Russia’s nuclear industry has profited handsomely from the world’s interest in alternatives to fossil fuels. But at least one environmental group is saying the latest Russian effort to capitalize on the green reputation of nuclear power — marketing designs for old Soviet nuclear submarine engines — is potentially dangerous.
The Russian industry is not alone in pushing the idea that the next generation of nuclear reactors should be shrunken, having more in common with the small power plants on submarines than the sprawling, panoramic installations of today.
The kind of marine reactors the Russians are promoting, though, also happened to create a byproduct that no one knows how to handle: spent fuel that is being stored at naval yards in the Russian Arctic, angering neighboring Norway.
Spent nuclear fuel is usually removed from a reactor and stored apart, in a pool of water. But the Soviet submarine model a Moscow company is trying to commercialize often ended with the fuel and the reactor frozen in one piece, and stored as such awaiting a time when an engineering solution will be devised to process the novel type of waste.
Moreover, the technology caused a number of mechanical accidents when it was used inside Soviet submarines, from the 1970s until the early 1990s.
But the same quality — packing a good punch in a small package — that appealed to the Soviet admirals is now being marketed as the latest in green technology.
As countries like China are racing ahead in wind energy and solar-cell manufacturing, Russia’s focus has been nuclear.
Kirill Danilenko, the director of the Russian company Akme Engineering, said during an interview that nuclear power could be safely miniaturized for civilian use, with no more of a meltdown risk at a small plant than at a larger one. He said it was his vision that small reactors would become so common that utilities could use them to “build power plants like Lego sets.”
The promise of miniature reactors powering homes, offices and schools is still years from being realized. The first Russian design, a pontoon-mounted reactor designed to be floated into harbors in energy-hungry developing countries, is already being built. But most promoters expect small reactors to begin operating only at the end of the decade.
The plans are going ahead here and elsewhere in the face of criticism that a diffuse nuclear infrastructure — the idea that midsize cities, for example, could have their own small reactor — is inherently risky.
But once the science is perfected, such reactors are potentially far less costly to build per unit of electricity generated than traditional nuclear power plants. This is no small matter, as upfront capital expenses form the largest cost of nuclear power, skewing its competitiveness with coal.
One solution to lower capital expenses is the tried-and-true economics of serial production. Reactor cores, like Ford cars, would be rolled off an assembly line, then shipped to the site of a plant. They could be used separately or as modules for a more powerful generator. This is only possible, however, if a reactor is small enough to fit on a railroad car.
Coincidentally, for other reasons, miniaturization was a cornerstone of submarine reactor design for half a century.
Russia is not alone in efforts to shrink reactors, with the goal of making nuclear power more affordable.
American companies are promoting nine designs for small reactors, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group in Washington. And the International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversees civilian nuclear power, has estimated global demand for small nuclear reactors to reach 500 to 1,000 reactors by 2040. The category is defined as reactors making less than 300 megawatts of electricity, or the amount needed for 300,000 homes in a developed country like the United States. That is roughly a quarter of the energy output of big reactors.
The little guys have other advantages, though. They would be small enough, for example, to fit the existing steam generating equipment in old coal plants, making it easy to swap nuclear for coal. And small reactors have at least one nonproliferation benefit over their larger cousins: they can be loaded with fuel in the factory, reducing the need to ship fuel separately.
Some models are very tiny. One, for example, would be small enough to fit into a shipping container and would be trucked from site to site, like a diesel generator, with the distinction it would only need to be refueled once every seven years or so.
The Russian company’s name, Akme, stands for atomic complex for small and medium energy and the company sometimes renders its name in English as Acme, though executives say they intended no reference to the cartoon company known for making improbable devices. Its goal is to produce, by 2019, a prototype of a miniature, 100-megawatt nuclear reactor small enough to fit into a typical backyard.
The company founded in December is a joint venture between Rosatom, the state nuclear power company, and a private electricity company owned by the Kremlin-connected oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska. It has $500 million in start-up capital, and one of its mini reactors will probably cost about $100 million.
The design it chose is peculiar for being cooled not with water but a molten lead alloy. In fact, the Soviet Union was the only country to deploy liquid metal reactors at sea. Introduced in the 1970s, they packed enough power to propel submarines more than 45 miles, or 72 kilometers, an hour under water. In fact, they were so powerful they compelled NATO to design an entirely new class of torpedo just to have a hope of hitting the new submarines, known as the Alfa Class.
But this Cold War design is not without its drawbacks. A Norwegian environmental group and authority on nuclear waste in the Arctic, the Bellona Foundation, says the lead alloy coolant tended to freeze in emergencies. Then, the reactor became an inaccessible block of lead, steel and waste.
The group documented an accidental freezing of the core on one submarine, K-123, in the early 1980s after an emergency shutdown in the Kara Sea. The vessel limped back to base. The only way to repair it, though, was to cut out the reactor segment with a blowtorch, a job that took nine years.
The former Russian naval captain working for Bellona who revealed these and other details of reactor failures in a report in the 1990s was put on trial for revealing state secrets.
Today, hardened liquid metal reactor cores litter the Arctic. While small, they still weigh hundreds of tons. No facility exists to melt out the lead alloy, which is itself lethally toxic, and extract the spent fuel rods. They remain an unsolved legacy of the Soviet submarine program; several are stored at a naval yard in Gremikha, on the Arctic Sea near Norway, according to Bellona.
The product can hardly be called green, Igor Kudrik, a researcher at Bellona, said by telephone.
The Russian nuclear industry, in its eagerness to capitalize on the booming global demand for nuclear power, including new applications like small reactors, has dusted off unsafe designs, Mr. Kudrik said. “They haven’t come up with anything new,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Akme said the company could not comment on military waste. Company executives said the commercial design would have to compete on safety, as well as economics, and that passive safety features would be built into the product. Anna Kudryavtseva, a vice president, said the nonmilitary version of the liquid metal reactor would be “maximally safe even in not very capable hands.”