DOE Funds 2022 First Demo for Factory Mass Producible Nuclear Power

The late 2020’s could see the start of a new age of factory mass produced nuclear power. The DOE is putting most of its first of its kind funding ($13 million out of $19 million) for advanced nuclear power research into the Westinghouse 25 MWe eVinci nuclear reactor. The funding will prepare Westinghouse’s 25-MWe eVinci micro-reactor for nuclear demonstration readiness by 2022.

New Age of Advanced Nuclear Fission

The eVinci will be mostly solid-state with very few moving parts. It will be using many heat pipes to transfer heat instead of water or steam. Eventually, these microreactor modules will be made in one month in a factory. They could be produced like airplane engines by the thousands. They will be walk-away safe and operate more efficiently and at lower-cost than existing nuclear reactors. They are targeting $2 per watt of electricity which means a cost of $20 million for a 10 MWe reactor that fits on truck. A 25 MWe nuclear reactor would cost $50 million. Forty such microreactors would be equal to a Gigawatt reactor and cost $2 billion. This is four times cheaper than current western nuclear reactors and as cheap as natural gas. The technological simplicity of the eVinci is what makes it unique. The reactor will operate autonomously. Its reactor core is a solid-steel monolith that features channels for fuel pellets, the moderator (metal hydride), and heat pipes, which are arranged in a hexagonal pattern. The monolith will serve as the second fission product barrier (the fuel pellet is the first barrier) as well as the thermal medium between the fuel channels and heat pipes. The heat pipes will extract heat from the core using a technology based on thermal conductivity and fluid phase transition. Key Attributes of eVinci Micro Reactor: * Transportable energy generator * Fully factory built, fueled and assembled * Combined heat and power – 200 kWe to 25 MWe * Up to 600ºC process heat * 5- to 10-year life with walkaway inherent safety * Target less than 30 days onsite installation * Autonomous load management capability * Unparalleled proliferation resistance * High reliability and minimal moving parts * Green-field decommissioning and remediation.
heat pipes
  • eVinci (TM) Micro Reactor Nuclear Demonstration Unit Readiness Project – Westinghouse Electric Corp LLC (Cranberry Township, PA) is for Westinghouse and its team to prepare for the Nuclear Demonstration Unit (NDU) of the eVinci micro reactor through design, analysis, testing and licensing to manufacture, site and test the NDU by 2022.

DOE Funding: $12,879,797; Non-DOE: $15,675,350; Total Value: $28,555,147

SOURCES- Interview with DV Rao of Los Alamos, Westinghouse materials, DOE

66 thoughts on “DOE Funds 2022 First Demo for Factory Mass Producible Nuclear Power”

  1. What will have to happen, is that the industry of other nations will have start selling innovative fission reactors, likely MSRs. I’d say the most likely nations would be South Korea, Taiwan, or China. Once US corporations think they are losing money, the Congress, and NRC will mysteriously decide that innovation is what the nuclear industry needs, not so corporations can profit, but for “safety”, and CO2 reduction. It will be a green revolution, as in greenbacks.

  2. Which is what they do in sodium cooled fast reactors like EBR, PRISM, etc. They put sodium in the fuel rods to fill the gap and have a lot of plenum space above the fuel stack.

  3. See, that just goes to show that you’re a bit out of your sandbox. The reactor is supposedly a hogged-out block of metal and it is small and uses perhaps high assay low enriched (20%). Just because there is some hydrogen present at a number density two orders of magnitude less than is seen in a LWR does not make this reactor “thermal” by any stretch. The hydrogen in the hydride has a reactivity effect, sure, and there are some thermal neutrons present, but there is no way that the average neutron energy is anywhere near sub-eV.

  4. If you are designing a reactor for use in space, this is *waay* too conservative. Mass is expensive, heat rejection in vaccum is difficult, and space is radioactive as all heck to begin with, so you do not actually need or want something super safe. You want as much power in as little mass as possible, with as high thermodynamic efficiency as possible.
    Meaning something along the lines of a dusty core fission fragment design. One gigawatt electric, 10-20 tonnes, 90% output as electricity, 10% heat.

  5. I’d start with a first generation of fast spectrum chloride chemistry reactors, breeding U233 in a molten thorium salt blanket for a later generation of LFTRs. Hopefully, the first generation would run on transuranics from used PWR fuel.
    This would give you time to build, and run several LFTR test reactors with the DOE’s stockpile of U233, so you would have a proven/mature reactor design ready, once there was tons of U233 available.
    I’d think you could have a fast core, with moderator in the breeding blanket to increase neutron capture cross section. Nothing spits out neutrons like a fast spectrum reactor, after all.

  6. It’s hard to tell in the plan view what’s fuel(green), and what’s moderator(blue), since the figure is so small. If the thing is supposed to be cheap, it will most likely be more moderator than fuel.
    I’m assuming this reactor runs on low enriched fuel(5% U235), since these days, the NRC has a fit over anything using highly enriched fuel, also the cost of fuel rises fast as enrichment rises. If it does use 5%, it will be hard to get enough fissionables into the core to support a fast spectrum reactor with any reasonable power density. Moderator is a lot cheaper than fissionables, and easier to get past the NRC. There will also be a higher negative temperature reaction rate coefficient, if the reactor has lots of moderator for hydrogen to vacate.

  7. Some combo of fission (thorium, sodium) and fusion are what we need, but somebody really smart will have to figure it out: Elon.

  8. I was idly speculating that packing your fuel tubes with sodium (which obviously melts as soon as things warm up to operating temperature) gives you good thermal contact while allowing the fuel pellets themselves the ability to swell without breaking anything.

  9. The pellets close the gap and come into contact with the cladding after ~20GWd/T depending on the heat rate. The gap can open and close briefly due to variation in heat rate when it is getting close to closure. If the heat rate drops really low for an extended period, the cladding creeps down on the pellet.

  10. Pellets could be soft. Maybe they are metallic. Can’t be too porous and below theoretical density because then they would sinter in-situ at power and open a gap.

  11. You see how much moderator is in there? Not much. Maybe just enough to take the edge off, so, it is fast.

  12. Light water reactors use helium to conduct heat from the fuel pellet to the rod casing, to allow room for the pellet to expand. Helium is a crappy conductor, so they only leave just enough room, and the expanding pellet can distort the tubes. There have been proposals for years to use a ‘ thermal bonding’ liquid metal, which would allow the pellets to run much cooler. Sodium would work, but could react with the water coolant if a tube failed ( though a tube is less likely to fail if it doesn’t have overheated pellets pushing into it.) Lead/bismuth/tin eutectic is another possibility.
    In a solid state reactor that already uses sodium vapour in the heat pipes, they should be ok.

  13. The other possibility is that the metal hydride moderator is spongy or crack-tolerant. Then it doesn’t matter if the fuel elements swell or not. As long as the structural integrity of the heat pipes is maintained, the moderator doesn’t need to do much, short of not failing apart completely.

  14. I was thinking mostly about the working fluid either freezing or failing to condense. If it freezes following a shutdown, the core heating up from decay heat will melt it, and it’ll start conducting heat more efficiently.

    But I’m pretty sure that the “walkaway safe” criterion means that there’s enough conduction through the walls in shutdown that the core’s temperature can’t rise above its melting point. So even if the heat pipes fail completely, the core won’t melt.

  15. I agree, Scary’s mention of the need for solid state conduction from a swelling fuel means either

    1. They never thought about an issue that a real nuclear engineer thought of right away
    2. Or there is a lot more to this design than their simplified description says
    3. Or this was never really intended to work in this form

    With option 3 probably being the most likely case.

  16. But as we all now know, radioactive decay can keep a reactor getting hotter and hotter for weeks after the actual fission chain reactions have stopped, if you can’t get the heat out of the reactor.

    The heat production rate is much lower than when the reactor is running properly, so I guess providing your heat pipe is still working at 10% or so it’ll be able to keep up with decay heat.

  17. umm… wrong. the point behind walkaway safe is that the system is designed so that if an accident occurs, there is enough give in the system such that the excess energy dissipates into the structure that surrounds it.

    The MSRE for example, had a ‘freeze plug’ where they could drain the contents of the reactor into a drain tank in the case of overheating, and hence dissipate the power density. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment

    Anyways, you really should do some research about this sort of thing before posting a response you don’t know anything about. Read a book about advanced nuclear design, or at least research passive safety on the internet.

  18. It remains to be seen if some random company/person with $50 million would be allowed to purchase a 25 MWe nuclear reactor.

  19. Presumably, the rate of fission of this reactor is in part controlled by the disassociation, of the metal hydride at higher temperatures, and the exit of the hydrogen from the reactor’s core. The decrease of moderation results in fewer fissions, and a decrease in power.
    Once the temperature of the core falls, the hydrogen reacts with the metal, and reforms the metal hydride.
    A reactor using uranium hydride, as a fuel/moderator was designed by Hyperion Power Generation, but abandoned by the company because of the futility of getting anything innovative past the NRC. It’s temperature was self controlled by the disassociation of UH3 at higher temperatures.
    The TRIGA reactor uses a hydride for moderation, and is the only reactor licenced for unattended operation. From Wikipedia:

    “TRIGA is a pool-type reactor that can be installed without a containment building, and is designed for research and testing use by scientific institutions and universities for purposes such as undergraduate and graduate education, private commercial research, non-destructive testing and isotope production.
    The TRIGA reactor uses uranium zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel, which has a large, prompt negative fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity, meaning that as the temperature of the core increases, the reactivity rapidly decreases. Because of this unique feature, it has been safely pulsed at a power of up to 22,000 megawatts,[1]. “

  20. It is moderated, so I’d consider it a thermal spectrum, or perhaps epithermal at the “fastest”. The greatest advantage of the thermal spectrum reactor is that the fission cross section of interaction for U235 is much larger for thermal neutrons.

  21. Ironically, things work fine in microgravity, but you need some of the adverse orientations to test the silly thing on the ground.

  22. For that to happen in the U.S. we’d need the NRC to start looking at designs earlier in the process. Right now companies have to spend several hundred million on a paper design before NRC will even look at it, then they give a flat yes or no. That’s a difficult environment for investors.

  23. Great link – thanks !
    Reading those test results, it looks like all designs still have problems. The performance degrades quite a bit when the pipes are bent or in adverse elevation. I’m not sure what they are saying about what design they are planning to use. Are they going for thermosyphons in gravity mode and something else in zero-g?

    The article is from 2017 and testing was ongoing at the time of writing.
    Do you know what progress may have been made since then?

  24. I forgot about the need to do solid state conduction. OK, I see the problem. I surrender.

  25. I hate to say it, but new reactors seem to be a repeat of the “new battery technology just around the corner”. You here about how great they would be, and that they will appear in just a short while, and then.. nothing.

    Also note, I really don’t see what difference 25 million dollars could make. Sure, in 1950 that would get you plenty of development, but now? My guess, a few simulations and some power point presentations. Forget prototypes…

  26. Wake me up when the total annual R&D effort for advance nuclear reactors is $10 to $20 billion a year. Only then will I consider it a serious effort. Candy makers spend more than $19 million a year on R&D for new bubble gum flavors.

  27. Eh, if you do it right, even if the fuel melts, as it tries melting its way out it gets diluted by the structure it’s melting, and eventually doesn’t have enough energy density to stay molten before escaping.

  28. It’s usually a pretty good temperature range, though, because until you go supercritical, raising the operating temperature just raises the pressure inside the tubes, (Assuming you start out with a sufficient amount of coolant to begin with.) increasing the condensation temperature. And the heat rejection capacity is rising with temperature, after all.

  29. That just means you don’t put one on each residential block to supply power in a distributed way. Which IS a pity, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have reactor farms behind fences.

  30. Sure then you can make the entire population sick with radioactive posioning by making the water table radio active we’re people pump water from wells… best case is using them on mars… it’s already a radioactive waste land due to high solar ion bombardment… ohh well … there went another reactor core melted down in the Marian waste land … better get another on setup…

  31. Anything that gets hot enough melts down… fuel rods get stuck… heat pipes break… container melts until reactor content is rejected out the hole in the reactor caused by overheating…

  32. No, because it’s easy to design the reactor so that thermal expansion of the core (or even just thermal expansion of the moderator) reduces the reactivity.

  33. Put 40 of them together, as suggested above, and you have a gigawatt at one secure site, just like nuclear plants now. The main point is low cost and rapid deployment, not distributed generation.

  34. If the heat pipes stop working because they are above operating temp range, won’t this lead to a runaway heat situation?

    Maybe one can have staged heatpipes that kick in if the primary pipes overheat. With another layer of pipes with their hot ends closer to the primary pipes cold ends, there will still be heat transport when it gets too hot.
    Or maybe just run the design like that all the time like a staged turbine.

  35. Heatpipes tend to work better in vertical orientation because of gravity.
    In zero-G, that means spinning the reactor or using some other trick.

  36. This tech would be really at home outside of Earth.

    Here on Earth? nope. Many small nukes make too many high reward targets for lunatics and terrorists.

    Yeah, that’s why we can’t have nice things.

  37. Sounds to me that the channels could be re-loadable, if the geometry is such that the fuel pellets don’t get stuck as they swell. Disassembling a bundle of pipes sounds tough (hot) to handle post-burnup, while pushing stuff out of the channel could be fairly straightforward. (It does have “autonomous load management” on the bullet list, but I can’t tell if that’s electrical load or the fuel load.)

    I thought that eVinci and Megapower were essentially the same thing, but I also thought that KRUSTY and Megapower were essentially the same tech at different scales. KRUSTY is a cast HEU-Mo core fast reactor with a neutron reflector, while eVinci is a thermal core. I guess they share the same heat pipes and center poison rod, but that seems like it’s about it.

    An NDU in 2022 sounds… not particularly pork-like.

  38. Wind and solar are not so cheap if you count in the back up or storage and the updated transmission infrastructure required.

  39. Yes, uranium hydride fuel works at not too much above room temperature. I have seen the famous pulse. Has anyone used a metal hydride moderator at a temperature appropriate for power generation?

  40. It seems overly ambitious. Are supercritical CO2 turbines used in electricity generation yet? Other than the Triga reactors which were operated at less than the boiling point of water, has any reactor used metal hydrides as a moderator?

  41. You mean molten salt reactors (or specifically the Two fluid or the fast types) . Thorium in it self isn’t very interesting but the combination of molten salt reactors with thorium fuel hence the ”Liquid fluoride(salt) thorium reactor” makes the promise.

  42. So the moderator is metal hydride will that be boron? Is there a surge volume for the moderator and who runs the thing? Best of luck.

  43. But make it to use safe thorium fuel with an escape drain container. and tested with unfuel high temperature testing.

  44. There is a reason why the eVinci reactor picture has lots of snow in the picture. There are whole seasons when solar is really bad.

    These reactors are for locating in places that are very far off the grid.

  45. What happens if it melts down… mini Chernobyl? Military application for sure… nuclear powered tanks? Aircraft… great for towing to mars aboard a super heavy

  46. I’d do the same, but consider this:

    1) If the temperature is too high, heat pipes stop working because the cold end won’t condense. But it’s usually pretty easy to get fission to stop as the core heats up and expands. As the core temperature comes down, the heat pipe will start working again. So as long fission stops and the core doesn’t melt before the heat pipe stops working, you’re pretty safe in this direction.

    2) If the temperature is too low, the working fluid freezes. But then the core will heat up, and the fluid will melt again.

    My bigger concern would be what happens if heat pipes actually fail. But this is a pretty robust technology, with a lot of miles on it, and a lot of redundancy.

  47. Heatpipes are great, but are only efficient over some pre-specified range of temperatures. If I was auditing the design, I’d look for situations that could go out of range.

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