Open Architecture for Cost Savings in Advanced Nuclear Reactors
Recently, nuclear power plant build projects in the West have run over budget due to high capital costs and schedule overruns. Compared to other sources of energy, nuclear power plants have higher capital costs. Reactors are often different at every site, resulting in a lack of standardization. Nuclear is expected to compete with other low carbon sources of energy which have lower capital costs making it essential for nuclear to develop ways of reducing costs. Strategies such as standardization, learning rates, modularization, and schedule reduction in advanced reactors can reduce nuclear costs by about 40%. Standardization as a way of cutting capital costs has been explored even in large nuclear power plants. Standardization of certain plant components can result in lower component and installation costs and higher learning from experience. Standardization can be achieved by adopting a criterion of key performance indicators and general design principles for a specific system or component such as the balance of plant. Modularization allows the construction of certain components of SMRs in a factory, which saves time, increases productivity, and encourages higher learning rates. Production learning decreases the time and the cost related to an activity. The potential for modularized components of advanced reactors to be manufactured in factories makes it conducive to achieving higher learning rates. Developing large-capacity nuclear programs through sequential builds cultivates a higher learning rate, which in effect may reduce schedule overruns. Open architecture has been identified as a way to drive standardization among advanced reactor designs and result in cost savings. Open architecture (OA) is defined as a design enabling a diverse supply chain by defining and publishing requirements of systems or equipment in functional and/or interface terms, utilizing technical standards in widespread use. Currently, the nuclear industry’s approach is to use closed architecture, making most designs proprietary. However, collaboration between various advanced reactor vendors and suppliers utilizing the concept of open architecture can result in modular and standardized architecture of subsystems or subcomponents of a nuclear power plant. Completely standardizing nuclear power plants may be impossible, however, certain common subsystems amongst the various reactor designs could be standardized and/or access a wider supply chain and leverage existing learning from other sectors. Open architecture will save time and allocate resources to the parts of the plants that have the most unique features. A key advantage of open architecture is its ability to improve production learning across advanced reactors (AR) types in the industry, by providing and utilizing the same kind of component. Sodium fast reactor (SFR), High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) and Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) are the advanced reactors considered for this project. This paper aims to determine the cost savings in advanced reactor programs due to open architecture learning rate. This work is an extension of work done on light water reactor small modular reactors; the cost methodology was utilized to investigate the impact of open architecture on advanced reactors with a particular focus on sodium fast reactors. The cost data on sodium fast reactors used in the model presented the most adequate information required for the analysis.