Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

AIUI, Poland has a bunch of generation sites that were small/medium in size that were around former coal mines, and so a lot of the transmission infrastructure is already present. It's just that they can't go 'too big' in those places as they'd have to spend a lot more on grid upgrades instead of 'just' a 1:1 replacement with SMRs.

Re: Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

#5

Post by meepmorp » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 1:08 PM UTC

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #2

RR product page for their Small Modular Reactors: https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...

There's not much information about the design itself, even on the SMR specific website (https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com). The best I could find was blurry embedded graphic with cross section of what looked like a reactor vessel.

Re: Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

#6

Post by rurban » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

Right now the wind would go from Temelin to Regensburg and Nuernberg. They will be surprised. But the typical wind direction is towards Brno and Wroclaw, to the north-east.

Re: Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

#7

Post by mikece » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 1:13 PM UTC

I love the idea of SMR, not only the run-safe designs but the idea that clusters of them could be installed in metro areas and eliminate the transmission loss from generating electricity far away and transporting it to the load. And by having clusters of small reactors it enables both economies of scale and makes it feasible to have standby units per cluster allowing spent units to be replaced without the cluster having a diminished load service capacity.

I'm sure the greenies will find some reason to hate this concept (despite it being a great ZERO CARBON electricity solution) but in the city I live there are already two decommissioned coal-fired plants which could be leveled and re-purposed in this manner -- and they already have grid connection right of way and some of the equipment. This is such an obviously winning idea it's hard to imagine why people would oppose it.

Re: Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

#8

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

#9

Post by HPsquared » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 1:18 PM UTC

meepmorp wrote: post #5

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #2

RR product page for their Small Modular Reactors: https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...

There's not much information about the design itself, even on the SMR specific website ( https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com ). The best I could find was blurry embedded graphic with cross section of what looked like a reactor vessel.

There's some pretty detailed information in the GDA documents on the site:

https://gda.rolls-royce-smr.com/documents

Re: Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

#10

Post by HPsquared » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

For those interested in technical detail, here are the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) documents published by RR:

https://gda.rolls-royce-smr.com/documents

EDIT: huh, interesting, it's designed so that if the core melts, it's to be fully contained in the reactor pressure vessel. See Chapter 6, page 60