Watch Idaho Nuclear Project to Gauge Obamas Energy Plan

Tuesday, Nov 11, 2008

One bellwether project to watch as a gauge of President-Elect Barack Obamas energy policy will be funding for a commercial demonstration project at the Idaho National Laboratory to produce hydrogen and heat with high-temperature, helium-cooled nuclear power.

The project faces technical and finding hurdles and is already running behind schedule. ""The Department of Energy asked us to complete the plant by 2016, but we are revising the date to 2021,"" said Sten A. Caspersson Jr. of Westinghouse in an interview with Design News following a presentation at the annual Congress of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Boston, MA. Caspersson is project manager of next-generation, high-temperature reactors at Westinghouse, a Pennsylvania company owned primarily by Toshiba.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized the Department of Energy to develop a research and development program that could deliver a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor prototype to increase domestic energy supplies, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and move more quickly towards a national hydrogen economy. Westinghouse and its partners plan to build a pebble bed modular reactor that uses fuel balls surrounded by a hollow sphere of graphite moderator. These are stacked in a close-packed lattice and are cooled by helium, not water. The term ""pebble bed"" derives from the use of spheres. Rods are used to control fission in conventional nuclear reactors.

Source: Design News