OK, so lets think about an alternative …
In part 2 we finished up about complaining about energy costs and perhaps having a discussion with our local member to see if government policy regarding nuclear energy is changing and hoping there will be some relief from the rising cost of living. Well it won’t happen unless we do something about it!
The next generation of nuclear reactors – the ones that could finally overcome Australia’s resistance to power by fission – are so small they will abide by road regulations.
Rolls-Royce is designing a reactor that will be 4.5m wide to fit under the 4.95m British road height limit. They would be built in a factory and transported to customers by truck or barge.
In the industry they are known as small modular reactors, or SMRs. They may be the most exciting development in the field since August 3, 1958, when the nuclear-powered USS Nautilus became the first sea vessel to reach the North Pole.
As the developed world tries to work out how to power their economies without contributing to global warming – some 75 per cent of Australian electricity came from coal in 2017 – nuclear power is making a comeback among experts after the backlash triggered by Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan eight years ago.
In Australia, political and public sentiment towards nuclear could have been shifted by a parliamentary inquiry initiated by former Liberal Government Energy Minister Angus Taylor into nuclear as a power source.
The inquiry had been specifically told to consider if the new generation of small reactors might be suitable for Australia, which is among the four OECD nations that don’t use nuclear power.
The others are Iceland, which relies on geothermal energy, New Zealand, which has abundant supplies of hydro and thermal energy, and Israel, which is frequently attacked by missiles.
None are in operation yet, but there are some 150 designs under way around the world, including in Russia, China, Britain and the US. Although the technologies vary, they share a common goal: to design super-safe and relatively cheap sources of electricity.
An example of small reactor technology is illustrated below:
The illustration shows the main components of a Rolls-Royce power plant. The red section is the reactor; the yellow section the electricity turbine and the blue containing a water pumphouse.
“So many of them would be made that it would be like building a jet engine in a factory,” says Ashley Brinson of the executive Centre, an engineering think tank at the University of Sydney. “You could put it on the back of a truck or fit it into a standard shipping container.
What are small modular reactors?
The small reactors are a radical shift from conventional nuclear power plants, which are very big, and very expensive. European and North American plants are designed to provide electricity to huge populations and exploit costs of scale.
The new generation of reactors could produce as little as 4 megawatts of electricity, enough to run 100,000 lightbulbs simultaneously.
Most, though, are planned to be more powerful. Rolls-Royce, a big maker of jet engines, is designing a model that would produce 400 to 450 megawatts of energy, or about half the output of the Loy Yang B brown coal power station in the La Trobe Valley in Victoria. Owned by Alinta, Loy Yang B generates about 17 per cent of Victoria’s electricity.
One of the great advantages of this technology to create power is it doesn’t require size compared to the Loy Yang plants and a coal mine spread across 6000 hectares, which is about 20 times the size of Centennial and Moore parks in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
The Rolls-Royce reactor would be 11.3m by 4.5m and the total plant about the size of a small office park, according to an illustration published by the British company.
Utilising a pressurised water reactor – the same basic technology in the Nautilus – nuclear fission would be used to split atoms, releasing energy into water. The super-hot radioactive water would then be piped into tubes running through non-radioactive water, which would turn into steam and drive a turbine that runs an electricity generator.
The plant would be encased in what Rolls-Royce calls a “hazard shield” and protected from tsunamis or aircraft by an earthen berm.
When will this technology become available?
See more on this subject in part 4 of, 'Its our own fault'...
This post is proudly sponsored by Liz & John’s Seven Day Pet Grooming Service
