micro-nuclear power generation

micro-nuclear power generation

I read an article on wired titled “The Next Generation of Nuclear Power Plants Will Be Smaller and Safer. The article is about a small nuclear power module called a mini-reactor being developed by a US venture called NuScale Power. The concept is to combine modules that are 19.8 meters high, 2.7 meters in diameter, and have an output of 60 megawatts (1/10 of a typical small nuclear power plant) (a few units are enough for a small city).

One of the features of the miniaturization is its safety, as it is so small that it can be submerged in an underground pool of water, and if a leak occurs in the reactor, the heat will slowly diffuse into the pool. If the reactor were to leak, the heat would slowly diffuse into the pool. This may allow the reactor to be located closer to where the power needs are.

In the U.S., even smaller micro reactors are being developed. These will be “plug-and-play” reactors, generating less than 50 megawatts of power, and have the potential to be used for small-scale power needs, such as maintaining power supplies to remote villages, or as a carbon-free source of power in urban areas.

The challenge will be cost competitiveness against rapidly declining renewable energy generation costs such as wind and solar power, as well as against inexpensive natural gas.

Currently, each nuclear power plant is built to custom specifications and takes more than 10 years to build, including the time required for the review process, and costs an enormous amount of money. Safety measures account for a large part of these costs, and if these can be greatly reduced, and if they can be made into modules that can be mass-produced in the same way, we will be able to see a different world.

From the perspective of power supply, the cost is not only in power generation facilities, but also in the construction and maintenance of the transmission system. The current transmission loss is said to be about 5%, but in order to achieve this, various costs are required, starting from low-loss cables to distribution and substation facilities. In addition, the maintenance costs over a vast area are not insignificant. Installing small power plants close to consumption areas means that power transmission facilities are no longer needed, and if the installation and maintenance costs of these facilities are taken into account, there is even more room to consider the benefits. The maintenance of power generation facilities could be done through communication as well as remote maintenance of servers. If it is just a control signal, it could be done wirelessly, including satellite communication.

Considering these factors, the main issue in terms of cost is to ensure safety. If fault-tolerance can be ensured more easily in small-scale nuclear power applications as described in the article, the advantage of these technologies will increase. My sense is that the use of smaller amounts of fissile material will go a long way toward ensuring this, but I would like to examine this issue when I have a chance.

In addition to these technologies, the application of the latest IT technologies of recent years, such as semantic web technology, IOT technology, and smart factory technology that uses streaming inference technology, is expected to improve operational efficiency Furthermore, the use of ICT technology integrated with risk analysis technology is expected to further enhance safety.

Currently, there are still a large number of excellent nuclear power engineers left in Japan, but the number of new engineers is on a significant decline after the earthquake. Rather than letting nuclear power technology, which is a social asset, disappear naturally, it would be worthwhile to take the approach mentioned above by converting it to the perspective of how to make high-functioning products at low cost, which is the norm in the world of manufacturing, both in terms of business and social development.

One technology that has been attracting attention in recent years is the combination of nuclear fusion with reinforcement learning. I will discuss these separately.

In the next article, I would like to return to the world of ICT and discuss formal language theory, which is the theoretical base of programming languages.