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    The Nuke Next Door
The United States has largely phased out it's coal power plants, replacing them with hundreds of small, cleaner, natural gas turbine power plants located nearer to their customers to increase electricity transmission reliability.

Now, the time has come to upgrade our CO2-emitting natural gas turbine power plants with more powerful, zero-CO2, SMALL MODULAR NUCLEAR REACTORS (SMRs).

The So-Simple NuScale Modular Nuclear Reactor Power Plant is a good design to install adjacent to our hundreds of CO2-emitting coal and/or natural gas combustion turbine units on their sites.
With a full complement of 12 reactor modules, it will produce 924 megaWatts of electricity, almost twice the power of the coal and natural gas turbine power plants it is intended to replace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1tK73l9Nbo 

  Easy reference for getting up to speed on modern nuclear power plants:   https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/advanced-nuclear-reactor-technology-primer     (pdf)    

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The World Now Has A Melt-Down-Proof Nuclear Fuel Rod

  https://www.ltbridge.com/lightbridge-fuel 

See Also:   https://www.deepisolation.com/

Lightbridge claims much better safety. refueling intervals, and power output on existing water-cooled reactors than obtainable from the traditional 77 year-old fuel rod design.

Lightbridge Sets Priorities for SMR Fuel Development

Lightbridge Corporation (NASDAQ:LBTR) has decided to prioritize developing fuel for future small modular reactors rather than fuel for large reactor designs, President and CEO Seth Grae said this

 week in a business update ahead of a webcast and conference call to discuss the company’s financial results.

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Recycling Natural Gas Turbine Sites Into Modular Nuclear Power Plant Sites

             
It's best to build new nuclear adjacent while the old plant is still in service. Undefined future loads such as night time electric car battery recharging and extreme night air conditioning loads
might throw a monkey wrench into plans for scrapping out CO2-producing natural gas electricity generating facilities. Turbine facilities are excellent quick-start stand-by power plants.

Also: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinas-HTR-PM-reactor-achieves-first-criticality  A "Nuke Next Door" reactor hot enough to directly replace the coal section of a power plant.

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The Relative Amounts Of Energy Sources Available And How They Are Being Used

                          
Uranium energy is cheaper than any fossil energy.

 

Here, corn is used as feedstock for fermenting ethanol to increase the octane of unleaded gasoline.
Massive amounts of biofuels massively drive up the cost of human fuels such as corn - as shown in this example.
It's morally wrong to for humans to have to compete with machines for energy.

 

Please look again at how much uranium mankind has available.  There is so much available there is absolutely no reason to recycle spent nuclear fuel waste. 
It should be buried irretrievably.

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Nuclear Proliferation

The necessity for uranium enrichment for Light Water Reactors and the presence of plutonium in the spent fuel are the primary proliferation concerns.

There are differing national policies for the use or storage of fissile plutonium in the spent fuel, with some nations electing to recycle plutonium for use in new fuels and others electing to leave it intact withinthe spent fuel (IAEA, 2008a). The presence of plutonium and minor actinides in the spent fuel leads to greater waste-disposal challenges as well. Heavy isotopes such as plutonium and minor actinides have very long half-lives, as high as tens to hundreds of thousands of years (NRC, 1996), which require final waste-disposal strategies to address safety of waste disposal on such great timescales. Alternative strategies to isolate and dispose of fission products and their components apart from actinides could have significant beneficial impact on waste disposal requirements (Wigeland et al., 2006). Others have argued that separation and transmutation of actinides would have little or no practical benefit for waste disposal (NRC, 1996; Bunn et al., 2003).

Alternative nuclear fuel cycles, beyond the once-through uranium cycle, and related reactor technologies are under investigation. Partial recycling of used fuels, such as the use of mixed-oxide (MOX) fuels where U-235 in enriched uranium fuel is replaced with recycled or excess plutonium, is utilized in some nations to improve uranium resource utilization and waste-minimization efforts (OECD and NEA, 2007; World Nuclear Association, 2013).

The thorium fuel cycle is an alternative to the uranium fuel cycle, and the abundance of thorium resources motivates its potential use (see Section 7.4.3). Unlike natural uranium, however, thorium does not contain any fissile isotopes. An external source of fissile material is necessary to initiate the thorium fuel cycle, and breeding of fissile U-233 from fertile Th-232 is necessary to sustain the fuel cycle (IAEA, 2005b).

Ultimately, full recycling options based on either uranium or thorium fuel cycles that are combined with advanced reactor designs — including fast and thermal neutron spectrum reactors — where only fission products are relegated as waste can significantly extend nuclear resources and reduce high-level wastes (GIF, 2002, 2009; IAEA, 2005b). Current drawbacks include higher economic costs, as well as increased complexities and the associated risks of advanced fuel cycles and reactor technologies. Potential access to fissile materials from widespread application of reprocessing technologies further raises proliferation concerns. The advantages and disadvantages of alternative reprocessing technologies are under investigation. - from Energy Systems Chapter 7 - IPCC 5 - IPCC Working Group III - 2014.

 

Please visit:  https://www.deepisolation.com/ 

Linked below is an article that sounds too good to be true but was written 20 years before the Republicans legalized lying.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/10/the-sub-seabed-solution/308434/ 

Sub-Seabed Nuclear Waste Disposal in Stable Clay Formations.pdf 

Bury It In A Subduction Zone And You'll Never Get It Back

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 The Best Way To Get A "Running Start" To 'Repairing The Air' Is To Build On An Existing Coal Power Plant Site
We are going to need a small nuclear power plant on almost every shut-down coal or gas power plant site everywhere in the world. 
 

TVA CEO: Utility Will Invest in SMRs

tva-logo

According to wire service reports, TVA President and CEO Jeff Lyash said last week during an online energy conference hosted by the Atlantic Council that to reach the 100% reduction goal, the utility will need technological advances in energy storage, carbon capture and small modular nuclear reactors. (YouTube video) Lyash said TVA is on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the year 2035.

Coal Plants Converted to SMRs?

Lyash said that the hundreds of shuttered US coal power plants could be repurposed as small nuclear reactor sites citing easy access to water resources and existing power grid connections. “I see those sites as very viable small modular reactor (SMR) sites.”

Lyash does not see coal as part of the utility’s future, saying TVA will continue to phase it out over the next 15 years because its coal plants are reaching the end of their lives.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who also attended the virtual meeting, agreed, “You could come online much quicker and we could accomplish this at a much faster rate than anything else we could do.”

“Some of our better manufacturing sites are the coal-fired power plants,” said Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia. “You could come online much quicker and we could accomplish this at a much faster rate than anything else we could do,” he said about the SMR potential.  - - -

Posted on May 1, 2021 by djysrv - https://neutronbytes.com/ 

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The Cost Of Various Types Of Reactors and Uranium
Actually, nuclear power is safer, environmentally cleaner, and cheaper than all other forms of commercial energy.

                                            

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The Safety Perimeters of Small Modular Reactors are tiny compared with a conventional huge reactor

                

Better to grab a Cat than a Tiger by the tail.

NuScale & UAMPS  (Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems) Take Next Steps to License, Manufacture, and Build the First of 12 SMRs

NuScale Power has gotten the go ahead to prepare a Combined License Application (COLA) to be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The UAMPS COLA is expected to be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) by the second quarter of 2023.

NRC review of the COLA is expected to be completed by the second half of 2025, with reactor construction of the project beginning shortly thereafter. NuScale expects to have the first of 8 units in revenue service before the end of the decade. Eventually, plans are for the site to have 12 SMRs. The power rating of the site is a work in progress as NuScale started with an estimate of 50 MWE, but has since increased its design objective to 60 MWe and indicated it has plans for 77 MWe.

The NuScale reference power plant can house up to 12 NuScale Power Modules for a total facility output of 924 megawatts of electricity (MWe). NuScale also offers smaller power plant solutions in 4-module and 6-module sizes with outputs of 308 MWe (gross) and 462 MWe (gross), respectively. The multi-module NuScale plant design is scalable, allowing customers to incrementally increase facility output to match demand.

NuScale Power announced this week together with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) that it has executed agreements to facilitate the development of the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP), which will deploy NuScale Power Modules at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

Fluor Corporation and NuScale (as a subcontractor to Fluor) are to develop higher maturity cost estimates and initial project planning work for the licensing, manufacturing and construction of the CFPP.

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NuScale's Control Room Simulator

Control stations for 12 NuScale Reactor Units. -  Simple NuScale Reactor units need relatively fewer controls.
The NuScale reactor actually shares a critical thermodynamic feature [convection water cooling] with the Ford Model T engine (October 1, 1908, to May 26, 1927).

 

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How Soon?

Technology Readiness Levels for these new thermal technologies. 
The NuScale, Lightbridge, and Carbon Engineering products have been approved by the U.S. Government.
At this time, CarbFix is non-mandatory.
The Class VI CO2 Disposal Well is a U.S. Government Design for an environmentally approvable disposal license.
 

These 'Cooling the Planet' technologies are of little or no value until Rolling Back Climate Change Part 1: DECARBONIZATION (i.e., Net-Zero) has been achieved.

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About Fossil Fuels: Hydrogen-to-Carbon Ratios

Different fossil fuels make different amounts of CO2 for the same amount of heat (BTUs)

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Cost and Capacity Factors are the Keys to Enabling Decarbonization Of Energy
 ENERGY HAS TO BE DISPATCHABLE and NON-INTERMITTENT

             

Cost and Capacity Factors are the Keys to Converting to Hydrogen-driven Decarbonization
 

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