These small modular reactors (SMRs), about a third the physical size of traditional ones, would be portable and built mostly in factories. They got a boost last week from the Department of Energy, which announced it would pay up to half the cost to design and license the first ones for the U.S. commercial market.
Citing nuclear energy as "low carbon," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the award is part of President Obama's push for a broad, "all-of-the-above" energy strategy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Chu said DOE will accept funding requests from other companies developing small modular reactors.
"You can put them together like Legos on a job site," Mowry says. "The industry likes building blocks of this size," he says, likening the heft of each to a tanker truck. He expects a two-reactor plant generating a total of
360 megawatts of power to cost $1.5 billion to build - about a tenth of the projected cost of a two-reactor, 2,000-megawatt plant the NRC approved earlier this year for Georgia.
Best Regards Tom.