A Preassembled Nuclear Reactor

I think nuclear is a part of our energy future, and I’d like to see more plants built. I’m glad some companies are submitting applications for new plants, and I hope we see more.

But I’d also like to see simpler, safer, more efficient designs, and this modular design might help. It’s a new Babcock and Wilcox design, that is smaller, only generating 150MW instead of the 1,000 or more MW that many plants develop. However putting these in should dramatically lower construction and operating costs, and you are not necessarily making a $1B bet on a plant, but rather a $10-100mm one.

Plus you could spread these out into more places. They’re smaller, so less of a radius around the plant, less of everything, including line losses as you distribute power.

As I said, I’m a pro-nuclear guy, so I hope things like this get going.

But I don’t want to see us standardize on one design. We need to set a standard for a period of time, say 5 years, but allow people to keep working on improvements and incorporate new designs over time.