All are advancing the same overall idea of small, safe nuclear power that doesn’t have to be built 10 miles outside of town in dedicated megacomplexes.Īn early design sketch of America’s NR-1. NuScale sells its tiny reactor size as a benefit for safety and scalability, because places can simply add as many as they want in order to meet their needs, but Korea’s KAERI and similar designers in China are focused on designs with a small enough footprint to squeeze effortlessly into crowded cities or small residential islands. Up-and-coming reactors, like those of NuScale and KAERI, are designed for applications like Bilibino, where residents need a permanent source of electricity or desalinated water. Floating Akademik Lomonosov will supplant it. The tiny nuclear plant supplies their power, but it's too much for the remote area after the population has declined over the decades. Maxinvestigator // Wikimedia CommonsĬhukotka is kind of like Russia’s Alaska, and is in fact the part Sarah Palin can “see from my house.” Just 50,000 people live in Chukotka today, and the town of Bilibino, even down from its mining heyday, is the second largest city, with just over 5,000 people. Bilibino is also the most remote nuclear plant in the world, built to power gold mines.īilibino Nuclear Power Plant. The smallest nuclear reactor in operation today isn’t from some startup or a cutting-edge nuclear agency: It’s tiny, frozen Bilibino Nuclear Plant in Chukotka, Russia, where up to four different 12 MWe modular reactors have run since 1974.

The RITM-200 and VBER-300 are the same mass but for such different purposes-and they represent a historic dichotomy in nuclear reactor design. Russia is the only country to design and manufacture these ships, at least partly because Russia’s frozen Krájnij Séver, or Extreme North, is crammed with natural resources that are best transported out by ship.

It will create 55 MWe of power and propel an upcoming new class of nuclear icebreaker. It’s fully mobile, designed to propel instead of only to generate electricity, and also weighs about 1,300 tons. The other OKBM reactor, called RITM-200, is for use in a Russian icebreaker ship.

Russia is Sailing a 'Floating Chernobyl'.

The first of these power plants, Akademik Lomonosov, was towed to its permanent offshore home in September 2019. It’s designed to be part of a future far northern Russian Arctic nuclear power plant that will be positioned offshore for its entire life, where it will ironically power oil rigs and northern residents. The VBER-300 reactor has a 1,300-ton “working” reactor size and can be transported in pieces over land. Afrikantov OKB Mechanical Engineering ( OKBM), part of state-sponsored nuclear organization Rosatom, both for use on the high seas. Let’s start with two reactors in development by the Russian nuclear company OAO I. Here’s what else is happening in tiny nuclear innovation today, how we got here, and where we’re going. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute’s competitive SMART reactor, for example, will make more power-100 MWe to NuScale’s 60 MWe per reactor-and is 18,400 cubic feet for the whole container compared to NuScale’s 13,400 cubic feet. And while NuScale takes the cake in terms of the smallest footprint and tonnage in this space, there are similar modular reactors in the late development and regulatory stages. Last week’s news of NuScale’s modular nuclear reactor, which can fit by the dozens into the space of one traditional nuclear plant cooling tower, resonated because of its tiny size and safety in numbers.

The smallest operational reactor will be shut down soon, replaced by Russia's new floating nuclear power plant.

They've improved on a legacy of innovation, from breaking the thick ice of Russia to populating tiny islands in China.

NuScale's modular nuclear reactor owes a debt to decades of small nuclear reactor design.

Nuclear time machine