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June 11, 2009, 10:59 AM ET

Modular Reactors

WSJ Blogs    Honey, I Shrunk the Reactor: Small Nukes Arrive - Environmental Capital - WSJ

Honey, I Shrunk the Reactor: Small Nukes Arrive

By Keith Johnson

If the nuclear renaissance can’t get underway with full-sized nuclear plants, are tiny nukes the answer?
 

The 125-megawatt nuclear reactor (B&W)

Babcock & Wilcox announced a potentially big change in the energy landscape yesterday: A 125-megawatt nuclear reactor that the company says can be built faster and cheaper than bigger reactors.

The so-called modular reactor is about one-tenth the size of traditional nuclear plants. The reactors could be used alone—such as to power big factories or oil-field installations—or stacked together to make up a full-sized power plant.While the small reactor is a departure from decades of nuclear technology, it’s precisely the new reactor’s smaller size that adds up to potentially big advantages, say the company and plenty of nuclear-power boosters.In a nutshell: The smaller reactors can be built in U.S. factories, and then shipped to where they’re needed. That gets around many of the roadblocks to building big nuclear reactors, such as a bottleneck on reactor core vessels made only in Japan.

Babcock & Wilcox say the new reactor, which uses existing technology, will also be as cheap or cheaper than existing plants—“less than $5,000 per megawatt.” That compares favorably to recent cost estimates for large-scale nuclear construction.What about nuclear waste? The new reactors can’t solve the riddle of Yucca Mountain—but are equipped to store their spent fuel on site and underground for the entire 60-year operating life. Babcock & Wilcox also says the new reactors, which use light-water technology, could use a variety of fuel if advances are made in thorium-powered nuclear reactors, for instance.

One potentially big hurdle: Government certification. No small nuclear reactors have been certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. B&W said they expect certification by 2011, on track to build the first plant by 2018.