Abstract
Current large scale, generation 3 nuclear power plants (in the western world) are mostly expensive, delayed and over budget [1] [2]. Modularisation in industrial plants has shown cost savings of between 7–20% and schedule savings between 20–50% [3]. Small Modular Reactors (SMR) defined as “shop fabricated and then transported as modules to the sites for installation” [4] might enable further cost reductions and there are over 50+ SMR designs currently in development internationally.
This paper establishes the module envelope constraints for road transportable factory built SMR Modules and analyses equipment data from a Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) reactor for these module envelope constraints. The paper found that two tanks and a pump might need to be redesigned for road transport or they may be utilised as one off logistical operations, depending on costs. The 900MWe PWR reactor equipment items were then scaled to reflect a 450MWe plant [5], [6]. If the equipment items are scaled, all equipment would fit into the 5m module space envelope at least in one direction. It may be advantageous to redesign the two tanks. Finally, a simple Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) modularisation optimisation was utilised to layout equipment into a (6 × 50 × 4.5m) module. The objective function was reduced from 14661 for the original Lapp (1989) plant to 2958 for the single module.
