NUCLEONICS WEEK - November 21, 2002
NEW REACTORS SHOULD BE DESIGNED
TO RUN 100 YEARS, SCIENTIST SAYS
The idiom for economical nuclear power in the early days
of the U.S. nuclear industry was "bigger is cheaper" but the
focus now should be on longevity, according to former Manhattan
Project scientist Alvin Weinberg, who said power reactors
in the 21st century should be designed to last 100 years.
If power reactors are going to produce electricity cheap
enough to desalt seawater or produce hydrogen for fuel, they
have to have longevity, he told industry officials Nov. 19 at
an American Nuclear Society conference in Washington, D.C.
"Time annihilates capital costs," said Weinberg, a former
director of DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Currently proposed reactors are being designed to last 50-60 years,
while existing units are outliving their 40-year licensed
lifetimes and receiving 20-year license extensions,
Weinberg said. There is nothing significant about 40 years, he
said, noting that licensing time had been arrived at by default.
Coal-fired plants had a similar licensing period.
The idea of multi-use reactors was a common element in
several conference presentations. "So far, reactors have only
produced electricity," said Mike Sellman, president and CEO
of the Nuclear Management Co. (NMC) "Going forward, I
think they will also be used for desalination and hydrogen
production." NMC is one of the larger nuclear plant operators in the U.S.
The next generation of reactors will have to build on the
current generation's successes, according to Sellman. The low
capacity factors seen when the current reactor designs went
online won't be accepted, he said. The expectation is that new
reactors would have to achieve capacity factors topping the
current industry average of more than 90% from the start, he said.
Sellman, who shared his views on how the U.S. nuclear
industry would progress, added that he believed the large
amount of corrective maintenance seen in the industry in the
early 1970s would not be repeated. "I think we will see a lot
of preventive maintenance going forward and very little corrective
maintenance," Sellman said.
He repeated an often-expressed belief among industry
officials that a consortium of utilities and other nuclear companies
would be the entity ordering new reactors, not individual utilities.
That, plus the consolidation now seen in the U.S.
nuclear industry in terms of reactor operations, might be one
reason Sellman speculated there would be an almost instantaneous
sharing of lessons learned among the next generation of power reactors.
In other areas, some of the reaction to the 1979 accident at
Three Mile Island-2 would be scaled back, Sellman speculated.
The size of the nuclear plant work force, which ballooned
after TMI-2, would be cut to 100-300 workers per reactor, he
said. He added that the number of training officials, which
jumped to more than 50 per plant after the 1979 accident,
would be fewer than 10 per site.-Elaine Hiruo, Washington