Irvine Firm, Russian Group Join on Nuclear Venture : Technology: Advanced Physics Corp. will work with five institutions to build a series of small, powerful reactors to be used in Russia and developing countries.
An Orange County company, trying to make use of old Soviet nuclear technology, said Monday it has signed a contract with a group of Russian organizations to build small-scale nuclear power reactors.
Advanced Physics Corp., a research company in Irvine, formed a joint venture project with five Russian nuclear and space industry institutions to build a series of miniature reactors to be used in Russia and developing countries.
Using technology developed by the former Soviet Union, the consortium plans to create a reactor that can generate 60 megawatts of electricity, a 20th of the power of a standard reactor.
The miniature reactor would still put out more than enough power for a developing country but at half the usual cost, said Bogdan Maglich, president of Advanced Physics.
“The idea is to create exclusively peaceful nuclear reactors, small and powerful like nuclear submarine reactors, but not hot rods that could produce huge amounts of energy,” Maglich said.
Instead of using water as a coolant, the reactors will use helium gas encased in pellets the size of tennis balls to control the nuclear reaction within the plant. The company says this method will help it avoid the construction pitfalls of past reactors, which often faced disastrous cost overruns and safety problems.
This technology, developed over decades by Russia’s nuclear scientists, could remove nearly all risks of radioactive waste associated with larger reactors, said partner Nikolay E. Koukharkine, leader of the Russian side of the venture and director of a nuclear reactor division of Moscow’s Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute.
The joint venture subsidiary is dubbed MARR, for Mini American Russian Reactor. The project leading to the venture started in 1990 as a joint research effort and was approved by Russia’s minister of atomic energy in September.
Like their U.S. counterparts, Russian nuclear weapons scientists are looking for ways to survive in an era of defense cutbacks in the wake of the Cold War.
The project was driven by that trend, as well as from the demand for safer atomic energy after the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown in 1986.
Current plans call for construction of the first plant to begin in 1996 at Chelyabinsk-70, a former secret weapons lab in Southern Russia that is being converted to non-weapon research.
The reactors would be used for peaceful purposes only in the developing countries, since the atomic fuel would not be of adequate quality to be used for nuclear weaponry, Maglich said.
Because Advanced Physics is designing the reactors here, it will need design approval from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It also must raise an estimated $100 million in private funding for development and construction. Maglich said the cost of the mini-reactors could be less than $200 million each, compared with past costs of more than $1 billion each.
Leading the effort by Advanced Physics is its chairman, Glenn T. Seaborg, a Nobel Prize winner who was headed the Atomic Energy Commission under three U.S. presidents.
The company has conducted research in nuclear energy for a decade. Seaborg became chairman in 1988, and the company moved to Irvine from Princeton, N.J., in 1991 as a result of a research consortium funded by UC Irvine.
