The nation’s most advanced small modular reactor project has suffered another setback, as the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) is downsizing the multi-billion-dollar project from 12 to six reactors. At the same time, UAMPS said the reactor supplier NuScale Power, will increase the capacity of their reactor from 60 MW to 77 MW, which has some heads scratching.
Overall, the projected capacity of the project will be 462 MW. UAMPS and NuScale earlier this year announced plans to seek a combined construction and operating license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the Carbon Free Power Project in 2024uoruor.
UAMPS is a multi-state public power joint action agency headquartered in Salt Lake City. The project will be sited on U.S. Department of Energy land at the Idaho National Laboratory, and the project has a $1.355 billion cost-sharing agreement with DOE. When the project was announced in 2015, it featured 12 reactors at 50 MW each, or 600 MW. Then NuScale said the units would be 60 MW, for a total of 720 MW.
Concerned about the uncertain costs of the project, UAMPS members who originally signed up to buy power from the CFPP have been dropping out or scaling back their purchase plans. By several counts, the project is only about 25% subscribed. And the cost-sharing deal with DOE is more aspirational than concrete. The money would come over 10 years, but DOE has no authority to make such an award. Instead, the money will depend on both the wishes of whatever administration is in power and approval from Congress.
In a letter to the Los Alamos County Utilities Board, local lawyer George Chandler said, “The UAMPS CFPP project looks to be slowly dying, because not enough communities consider it to be a viable project.” Chandler added, “The design has undergone two paper upgrades in the output of each module, from 50 MWe to 60 MWe to 77MWe, and reductions in the plant size from 12 to 6 modules, with corresponding convenient decreases in the LCoE [levelized cost of energy] just as UAMPS members were reducing their subscriptions or departing completely. The ability to willy-nilly make these enormous output changes with no accompanying design changes suggests to me that the design is not in fact complete, contrary to representations.”
The Utah Taxpayers Association has also been campaigning against the CFPP, saying that “the project’s budget had ballooned from $3.1 billion to $6.1 billion.” The group said, “In February, it was confirmed by the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), the project’s developer, that commitments to the project had shrunk from 213 megawatts (MW) to only 101.6MW (a decrease of more than 52%). Then in March, UAMPS disclosed to its members that Energy Northwest had pulled out as the operator of the proposed nuclear plant.”
Oregon-based NuScale has major investments from Fluor and South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)