Several years ago, GE partnered with Hitachi to develop new nuclear power technologies. The first BWRX-300 small sized reactor is making progress toward starting construction in Ontario, and perhaps in Tennessee in a few years.
Friday, 4 April 2025
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Here in the US, the Tennessee Valley Authority is planning to build a BWRX-300 at its Clinch River site, near Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
From the Power link… In March 2023, GEH, TVA, Ontario Power Generation (OPG), and Synthos Green Energy (SGE) agreed to team up to advance the global deployment of the BWRX-300 SMR. Through a technical collaboration agreement that was announced in Washington, D.C., TVA, OPG, and SGE agreed to invest in the development of the BWRX-300 standard design and detailed design for key components, including the reactor pressure vessel and internals. GEH, meanwhile, said it was committed to standard design development and anticipated a total investment of about $400 million associated with the development.
Each contributor said it would fund a portion of GEH’s overall cost and collectively would form a “Design Center Working Group” with the purpose of ensuring the standard design would be deployable in multiple jurisdictions. The long-term goal is for the BWRX-300 design to be licensed and deployed in Canada, the U.S., Poland, and beyond.
And… In the meantime, there are two primary items on TVA’s to-do list. “Right now, the two biggest things that we have on our list are completing the standard design work, and then the construction permit application,” Boerschig said, noting the standard design is “somewhere north of 75% complete” and that TVA’s plan is to submit the construction permit application “sometime around mid-year of this year.”
Premier Doug Ford’s government has given Ontario Power Generation the green light to start construction on Canada’s first small modular reactor, a new nuclear energy technology to be built next door to the Darlington power plant.
The small modular reactor (SMR) would provide 300 megawatts of power, enough electricity to supply about 300,000 homes, according to briefing documents from Ontario’s Ministry of Energy and Mines.
It would be the first of four such reactors that OPG aims to build on the site, at a total project cost of $20.9 billion, in an effort to meet what’s forecast to be a steep rise in demand for electricity in the province.
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This project is unique in a number of ways. All of Canada’s existing CANDU nuclear plants use heavy water for moderation. This allows them to use unenriched uranium for fuel. However, these new GEH BWRX-300 reactors will use regular light water for moderation and cooling. This means they need uranium enriched in the U-235 isotope to around 5%. Canada doesn’t have any domestic uranium enrichment capability, and will not be able to manufacture the fuel in Canada. They will need to purchase it elsewhere, I’m guessing from GE’s nuclear fuel manufacturing facility in North Carolina.
This nuclear deal will help to shift the balance of trade with Canada. A US (and part Japanese) company will now sell more stuff to Canada. This should make the executive branch of our government happier.
BTW, the Darlington site is located on the north shore of Lake Ontario, east of Toronto, so it is physically close the US.
I don’t know if AI data centers come in standard sizes. There might be a minimum number of computers that need to be networked together to create an AI “intelligence”. This is not my area of expertise.
Amazon Web Services recently purchased a data center located adjacent to the existing Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The following article says AWS plans to expand the data center in 120 MW increments over several years, with a final capacity of 960 MW.
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But I don’t know if AWS will use this data center for AI computing, or other cloud-based computing and storage needs.
I see no indication that this new nuclear project in Canada is being built for AI computing. I think the utility just sees the need for future base-load capacity, and they want to add that base-load with carbon-free generation. The OPG website indicates they need the power because of the increasing electrification trend in the transportation sector, among other reasons. In other words, the projected increases in the numbers of EVs will drive up demand.
Data centers, EV charging, and the desire to have reliable carbon-free power generation are all good reasons to go nuclear. Here in the US, I am also beginning to see an over-reliance on natural gas to provide reliable, constant power. Diversification of an energy portfolio is as important as diversification of a person’s investment portfolio. Over-reliance on just one energy source could create unforeseen problems down the road.
On the subject of data centers and their power needs, the following could be an important development.
Nuclear developer Elementl Power said Wednesday it’s signed an agreement with Google to develop three sites for advanced reactors. It’s the latest example of tech giants teaming up with the nuclear industry in an effort to meet the vast energy needs of data centers.
Google will commit early-stage development capital to the three projects, although the exact terms of the deal remain private. Each site will generate at least 600 megawatts of power capacity, and Google will have the option to buy the power once the sites are up and running. The proposed locations remain private, but Elementl said Google’s funding will be used for things like site permitting, securing interconnection rights to the transmission system, contract negotiations and other early-stage matters.
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Three different projects, at 600 MW each, could mean 1800 MW of new nuclear capacity. This is currently just early-stage planning, and they will need to go through the license application and approval process, but right now this looks encouraging. Google’s computers need to operate 24 hours a day.
It was a tongue in cheek question. The number of households and their power usage are relatively stable while power hungry AI is exploding. While households are the “human interest” part of the journalistic story the energy consumption facts make using households numbers as a guide quite misleading.
I’m all in favor of renewable energy. ICE vehicles literally stink, are noisy, and pollute but the transition to renewable energy cannot be driven by religious type mandate. We need a workable transition plan and reasonable transition programs to avoid disruptions like Germany and the Iberian Peninsula are suffering. These include nuclear power, storage, and a revision of grid frequency and its function as the controlling metric.
The useful coincidence of AC and gigantic, high momentum rotating devices does not exist with wind and solar. This could be the time to transition the grid from high voltage AC to high voltage DC, preferably underground. This is the time for high capacity energy storage.
Sure it can. We changed from lead paint to non-lead paint by regulation. We recycle 97% of old car batteries thanks to regulations which require stores to take them back and institute ha “core charge” is they’re sold without a trade in. It was regulation which made that happen.
We severely diminished tobacco use thanks to “religious type mandate”, starting with warnings on packages, laws restricting smoking in restaurants and airplanes, and more. Cities have cleaned themselves up by adopting pooper-scooper laws, and we changed social convention dramatically with the expansion of civil rights laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of race or religion, and to a lesser extent, sex.
We all use seat belts now, that’s a change that didn’t just fall out of the sky, nor was it voluntarily adopted because manufacturers thought they looked pretty in their vehicles.
We do all sorts of things to change human behavior for the better, sometimes coercively. Ridding the planet of unnecessary* carbon emissions, without too much inconvenience, is well within our grasp.
(*I make exception for those things which we cannot technologically do without petrochemicals, such as airplane travel or certain industrial processes. In a similar way we didn’t outlaw tobacco, we just made it less desirable to impose the dirty habit on unwilling others.)
I believe we are there with the high-power DC transmission line. They are starting one in Kansas that is going back to Indiana. It is not underground though.
“Using high-voltage direct current technology, the line will add 5,000 megawatts of energy delivery capacity, which is expected to provide $52 billion in energy cost savings to Americans over 15 years.”
TVA recently submitted a construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
It will take a while for the NRC to review and approve the application. The BWRX-300 standard design is not yet licensed for the US, and the gears of bureaucracy turn slowly at the NRC.