Good things come in small packets

Economy of scale. I love this phrase, bandied about by my economist friends as if there is no tomorrow. And the industrial age, the 19th and 20th century, has been a testament to the beauty of this phrase. Mankind figured that the bigger systems we build, the more efficient they are and the more we can harvest them. Eureka!

Nuclear power must have been one of the darlings of our economist friends, for no other system epitomizes enhanced efficiencies, from enhanced size, than nuclear. Thus, we ended up with behemoths, 1000 MW capacity units, and clubbed 2-4 of such units at one location. All of a sudden we had about 4000 MW of generation capacity to hook up with demand.

As with many 20th century legacies in the 21st century, the concept of economy of scale has also taken a beating. We have realized a whole new love for smaller, manageable things. Remember, too big to fail:) This exciting new paradigm has affected the thought around Nuclear power too and there is a movement towards making smaller, modular nuclear reactors. Reactors which can be placed in each township and managed directly by the people it serves. This not only obviates the need for intricate transmission networks to get this large amount power from God-forsaken places to civilization but also creates something that has never been thought before.

You might be amazed at the concept of a small, modular nuclear reactor in your township. And rightly so. Some of my readers would question, didn’t the Three Mile and Chernobyl nuclear disasters push these dangerous systems away from humanity’s faintest reach, for good? How on earth can we talk of getting them in the midst of townships this time? Fair questions and bear with me for a few more paragraphs for their answers.

One of the major impediments of large-scale installation of nuclear energy has been the enormous cost of financing such a plant. The total cost of starting a conventional nuclear plant is about $10 billion these days, an amount which is not easy to finance without huge government subsidies and other incentives. Small Modular Reactors(SMR), in the works, have capacities in the range of 25-125 MW, a fraction of the conventional designs. This also brings down the installation cost to a few hundred million dollars, which tremendously increases the affordability of such a reactor. The smaller size also reduces the amount of construction material that goes into a safe design, for the risks are much lower with a much smaller quantity of nuclear fuel being used. So much so that initial reports say that the amount of fuel in such a reactor is of no use for weapon grade application. SAFE!

Refueling of nuclear reactors is a process that takes up months and is not a plant operator’s delight. The technology of SMR can make such a reactor go for as much as 30-60 years without refueling. The operators will love this idea, no doubt about it!

All things said and done, it is not that easy to go about planting these reactos. As with every human being, technologies have a cycle of Karma too, and nuclear has not served its Karma well by those famous accidents mentioned in the beginning of this post. A proliferation of such reactors will cause many people to balk at the idea. There will be major delays in their sanctioning by regulatory commissions, which are not adept at handling such a technological shift. Nuclear waste is always a sensitive issue and this concept is not untouched by it. In fact, a number of smaller nuclear reactors will only compound the problem of distributed nuclear waste and ways of disposing it.

However, there are many examples currently to suggest that there is movement in a favorable direction. Several cities, for example the towns of Galena and Fairbanks in Alaska and many island cities, are going ahead with the installation of SMRs. Just keep an eye on this exciting technology in the distributed generation space.

It is exciting to watch how the concept of economies of scale has been turned on its head lately. We have figured that it’s better to work with smaller systems. In fact, this calls for a new phrase, which could be of the order of “Economies of De-Scale!”

Remember, you heard it here first:) 21st century will show us numerous situations where Economies of De-Scale will trump economies of scale.

Let’s not jettison the concept totally. There will always be instances where we cannot do away with scale. And one such instance is the number of followers I have on my blog:) The more followers I have, the more motivation I shall have to write and greater the efficiency of my blog. This economy of scale will always hold true:)