See how this company plans to transform nuclear power

The nuclear industry has long said that the power plant of the future will be smaller, cheaper and quicker to stand up than the behemoths of the past.

But the bid to reinvent nuclear power has created its own costly engineering and safety challenges, leaving innovations in limbo for years. And plans to expand existing projects like the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia have saddled ratepayers with billions in unforeseen costs.

A startup called Last Energy thinks it has a better solution. It’s using scaled-down versions of old nuclear technologies to build small, modular reactors.

The company says its “microreactors” can be mass produced and sold in the form of a simple kit that companies can use to power factories.

The reactor is housed in nine modular units, each slightly larger than a shipping container. They are delivered by truck and then bolted together on site.

They include a simple, plug-in ready electrical system and reactors that double as waste storage caskets.

The design is meant to make nuclear power as cheap as possible.

Some are skeptical that the parts, mass produced using repurposed oil and gas industry machinery, will hold up to the strict scrutiny of nuclear regulators.

The kits, built at Texas factories that make parts for the oil and gas industry, forego the huge amounts of cement and giant cooling towers typically associated with nuclear power. They are instead almost entirely steel, which can more effectively contain radiation. They are cooled with fans.

The entire cube is buried underground as a safety precaution. The rest of the plant’s machinery is housed in a low-profile building above ground, designed to integrate with the aesthetics of the landscape.

The reactors don’t get refueled. They are instead replaced after about six years. The used reactors stay on site, storing spent fuel in the cube.

After several decades, all the used reactors would get hauled away to a waste storage facility.

Last Energy has contracts to build its first plants in Romania and Poland as soon as 2025, with additional plans for deliveries to Britain.

Its success is contingent on European regulators approving its reactor design, which could prove a heavy lift.

But if the plants get up and running on anything close to the timetable and budget the company projects, it will be awkward for other nuclear firms that rely on billions of dollars of U.S. subsidies and contracts that put ratepayers on the hook for cost overruns.

Last Energy argues the industry doesn’t need all that.

Could this be the path to a nuclear power future that does not require massive government subsidies? Or is this small start-up over-promising?

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Credits

Photo editing by Haley Hamblin. Production and Editing by Karly Domb Sadof and Sandhya Somashekhar.