A major effort under way within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Engineering School is focused on the contributions that technology innovation can make in revitalizing nuclear power in the United States. A principal component of this effort is a project to improve the designs of the next generation of light water reactors (LWRs) with emphasis on achieving improved capacity factors and safety, and reducing the construction duration. The motivation for this overall effort is to prevent the nuclear option from being unnecessarily lost by being available only in uneconomic configurations. In considering how to advance this effort, we have focused on refining the designs of new reactors because this is the area where the greatest opportunities for improvements exist. This effort has the following main emphases:

  1. definition—in a plant design goal statement—of plant design criteria and means of assuring their satisfaction
  2. independent, parallel technological improvements
  3. conceptual design.
We have concluded that, in addition to nontechnical factors, many of the problems of the current generation of U.S. power stations could have been prevented by using a more comprehensively formulated design goal. Such a formulation would involve identifying the attributes necessary for maximizing the economic performance functions of all portions of the plant, in contrast to the current pattern of a decreasing devotion of design resources as one moves out from the reactor core. We are using the experience of the current generation of plants to improve the designs of the next generation. The areas of emphasis for independent, parallel technological improvements are the following:
  1. simplification
  2. refinement of safety requirements
  3. use of new technology
  4. improvement of troublesome components.
The major technical areas of potential improvements involve simplification, reliability improvements, introduction of greater realism into safety requirements, and designs for rapid construction, maintenance, and repair. The elements being emphasized in conceptual design efforts are the following:
  1. use of passive rather than active systems as a means for enhancing reliability
  2. a design emphasizing plant features that would reduce source terms in severe core damage accidents
  3. modular construction
  4. performance of only a single function with each plant system
  5. separation of systems used for safety functions from those used for operational functions.
The MIT LWR Innovation Project was undertaken with the hope that an independent, creative group based at MIT would serve as a stimulus to the U.S. nuclear industry for advancing improvements presented previously. Finally, it has been suggested that work on LWR technology improvement is unlikely to be important if the currently hostile political and incoherent regulatory environment in the United States does not become more sympathetic and predictable. Therefore, it is sometimes argued that efforts to improve the prospects for nuclear power would best be devoted to these sociopolitical areas. To the contrary, we expect that nuclear power will continue to have political opposition and a difficult regulatory environment in the United States until it becomes so reliable and uninteresting to the public that substantial anti-nuclear-power political constituencies will no longer be sustained. If so, work for technology improvement will serve the advancement of both the economic and public acceptance of nuclear power. For the group at MIT, whose strengths are in the disciplines upon which the technology is based, we have concluded that we can be most effective through such a focus in our work.