Converting your neighborhood coal plant to nuclear.  The world's 1,200 supersized power plants that must be converted to nuclear to end Global Warming are large facilities usually located on several thousand acre plots of land in areas zoned industrial.  They are always located next to substantial bodies for cooling water and, of course, large numbers of high voltage electrical grid towers, a substantial road, and railroad tracks.

There is a supersized coal burning power plant not far from my neighborhood (names are fictitious  but everything else is real).

I can see the tops of Tampa Electric Co's "Big Bend" coal burning power plant's four stacks from my front porch.  Usually plumes of white water condensate are coming out of two or three of the stacks (CO2 is invisible) but sometimes a light yellow haze appears for a while.

(Right, north is up.) Tampa's Big Bend power plant.

Big Bend would be considered a typical supersized coal burning power plant.  Tampa's Big Bend is the world's 212th largest CO2 emitting power plant at 10.9 million tons of CO2 per year.  Its coal yard begins immediately to the left of the stacks.  You can see an ocean going coal barge tied up at the far end of the coal storage yard.

Will a BN-800 nuclear boiler work?  One 880 MWe BN-800 is powerful enough to replace two of Big Bend's 450 MWe coal burning boilers.  When you look at the details of the steam required by Big Bend's turbines and what a BN-800 can supply, at least two steam scenarios come to mind.  1. Use two the BN-800's three heat exchangers as primary heat, use the third as a turbine high-to-medium pressure stage reheat.  2.  Use all three heat exchangers to provide supercritical water to drive steam generators designed to deliver both primary heat and reheat stage steam. 

The supercrtitical option might make trunking of supercritical water possible and perhaps reduce the need for the third and fourth reactor.  It all depends upon how hot the Russians think the BN-800 should be run, heat exchanger details, and the real-world steam needs of Big Bend's existing four turbines.  Like most large, older than new coal burning power plants, Big Bend also has several natural gas burning combustion turbines for peaking.  Trunked steam or supercritical water would enable their generating capacity to be picked up by a new small steam turbine as natural gas burning - 2/3 as CO2 dirty as coal - will, like coal, eventually be outlawed.

Will it be safe?  Unlike conventional nuclear reactors, the argon purged "hot-tub" core vessel of the BN-800 is not under pressure and therefore is incapable of causing an explosion.  Despite this, the author is suggesting the safety assurance of extreme containment measures (see part 4, above) for the BN-800 since coal burning power plants almost always have nearby clusters of residences.  Containment was the hero of the Three Mile Island accident, lack of containment the villain at Chernobyl.  As for the radioactive materials themselves, even though almost all hospitals now have flesh-killing levels of radioactivity in their cancer treatment centers, methods of storage and handling insure that the materials do not pose a threat to either the hospital patients or staff.

Nuclear power plants cannot explode atomically but Chernobyl proved they don't have to in order to cause a disaster.  Modern nuclear hazard studies are not your father's risk assessment either.   While the Nuclear Regulatory Agency now uses risk-assessment techniques that put insurance companies to shame, back in the early days, they built a solid foundation of real life experience and data by deliberately running reactors to self-destruction by melting different reactor designs down in "Special Power Excursion Reactor Tests" (SPERT) investigations (by remote control from distant bunkers) in a remote corner of what is now the Idaho National Laboratory.  These tests are what the U.S. government did to learn which our first generation reactor designs were safest and what would happen if you forced them into meltdown. 

These reactor tests - some 51 different first and second generation reactors - along with thousands of materials and other studies, laid the design foundation for today's first and second generation slow-neutron power reactors.  Reactor designs based on the knowledge that came out of Idaho National Labs are, despite what the Sierra Club says, safe in all modes of operation and are incapable of posing a hazard to the public.  Most of the world has based most of their nuclear electricity generating power plants on designs we pioneered.    SPERT 1 Reactor Safety Studies - ref_090.pdf 

But the BN-800 is not your father's reactor.  What have we and the Russians done along the same lines to learn how safe the existing and proposed fourth-generation reactors are?  The U.S. version, the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) has its roots in the early 1950s with the formal IFR program beginning in the 1983.  The first commercial Russian BN series reactor, the BN-350, went on-line in 1973.  Chernobyl, an old-generation uncontained slow-neutron RBMK type reactor disaster, happened in 1986.  The harm brought about by Chernobyl's non-nuclear explosion should have prompted a flock of Russian SPERT-type investigations to learn what they were sitting on. 

The International Atomic Energy Agency (UN) (IAEA) or World Nuclear Association (WNA) should have English translations of these studies on hand.

Well, will it be safe?  Only the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's experts prevail on decisions in this area in the United States.  Their word is literally law.  To make a case for the NRC to go to the effort of rendering such a decision, we need to come up with all the technical and economic reasons why the world's supersized coal burning power plants should be repowered with BN-800s.  What is being proposed here is so preliminary and so far from day-to-day NRC they shouldn't even be informed of this thinking until preliminary talks with Rosatom and turbine experts have been completed.

The fate of the world depends upon the quickest possible, most rigorous, and most complete gathering and presentation of all facts to all involved.