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NuScale Power LLC is building six small nuclear reactors to place in a prototype power plant in Idaho in this decade. The test plant could be the model for nuclear plants that could be built in the Ohio Valley.

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The Ohio Valley could be ripe for conversion from coal to nuclear power, but don’t expect utility companies to lead it.

So says an officer of a company preparing to deploy a small modular reactor to test the viability of a new generation of nuclear power plants.

Chris Colbert, chief financial officer of NuScale Power LLC, which is based in Portland, Oregon, says smaller nuclear power plants are a possibility as coal-burning power plants are retired.

“We’ve certainly had a number of conversations with people in that region, including the state of West Virginia,” Colbert said in a recent interview.

Nuclear power wasn’t legal in coal-friendly West Virginia until this year, when the Legislature repealed a law preventing its use here. Attitudes toward nuclear power have changed as popular sentiment and federal regulations have made burning coal less cost-effective compared to other sources.

Nuclear power likewise has had its periods of being unpopular, but its attractiveness has grown as public sentiment and federal regulations are moving away from fossil fuels. Renewables such as solar and wind are growing, but until the technology for battery storage improves, they are seen more as intermittent sources of power instead of as baseload sources that can run 24/7.

That leaves a new generation of smaller, less expensive nuclear plants as an option.

The federal Department of Energy provides economic assistance to NuScale and other companies working on developing and testing small modular reactors. The Tennessee Valley Authority plans to build a small nuclear plant at its Clinch River site in Tennessee. Power providers in Canada are also planning to deploy small nuclear plants.

“We’ll have proven it out by the end of this decade, and people will say, ‘Yeah, I can see it operating, I can see what it takes to build it, and I can see what it costs to build it,’” Colbert said.

NuScale has a local connection in that one of its investors is Nucor Steel, which will soon begin construction on a $2.6 billion steel mill in Mason County less than 30 miles from Huntington. In April, Nucor announced it had invested $15 million in NuScale as part of its plan to reduce the amount of carbon emissions resulting from its steelmaking processes.

NuScale Power LLC is building six small nuclear reactors to place in a prototype power plant in Idaho in this decade. The test plant could be the model for nuclear plants that could be built in the Ohio Valley.

The first NuScale power module is planned to go into operation in Idaho in 2029. It will be what the company calls a VOYGR 6 — a six-module plant that will produce 462 megawatts of power. For comparison, coal-burning plants in this region are rated from about 1,300 megawatts such as the Mountaineer plant in Mason County up to the 2,300-megawatt John Amos power plant in Putnam County, West Virginia.

NuScale plans to build plants with four, six or 12 reactor modules, with each module producing 77 megawatts. Thus the plants’ production can range from 308 megawatts to 924 megawatts, Colbert said.

The small reactors have two advantages over the larger ones at existing nuclear plants, Colbert said: the fundamental technology is the same and there is a well-established supply chain for them.

The smaller reactors can be built in a factory and transported to the power plant site, he said.

“A large reactor might take six years to build. We’re looking at three years for our reactor in a four-, six- or 12-module configuration,” he said.

While replacing coal-burning units with nuclear units on the site of an existing or former coal-burning plant is possible, it probably won’t be done by utilities, Colbert said.

“They will need to see the plants can be built on time and on budget. Investor-owned utilities must justify their rates to utility regulators and to their investors and rating agencies.” he said, “They just want to see it proven out, so they probably won’t be second movers. They may be third or fourth movers.”

Waste from the small reactors will be stored on site, the same as with existing nuclear plants, Colbert said.

Once fuel is used, it’s put in a pool of water to cool. Then it is put in casks that are set on a concrete pad on the site.

“Unlike other technologies where there’s no way you could physically store 60 years of used fuel or waste from that fuel on the site, at a NuScale plant you could take 60 years of fuel, put it in dry-cask storage and put it on a concrete pad within the boundary of the plant on about a one-and-a-half-acre pad,” he said.

“The overall site is maybe 40 acres or 60 acres depending on the size and configuration, so it doesn’t take up a lot of space and it doesn’t cost a lot of money to do it. People don’t realize there are like 70 sites where fuel is being stored in 35 states. You don’t hear about it because it’s never been a problem, and you don’t expect it to be a problem because it’s a solid that sits in a robust steel-reinforced concrete cylinder. Ultimately the expectation is for it to go to a permanent repository. We don’t have that yet in the United States, but those casks are good for a hundred years. If you don’t have something in a hundred years, you just re-cask it.”

Eventually, the spent fuel will be recycled, Colbert said.

“Ninety-five percent of the uranium is left in that spent fuel, so reclaiming that would represent a pretty large resource of energy in itself,” he said.

“Most people don’t do it because new fuel is cheaper than recycled fuel. At some point we will figure out how to recycle it in a way that doesn’t both create any concerns of over-proliferation into a weapons program and can be done cost-effectively.”

The federally mandated safety zone for small nuclear plants will be smaller than those for larger ones, Colbert said. A large nuclear plant usually has an emergency planning zone that goes out in a 10-mile radius from the reactor building, he said.

“For our plant, it’s basically about 300 yards. That’s because it’s a different design, and the amount of fuel in each independent NuScale power module is much less,” Colbert said.

At a typical nuclear plant, the large dome over the reactor is the containment. In a NuScale plant, the modules will sit in a pool of water in the reactor building, and that provides an additional barrier, Colbert said.

“Even if it gets out beyond that 300 meters, it’s not harmful to people or the environment.” he said.

Jim Ross is development and opinion editor of The Herald-Dispatch. His email address is jross@hdmediallc.com.

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