MOSCOW -- When the Soviet Union introduced its Alfa-class submarine at the time, the world’s fastest the subs were the bane of American sailors. Now, the reactors that powered those submarines are being marketed as the next innovation in green power.
Environmentalists say that the technology is outdated and dangerous, and that marketing it as green energy is an abuse of nuclear power’s good green name.
The Russians are not alone in pushing the idea that the next generation of nuclear reactors should have more in common with the small power plants on submarines than the sprawling installations of today.
The kind of marine reactors that the Russians are promoting, though, create a byproduct used fuel that no one knows how to handle. Right now, that spent fuel is being stored at naval yards in the Russian Arctic.
In most nuclear facilities, the used fuel, which is highly radioactive, is removed from the reactor and stored in a pool of water. But in the Soviet submarine model currently advanced by a Moscow company, the spent fuel ends up frozen along with the reactor and stored away. No engineering solution has been devised yet to decontaminate the fuel.
Kirill Danilenko, director of the Russian company Akme Engineering, said the technology could be made safe, with no greater risk of meltdown than that at a larger nuclear plant. His vision is that small reactors will become so common that utilities can connect them and “build power plants like Lego sets.”
The promise of miniature reactors powering homes, offices and schools is still years from being realized. The first Russian design, a pontoon-mounted reactor intended to be floated into harbors in energy-hungry developing countries, is already being built. But most promoters expect small reactors to come online at the end of this decade.
The plans are going ahead in Russia and elsewhere in the face of criticism that a diffuse nuclear infrastructure the idea that many midsize cities, for example, could have their own small reactor is inherently risky.
But once the science is perfected, such reactors are potentially cheaper to build for every unit of electricity generated than traditional nuclear power plants.
Around the world, much of the nuclear industry is embracing the tried-and-true economics of serial production. In serial production, reactor cores, like Ford cars, would be rolled off an assembly line, then shipped to the site of a plant. They could be used separately or as modules for a more powerful generator. This would be possible, however, only if a reactor were small enough to fit on a railroad car.
U.S. firms are promoting nine designs for small reactors, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group in Washington. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the group overseeing civilian nuclear power, has estimated that global demand for small reactors could reach 500 to 1,000 reactors by 2040.
The category is defined as reactors making less than 300 megawatts of electricity, or the amount needed to power 300,000 American homes, which is a quarter of the energy output of big reactors.
Small reactors have other advantages, too. They would fit the existing steam-generating equipment in old coal plants, for instance, making it easier to put nuclear facilities in current coal-burning energy plants. And small reactors have at least one nonproliferation benefit over their larger cousins: they can be loaded with fuel in the factory, reducing the need to ship fuel.
Some models are tiny. One, for example, would be small enough to fit into a shipping container and would be trucked from site to site, except that it would need to be refueled only once every seven years or so.
Proponents note that Russian nuclear regulators and the U.S. Energy Department have both endorsed small reactors. In America, companies with designs include Westinghouse, the maker of traditional reactors; Babcock & Wilcox, a maker of submarine reactors for the Navy; and Nu- Scale, a startup that spun out of an Oregon State University research project.
The Russian company, Akme, is an acronym for atomic complex for small and medium energy and sometimes renders its name in English as Acme.
Akme’s goal is to produce a prototype of a 100-megawatt nuclear reactor small enough to fit into a typical American backyard by 2019.
The company was founded in December as a joint venture of Rosatom, the state nuclear power corporation, and a private electricity company owned by the Kremlin-connected oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It has $500 million in startup capital.
A mini-reactor will probably cost about $100 million.
