May-June 2018 NPJ

Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2018 NuclearPlantJournal.com 25 Nuclear Plant Journal Welcomes Technical Articles. Email: michelle@goinfo.com Telephone: (630) 364- 4780 6. Hitachi also has big expertise in modular construction. How are you applying that technology? There are companies who are developing that modular construction so that you can just have the nuclear steam supply system and bring their balance of plant system, and you’ve got the whole plant together. Is there any concept like that, or you are doing your own balance of plant system? Let me talk about both the construction as well as the turbine island and balance of plant. The way in which this plant will be constructed is going to be much different than current reactors. This plant is being designed to be a fully embedded plant, underground. What we are evaluating is digging about a 20 meter in diameter shaft, and construct the plant fully embedded inside, underneath the ground. By the way, the size of these holes is typical in other industries and construction projects. In terms of building a pump station, for example, or building a tunnel, you’d use the same kind of traditional blast, dig, and pour construction techniques. The idea here is that we would build modules in a factory. We would ship those modules to the construction site. We would then put together one floor of the reactor building, perform the necessary connections, then lower that floor into this silo-type hole. We would continue this process one floor at a time. By using this approach for construction, we see a significant amount of savings. Regarding the balance of plant and turbine island, since the size of this reactor is 300 MW electric, our steam turbine business inside GE has equipment that’s essentially off-the-shelf that’s used for combined-cycle steam systems. We can use the turbine and the generator typically used for those systems. This represents additional savings by using what we consider off-the-shelf equipment. 7. What is the time frame you are looking at? The first technical hurdle that we need to clear this year is proving out this LOCA elimination concept. That’s going to comprise the majority of the engineering work that we perform this year. That, coupled with the ESBWR design, we believe we can leverage about 80% of the design certification from the ESBWR with some scaling for this size reactor. Because we’ve got such a big head start leveraging the ESBWR design, we think once we get into the licensing phase, that can be accelerated. Overall, we believe once a customer is ready to move forward, we think the timeline is approximately 10 years to go through the licensing, detailed design and construction. 8. Idaho National Lab is building the first NuScale plant. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) has a request for a proposal out for companies who are interested in constructing a small modular reactor on their site in Canada. Has the construction site for the first plant been thought out? Not yet, but the Canadian market certainly is very interesting for SMRs, especially long-term as they begin to retire their coal plants. We believe BWRX-300 could be an ideal solution there, as well as other global markets. The UK, US, and Japan have expressed long-term interest in SMRs. 9. Is there any conversation with Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, where there is, dire need for electricity? I agree that the countries you listed will have a need for this type of technology in the future. Saudi Arabia is another one that has a lot of interest in SMRs, and we have been part of the trade missions that have taken place there. Saudi Arabia is an interesting market to us. At the end of the day, all of these countries that are pursuing new nuclear, we need to make sure that they ultimately have 123 Agreements in place with U.S. and that they have the right nuclear liability laws for us to be comfortable in those markets. 10. Is there any effort to expedite nuclear agreements with foreign countries? I think the first key is for the US to have leading technology in the global marketplace. When we have leading technology, then we’ve earned a seat at the table, when talking with these foreign countries regarding deploying nuclear in their countries. At that stage, we can help shape the policies such as 123 Agreements and ensure that they’ve got the right nuclear liability protections in place. Leading technology leads to strength in this area and allows the US to have a lead seat at the table to help shape those nuclear policies on a global scale. 11. What role is innovation playing in the development of this BWRX-300? First of all, what I would say is the process we’re using has been to engage customers in the innovation. This whole design concept was born out of getting inputs from customers on what’s really important to them. About a year we started asking customers what it would take to build new nuclear. We learned two important things: 1) We need to be cost competitive with gas, and 2) They didn’t want to invest more than $1 billion in a new plant. At that point, we knew that the technology had to be small and had to be dramatically simplified to reduce cost. This thinking led to the key innovation of eliminating a large break LOCA, and rethinking how we construct a plant. 12. Can you tell us about any customers that you are working with? We have been collaborating with a couple of utilities so far. We’re going to be in a position where we can announce, hopefully in the coming weeks, those partnerships. 13. Anything else you’d like to add? I believe that the long-term prospects for SMRs and advanced nuclear are bright. I think ultimately, the key to the future, as I mentioned, is really solving the cost equation. We are very enthusiastic and continuing to collaborate with industry on bringing this technology to reality. Contact: Jon Allen, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, telephone: (910) 819-2581, email: jonathan.allen1@ge.com .