and Westinghouse accepted)?

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#6

Post by rgmerk »

Some history might be worth going in to here.

The AP1000 design was an evolution of an earlier design called the AP600. The AP600 conceptual design apparently didn't find any customers because the economics of it were unappealing compared to larger reactors. In a nutshell, if you're going to build a huge containment building etc etc etc, it doesn't cost (in theory) that much more to go even bigger and get more power out of it.

So why SMRs?

It turned out that because you were building so few AP1000s, and building them with different workforces each time, that there was very little learning going on.

Some bright spark seeing what's gone on in other industries had the bright idea that if you could build a nuclear reactor in a factory, and increase the number of units built and minimise the amount of work done on site, you'd start getting learning rates and economies of scale that easily outweigh the lower inherent efficiency of a smaller reactor.

At 300MW, this reactor seems to be too big to be "back of a few trucks" construction, and thus you still have the bespoke construction project issues, and sufficiently small that the construction costs of 4 of them are likely to be much higher than one AP1000 (the AP1000 actually puts out about 1100 MW).

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#7

Post by epistasis »

nukeman wrote: post #2

Seriously? I’m insanely pro-nuke, and work in the nuclear sector, but Westinghouse should really focus on their AP1000. They’ve already got deals in place with several countries, and now that they’ve got them running in more than one country, there might be a chance of bringing costs down some. The light water SMR market is getting crowded rather fast. They’re competing with both GE (and their BWRX-300) and NuScale (…

Given the track record of AP1000 construction, who do you think would ever order one?

I don't see a future for this. If somebody thought it was a feasible design for construction in Western countries, they could buy the half completed sites at Summer for a song.

I also think 300MW is too big. It's not really small enough to get the supposed benefits of small and modular.

The entire nuclear industry appears to be off its rocker when it comes to designs that are possible to construct for any reasonable amount of money. They bungled the AP1000 so badly that it bankrupted Westinghouse, and there's no reason to believe that they learned enough from the experience to do better next time. It's all terribly depressing, and completely soured me on the possibility of nuclear for the next 20-40 years. And in 20-40 years, look at how far storage, wind, and solar will have developed. It's unlikely that my nuclear will ever be a dominant energy source.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#9

Post by alliao »

nukeman wrote: post #2

Seriously? I’m insanely pro-nuke, and work in the nuclear sector, but Westinghouse should really focus on their AP1000. They’ve already got deals in place with several countries, and now that they’ve got them running in more than one country, there might be a chance of bringing costs down some. The light water SMR market is getting crowded rather fast. They’re competing with both GE (and their BWRX-300) and NuScale (…

SMR is being sold as smaller thus inferring smaller mess when disaster strikes but I don't see that anywhere can you shed some light on whether it's safer? perhaps the smaller containment meant it can be constructed to a higher threshold?
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