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Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

westinghousenuclear.com

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Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#81

Post by evilos »

Animats wrote: post #4
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 ve…

Which SMRs don't have a full scale containment vessel?

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#82

Post by Reason077 »

epistasis wrote: post #49
dirtsoc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's sad is that it's mainly the US that has problems with this. China has managed to bring multiple of this reactor design to fruition while the US still screws around with building just two. I live in Georgia and the almost decade of overruns and corruption are being about to be paid for by Georgia Power customers via rate hikes.

France and Finland have had excessive difficulty with their EPR. My hypothesis is that modern economies with high wages will simply not be able to build a nuclear reactor economically. It appears to require a certain amount of 20th century technological advancement, but not so much economic advancement that labor costs are too high. France had a much better track record with nuclear in their first round of building.…

It's a bit simplistic to blame only labour costs. Large, complex civil projects often have cost and schedule overruns because contractors know they're going to get paid anyway so are incentivised to make the project slower and more expensive.

Smaller, simpler projects don't tend to have the same issues because contractors know they can be replaced easily if they fail.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#83

Post by pfdietz »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #51
Mistletoe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this, but if it was so great wouldn’t someone have bought some? The money never seems to work out.

There were at least some confounding factors beyond how good of an idea this was. The primary expected electricity customer was oil refineries off the New Jersey coast. The Atlantic Generating Station was to be the first of these power plants. But after the 1973 oil shocks, oil refinery energy demand fell more than expected. By the time things were looking up again, Three Mile Island happened in 1979 and the general…

The primary thing that happened in the 1970s to ruin the US market for nuclear was PURPA, the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act. This act began the opening of US electricity markets to non-utility providers. It turned out there was very large potential for this: cogeneration, and just low overhead fossil generation, especially as natural gas became seen as more abundant and combustion turbines improved.

Those oil refineries you mention became prime targets for cogeneration. Instead of burning fuel to provide process heat (for distillation, for example), a refinery could instead add a combustion turbine topping cycle ahead of that and produce electric power at near 100% marginal efficiency. This reflects the large second law losses involved in burning a fuel to produce relatively low temperature process heat. Basically any industrial process that used low or moderate temperature process heat could become a source of electric power via cogeneration after PURPA was enacted.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#84

Post by pfdietz »

Reason077 wrote: post #82
epistasis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France and Finland have had excessive difficulty with their EPR. My hypothesis is that modern economies with high wages will simply not be able to build a nuclear reactor economically. It appears to require a certain amount of 20th century technological advancement, but not so much economic advancement that labor costs are too high. France had a much better track record with nuclear in their first round of building.…

It's a bit simplistic to blame only labour costs. Large, complex civil projects often have cost and schedule overruns because contractors know they're going to get paid anyway so are incentivised to make the project slower and more expensive. Smaller, simpler projects don't tend to have the same issues because contractors know they can be replaced easily if they fail.

Renewable projects also can be rolled out in stages, so if the contractors are scammers it shows up early.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#85

Post by pfdietz »

m4rtink wrote: post #24
epistasis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some older plant blocks were in the 300-500 MW range so I guess you could replace them with this ?

Those older plants in the US have been shut down because they can't even earn back their operating costs.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#86

Post by pfdietz »

evilos wrote: post #81
Animats wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

Which SMRs don't have a full scale containment vessel?

None, although I think some (NuScale?) save money by sharing pressurized containment volume among multiple reactors. Just hope you don't see multiple correlated meltdowns.

Containment vessels could also be made smaller if steam filtering were used instead of planning to just contain and condense it. I don't know if any SMRs plan to do this.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#87

Post by Etrnl_President »

pbmonster wrote: post #71
booi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it actually cheaper and easier? Seawater isn’t exactly known for its ease of use and non-corrosiveness and fouling is a real problem. Not to mention all the sea life that isn’t going to respond well to high temp water spewing out..

> Not to mention all the sea life that isn’t going to respond well to high temp water spewing out.. Ideally, you're not dumping the hot water back into the harbor. At least from a naive theory perspective, you could put huge cooling towers on deck and cool the reactor 100% through evaporative cooling. Bonus: the huge steam/mist cloud out of the cooling tower could help delay global warming through marine cloud bright…

You might want to take a second look at IR (heat) absorption spectra:

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/meteo3/sites/www.e-education...

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#89

Post by pyrale »

Certhas wrote: post #64
Mistletoe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this, but if it was so great wouldn’t someone have bought some? The money never seems to work out.

Also: Renewables have downsides, but they are vastly cheaper and more proven. There is no reason to assume that the downsides of various other techs are in any way more manageable. (And ironically some of the solutions proposed for the downsides of nuclear are also what you need for renewables, i.e. storage to maximize use of expensive infrastructure with low opex.)

> And ironically some of the solutions proposed for the downsides of nuclear are also what you need for renewables, i.e. storage to maximize use of expensive infrastructure with low opex.

It's exhausting to see this claim see the light so often, despite being debunked so frequently.

Nuclear doesn't require storage.

Some people claim that economies could be made with storage because then you wouldn't need to build production equivalent to 100% of your peak consumption.

The dishonest discourse happens when renewables proponent claim that this small potential optimization means nuclear needs storage just as much as renewables do. Actually, losing your power source is not equivalent to shaving a few %s of budget.

This idea also completely ignores the fact that power grids don't optimize for efficiency, but for stability. We want redundant production, and the ability to move as many cursors as possible on the grid, in order to balance for issues. The ability to ramp up a power plant isn't just useful to produce peak load, it also helps mitigating e.g. losing a power line or a power transformer.

Re: Westinghouse AP300 Small Module Reactor

#90

Post by pyrale »

wkat4242 wrote: post #72
elihu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A side benefit of being on or near the ocean is immediate access to a thermal sink. Nuclear power plants (and also fossil fuel thermal plants) divert substantial amounts of water for cooling. If fresh water is increasingly in short supply around the world, that's a problem. The usefulness of the ocean as a thermal sink though depends on water temperature which can vary a lot depending on where you are.

Yes this caused major issues in France this year, the surface water was so warm it was not ecologically sound to use it for cooling so some nuclear plants had to shut down or throttle.

Seaside plants don't have this problem in France, never have, never will.

The issue happens with river plants, more specifically those that release cooling water back to the river.

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