Modular Nuclear Plant: Make Mine a Double-Wide...

Last month, President Obama said he would guarantee federal loans for two new nuclear power plants in Georgia. For nuclear energy advocates, those were welcome words. But it takes billions of dollars to get big nuke plants built. "The challenge isn't technical. It's economic," says Christofer Mowry, President and CEO of B&W's (The Babcock and Wilcox Company) modular nuclear energy business. "Traditional, large nuclear power plants are very, very expensive, and there are very few companies who have the ability to afford them." Mowry and team are trying to, in his words, "turn the paradigm of nuclear on its head," not by developing new technologies, but through better engineering. 

Just like modular houses turned your on-site home construction project into an off-site manufacturing project, so too B&W hopes that its possible to, yes, factory-build nuclear reactors. The company is calling it the mPower. Instead of one gigantic above-ground 1,000 MW reactor, Mowry envisions a series of up to four, pre-manufactured nuclear modules, each running at around 125 MW. These smaller reactors (15 ft. wide by 75 ft. long), and the entire containment for them, would be housed underground. They would be shipped by rail to their installation location.

Mowry hopes that by taking all that construction cost out of the equation, the mPower reactor system will make nuclear power scalable. In other words, a company could bring one mPower online, generate a revenue stream, and then add new units as time goes by. He also told me that modular nuclear might be a "plug and play replacement" for old coal plants that have no economic viability as upgraded, clean coal plants.  

Of course, I asked about safety. Mowry said that in a factory setting, quality control on the build of the nuclear reactor would actually be better than an on-site build. He also said that because the entire reactor and containment would be underground, it makes it less of an obvious terrorist target.

One last interesting note. Mowry told me that while he definitely sees a growing market in the United States for modular nuclear units, the real growth markets will be outside of North America. "If you look at the amount of power that's needed worldwide over the next 20 years, 90% of the addition is going to be outside of North America. And if you look at the developing countries, a lot of them want to adopt nuclear power." Modular, he said, might be ideally suited to these countries, which don't have a large or robust transmission infrastructure.

(Top graphic: Four B&W mPower™ nuclear reactors configured as a 500 megawatt nuclear power plant)

(Bottom graphic: B&W mPower™ nuclear reactor design)