nuclear-news

Last month’s first-ever small modular reactor design approval could usher in a new era for nuclear power, provided the technology can live up to the hype.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) phase 1 review approval of a small nuclear reactor (SMR) design from Portland, Oregon-based NuScale Power means the technology now has a realistic chance of being up and running within a decade.

In a press release, NuScale said its first operational products, for Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), could be hooked up to the grid “by the mid-2020s,” while Bloomberg reported that the company was aiming for commercial operations in 2026.

The reactor developer next has to get NRC design certification application approval and customer UAMPS needs a combined construction and operating license, NuScale’s director of communications, Mariam Nabizad, told GTM. …….

When it goes live, the UAMPS plant could be the definitive test of whether nuclear has a future in many Western economies. In Europe and the U.S. the industry is on the wane, mounting a rearguard PR campaign to claw back fans and betting heavily on SMRs to regain credibility.

That means the UAMPS project, which is set to have a dozen 50-megawatt NuScale SMR modules, will have to buck recent nuclear new-build trends by coming in on time and on budget.

And, critically, it will have to be competitive with other generation sources being built eight years from now. Nabizad said that the estimated overnight cost for the UAMPS project was $2.9 billion, and its target levelized cost of energy was $65 per megawatt-hour.

For comparison, the International Renewable Energy Agency predicts that by 2020, more than half a decade ahead of the UAMPS project going live, onshore wind will be hitting an LCOE of $50 per megawatt-hour and solar will be at $60 per megawatt-hour.

……… with wind- or solar-tied storage plummeting in cost, it is unclear to what extent intermittency will be an issue for intermittent renewables eight years from now. All these factors could fuel concerns that SMRs may never be a viable technology. ……. even if NuScale and its brethren can reignite interest in nuclear across the U.S. and Europe, it may still face a threat from within its own industry.

While the NRC’s experience with NuScale is expected to streamline the permitting of other SMR designs, it will be at least a decade until U.S. SMRs start hitting the ground in any meaningful numbers……..https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/small-modular-nuclear-reactors-moment-of-reckoning#gs.ydvNBns