Tennessee Valley Authority Looks To Build Six Small, Modular Nuclear Reactors

This is just stupid. Nuclear power is dead as fried chicken. Who would want nuclear powerplant in their town. That won't help property values. In fact it will drive them down. Stupid. Stick to solar. That energy will never runout.

People are finally using Thorium? About damn time.

@boka - Hahahahahaha

Yea, thorium reactors, its way past time for them to see commercial production and use.

@boka, solar will run out in time, (like 5 billion years) but it isn't efficient enough yet to justify the 2-5 billion dollars in construction that for out put that is less than the same for nuclear. Soon but not yet.

@caradoc01 Not to forget that a solar installation that can generate same amount of electricity as a nuclear power plant would have to cover about half of the continent.

@boka

Modern nuclear plants are much safer than older designs like the one at Fukushima. Solar power still costs triple or more than what nuclear does per kwh. Until it becomes cost competitive, nuclear is still the best solution for providing continuous, safe, cheap, reliable and abundant power.

I'm a fan of Thorium so I hope the entire world switches to it for it's incredible benefits, including negating the possibility of a meltdown like Chernobyl or Fukushima. The nuclear industry should also be supported because they'll develop power-plants that'll be used on star-ships that'll take us to other planets in the future.

I think the fears over nuclear are far over-blown. Of course they should be built far away from population centers in case the worst happens, but the odds are minute and with Thorium becoming more mainstream, I believe we'll finally have kind of nuclear power industry we've always dreamed about. Of course one step better would be fusion plants, but that's still a long way off.

"Nucelar"?
Really, Popsci? Please, get an editor. This is getting ridiculous.

Its about bloody time some body starts building more power plants in this country. We need to mass produce these small reactors. Yes the waste is still an issue, but there are some new technologies being developed to deal with that. University of Texas is working on a hybrid fusion-fission reactor that blast nuclear waste with neutrons from the fusion reaction which breaks down the radioactive atoms and produces power to boot.

@boka, I don't know where you live, but around here we run out of solar power about 8:00-ish every day, and do not get any more until around 6:00. Nuclear is on demand 24-7.

I'm not sure why PS mentioned thorium. I'm fairly certain that these are uranium reactors and definitely are MSR or LFTR. I'd be happy to be wrong so if someone could provide link stating that these will be thorium, I'd like to read it.

solar (both PV and heat), geo thermal. wind, water and fusion when it’s ready are the only sane ways to get power.

Fission may be cheep but it will never be as safe or clear as those I said before. There is more to life then money and some of that is making sure to leave the world a better place form those that came after as. we simply can't do that using fission power planets that makes waste that hurts the world WHEN they leak because as we found out they always will.

if you're willing to spend more money to upgrade your car computer or phone to be even slightly better. isn't it worth a little more money upgrade our planet and make it a better place if not for us then our children and there children?

just my view

MSR stands for Molten Salt Reactor. The article does not mention any such thing. These are standard Uranium powered LWR (Light Water Reactors). The proof is in the statement "B&W’s design hews very close to that of previously approved and larger pressurized water reactors,"

There is no basis for the following statement "but dispenses with some of those larger plants’ vulnerabilities." There is no particular reason to believe smaller equates to safer. In fact all the safety measures (and expense) has to remain the same, so as a percentage of cost, the safety requirements will be higher.

Don't confuse Thorium with reactor design. Some "Thorium" designs are a mixture of uranium and thorium designed to lower the cost of the fuel, but these designs are not safer and still produce radio-active waste that lasts up to 10,000 years. Only the LFTR (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor) runs without uranium and completely burns its fuel so there is no long term radio-active waste. See flibe-energy.com.

The LFTR is inherently safe and would be significantly lower cost. It is a shame that only China sees fit to pursue this design.

put one in my back yard and turn me green and power me up baby!!!!

well we have a nuke plant a few miles from here. never had any issues. im all for building several more. new reactors would be much safer than the old outdated ones. when solar gets economical and efficient ill be relieved, but til then, its nuclear all the way

@boka "This is just stupid. Nuclear power is dead as fried chicken. Who would want nuclear powerplant in their town. That won't help property values. In fact it will drive them down. Stupid. Stick to solar. That energy will never runout."

I have to say you have truly shown you complete ignorance here.
people as dumb and closed minded as you were the ones who built Chernobyl and managed Fukushisma. Those two accidents happened becuase of stupidity. HUMAN stupidity.

I live in Japan. I have been here front and center for the whole damn thing. I have 13 reactors in my prefecture alone! I am 400km away from Fukushima and radation has been detected that far away to the south. Am I happy about it? hell no. but I blame a once in 10,000 year earthquake and I blame TEPCO.

if you knew ANYTHING about nuclear power plants you would know how safe they are. the new ones will be so safe it isnt even funny. solar power is still extremely expensive. if you covered your entire house with solar panels (which would cost you 10 of thousands of dollars, you still would not have enough energy).

Germany is shutting down their nuke plants and guess what they are doing burning MORE coal!!! and getting the rest from Frances nuke plants. HYPOCRITES. they are only bowing to the public ignorant fears of radiation.

Radiation has killed a few hundred people. caused a few thousand birth defects.

COAL has killed MILLIONS. black lung anyone? lung cancer? not to mention the pollution you get after you burn it.

oil? yeah only a millions have died in the name of oil.

LGP isnt much better. the environment has to be torn to $$$$ just to get it.

I bet most of you have no idea how many nuclear reactors there are in the world. chances are live close to one.
I did in the USA and now in Japan.

Here is a little analogy for you all. Cigarettes kill more Iraqis than anything else. War or terrisism. but half the homes have no power.
lets say you built a nuke plant big enough to give EVERYONE power. its blows ups. it would only kill about 1% of the same number of people who smoke.
there are FAR more dangerous things out there than a nuclear power, that are not beneficial at all. that was my point.

For a fact sheet "produced by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Physicians for Social
Responsibility"

Google the following words.

Small Modular Reactors No Solution for the Cost, Safety, and waste Problems of Nuclear Power

I find the arguments here entertainingly silly. Lets look at the whole picture.

Does Nuclear Power have danger, Sure it does.

What form of power kills more people every year relative to the power it produces on the plant? Hint it is not Nuclear!

For some reason deaths by Nuclear power count 10x as deaths from other sources.

Seven people died on the space shuttle and the nation could not recover for a year but if seven died in a car accident nobody would notice.

Solar is a good alternative as it produces power best at peak power levels. But think about it. Do we shut down the economy when the sun is covered by clouds? Or stop things from working at night? You need more than Solar you can't run the worlds power needs from clean safe non polluting sources currently. Fossil fuels are causing global warming (Coal, Oil, Natural Gas). Wind can't supply but 2% at best of the nations power needs. Dams are maxed out. If you believe global warming exists as I do there is no choice but Nuclear. So the smart thing is to use safe Nuclear designs and get away from those 50 year old designs of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and those plants used in Japan. You have to embrace a design that assumes you will loose power to your backup pumps or loose your backup pumps and still need to be able to shut down the nuclear reactor.

The guy who invented the US design light water reactor (basically same as boiling water reactor design) suggested his LFTR reactor (thorium) was better. Well it was a better design. But they powers at the time wanted to make crazy money off making fuel assemblies so they went with a more profitable less safe more polluting design. Simple solution dump Uranium move to Thorium LFTR reactors and get rid of the bulk of the long term nuclear waste problems and infinitely cheaper fuel. Sensible designs are many smaller LFTR reactors using Thorium not Uranium or Plutionium/MOX fuel.

There are good designs out there we simply don't use them.

Also smaller reactors "are" safer as they have less total reactivity.

There are pure thorium designs and thorium mix designs (mox).

The Russians are using MOX with thorium to double the life of the Uranium/Plutonium fuel burn. They produce less waste as they last twice as long producing half the waste as fuel loads without thorium.

Respect the Russians they have a good understanding of Physics. Much of the better ideas are coming from them not the US any more. I particularly like their idea of putting reactors on barges ad parking them off a city. If the plant has a problem you sink it in the ocean and the contamination/radiation doesn't get all over the place like Chernobyl or the Japanese plants (Three mile island released comparatively little radiation as the secondary containment held. If it did not it would be a very different story).

If you loose primary and secondary containment in this design, you sink the ship and raise it later. Roughly a dozen nuke powered submarines have gone down over the years (two from the US) where is the damage from those reactors? Near zero because the water absorbs the radiation and the contamination keeping out of the air and off the land.

The problem is not Nuclear Power. The problem is unsafe designs used in Nuclear Power. Nuclear Power is historically the safest 24/7 power source available on the planet. Look at the actual statistics not the paranoid hype where your children turn into super hero's because they wandered into the plant.

One more rant while I am at it targeting the know nothing who quotes statistics from the Green party who has no clue about anything Nuclear.

Radioactive waste lasts 10,000 years. Yes it does. But so does Nuclear Fuel. If you go to a Uranium mine you extract Uranium Ore that produces radiation for 10,000 years. So what is the difference? Man did not create it, it exists in nature.

Simple truth is living on earth if man never created a nuclear reactor I am living between two massive nuclear reactors. One is called the Sun (a massive Fusion reactor) which allows everything useful to happen on the earth (warmth, plant growth, wind creation). The other is called the center of the earth where out of control fission reactions from Uranium in the core of our earth keep the center of the earth fluid and moltant. Powering Geo-Thermal power sources as well as Volcanoes. So truth is without man making Nuclear Power most of the power we have on the earth is Nuclear. Would you call the Sun an unsafe source of power???? Solar panels collect energy from Nuclear power.

Quit listening to the fear propaganda and understand the science already people.

I would just like to say i support this since yall have already gave the obvious agruments..... oh and Hurray for Thorium!!!!

Finally, I've found a place where there are more people with common sense than fear mongers. Go Team Thorium!

Nuclear is stupid. A few hundred years from now they will look back saying "I can't believe how stupid and irresponsible they were back then".

Yes, for the myopic view of the pro-nuclear group ... it is statistically good for the short term. Even if you had a guarantee nothing would happen (not possible), there are still thousands of tons of WASTE where some is so toxic IT CAN NOT BE MOVED - EVER! There are just too many dangers. They have to dispose of everything that goes near the radiation - every broom, piece of clothing, tools, ladders, etc - ALL of it is forever RADIATED and need to be buried in a mountain somewhere. Even the metal cases which transport it! It's madness... not even counting the stuff that can't be moved because they DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO MOVE IT SAFELY yet think they can go on merrily building new reactors... idiots...

I would much rather use coal and Natural Gas until FUSION gets up to speed. That is the smart thing to do, not screw around with this fission garbage ...

Personally as a nuclear engineering student I am glad to see that not everyone is scared of nuclear reactors. I want to have a civilian job when I get my degree.

LFTR (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor)is a wonderful idea.

Most people really don't look at reactors from how hard to find fuel for the reactors. The fuel stand point uranium and plutonium are rare, H3 for fusion extremely rare, Thorium is everywhere. The only reason everyone is not using Thorium from the beginning is that Thorium can not be weaponized. Not only can it not be weaponized it's radioactivity life span and radioactive waste is far less then uranium and plutonium.
Thorium reactors are also better because it requires a person in the lop to keep the reactor running. Uranium and plutonium reactors require people in the lop to stop the reactor.

@cruzinmy64 "Nuclear is stupid." have you EVER done ANY research or even read any of the comments posted. My guess is not, because you are thing only coming off as "stupid."

people who thinks that distributing smaller nuclear power plants would be safer than simply building a larger one, seemed to forgot adding 'terrorism' (foreign or local) into their equations.

you're practically giving them more targets to aim at.
but that's probably just paranoia talking..

also, people tend to scoff at sustainable energy concepts as merely for the 'tree hugging' community, but the keyword here is sustainability.

are the available thorium we have sustainable or will it eventually reach it's peak in viability same as oil, uranium, or natural gas?

and if you go completely nuclear, can you find a permanent way in containing, securing, or perhaps even recycling nuclear wastes while at the same time maintain lower costs as they advertised? (i kinda doubt that)

if not, then until we can find acceptable solutions to these concerns then we really shouldn't be too complacent and settle with any of these 'less than ideal' products, and keep striving to develop better ones.

i think most of the nuclear advocates are just trying to choose the easy option available to them rather than looking at this issue from a broader perspective.

and people should also start to consider that perhaps there is not just a singular solution to all of our energy needs.
and that multiple sources of energy should be considered to work in tandem with each other to be able to fulfill all of the necessary requirements for sustainability.

besides, the majority of people don't really care about the source of their electricity so long as it's sustainable, cheap, has a lower security risk, and it's wastes materials doesn't end up killing the planet their kids are gonna live in..

i'm guessing most people could at least agree with that.

Germany remains the only country who has foolishly turned its back on nuclear power, on the basis of an accident that could not possibly happen in Germany. Hey, they thought Hitler was a great guy too.
Not one single American soul has ever been harmed after
60 years of nuclear power generation in this country, yet we have morons claiming nuclear power ain't safe. Thinking like that - now that ain't safe. Fast breeder reactors can basically defuse all danger of nuclear waste and provide all the power this country will use for the next 1000 years, simply by using the nuclear "waste" now residing at nuclear reactors around this country. We would never have to mine another ounce of uranium. "Renewable" solar panels and windmills last about 20 years.
As for SMRs, they have advantages both in terms of easier
physical security, and financial, in terms of getting power produced without taking out a loan for 5 years before doing so. They also are completely flexible - units can be added
as energy demand rises. They are also, if you are crazy enough to be concerned in the first instance, safer than larger units. Installing solar arrays - now that's dangerous. Or ten story windmills that provide power when the feel like it, and require fossil fuel gas powered generators (running ALL the time) to back up their unreliable output. Wind is as dead as a doorknell. The coming generation seems not as brainwashed as the current one.