nuclear-news

America’s first SMR fizzles out as uranium continues to ride high

SMR developer NuScale has, predictably, rebutted a short seller’s report from Iceberg Research on its operations last month.

Its stock is down 81% over the past year.

Yet enthusiasm for the nuclear renaissance is still strong

Stockhead, Josh Chiat, 14 Nov 23

Small modular reactors — they’re the technology the nuclear power industry hopes will mainstream the controversial energy sector and prove it can expand without the massive scale of traditional nuclear energy.

But the emerging market has been dealt a blow just as enthusiasm for a nuclear renaissance hits a new level of intensity.

It came in the form of a decision from the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems and advanced SMR developer NuScale to dump a plan called the “Carbon Free Power Project”.

That would have been the first SMR rolled out in the States, six minireactors due to be constructed in Idaho Falls from 2026. But NuScale and UAMPS deemed it unviable after subscriptions fell well below the level required to underwrite the project’s construction.

It came despite strong political support, including from the Biden Administration, amid long delays and cost overruns for conventional plants.

Wood Mackenzie vice-chair of Americas Ed Crooks said it was a serious setback for the SMR industry.

“But while the end of the Carbon Free Power Project was not entirely unexpected, it is still a serious setback for nuclear power in the US, and for hopes of reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally,” he said in a note.

“It is increasingly likely that no new SMRs will be built in the US or Europe in the 2020s.”

According to Crooks the levelised cost of energy for the power to be delivered by the dumped project was over double that of utility-scale solar and materially higher than gas turbines.

“Estimates published in January set a target levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for the plant of US$89 per megawatt hour, up from an earlier estimate of US$58/MWh, including the benefit of tax credits and federal government support,” he wrote.

“But even that revised target relied on some favourable assumptions. Hitting that US$89/MWh target depended on cutting US$700 million from the Carbon Free Power Project’s estimated cost of US$5.1 billion.

“Without that, the LCOE would be US$105/MWh, and there were clear risks that it could rise higher.

“Wood Mackenzie calculated last year that the average LCOE from a combined-cycle gas turbine power plant in the US was US$58/MWh, while utility-scale solar was US$43/MWh.

“That makes the Carbon Free Power Project’s cost estimates seem expensive, even before any additional overruns.”

Enthusiasm for nuclear continues

Despite that news, SMR developer NuScale has, predictably, rebutted a short seller’s report from Iceberg Research on its operations last month.

Its stock is down 81% over the past year.

Yet enthusiasm for the nuclear renaissance is still strong, ………………………………………………………….  https://stockhead.com.au/resources/ground-breakers-americas-first-smr-fizzles-out-as-uranium-continues-to-ride-high/

November 15, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

Deal to build pint-size nuclear reactors canceled, ‘avoiding a giant financial debacle.’

NuScale Power’s small modular reactors promised cheaper nuclear power, but costs soared and utilities balked

Science, NOV 2023 BY ADRIAN CHO

A plan to build a novel nuclear power plant comprising six small modular reactors (SMRs) fell apart this week when prospective customers for its electricity backed out. Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), a coalition of community-owned power systems in seven western states, withdrew from a deal to build the plant, designed by NuScale Power, because too few members agreed to buy into it. The project, subsidized by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), sought to revive the moribund U.S. nuclear industry, but its cost had more than doubled to $9.3 billion.

“We still see a future for new nuclear,” says Mason Baker, CEO and general manager of UAMPS, which planned to build the plant in Idaho. “But in the near term, we’re going to focus on … expanding our wind capacity, doing more utility-scale solar, [and] batteries.” NuScale, which was spun out of Oregon State University in 2007, declined to make anyone available for an interview. But David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says, “The communities and their ratepayers have avoided a giant financial debacle.”

To some observers, the plan’s collapse also raises questions about the feasibility of other planned advanced reactors, meant to provide clean energy with fewer drawbacks than existing reactors. NuScale’s was the most conventional of the designs, and the closest to construction. “There’s plenty of reasons to think [the other projects] are going to be even more difficult and expensive,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist and director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The U.S. nuclear industry has brought just two new power reactors online in the past quarter-century. In a deregulated power market, developers have struggled with the enormous capital expense of building a power reactor. Two new reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, one of which came online in May, cost more than $30 billion.

To whack down cost, engineers at NuScale decided to think small. Each NuScale SMR would produce just a fraction of the 1.1 gigawatts produced by one of the new Vogtle reactors. As originally conceived in 2014, the plant would contain 12 SMRs, each producing 60 megawatts of electricity, for $4.2 billion.

Small reactors are not an obvious winner. Basic physics dictates that a bigger nuclear reactor will be more fuel efficient than a smaller one. And a big nuclear plant can benefit from economies of scale. However, a small reactor can be simpler. For example, NuScale engineers rely on convection to drive cooling water through the core of each SMR, obviating the need for expensive pumps. SMRs also can be mass-produced in a factory and shipped whole to a site, reducing costs.

Size aside, NuScale’s SMR is relatively conventional. Whereas other advanced reactor designs rely on exotic coolants, NuScale’s sticks to water. It also uses the same low-enriched uranium fuel as existing power reactors. Those features helped the NuScale design win approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in September 2020—the only advanced reactor to have done so.

DOE agreed to host the plant at its Idaho National Laboratory, bypassing the long site permitting process commercial reactors ordinarily face. Still, by the time NRC approved the design, the cost for the project has risen to $6.1 billion. That led DOE to chip in $1.4 billion and developers to reduce the design to six modules, each pumping out 77 megawatts. In January, an analysis revealed that the cost had increased by an additional $3 billion. It suggested power from the plant would cost $89 per megawatt-hour, roughly three times as much as power from wind or utility-scale solar.

Why the costs sky-rocketed remains unclear. Lyman notes that NuScale’s first plant was always going to be expensive, as the company’s production lines still need to be developed. Even so, he says, NuScale designers overestimated how much they could save with a simpler design. “They never demonstrated that you could compensate for that penalty in economies of scale with these other factors.”

Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the NuScale design has an Achilles’ heel. Each reactor’s core resides within a double-walled steel cylinder, with a vacuum between the walls to keep heat from leaking out. The reactor modules sit in a big pool of water, which in an emergency can flood into the vacuum space around a reactor to prevent it overheating. Compared with a conventional reactor’s building, the pool requires more reinforced concrete, the price of which has soared, Buongiorno says. “In terms of tons of reinforced concrete per megawatt of power, NuScale’s design is off the chart.”

UAMPS’s members balked at the cost of that power. UAMPS had to line up agreements to buy 80% of the plant’s 462 megawatt output before early next year, Baker says, but it had commitments for only 26%. On 7 November the 26 of the 50 UAMPS members that had signed up for the project voted to terminate it, Baker says.

Other, more ambitious nuclear projects are in the works. DOE has agreed to help a company called Terrapower develop a reactor that will use molten sodium as a coolant. It will also help another company, X-power, develop an SMR cooled by xenon gas. Both plants would use novel fuel enriched to 20% uranium-235. That fuel is not yet commercially available, and it could make those designs even more expensive, Lyman says………………………….. https://www.science.org/content/article/deal-build-pint-size-nuclear-reactors-canceled

November 13, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

The First Small-Scale Nuclear Plant in the US Died Before It Could Live

“One of the stories they’ve kept telling people was that the SMR was going to be a lot cheaper than large-scale nuclear,” David Schlissel, an analyst at the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Fiscal Analysis, told WIRED last month. “It isn’t true.”

Wired. 10 Nov 23

Six nuclear reactors just 9 feet across planned for Idaho were supposed to prove out the dream of cheap, small-scale nuclear energy. Now the project has been canceled.

The plan for the first small-scale US nuclear reactor was exciting, ambitious, and unusual from the get-go. In 2015, a group of city- and county-run utilities across the Mountain West region announced that they were betting on a new frontier of nuclear technology: a mini version of a conventional plant called a “small modular reactor” (SMR).

Advocates said the design, just 9 feet in diameter and 65 feet tall, was poised to resurrect the US nuclear industry, which has delivered only two completed reactors this century. It was supposed to prove out a dream that smaller, modular designs can make splitting atoms to boil water and push turbines with steam much cheaper. But first that reactor, the Voygr model designed by a startup called NuScale, had to be built. A six-reactor, 462-megawatt plant was slated to begin construction by 2026 and produce power by the end of the decade.

On Wednesday, NuScale and its backers pulled the plug on the multibillion-dollar Idaho Falls plant. They said they no longer believed the first-of-its-kind plant, known as the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) would be able to recruit enough additional customers to buy its power.

Many of the small utilities underwriting the pioneering project, members of a group called the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) saw the pint-sized nuclear plant as a potential solution to pressure to reduce their carbon emissions. The Department of Energy, which was due to host the plant at Idaho National Lab, awarded $1.4 billion to the project over 10 years.

But as WIRED reported in February, the utilities backing the plant were spooked late last year by a 50 percent increase in the projected costs for the project—even after factoring in substantial funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. The Idaho Falls reactors’ chances of survival began to look slimmer.

At the time, commitments in place to buy the reactor’s future power covered less than 25 percent of its output. UAMPS set itself a year-end deadline to bump that figure to 80 percent by recruiting new customers. Reaching that number was seen as key to ensuring the project’s long-term viability. As the project moved into site-specific planning and construction, its costs were poised to become more difficult to recoup if the plant ultimately failed, heightening the risks for the members.

Atomic Homecoming

As recently as last month, local officials returned to their communities from a UAMPS retreat with a reassuring message that the Idaho Falls project was on track to secure the new backers it needed, according to local meetings reviewed by WIRED.

That appeared to be good news in places like Los Alamos, New Mexico, where an official this spring described the project as a “homecoming” for atomic technology. The project was due to arrive just in time to help the county meet its goal of decarbonizing its electrical grid and adjusting to the retirement of aging fossil fuel plants nearby. At the time, locals expressed concern about where they would find clean and consistent power if the first-of-its-kind plant was to go away, given limited capacity to connect to new wind and solar projects in the region.

Now that the project is dead, SMR skeptics say the municipalities should find those cleaner power sources and focus on proven technologies. “One of the stories they’ve kept telling people was that the SMR was going to be a lot cheaper than large-scale nuclear,” David Schlissel, an analyst at the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Fiscal Analysis, told WIRED last month. “It isn’t true.”

UAMPS spokesperson Jessica Stewart told WIRED that the utility group would expand its investments in a major wind farm project and pursue other contracts for geothermal, solar, battery, and natural gas projects………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.wired.com/story/first-small-scale-nuclear-plant-us-nuscale-canceled/

November 12, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment