Assembly Line Nuclear Reactors Are Quietly Building Steam in the Northwest

In Oregon and Washington, the two states with surely the highest percentages of Fukushima scare advocates, nuclear power is nonetheless pushing forward. The specific technology is unusual, however, if not in basic principle so much as scale. Nuclear power here is going "modular," downsizing to the point that reactors can be built in factories en masse (relatively speaking) and shipped by rail or barge to distant destinations.

Last week, the Washington state senate passed a bill requiring the state's commerce department to "coordinate and advance the sitting and manufacturing of small-scale reactors," according to the bill's text. It goes on to define the technology in question as, "a scalable nuclear power plant using reactors that each have a gross power output no greater than three hundred megawatts electric, and where each reactor is designed factory manufacturing and ease of transport, such as by truck, rail, or barge."

It was a fairly close vote, with proponents collecting 27 votes to the opposition's 21. The bill's sponsor, state senator Sharon Brown, argued that Washington risks being left behind its southern neighbor Oregon and its homegrown reactor manufacturing outfit NuScale Power. The technology itself was developed in the early 00s at Oregon State University, which has been licensing the design's development rights to NuScale since 2007. (Disclosure note: The author is enrolled at Oregon State as a student, but is not involved in any associated project or research.)

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Just a couple of weeks ago, NuScale deployed the first of its full-scale modular generators at a reactor testing facility outside of Piacenza, Italy. If all goes as planned, input from these tests will go into NuScale's Design Certification Application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, expected in late 2016. With that hurdle cleared, in 2017, the firm will seek approval for the first of its US operations, a reactor to be installed as part of the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems' Carbon Free Power Project.

If everything works out right, the Utah plant will be online in 2023. Meanwhile, the energy consortium Energy Northwest is planning for a demonstration NuScale reactor to be installed in Idaho, possibly at the Idaho National Laboratory, by 2024. In late 2013, the US Department of Energy announced an agreement in which it pays for roughly half of NuScale's total project cost, with "industry partners" contributing the rest.

In any case, Brown wants in—or she wants Washington to be in. "It's really important that we as a state get our arms around small nuclear reactors," Brown said at a hearing last month, according to the Olympia Olympian. "We need to make sure we're not left behind." To that end, Brown has pitched a $176,000 state study to focus on possible reactor locations in Washington, along with a proposed sales tax exemption for the systems. It's still unclear who exactly would build the state's answer to NuScale reactors, but the preferred location would seem to be Hanford Site nuclear facility.

While the reactors themselves are small at 45 MWe of power output each—offering just a slice of the 900 or so MWe kicked out by either of the two units at Three Mile Island, for comparison—they're meant to be bundled together. A NuScale plant design consists of 12 of these modules together, which is still smaller than our Three Mile Island comparison. For further reference, the reactor retained by Oregon State, which is used for educational and research purposes only, offers a peak output closer to 1 MWe.

NuScale isn't on its own in this market, it should be noted. Its competitor comes via Bechtel, in partnership with reactor designer Babcock and Wilcox, and it too is doing pretty well with the government funding and also has a series of plant installations in Virginia and Tennessee in the planning stages. Nuclear is still here, just out of sight.