Katie Fehrenbacher reports that As the wind gusts across the rural plains of Idaho rise and fall, a new type of nuclear plant could react in kind, generating more and less power in tandem with the wind farm. That is the vision laid out in a new paper from nuclear startup NuScale Power using computer models for a planned nuclear farm built near the Horse Butte Wind Project in Idaho. The company, founded a decade ago, recently looked at how its modular nuclear reactors could follow clean energy, lowering and raising electricity output, if needed. The surge of wind and solar in grids around the country is creating more variability in generation. As a result, power companies are starting to look at how traditional baseload energy sources like coal and nuclear can be more flexible, and lower their energy generation to avoid wasting power or overloading the grid. In Germany, France, and Canada, some nuclear plants are already doing this, but it is more out of necessity than design. Because NuScale reactors are much smaller than traditional nuclear reactors, the design can enable a power company to switch off individual modules, enabling load following (adjusting power output) in a more efficient way.
They concluded that the system can load-follow and they should be able to do it better and more responsibly than large nuclear plants, said Daniel Ingersoll, NuScale Power director of research collaborations and lead author on the paper. Baseload plants are being forced into situations where they need to load-follow, and that is not really operating those plants in their best form, Ingersoll explained. The findings are important because they provide a new way for nuclear energy to adapt and be more flexible as the grid mix changes. Some U.S. nuclear plants are getting shut down early, removing large sources of carbon-free baseload energy from the grid, and a handful of new nuclear plants are in danger of not getting built. .
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