POWER January 2020 - 29

NUCLEAR
As Peters explained, among NRIC's
chief goals is to help developers tackle
the economics of new nuclear. Many of
the companies that approach INL " certainly
express optimism that they can get
down the cost-curve, " he said. " That's
why it's so important to do the research,
but more importantly, to get to demonstration.
We've got to start building some
of these to really be able to show that we
can get there. "
Hot Prospects for Future
Nuclear Power
Cost competitiveness should be a critical
imperative for technology developers
because it directly translates to market
opportunity, as Simon Irish, CEO of Terrestrial
Energy, a company developing
a 195-MWe Generation IV molten salt
reactor, pointed out. " Nuclear power as
an investment is unremarkable. It does
not attract private capital. " That's why
future systems " must be commercially
transformative, " he said.
Irish noted that Terrestrial, which is
developing the Integral Molten Salt Reactor
(IMSR), is today the only private
company participating in GIF, the international
collaboration that is exploring
six advanced reactor technologies with
the expectation that they will be commercially
deployed starting in 2030.
Much attention is being paid to these
six technologies because they operate
at very high temperatures. Terrestrial's
IMSR operates at 700C, supplying
steam turbines with superheated steam
at 600C, which raises the system's fuel
efficiency to as much as 48%, he said.
" A conventional reactor is stuck in the
mid-30s, and if it's a small conventional
reactor, it may not achieve 30% at all, "
said Irish.
" If you operate at a much higher temperature,
you can make power much
more efficiently and you can do many
more things with your nuclear reaction.
You can provide high-quality industrial
heat that can be used in industrial process
applications that are very different
compared to the steam generated electric
power provision-which is pretty
much the sole activity of nuclear energy
today, " he explained. Those applications
include petrochemical processes, including
for production of hydrogen and
ammonia, fertilizers, and plastics-and
they could open up new end-users and
sources of revenue. But industrial heat
could also drive desalination, and even
synthetic fuels, which could help decarbonize
the transport sector, Irish said.
January 2020 | POWER
An Emphasis on Small
Industry's solution to construction uncertainties
associated with large reactors is
to build them smaller. That's why so much
attention is also being paid to small modular
reactors (SMRs), hovering between 60
MW and 300 MW, and microreactors,
which are generally 10 MW or less.
" What you get is dispatchable power
that looks like a fossil fuel option, without
any of the hassle of logistics of fuel
procurement, and without any of the risks
that people typically associate with nuclear
power, " said Mark Mitchell, president of
Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. (USNC). USNC is
leading Canada's efforts to commercialize
microreactor technology, and the company
is well-positioned to build the first Micro
Modular Reactor (MMR)-a 5-MWe
(15-MWth) high-temperature gas-cooled
reactor design-at the Canadian Nuclear
Laboratories' Chalk River site in Ontario
by 2026. Not only does that inherent flexibility
aspect give nuclear a new role as
a distributed, combined heat and power
generator, he told POWER, it opens up
new markets, including for remote offgrid
applications, as well as in burgeoning
power-hungry regions that have been
hesitant to take on the complexities of
new nuclear builds, such as in Africa.
Reshaping Existing Nuclear
Through Innovation
Flexibility appears to have also been
firmly lodged into operational paradigms
at many existing nuclear plants that have
traditionally been operated at baseload,
but which are increasingly grappling with
fluctuating grid demand. According to nuclear
technology giant Framatome, that
transformation is partly being enabled by
increased adoption of digital instrumentation
and control (I&C) systems.
" Equipment that would previously
have been a single monolithic item can
comprise smaller distributed packages
in multiple rooms, " the company told
POWER in December. " This offers greater
safety because of physical ergonomic
separation considerations. " Digital I&C
systems could also boost nuclear plant
efficiency and economics by improving
operator actions, reducing surveillances,
cutting the number of unscheduled
outages, and enhancing diagnostics.
" Digital equipment allows for automatic,
remote diagnostic, analytical and
self-testing capabilities, which means
that utilities can gain time during outages
and operations while having a better
understanding of the state of their
control equipment, " it said.
www.powermag.com
2. Framatome for the first time applied
its ultra-high-pressure cavitation peening
process to primary pipe welds on reactor
pressure vessel nozzles at Dominion's Millstone
Power Station during the plant's spring
2019 outage. " Because it is deployed directly
to the inner surface, it is uniquely suited to
remediate the component regardless of external
space restrictions or dose constraints, "
the company said. Courtesy: Framatome
Advancements in tooling are also paying
off. Framatome, for example, in late
2018 rolled out a new solution for ultrasonic
testing of stainless steel baffle
bolts-components that secure removable
liner plates around pressurized water
reactor vessels. The tool, known as
Falcon, has saved about 30 hours on
average during outage schedules when
it has been deployed. Meanwhile, in the
spring of 2019, the company applied a
new ultra-high-pressure (UHP) cavitation
peening maintenance technique to
primary pipe welds on reactor vessel
primary nozzles at Dominion's Millstone
power plant in Connecticut (Figure 2).
" UHP cavitation peening can extend the
life of nuclear reactor primary components,
including the hot leg primary nozzles,
for up to 40 additional years, " it said.
Finally, technology advancements are
also opening up " new ways to use nuclear
power never seen before, " Framatome
noted. For example, Bruce Power,
engineering consulting firm Kinectrics,
and Framatome recently partnered to advance
a project that will use Bruce Power
reactors to produce a significantly needed
medical isotope-Lutetium-177-for
use in targeted cancer therapies. The
partnership could begin production in
2022 following regulatory and other
approvals. If successful, it would both
" leverage the multi-unit Bruce site to
provide a stable, redundant supply of Lutetium-177
for many decades to come, "
as well as possibly spur development of
an isotope production system that could
support production of other isotopes,
Framatome said. ■
-Sonal Patel is a POWER senior
associate editor.
29
http://www.powermag.com
POWER January 2020

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