The design comes from NuScale, a company birthed from research at Oregon State University that has received some substantial Department of Energy funding. It’s a 76-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide steel cylinder (23 meters by 5 meters) capable of producing 50 megawatts of electricity. (The company also has a 60-megawatt iteration teed up.) They envision a plant employing up to 12 of these reactors in a large pool like those used in current nuclear plants.
The basic design is conventional, using uranium fuel rods to heat water in an internal, pressurized loop. That water hands off its high temperature to an external steam loop through a heat exchange coil. Inside the plant, the resulting steam would run to a generating turbine, cool off, and circulate back to the reactors.
In the case of a problem, the reactor is similarly designed to manage its heat automatically. The control rods—which can encase the fuel rods, blocking neutrons and halting the fission chain reaction—are actively held in place above the fuel rods by a motor. In the event of a power outage or kill switch, it will drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity. Valves inside also allow the pressurized water loop to vent into the vacuum within the reactor's thermos-like double-wall design, dumping heat through the steel exterior, which is submerged in the cooling pool. One advantage of the small modular design is that each unit holds a smaller amount of radioactive fuel, and so it has a smaller amount of heat to get rid of in a situation like this.
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The basic design is conventional, using uranium fuel rods to heat water in an internal, pressurized loop. That water hands off its high temperature to an external steam loop through a heat exchange coil. Inside the plant, the resulting steam would run to a generating turbine, cool off, and circulate back to the reactors.
In the case of a problem, the reactor is similarly designed to manage its heat automatically. The control rods—which can encase the fuel rods, blocking neutrons and halting the fission chain reaction—are actively held in place above the fuel rods by a motor. In the event of a power outage or kill switch, it will drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity. Valves inside also allow the pressurized water loop to vent into the vacuum within the reactor's thermos-like double-wall design, dumping heat through the steel exterior, which is submerged in the cooling pool. One advantage of the small modular design is that each unit holds a smaller amount of radioactive fuel, and so it has a smaller amount of heat to get rid of in a situation like this.
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