In the wake of the devastation of Puerto Rico’s electric generating and distribution system two years ago by Hurricane Maria, the U.S. Department of Energy has okayed a feasibility study of whether advanced nuclear reactors could solve the island’s energy calamity. The energy agency approved a proposal from DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory to examine market conditions and acceptability of nuclear in Puerto Rico. The $820,000 grant is for the first of two phases of the feasibility study. That first phase is due Dec. 18.
A bit of history is in order on Puerto Rico’s involvement in nuclear power. In the early days of the Atomic Energy Commission’s work on civilian nuclear power, when the agency was basically throwing nuclear reactor concepts up against the wall to see what would stick, the AEC in 1959 awarded General Nuclear Energy Corp. (GNEC) a grant to build what was designed to be a superheated boiling water reactor for the Puerto Rico Water Resources Commission, predecessor to today’s Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), which has presided over one of the worst-run public power systems in the U.S. for many years.
GNEC’s idea was to overcome a fundamental problem of commercial light-water nuclear designs, which produce lower temperature steam than then-conventional fossil-fueled plants. The company, created by former Argonne National Lab creator of the boiling water reactor (BWR), Walter Zinn, proposed to use nuclear to add heat to the steam from a BWR. As Will Davis of the American Nuclear Society wrote in a 2016 retrospective on the Puerto Rico project, “This would greatly increase the efficiency of the plant, as well as make dry steam at a high pressure that would allow the use of (less expensive) commercially available equipment in the steam plant.”
As Davis describes the plant, named BONUS for “Boiling Nuclear Superheater reactor,” it was “both a conventional boiler core (rated 37 MWt) and also four nuclear superheater elements arrayed around the core’s periphery, using very different fuel element designs (a total of 13 MWt). The reactor had a complex internal and external piping arrangement; recirculation pumps were located below the reactor.”
Construction of the $24 million project began in 1960 and the plant went critical in 1964, reaching full capacity of 16.5 MW in September of 1965, according to the AEC’s project completion report. But the plant was a failure, largely due to the complexity of the plumbing and the high cost of repairs. It shut down in June 1968, and was decommissioned between 1969 and 1970. Additional cleanup of radioactive contamination took place in the 1990s and 2000s.
The advanced reactor concept of superheated steam from a BWR died with it.
The AEC also tried superheating low-quality nuclear steam from pressurized water reactors at Consolidated Edison’s Indian Point 1 nuclear plant outside of New York City. The Babcock & Wilcox 275-MW PWR went into service in 1962 on the Consolidated Edison system, using oil-fired burners to upgrade the steam. The reactor shut down in 1974. No attempts to upgrade nuclear steam have occurred in BWRs or PWRs since.
— Kennedy Maize