Electricity: Small Nuclear reactors to the rescue?

 A few days ago, I posed about a company seeking to put solar panals on valuable rice growing land in our area.

I was skeptical: I have little problem with solar panels on unused land, but wouldn't investment in agriculture be better?

 But part of our farm land is on high ground hard to irrigate, so placing solar panels there could help us to meet the budget (since the high diesel and fertilizer prices, expensive equipment, and fewer farm laborers mean higher price to grow rice and less profit).

Not enough electricity is a growing problem here in the Philippines: a growing population but also less poverty, meaning that people will now want electricity for lights, TV, cellphone charging, fans, and more commonly, air conditioners.

Alas, a lot of electricity here comes from fossil fuel or coal (70 percent), which the world is trying to eliminate. And a lot of our local electricity comes from hydro electric power. (15 percent)

Whoops: It is dry season, meaning the water in the rivers running the hydroelectricity is low, and since it is also "tag init", i.e. summer, before the monsoon rains cool you off in the afternoon, it means more electricity is being used.

So we have rotating brownouts. Another one scheduled this Thursday. 

The city uses this time to repair the aging spaghetti electric wires and replacing them with higher energy cables and transformers (that explode or are hit by lightning once or twice a year, but hey, the alternative is spaghetti wires sagging and being snagged by passing rice trucks, another problem we see a couple times a year). 

We have a large generator that we just fixed, and two small ones that right now need to be fixed, so no problem. But the old folks in the poorer area, where no one has a generator, will be dying of "asthma" and heart attacks from the heat.

Sigh

Well, anyway, what else can be used intstead of coal/NG/Diesel to generate power? Solar panels... hydro electricity...and nuclear...

Nuclear?

Headline in the Phil Inquirer:

US firm plans to build small nuclear power plants in PH

..WASHINGTON — NuScale Power Corp., a publicly traded American company that designs and markets small modular reactors (SMRs), on Monday (early Tuesday in Manila) disclosed plans to build SMRs worth up to $7.5 billion in the Philippines. ..SMRs are a fraction of the size and cost of a conventional nuclear power reactor and can produce low-carbon electricity at about a third of the generating capacity of traditional nuclear facilities, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

More here about this new technology that is starting to be used in the USA and Asia, from the Straits Times (Singapore newspaper):

The future of the industry will likely rely on small modular reactors – or SMRs – similar to the ones currently powering submarines.

SMRs have been promoted as a cheaper option than legacy reactors, with shortened construction time and less fuel needed to power them, which translates into less nuclear waste.

I had heard about these small reactors in isolated towns in places like Alaska, 

The technology is sort of similar to that in nuclear subs, and much smaller, much cheaper, and more reliable than traditional nuclear power plants, many of which are now reaching the end of their useful life and being decommissioned all over the world. 

Several designs are being developed, so you read a lot of articles hyping this, but the real test is: Will they work? Will they be cheap? Will they be safe?

All this sounds good, if they aren't lying. It comes down to trust. And here, there is more trust in US and Korean/Taiwan/Singapore/Japanese companies than in Chinese companies, because of the high rate of corruption in that country 

The bad news is that China could steal the technology and build these things cheaper, and these would be bought by countries with tight budgets (and whose bureaucrats might be influenced by small gifts from Chinese companies).

Nuclear power has been pushed here in the Philippines in the past, under under the old Marcos administration, when a huge nuclear power plant was being made in Bataan. Activists stopped it from being finished, because it was suspected as being given permission to build from bribery, but mainly because it had been built on an earthquake fault. Duh. 

The Three Mile Island and Chrnobyl nuclear accidnts were human caused accidents, but  the ultra sophisticated Fukushima power plant was destroyed by an earthquake. So safety is a big issue.

but the SNR are safe, we are told, and there are several versions, some using water and some with salt, which is even safer.

so is the Philippines being sold a technology that has been proven safe and efficient, or is just a guinea pig for big business to see if these reactors are feasable in plans to stop using a carbon based economy? 

BusinessMirror has the usual gobbly gook explaining how these fit into the world's no carbon plans but no details. 

The NuScale version has been approved to be set up in Oregon, but not on line yet.

So will it work? Enough big money interests are willing to pour money into these projects, so maybe.

But then I remember: WHOOPS!

TimeMagazine:1983

Whoops! A $2 Billion Blunder: 

Washington Public Power Supply System Fallout from a record default spreads from Washington State to Wall Street

...With its coffers almost empty, WPPSS or Whoops, as everyone now calls the agency, formally declared that it could not repay $2.25 billion in bonds used to finance partial construction of two now abandoned nuclear power plants in Washington State....

wikipedia page here.

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this is a short video about these small nuclear reactors. 

As Doc McCoy would say: Don't ask me. I'm a doctor, not a nuclear scientist.

Homer Simpson, call the office. We have a question for you.