The future of nuclear power in the USA (Jose Maldifassi) Chile

THE FUTURE OF NUCLEAR POWER IN THE UNITED STATES, A PROPOSAL JosĂŠ Maldifassi, Ph.D. Universidad Adolfo IbĂĄĂąez, Chile August 2, 2017 Nuclear power technology is a mature one in absolute terms. Most, if not all, the knowledge needed to design and build safe, efficient and long lasting nuclear power reactors is already available. Therefore, the main issues would be which technologies to choose as to maximize the benefit that this noble technology can offer, and which policies could be adopted in order to allow nuclear power to provide a significant and long-lasting amount of nuclear electricity.

If one looks at the last three decades of nuclear power reactors, the issue of overall plant standardization appears as one of the advantages shown by CANDU and French reactors. Recently South Korea has developed, in association with Combustion Engineering, the standardized third generation APR 1400, of which four identical units have been sold to UAE, and other three identical units are being built and one is operational in their own country. As well, pressurized water reactors have been preferred worldwide for economic and operational reasons over BWR ones. I support the proposition that in the US one of the main drawbacks of its nuclear power industry has been the absence of a standardized design that could have evolved smoothly along time, allowing operators, manufactures and government agencies to improve and optimize the design, licensing and manufacturing of a fleet of such a kind of standard power plants. If the development of new reactors in the US continues to be based on inter-firm competition, no standard design will ever come out of design and manufacturing companies. This lack of standardization requires that each new build has to be licensed as a new type or kind of nuclear reactor, increasing administrative burden, delays and costs to license new builds on a one-by-one basis. There is no global and incremental learning at the industrial, operational and licensing levels. Accordingly, my proposal is to start developing a standard US design of a 1.000 MW power plant, whose individual standardized items could be manufactured by different companies but fully compliant with the prevalent standard design. This would reduce all kind of costs and will increase safety, licensing times and procedures, personnel training and so forth.

The second issue has to do with fuel reprocessing. Vast amounts of spent fuel are scattered all over the US, with only a small amount of it that is reprocessed.

The French have shown that it is fully possible to have government facilities in charge of fuel reprocessing, long-life waste storage, and manufacturing and use of U-Pu mixed fuel. In the US there is more used fuel available than in France,

with enormous amounts of LEU and fuel-grade Pu in it that could be used to reduce U consumption and waste volume. A government-directed and controlled industrial policy should be established to reprocess stored radioactive fuel-waste, and to start employing mixed oxides in all power plants. This would be the only way that U and Th can last for more than 200 years of electricity production. Significant reduction in waste volume would be achieved and fuel costs will be further reduced, making nuclear electricity still more competitive and environmentally safe than other forms of power generation.

ViĂąa del Mar, Chile