Portland, Oregon-based NuScale Power announced Tuesday engineering efforts had managed to bump the power capacity of its NuScale Power Module up by 25 percent. Engineers used “advanced testing and model tools,” in order to increase power per module to 77 MWe (gross). This would bump the total of a 12-module facility to 924 MWe, the company said. Concurrently, the company said it would now be able to offer two additional facility types, including a four-module plant and a six-module plant with respective outputs of 308 MWe and 462 MWe.
The increased capacity means more bang for the buck, NuScale said. The increased power “lowers the overnight capital cost of the facility on a per kilowatt basis from an expected $3,600 to approximately $2850.” At the same time, a plant with more power would be more appealing to some. A 12-module system “now approach(es) a size that makes it a true competitor for the gigawatt-size market.” At the same time, the changes do not significantly impact the plant’s NPM technology, NuScale said in a statement.
Increasing the power generating capacity of a 12-module NuScale small modular reactor (SMR) plant by 25 percent lowers the overnight capital cost of the facility on a per kilowatt basis from an expected $3,600 to approximately $2,850, NuScale said. Furthermore, the scalable, 12-module power plant will now approach a size that makes it a true competitor for the gigawatt-size market. The increased power output comes without any major changes to the NPM technology.
The regulatory process of increasing the level of maximum reactor power at which a nuclear plant can operate is referred to as a power uprate. The power increase will be reviewed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as part of NuScale’s Standard Design Approval (SDA) application, which NuScale is scheduled to submit in 2022.
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