Assessing Government and Industry Roles to Accelerate Commercialization of Advanced Reactors and Supporting Fuel Cycles

Journal Article · Fri Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2016 · Transactions of the American Nuclear Society

OSTI ID:23042579

Krahn, Steven; Burkhardt, Bethany ^[1]; Sowder, Andrew ^[2]

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1. Vanderbilt University, 2301 Vanderbilt Place/PMB 351831, Nashville, TN, 37235 (United States)
2. Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), 1300 West W.T. Harris Blvd, Charlotte, NC 28262 (United States)

Recent growth in private sector interest and investment in advanced reactor designs signals a new period in the greater than six decade pursuit of commercial nuclear technology. This nuclear entrepreneurship is primarily centered in the North America; meanwhile, national programs in China, France, India, Russia, and South Korea also feature active efforts to design, construct, operate and export advanced reactors .The business case for most private ventures calls for an aggressive commercialization timeline-tied to expectations for returns on investment. Finally, strategic energy portfolio projections and utility resource planning point to the 2030 - 2050 window as the period of greatest need for dispatchable, energy intensive, low-carbon generation options to address retirement of baseload capacity, increased penetration of renewables and economy-scale decarbonization. However, lead times for commercialization range from 30 to 50 years based on more traditional government-centric timelines. Fuel development and fuel cycle infrastructure deployment represent parallel timelines that directly influence the timeline for commercialization of many advanced reactor concepts. While multi-decade development periods appear to be commonplace for new nuclear projects, such timelines were not always the norm-three separate countries set out to develop civilian commercial power from fundamental nuclear principles, in just over a decade, on average. The US led light-water reactor (LWR) development in the 1950's, the UK pioneered a gas-cooled reactor (GCR) concept in the same time period, and Canada forged the path to commercializing the heavy-water reactor (HWR) starting in the mid-1950's and into the mid-1960's. The necessary fuel cycle facilities to support the commercial reactor design also did not appear suddenly, but were a collaborative effort between government and private partners. In this paper, the efforts of these three governments and their private industry partnerships in reactor and fuel cycle development are explored, and a select sample of representative milestones for each is presented, with the roles that each group played. (authors)

• OSTI ID: 23042579
• Journal Information: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Journal Name: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society Vol. 115; ISSN 0003-018X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
COMMERCIALIZATION
DECARBONIZATION
FUEL CYCLE
GAS COOLED REACTORS
HEAVY WATER
NUCLEAR FUELS
NUCLEAR INDUSTRY
REACTOR DESIGN
SIGNALS
WATER COOLED REACTORS
WATER MODERATED REACTORS