By Tripti Chanda
There is a time for every technology. As the human race evolves, so does the technology that it uses. We would be nothing without machines and our machines need something to power them. Seeing from where we are now, the future of humanity depends on its energy sources. We started with the steam and then moved to electricity. Is the nuclear power the latest frontier that we have to conquer?
The law sets the limit
In the world of energy, the US Government has taken a bold step. The Senate has decided to amend the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This would help in carrying out demonstration projects which would be crucial for advancement in nuclear reactor technology. This bill, called the Advanced Nuclear Energy Technologies Act, along with the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act would help in making great strides in the development of the technology.
This amendment would allow the building of advanced nuclear plants by private companies along with national research laboratories. These plants would be considered an improvement over the regular commercial nuclear plants. The demonstrative projects in research are to show these by implementing various types of nuclear reactor technologies. The goal is to get a nuclear reactor which has lower waste yields, improved fuel performance, enhanced reliability, lower levels of cost of electricity, an increased thermal efficiency, and a higher level of safety among others.
The project would show how such a reactor can be built. The reactor also needs to have commercial, electrical and non-electrical applications. Moreover, it should help in the development of the private and the public sector.
The government seems to be looking towards a future of clean energy: A world which not just takes from the environment but also continuously harasses it in return. With such goals for the present research, when the project does finally get implemented there could be further research into zero-waste power production.
Hungry for everything ‘nuclear’
The production of nuclear energy, though having a lesser carbon footprint as compared to coal production, is not completely clean. The nuclear energy is counted neither as a clean source nor as a renewable source of power. Not only the waste generated during production but also after it is harmful. The nuclear waste is a radioactive pollutant making it very difficult to dispose of, making the disposal sites very limited. Even the slightest contact with such a waste would cause harm to the entire biosystem.
The uranium deposit on the Earth is finite, unlike solar and wind energy. Shifting to a cleaner energy would render us independent of a raw material and support from other countries, unlike nuclear energy. This would be the case of the race of yellow cake, driving up the prices of energy, resulting not only in environmental but economic effect further causing a paradigm shift in the world of business and economy.
Jumpstarting the nuclear sector
In most countries, the nuclear sector is a government controlled initiative tied up in a lot of bureaucracy. The threat that has been in existence since the discovery of nuclear energy is a war that could end up destroying the entire world. This has led to a very careful development of controlled and highly observed laboratories. Even in the United States, the field has come to a halt with no construction of new reactors for over three decades.
An article like this would provide a fresh lease of life for this sector. Involvement of private firms and maybe, further down the road, even enterprising individuals would result in new innovations and faster development. This can also be seen as a development that has already happened. A company called NuScale Energy has taken a revolutionary step forward, and its secret seems to be going small.
Small modular reactors win where their bigger sized counterparts tap out. They require lesser initial capital investment and have safer and simpler designs. Their parts can be built in a factory and then assembled on site unlike the traditional plants, where the parts are actually built on site. This means that the rate at which the reactors can be built increases drastically and the troubles with logistics are also reduced. The initial designs show that they could run on their initial fuel for 20 years and thus generate minimal waste.
NuScales initial small modular reactor promises a 50-megawatt power and a cost which is cheaper by huge magnitudes. Compared to a traditional plant, it could be one-fifth of the cost. If all goes according to the plan, the initial plant could start producing power by the year 2026. Though this seems a long way off, by the time this happens, there would be enough third-party companies to streamline the whole process and make the entire procedure much faster for the upcoming reactors.
NuScale is not the only firm in this sphere. Babcock & Wilcox has also submitted their design to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This has resulted in attracting capital investments from various opportunities. A meeting held at Berkley on small modular reactors saw designs presented for the same from multiple countries like the United States, Japan, Russia, Korea, and France.
Is the nuclear future is here?
With the smaller reactors, it is not just the parts of the reactors that have been scaled down, there have been many novel safety features added to it. They need to have an increased tolerance to loss of fuel cooling and also have reduced consumption of cooling water. To solve this problem, the reactors would be placed underground in a pool of water. It would also eliminate additional piping, plumbing and tanks.
What can be seen from this is that it isnt a completely far-fetched idea to imagine a future where all our appliances would be powered by energy sourced from nuclear power. Right now, we are at a point in the human history where some pivotal decisions in important fields have to be made that could make or break up a species. A decision to go clean and green in all our energy needs is an important one and one that we need to make urgently if we expect it to have any effect.