Toshiba and NRC go over the 4s

KIYU NEWSROOM

Toshiba goes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
10-25-07
Tim Bodony (KIYU)

Only two months ago, the City of Galena was about to abandon its pursuit of a 10 megawatt nuclear reactor for the village, as the manufacturer of the proposed reactor, Toshiba, had not been forthcoming about whether the company remained committed to the project.

But a meeting on October 23 at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission headquarters near Washington DC affirmed that the manufacturers are serious about making this project happen.

Toshiba and its American subsidiary Westinghouse met with the NRC to summarize the work they have done so far on the “4-s” nuclear reactor design, and to announce that they plan to turn in a formal license application in about one year.

Toshiba project managers with a scale model of the 4s
(photo courtesy of the NRC)

Pre-application review

The NRC allows nuclear power plant builders to get feedback on their plans, before a formal application initiates more rigorous testing and verification.

While the NRC follows strict guidelines during the formal review process, the pre-application dialogue can be whatever the nuclear company wants it to be.

Toshiba has devised a pre-application strategy that started with Tuesday’s meeting, and calls for 3 or 4 additional meetings with the NRC over the next few months. The meetings would go into increasing levels of detail, generating questions that Toshiba would answer in technical documents next year. By 2009, Toshiba plans to submit a formal application to the NRC, launching a review of the 4s design that could take 2 or 3 years.

Toshiba’s recently-acquired American subsidiary Westinghouse will steer the effort to get the 4s approved for use in the United States. During Tuesday’s meeting, Westinghouse Chief Technology Officer Regis Matzie said that his company has prior experience with reactors similar to the 4s – but admittedly, it goes back a few years.

Matzie: Unfortunately, the United States turned away from liquid metal cooled reactors in the 1980s, and thus there has been a gap in our intimate involvement with this technology. Nevertheless, Westinghouse has not been standing still. We have developed three advanced light water reactors over the last two decades, and achieved design certification on all three of these.

Sodium and water

Most commercial nuclear power plants in the world use water as a coolant. But the 4-s design would use liquid sodium. The metallic fluid would be cycled through the reactor using electro-magnetic pumps, flowing at temperatures between 500 and a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, transferring heat to the steam turbines that ultimately produce electricity.

The sodium would move in a sealed loop and be double-insulated from the outside environment – in part because sodium is highly volatile, and explodes upon contact with water. The risk of such an accident happening in the 4s is one of several scenarios that the NRC would have to analyze.

Another major question brought up in Tuesday’s meeting was how far the NRC will deviate from its entrenched set of rules and policies when evaluating the 4-s, given that the NRC usually deals with power plants that are hundreds or thousands of times larger.

For example, the NRC has minimum requirements for the buffer zone that must exist around a nuclear plant, and the number of guards and operators that the plant must employ. Toshiba and Westinghouse went through the NRC regulations, and classified about half of them as being irrelevant to the 4s, and the companies are asking for special treatment in those areas.

The NRC has some prior experience analyzing liquid metal cooled reactors, mainly for research units. Only a few proposals to use this type of reactor commercially have come before the NRC over the past 25 years, including the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project in Tennessee. According to the GAO, the federal government spent about 8 billion dollars on that unconventional design, but Congress cut off funding in 1983 and it never came online.

Toshiba has been working on the 4s project since 1988, when it saw the potential for relatively small nuclear reactors to meet the needs of desalinization plants, oilfields, mines and other remote sites with large power demands.

The preliminary design has come together over the past 5 years, and according to the project leader at Westinghouse, Brad Maurer, the 4-s design is ready for action.

Maurer: Our preliminary design is complete. Extensive testing needed for the design verification has also been complete. And its noted that we have additional testing identified to further support our database of tests, and the 4s is considered to be a mature design. And by this we mean that it is based on many years of design, analysis and extensive testing that has been performed that is specifically for, or is applicable to the 4s reactor design.

Tuesday’s meeting mainly consisted of summaries of those experiments, and dialogue between the companies and the NRC staffers.

Feedback

Among those that spoke up during a public comment period was Rob Rosenfeld, the Alaska Region Director of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, a treaty organization consisting of 66 tribal governments in Alaska and Canada. Rosenfeld has taken the lead in building a coalition of native groups to oppose the introduction of nuclear power in Galena or anywhere else in the Yukon River watershed.

He says that Toshiba is dismissing the opinion of native groups, and announced plans to voice that opposition on Toshiba’s home turf in Japan, and possibly at the United Nations.

Speaking by teleconference, Rosenfeld encouraged Toshiba to take their business elsewhere.

Rosenfeld: I do hope that in your exploration of trying to find energy solutions for tomorrow that you can find a remote area that wont be as volatile as far as opposition goes.

Also commenting via teleconference was Richard Burke of ISO New England, the group that oversees the power grid throughout the Northeast. He said that after reading the 7 feasibility studies on the potential for the 4s to operate in Galena, he thinks it’s a solid project.

Burke: Having been involved with nuclear power since the 60s, I found the design to be quite innovative and passive. And I worked in advanced light water reactors in the past, and I’ve operated a nuclear plant in this country for 20 years. I would think that some of things like reduced staffing and emergency planning zones that are promised could in fact be done, if people think a little bit out of the box, because it is not an old light water reactor design

Toshiba officials admitted during the meeting that they don’t have a firm plan on what to do with the nuclear waste that will remain after the 30 year lifespan of the 4s. Toshiba is not alone in that regard, since a long term nuclear waste storage site in the US - at Yucca Mountain, Nevada or elsewhere - is still being debated.

Toshiba won’t say exactly how much this project is going to cost them before the first reactor is delivered. As of 2005, the company estimated that about 140 million dollars had been spent on research and development since the project’s inception, with an annual budget of 15 million dollars over the past few years of systems testing. But that budget will likely increase as the project moves into the permitting process.

The next step for the City of Galena and its partners on the project would be to pursue a site permit for the reactor. That too is a multi-million dollar proposition, without money in the bank to pay for it yet.