MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Today, a nuclear power plant today can produce 10,000 times as much electricity. But for the last 20 years, new plants have been too expensive to build. As NPR's Christopher Joyce reports, engineers are now trying to revive the industry by thinking small again.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE: They're calling them modular or mini reactors. Instead of occupying a city block of buildings, the smallest could fit in a two-car garage. And it won't break the bank.
JOSE REYES: We've been calling it the economy of small.
JOYCE: Jose Reyes runs NuScale Power. He's designed a reactor about one-tenth the size of current reactors. It looks very different, kind of like a 50-foot thermos.
REYES: The concept is that you can't take a large reactor with all of its pumps and valves and piping and just shrink it down and expect to see an economic advantage there.
JOYCE: Nuclear engineers say this so-called passive cooling design is safer than existing plants. And Reyes says it's cheaper, too. Because his reactors are small, a utility company can order, say, half a dozen, and then add more as needed.
REYES: If you built a six-pack plant, you are looking at a cost of around $1.2 billion. And then if you are looking at filling it out with the remainder, it's about a $2 billion plant. So we're not having to require the utilities to put out $5, $6, $7 billion up front to build a large facility.
JOYCE: There are doubters, of course, like Ernest Moniz, energy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ERNEST MONIZ: To really test that proposition, you've got to produce a whole bunch of the same modular reactor on a cookie-cutter line because that's where the cost reduction is supposed to come from.
JOYCE: Energy consultant Kevin Book, with ClearView Energy Partners, says that's not likely. Some costs are pretty well fixed, no matter how small you are: getting permits, for example, or paying interest on loans.
KEVIN BOOK: If you only have a very small plant bearing a very large regulatory or capital cost from delay, you don't have an economic resource at all.
JOYCE: At the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute, policy head Paul Genoa says mini- reactors might appeal to smaller utilities or foreign buyers who can't afford $5 billion for a big power plant. And cheaper kinds of power now - coal and natural gas, for example - may not look so good as more governments tax or limit climate-warming carbon from power plants. Nuclear reactors don't emit carbon.
PAUL GENOA: The price that we're trying to compete with is not the price of a big nuclear plant today or natural gas today, but it's what it will be in 2020, and it's what it will be in different parts of the world.
JOYCE: Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.