Floating fission
Small modular reactors are seen as the future of nuclear in the UK, but what if these were put out to sea? As part of a new series on emerging technologies within energy, Utility Week looks at the potential for floating nuclear power plants.
By Lucinda Dann, features editor
Floating fission
Small modular reactors are seen as the future of nuclear in the UK, but what if these were put out to sea? As part of a new series on emerging technologies within energy, Utility Week looks at the potential for floating nuclear power plants.
By Lucinda Dann, features editor
The UK’s first new nuclear power plant in a generation is currently forecast to be delivered for twice its initial budget. Hinkley Point C was expected to cost £17 billion in 2016, but due to civil engineering price hikes and delays in the electromechanical phase the latest estimate is £35 billion, with this cost still to be adjusted for inflation.
The only other nuclear project of the same type, built at Flamanville in France, was delayed by more than 12 years and came in over three times its initial budget.
Both projects have suffered from what Mikal Boe, founder and chief executive of Core Power, a nuclear marine company, calls the “iron law of mega-projects”. He outlines this as: “They are always over budget and always behind schedule, and it happens again, and again, and again. It’s just the way it is, when we are doing some big thing for the first time we are learning on the job, and it takes longer than we thought it would.
“It’s partly poor planning, partly being over ambitious about how long it’s going to take and cost, not really having a full view of all the details of what goes into building something as large as that. And of course, the workforce comes together for the very first time and has to coordinate across lots of different functions. It’s just really hard.”
While the UK’s planned investment in small modular reactors (SMRs) will help avoid some of these pitfalls by allowing components to be prefabricated in factory settings and shipped to sites, Boe believes the process can be streamlined even further by placing the SMRs on ships.
Estimated cost of Hinkley Point in 2016
Latest estimated of cost of Hinkley Point C
France's Flamanville was delayed by 12 years and came in 3 times over budget
Old technology
Floating nuclear power plants (FNPP) are ships without self-propulsion that contain specialised nuclear reactors. Far from being a new concept, FNPPs predate land-based nuclear power plants, with the first experimental FNPP being constructed by the US Army in the late 1960s.
Former merchant sea vessel the SS Charles H Cugle was converted into the MH-1A Sturgis by fitting a 10MW pressurised water reactor running on low-enriched uranium. It was moored in Gatun Lake in Panama to supply electricity to the Panama Canal zone in 1968 during dry-season water shortages. Its electricity helped free up water that would have instead been used to power a hydroelectric station and allowed more ships to pass through the canal each day.
Today only one FNPP is currently in operation in the world. The Russian vessel Akademik Lomonosov is equipped with two KLT-40s SMRs, which deliver a combined electrical output of 70MWe and thermal capacity for district heating. Russia has just taken delivery of its second FNPP and has another four on order, while China, where the Russian ships are being built, also has plans to deploy 21 FNPPs at military installations.
British company Core Power is the only developer of FNPP technology in the West and has already signed a first-of-its-kind federal-private cooperation framework with the US government to accelerate the commercial, industrial and regulatory pathway for a future fleet of US-flagged nuclear-powered merchant ships.
“The reason why floating nuclear is becoming such a hot topic around the world, and that’s not just in the developer space but also the political space and regulatory space, is it breaks two of those fundamental constitutional laws which are holding nuclear back from taking its rightful place as a serious contributor to affordable long-term energy security,” says Boe.
The first is that iron law of mega-projects. “Floating nuclear power plants break that law because what you are now doing is taking not just the reactor technology but the entire nuclear power plant and creating that in a shipyard.
“The way we build ships is in component pieces. You have blocked components which are brought into a grading dock and then assembled, and as they are assembled the ship moves forwards and the next blocks come down. You’ve effectively got an assembly line and you are building this in 100% modular fashion.
“Once the hull is built and everything has been validated for all of the standards, then the nuclear systems are fitted, the reactors come in, and all instrumentation and control systems, all of the things that are really safety critical components are then fitted, validated and tested. Then at the end of that process you now have a functional floating nuclear power plant which is delivered to a customer.”
Boe expects the current predicted three-year construction period to reduce to just 17 months as order volumes increase, with the cost to be around $1.6-1.8 billion (£1.2-£1.36 billion) per installation. “That’s cheap, that’s really the price point at which affordable clean energy ought to be,” he says.
“So now a utility that needs to add nuclear generating capacity to its grid can have nuclear delivered as a product, in the same way as British Airways, when it needs another aircraft, it doesn’t set up a project to try and build one, it gets one from Boeing or Airbus.
“And British Airways can replace them as well. This one’s getting a bit old or we need one that’s a bit bigger, they can replace them, same as nuclear power plants. They are built for a 60-year life, although that can be extended, but you can replace [FNPPs] just as easily as you could an aircraft. You just detach it from its mooring, and replace it with a new model, and that’s the second law that it breaks – the 80-year replacement cycle.
“Nuclear has a very long cycle. While gas turbines can be replaced, as can solar panels and wind, a big nuclear power station like Hinkley is not a replaceable asset. And we do have to decommission them, and 80 years is several generations. Whoever is going to build the new ones to replace them are three generations down the road and they have to go through the process again as all the institutional learning is lost.”
With such assets requiring maintenance to the highest standards, there is also the potential for FNPPs to be swapped out before the end of their 60-year lifespan and sold on for use at another site, impacting the initial investment case.
But there are also other benefits to FNPP besides the ability to industrialise their production, says Boe. In the rare instances where there has been a nuclear incident, such as at Chernobyl, there is the expectation that local residents must evacuate the area. However, with FNPP, if there ever was a problem and it was decided that people needed to be moved from the vicinity while the problem was fixed, the FNPP could be moved away from the area instead.
Similarly, land-based nuclear must be refuelled on site, which means the spent nuclear fuels that are removed and the parts that are replaced inevitably stay on site. “It’s not a problem but it’s something we have to think about, you’re building up an inventory of spent nuclear fuels on site,” says Boe.
Meanwhile, the FNPP would be returned to the shipyard for refuelling. “You’re centralising this, which is a great benefit in security and safeguards, as well as with that community engagement,” Boe says.
UK potential
Despite being a British company, Core Power is focusing its initial efforts on the US market. It plans to provide nuclear-powered shipping for the US market first before also producing FNPPs using BWXT's mPower Generation III+ SMRs.
“We can’t do this everywhere all at once so we are focusing on the United States. These are US reactors, there are US utilities and ports and industrials who are stepping up and saying we actually want this. The US government has said it is 100% committed to developing and delivering FNPP and nuclear-propelled ships,” says Boe.
However, in contrast Boe says he has not had much luck “waking up the British administration” to the concept of FNPP. Although FNPPs are ideally suited to providing power in remote locations, with Akademik Lomonosov supplying electricity to local residents and mining projects in the Chukotka district, Russia’s most remote, easternmost Arctic frontier, there is potential for the technology both domestically and for export from Britain.
“At Humberside, just as an example, say there is a pier side which is developed, and along that pier is the electrical interconnection with the national grid. You place one of these on there and it produces electricity at the right current and voltage that the grid can absorb,” Boe explains. “But you can then add as many along this pier as you have space for. If there were room for 10, you’d have 3.5GW of generating capacity that’s delivered to the site as products and you could swap them out as necessary for maintenance and repair, inspection and upgrades without having to shut the whole plant down.
“So, you’d have a Hinkley C-sized generating capacity but in a completely different way. For Britain I think the opportunity here is to look at this and think should we really be building £40 billion power stations that are going to be with us for 100 years and then are going to subject to that replacement law. Let’s just live with those two laws and continue to endure it, or should we think about this differently.
“We are an island nation, we can set infrastructure in place along the coast, docking stations in all the right places, and then you have the ability to take them in and out as you flex with demand.”
Boe hopes that having a reference plant in the US that ministers can visit will help them see the opportunity in the future. “There is an opportunity for an export market, there’s a huge market for this all over the world,” he says. “That would transform how you combine the maritime and nuclear industries in the UK, both traditionally strong industries in the UK but getting weaker by the day. This would give them a shot in the arm to come back.
“It’s a £2.5 trillion opportunity - that’s a lot of money. That’s 40% of the entire country’s GDP, it’s not to be ignored.”
Boe adds that while existing nuclear licensing and regulations already cover floating nuclear, there is still work to do on standards development, and Britain could play a key role in that to help British manufacturing and engineering deployment.
Other than standards, the only meaningful barrier to FNPP is to run the gauntlet of doing something for the first time itself.
“Like any long-distance runner knows; you’ve got to go all the way,” he says. “Don’t spend all your effort in the first 10 miles, there’s a long way to go yet. The challenge here is as we go forward is the complexity which moves through the design spiral. Every time it goes along it picks up more and more relevant and real life specific issues down to the point where you have now got orders for specific sites, for specific customers according to specific licencing conditions and the workforce that is going to be running these things becomes a large and complex thing. The challenge is managing that complexity until this is just really boring because you are just making them, and they are working and nobody thinks about them because they are just doing their job.
“There are no showstoppers here, there’s always risks, the economy collapsing and funding not being available for projects but that’s the same for everything. I don't think politics plays a big role in this. We are seeing especially young people becoming more and more accepting of nuclear as part of the energy mix.
“Energy security plays a big role in that. Nuclear has got this phenomenal ability to be resilient regardless of what happens. Ukraine is still running its nuclear power plant. I spoke to one of the operators last year via satellite link and he was saying we are working in the worst possible scenario but these things just keep on going.”
With Core Power planning to open its order books for FNPP in 2028, and the company targeting a commercial prototype by the early 2030s, the British government will not have long to wait to see whether FNPP presents a viable opportunity for the country.
“I don't think politics plays a big role in this. We are seeing especially young people becoming more and more accepting of nuclear as part of the energy mix.”
Mikal Boe, chief executive, Core Power
