Federal regulators have given the go-ahead to energy researchers at Abilene Christian University to build a nuclear reactor on campus.
The reactor will be relatively small and will rely on molten salt for cooling. It’s the first of its kind to get approval in more than 40 years.
Rusty Towell, a professor of engineering and physics and director of the Nuclear Energy
Experimental Testing lab at Abilene Christian, spoke to Texas Standard about the project. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us a little bit more about this design that you’ll be researching with this reactor. Maybe you can begin by explaining to us how big is this?
Rusty Towell: As you mentioned, it’s a small reactor, so it’ll produce one megawatt thermal energy. But realistically, the core is about the size of a refrigerator.
It’s one of these what refer to as “small modular reactors.” So it can be built in a factory, in a high quality environment, and shipped to location deployed. And so it’s a new paradigm for nuclear power in this country.
Whenever people talk about nuclear power, images of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl come racing back into thought. How does this differ, in terms of its design, in a way that the layman would understand?
Yeah. So the design has two real technical changes. Instead of using water as the coolant, we use molten salt. That’s just salt in a liquid phase.
And so it’s a fluid that does a great job of transferring heat, but it never flashes to steam. It never has high pressure. So you never have that energy release that you saw in some of these other accidents. And so it just makes the reactor inherently safe so that that prevents us from having the accidents that you mentioned that come to mind when people think of nuclear power.
And the second thing is, we’re liquid fuel. So instead of having solid fuel rods that can melt down, we actually dissolve the fuel in the salt, sort of like dissolving sugar in your coffee. And that allows us, if we want to shut down the reactor, we can actually drain the fuel from the core.
So we’re just depending upon gravity doing its job for us to shut down the reactor in any sort of a case where we want to do that.
I see. Actually, now it’s my understanding that nuclear power plants in Texas contribute about 10% of the state’s energy mix, and that’s behind natural gas, wind and coal. How are you going to scale this up if you’re using molten salt, which, as I understand it, has been one of the key problems in trying to get these smaller nuclear reactors to to give you more power?
Yeah. So it’s not a question of getting more power out of a single reactor. What the challenge is, is how can we deploy reactors in a timely and cost efficient manner?
So Georgia brought on a couple of new nuclear reactors, the traditional water-cooled pressurized water reactors. And, you know, they took twice as long to build and was twice the budget as predicted. And so that really hurts the industry.
So we’re talking about can we build small modular reactors with a safe, inherently safe technology so we can rapidly deploy these around the state, around the nation and really around the world because it can produce clean, safe energy that’s affordable. Then you’re really going to not just help our grid be stable, but you’re going to bless the lives of people around the world that are living in energy poverty.
Well, what’s the process like to get approval for this project? I mentioned this is the first of its kind to get approval in more than 40 years.
Yeah. And in fact, this is the first time the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ever licensed a liquid fuel port for a reactor. And so this really is the first of a kind.
And so, you know, the process wasn’t simple. We started down this road with pre-application engagement with the nuclear regulatory six years ago. Four years ago, we submitted a regulatory engagement plan and said this is what we’re going to do. Two years ago, we submitted our application and last week we got that application approved.
So we now have permission to build this reactor, the first ever they’ve issued. So we’re pretty excited about that.
Have you faced any opposition from local folks who maybe get nervous at hearing the mention of a nuclear reactor nearby?
No, we really haven’t. And I credit that to the university doing a great job of communicating with our neighbors and with the city and saying “this is what we’re thinking about doing” and giving people a chance to ask questions.
We’ve had numerous town halls and information sessions. And then, as we built our new facility and we’ve opened it a year ago, we’ve had a whole bunch of tours and people coming through.
So people have a chance to see what we’re doing, learn about what we’re doing, and when they hear how we’re going to safely produce electricity that’s going to bless the world or we’re going to produce medical isotopes that doctors can use to treat cancer and we’re going to provide a heat source that can purify water… You know, those are needs that everyone’s aware of. And so they’re actually pretty excited about the prospect of Abilene being a center for this.
Professor, historically, nuclear waste has been one of the big downsides of nuclear energy. What do you do with that?
That’s a great question, and that’s a question that a lot of people have.
What we do is when we transition from solid fuel rods to a liquid fuel form, we’re actually able to minimize the waste we produce. Most of what goes in the waste stream today is fuel that just isn’t used because of those solid fuel rods. We only burn about 5% of the energy content and we throw away 95% of that.
And so we eliminate that. With having liquid fuel form, we burn 100% of the fuel. And so none of that goes into the waste stream. And so we eliminate the majority component to the waste stream. And it’s not just the majority by master weight, but also in terms of how long you need to store it for it to be safe to be around. And so we have much, much smaller quantity that you need to store for a much shorter time.
So really, I would say we are the cleanest form of energy you can imagine.
What is the timetable for this?
Yeah, great question. We spent two years getting a construction permit. The next step in the process is we actually have to get an operating license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So we’ve got permission to build it, but we don’t have permission to actually turn it on yet. So we have to submit that.
We assume that’s going to take two years for them to approve it. That’s about how long we expect it’ll take for us to build this. And so we’re a couple of years away from actually having a reactor on site and having permission to turn it on.
