With the decarbonisation effort in full swing, the question of what the new global energy mix will look like has become a pressing issue of technology and infrastructure investment.
As solar becomes the cheapest form of energy on average, governments, multinational corporations and not-for-profits are all racing to find the best combination of renewable energy, energy storage and base load power to service their economies.
Whether that base load power will be met by some kind of battery-based energy storage, hydrogen, or nuclear is still up for debate – and the answer may be vastly different depending on location – but a new initiative by Westinghouse Electric Company and CORE POWER seeks to offer a potential solution.
The two companies are collaborating to design and develop floating nuclear power plants (FNPP), with the goal of vastly increasing the flexibility and portability of energy generation while also addressing potential safety concerns from natural disasters.
Nuclear anxiety difficult to shake
While nuclear power plants have been in operation for over 70 years, the general public is still wary about their potential harms – for good reason in some cases.
Disasters like Chernobyl or Fukushima have demonstrated the outsized harm nuclear accidents can cause, with the damage from such incidents continuing to affect the local environment for potentially hundreds of years after the event.
While the danger is real, the impact of coal-fired power plants has been much more severe, causing more than 43,000 premature deaths per year between 1999 and 2007, according to research published in Science.
Regulation has drastically improved in much of the world since then, but it’s difficult to argue any singular energy source has a worse track record than coal in terms of health and environmental impact.
Taking that into account, with modern safety designs (a large part of why nuclear reactors are so expensive) and stout regulation, nuclear power plants are overall arguably safer than coal powered options, although still riskier than most renewable power options.
With sufficient regulation in place, Westinghouse Electric Company and CORE POWER’s floating reactor concept could address one of the remaining barriers to safely using nuclear power – natural disasters.
Nuclear as part of the net-zero solution
The two companies propose to build a series of identical FNPPs, using multiple installations of Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactor.
By operating offshore, Westinghouse and CORE hope to avoid the threat of tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters altogether.
“There’s no net zero without nuclear,” CORE POWER CEO Mikal Bøe said in a press statement.
“A long series of identical turnkey power plants using multiple installations of the Westinghouse eVinci microreactor delivered by sea, creates a real opportunity to scale nuclear as the perfect solution to meet the rapidly growing demand for clean, flexible and reliable electricity delivered on time and on budget.”
According to Westinghouse, the reactors require very little maintenance and can operate for up to eight years before needing to be refuelled, suitable for applications ranging from a few kilowatts to five megawatts.
“With this groundbreaking agreement, we will demonstrate the viability of the eVinci technology for innovative use cases where power is needed in remote locations or in areas with land limitations,” said Jon Ball, President of eVinci Technologies at Westinghouse.
The company says the eVinci is also capable of producing high-temperature heat for industrial applications, including the production of hydrogen fuel.
Tech companies look to nuclear power
While this particular iteration of nuclear technology has a long road ahead of it, it’s becoming clear that nuclear power will have a part to play in the energy transition.
About 65 nuclear reactors are currently under construction globally, with a further 90 in the planning stages, and 300 more in the proposal stage.
Tech giants in particular have begun to take a hard look at nuclear as a potential energy source, with Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) recently signing a deal with Kairos Power to use small nuclear reactors to fuel its artificial intelligence data centres.
Google also reached a deal to restart operations at the Three Mile Island energy plant this year, the site of the worst nuclear incident to occur on US soil.
In March, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) signalled it too would buy into nuclear, with a deal to acquire a nuclear-powered data centre in Pennsylvania.
While it remains to be seen whether nuclear will become a staple energy source globally, the technology has certainly entered a new age of innovation and growth.
Above all else, safety will need to be a core focus if the technology is to succeed.