John Stang reports that the citizens of Tri-Cities area in the state of Washington wait to learn whether the area could be home to a new nuclear enterprise. The designers of the first small modular reactors (SMRs) in the U.S. are expected to decide in about two years whether the state of Washington is a good place to build a plant for manufacturing reactor components to assemble elsewhere.
NuScale of Corvallis, Oregon, is looking at several states scattered across the nation as potential manufacturing sites. The prime manufacturing site will likely be a place near where utilities are ordering a significant number of small modular reactors, said Mike McGough, NuScale chief commercial officer.
The Tri-Cities area hopes it will attract a manufacturing plant. And the Tri-Cities hopes to attract at least one small modular reactor to a partly-built reactor site in southern Hanford. But a number of questions must be addressed before the nuclear-oriented Tri-Cities will know whether it will get either a small modular reactor or a manufacturing plant.
Recently, the state Legislature approved allocating $176,000 to have the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council study potential sites for individual small modular reactors in the state with southern Hanford next to the Columbia Generating Station being a likely front runner. That report is due in December.
Small modular reactors are prefab reactors whose parts are manufactured in one location, and then transported to the reactor site for final assembly. A modular segment would be a mini-reactor of 50 to 300 megawatts. Energy Northwest Columbia Generating Station, a nuclear plant, produces more than 1,190 megawatts of electricity, equal to about a tenth of the state energy needs. Small modular reactors are supposed to be designed so extra modules can be added as needed, with 12 modules being the theoretical maximum. They are similar to the small reactors that operate on U.S. Navy ships.
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