Facing a partial revolt among its customers on the basis of increasing costs, Oregon-based NuScale Power (owned by construction giant Fluor Corp.) has announced a 25% uprating of its still hypothetical small modular reactor design. The power upgrade, based entirely on what NuScale said was advanced testing and modeling, increased the power of its tiny nuclear reactor module from 60 MW to 77 MW.
That means that the company’s initial project – a 12-module project for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Services (UAMPS), to be built on Department of Energy land in Idaho – would increase its planned output from 720 MW to 924 MW. UAMPS is a municipal joint action agency serving Utah, Idaho, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
UAMPS is rapidly losing member city utilities or seeing commitments to take power from the project reduced. Most recently, Heber City, Utah, bailed out of its 10-MW agreement to take power from the NuScale project.
NuScale said its upgrade “lowers the overnight capital cost of the facility on a per kilowatt basis from an expected $3,600 to approximately $2,850. Furthermore, the scalable, 12-module power plant will now approach a size that makes it a true competitor for the gigawatt-size market. The increased power output comes without any major changes to the NPM technology.”
NuScale is pursuing a reduced levelized cost of energy (LCOE) to make its new technology economically competitive. The current LCOE for the $6.1 billion plant is $55//MWH over 40 years, by theior calculations. Two years earlier, the company scaled up its reactor design from 50 MW to 60 MW. NuScale said it would submit its analysis of the power upgrade to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in its Standard Design Approval filing in 2022.
The NuScale announcement has generated considerable skepticism. Former member of the NRC Peter Bradford and veteran utility regulator who now teaches energy policy and law at the Vermont Law School, told The Quad Report in an email, “If I had the talent, I’d write NuScale’s changes of size and price up as musical comedy. In a nutshell, you can’t produce 5.5 cent per kWh power from a $6.1 billion plant of 720 or 1000MW. The best NuScale can hope for is about twice that.”
Bradford added that earlier NRC approval of the basic design “deferred key safety issues for the site specific license in any case, but increasing the output by this much inevitably raises safety questions that should require another look. After all, when operating plants uprate by a lot less than this, an NRC review is required, and significant operating problems have arisen in a few cases.
Edwin Lyman, a PhD in nuclear physics who heads the Union of Concerned Scientists’ nuclear safety program, told The Quad Report in an email that the NuScale move “is an act of desperation. The company is trying every trick up its sleeve to reduce the projected LCOE. And I’m skeptical about NuScale’s claim that the power uprate can be justified simply by using ‘advanced testing and modeling tools.’ Its modeling previously missed some of the biggest safety defects of the design. This will no doubt reduce safety margin and further call into question the adequacy of passive cooling.”
Lyman said, “It is absolutely the case that the LCOE of a 12-unit plant would be greater than a single plant of the same power capacity if the small reactors are miniature versions of the large reactor. You would have to change things to lower the cost. That’s why NuScale has sought so many cost-cutting measures and regulatory exemptions that don’t apply to large reactors. To overcome the capital cost penalty, changes have to be made that undermine any safety advantages the passive cooling features might provide. This is the wrong way to move forward on nuclear power.”
— Kennedy Maize