America's biggest engineering firm is thinking smaller when it comes to the next generation of nuclear power.
Bechtel Power Corp., which has helped build or maintain many of the nation's 104 operating nuclear reactors, announced Wednesday that it is joining with Babcock & Wilcox Nuclear Energy to build a new type of nuclear plant that's only about 10 percent as large as most existing reactors.
The Tennessee Valley Authority could be one of the early buyers of the new smaller reactor design and has pledged to support its licensing.
With the support of three members of Congress at a Washington, D.C., news conference, Bechtel Power Business Unit President Jack Futcher said Wednesday that bringing the two U.S. companies together for the new mini-reactor "is a turning point in the nuclear power plant industry."
The smaller size should allow most of the plant to be built in a factory and shipped to the plant site, he said. It also will open up nuclear power to many countries and utilities that otherwise couldn't afford or need the power of a bigger reactor.
But the smaller design - called mPower - will lose the economies of scale made possible by bigger reactors. Even though they are smaller, the new plants still would require operators, maintenance and security crews similar to larger plants.
TVA officials said the federal utility continues to evaluate the abandoned site of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Oak Ridge for one of the mPower units.
"As we look out into the future, we realize that we may need power in smaller increments as we see the growth of our power load change," TVA Senior Vice President Ashok Bhatnagar said. "The option of having a small modular reactor fit in very nicely with our strategic plan of having 50 percent of our power from clean sources by 2020."
TVA now derives more than 60 percent of its power from coal, but the utility is buying more renewable solar and wind energy, finishing another reactor at its Watts Bar plant and considering adding a reactor at its Bellefonte plant in Alabama.
TVA considers nuclear, hydro, wind, solar and geothermal as clean sources of energy.
Dan Ingersoll, a senior program manager who studies small modular reactors at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said Westinghouse Electric, Toshiba, Hyperion and NuScale also are developing small reactor designs for the U.S. market.
But the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has yet to endorse any of the designs, and no utility has ordered any of the new units.
U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis, D-Tenn., said he supports the development of more nuclear power, both big and small.
"We can export this design on ships throughout the world," he said.
U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said the alliance announced Wednesday "will hopefully be the beginning of a whole new surge in safe, clean, and affordable nuclear power."