Full Title: Small Modular Reactors: Adding to Resilience at Federal Facilities
Author(s): Seth Kirshenberg, Hilary Jackler, Jane Eun, Brian Oakley, and Wil Goldenberg
Publisher(s): U.S. Department of Energy
Publication Date: December 1, 2017
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Small Modular Reactors: Adding to Resilience at Federal Facilities (this “Report”) expands on the January 2017 report entitled Purchasing Power Produced by Small Modular Reactors: Federal Agency Options (the “Initial Report”). The Initial Report focused on assisting federal agencies to identify options to participate in the purchase of power produced by small modular reactors (“SMRs”), the structure and issues with financing an SMR, and the unique issues that federal agencies face when making power purchase decisions. The Initial Report identified how federal agencies can purchase SMR-produced power through long-term agreements (over thirty (30) years) by using the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”) SMR project as an example. SMRs are designed to provide valuable resilience services as a secure, reliable, and flexible source of primary and backup power.
SMRs, coupled with transmission hardening, could provide highly reliable, non-intermittent, clean, and carbon-free power. SMRs can also easily store two years’ worth of fuel on-site. Certain SMR designs allow for output to
be varied over days, hours, or minutes, thereby enabling the SMR to ramp up quickly in the case of a grid outage and adjust to be in line with changing load demands.
This Report identifies the need for energy resilience and how an SMR can provide such a service for federal agencies. As an illustrative example, this Report focuses on the SMR project being developed by the Tennessee Valley Authority (“TVA”) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on a site adjacent to critical U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) and National Nuclear Security Administration (“NNSA”) facilities (referred to herein as the Oak Ridge Reservation).