© NuScale/YouTubeGet an intimate look at how small modular reactors are changing energy. Step inside the NuScale test facility, where nuclear magic happens.
In a new video, small modular reactor leader NuScale takes viewers through its research and simulation facilities. Complex software models how a NuScale plant will look and work within an electrical grid or process heat infrastructure, while physical models test both component integrity and the "human factor" of workers who will interact with the modular reactors.
The simulation software helps NuScale make its case to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, including for lower staffing numbers and lower safety power that must be justified with care. NuScale points out that its simulation is the only one leading to the design of power plants, rather than being coded afterward to suit how a plant was built.
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In a NuScale reactor, a core is kept cool by circulating normal fresh water, as happens in today's operating nuclear plants on a much, much larger scale. Inside huge nuclear towers, most of the space is dedicated to cooling. But the NuScale reactor uses gravity and buoyancy to naturally circulate the cooling water. And the size difference is staggering: "About the size of two school buses stacked end to end, you could fit around 100 of them in the containment chamber of a large conventional reactor," WIRED reports.
In NuScale's integral system test, electrically heated water mimics the real thing inside a reactor mockup that helps engineers test components for factors like water circulation. They can also model "off normal" events and plan for contingencies.
The upper module mockup is a physical model of only the topmost assembly of the reactor module-where a plant support worker can do the equivalent of shutting off the water before tinkering with the pipes under the sink.
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Studying "human factors" of the reality of working with these parts, the video's narrator explains, helps engineers reach the industry standard as low as is reasonably possible for complications.
NuScale has led in government funding as well as the public imagination around tiny nuclear reactors, with an easily digestible, safer, and smaller version of the pressurized water reactors that power many nuclear plants today.