NuScale Submits First Ever Small Modular Reactor Design Certification Application (DCA). This submission was made today in Washington, DC (actually Rockville, MD) at the headquarters of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Once within a couple of months the US NRC accepts the DCA (and we all pray that happens), then comes RAIs (Requests for Additional Information). This could span a two year period of time (as it did at GE-Hitachi, Areva and others). RAIs are questions the US NRC has about the application, and NuScale has to answer those questions to the satisfaction of the Regulator. These could easily number into the thousands if not tens of thousands. Then once the US NRC accepts the answers to all the RAIs (after two years), the process of writing a Safety Evaluation Report commences. That could take the US NRC up to another two years if experience at other NSSS (Nuclear Steam Supply System) organizations is any indicator. So basically it could be four years from now before NuScale gets the official word from the Federal government that the design is "safe to build." And years have already been spent writing this application (as you can see from the new announcement) with concomitant Regulatory scrutiny. This reminds me of Dr. Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisers in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Increasing this bureaucratic constriction has ever been the aim of anti-nuclear power activism which operates under the guise of the precautionary principle:
If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public, or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus (that the action or policy is not harmful), the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action that may or may not be a risk.
Because of the misapplication of this principle - don't do anything unless you can prove it's 100% safe - nuclear power plants are being shut down within certain areas - invariably controlled by Democrats - of the United States. Edward McGaffigan, a former US NRC Commissioner who sadly died of cancer in 2007, dealt with this in the following statement:
The commission’s mandate, Mr. McGaffigan emphasized, is to “provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection, not absolute assurance of perfect protection.”
“When they change the law to require absolute assurance of perfect protection,” he said, “there won’t be a lot of nuclear reactors in this country. Also, there won’t be a lot of cars or McDonald’s.”
Yet perfect safety has ever been the rallying cry of all the anti-nuclear activists. On the left coast, because of fears of recurrence of steam generator tube leaks, the San Onfore Nuclear Generating Station is permanently shut down, and for different reasons in a few years the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plants will be shutdown, fulfilling Governor Jerry Brown's desire for the denuclearization of California.. And in the liberal progressive northeast Governor Andy Cuomo is shutting down the Indian Point Energy Center in a few years, and already Vermont Yankee has been felled to Senator Bernie Sanders' socialists in the State of Vermont. And the Pilgrim Nuclear Generating Station has long been in the eye of Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts for chopping, being now scheduled for permanent shutdown in a few years also.
Meanwhile in the Republican southeast where free enterprise is encouraged two Westinghouse AP-1000 units are being built at VC Summer and two more at Vogtle. And Watts Bar Unit 2 is the first large nuclear power plant to have been put into operation in decades.
The irony in all this is astounding. Republican conservatives are skeptical of anthropogenic global warming from carbon emissions off fossil fuel power plants (for good reason - consensus isn't science), yet they support nuclear energy, the only means of replacing base load fossil energy on a 24 / 7 / 365 basis. But Democrats who believe in anthropogenic global warming with a passion that only the religious possess have shut down nuclear power plants right and left (and that is par for the course on the part of pagan worshipers of the goddess Gaia). While they install so called green energy like wind turbines and solar cells, these have capacity factors of less than 30%, which means that spinning fossil fuel reserve is required 70% of the time when there is no wind, no sun. And that fossil fuel emits the carbon pollution that Democrats say they hate. Fathom the hypocrisy.
So unless NuScale is planning to build in the Republican southeast, its prospects for success (especially in liberal Oregon where it is based) is poor indeed. If a 2000 MWe facility like IPEC can't pass economic muster, then how shall a 600 MWe facility comprised of twelve 50 MWe SMRs pass muster? Now that said, UAMPS (Utah Area Municipal Utilities) does have a plan to use the NuScale design, but that organization is a conglomeration of many different small municipal utilities with no nuclear experience. However, embedded within the UAMPS web site is its Carbon Free Power Project featuring the NuScale design. Good luck is sincerely wished to them.
Now in all this I fully acknowledge that both sides of the political aisle in Oregon and Washington State have been positive regarding NuScale's endeavor. But to those on the left of the political spectrum - whether senator or representative, whether state level or federal - when will you deal with politicians like Cuomo and Markey and Brown and others in your own political party who are virulently anti-nuclear? Failure to persuade them to support nuclear or, failing that, to eject them from your political party and from political office endangers our Republic in the long run because continuing to pollute the air with fossil fuel excretions will have unintended and unpredictable consequences. I write that as a global warming skeptic, yet I am not so foolish as to posit that NO results will occur from dumping billions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. Solar and wind and other so called green energy schemes cannot and will not ever work. If solar were so great, then why don't we still bake bricks in the sun as the ancient Sumerians did? If wind were so great, then why don't we still use sailing ships to cross the ocean as the ancient Vikings did? It's a joke: green energy, black death. If we want real non-polluting energy, then we will go nuclear full tilt, and the first step is an SMR like NuScale's design - passively walk-away safe. This should NOT be a partisan issue, so prove that it isn't and do something about the likes of Cuomo and Markey and Brown et alias.
In conclusion, below are some great videos from NuScale explaining its design in simple, easy to understand terms. This design can and will work. But somehow regulatory constriction and anti-nuclear obstruction must be eliminated. We are NOT a Democracy. We are a Republic where rule of law is sacrosanct. The ignorant have no right to obstruct.
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