Analysis: Small Modular Reactors Are Decades Away. That Suits the Fossil Lobby Just Fine.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the fossil fuel lobby in all three countries is keen to support nuclear power as “one of the answers to climate change.” Unlike renewables that can be deployed quickly, new nuclear power is decades away, providing breathing space for a dying industry to go on exploiting fossil fuels while nuclear power plants are built.
Analysis: Small Modular Reactors Are Decades Away. That Suits the Fossil Lobby Just Fine. https://www.theenergymix.com/2021/12/01/analysis-small-modular-reactors-are-decades-away-that-suits-the-fossil-lobby-just-fine/December 1, 2021
Primary Author: Paul Brown @pbrown4348 Media outlets and the energy journalists employed by them seem to have lost their critical faculties when it comes to writing about small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), according to critics who think the industry has no hope of delivering on its promises to build a new generation of power stations.
In the build-up to the climate talks at COP 26 in Glasgow, through the negotiations and afterwards, small modular reactors were repeatedly discussed enthusiastically in newspaper articles, government announcements, and by the nuclear industry.
In every article or press release these reactors, which in the UK have yet to leave the drawing board, were touted as a vital part of Britain’s efforts to reach zero emissions by 2050. The same treatment has been given to similar plans in Canada, France, and the United States.
Oil Price reported Rolls Royce, the British engineering giant, was “breathing life back into the nuclear industry” by promising the first reactor in operation by the early 2030s and 10 by 2035.
After months of hype, having been given £210 million of British government money and raised £250 million from private investors, Rolls Royce has finally applied to the UK licencing authority to have its design approved so construction can begin.
Rolls-Royce SMR has been established to deliver a low-cost, deployable, scalable, and investable program of new nuclear power plants,” said CEO Tom Samson. “Our transformative approach to delivering nuclear power, based on predictable factory-built components, is unique, and the nuclear technology is proven. Investors see a tremendous opportunity to decarbonize the U.K. through stable baseload nuclear power, in addition to fulfilling a vital export need as countries identify nuclear as an opportunity to decarbonize.”
Meanwhile, campaigners and climate policy specialists at the Glasgow talks were looking for fast, deep cuts in carbon emissions before 2030, to enable the planet to have a chance of staying below 1.5°C. They cast Rolls-Royce’s plans, which have been re-announced repeatedly over several months, as another prime example of “greenwash” or “kicking the can down the road.”
Nor did campaigners at Glasgow miss the fact that Britain, Canada, and the United States, the three countries with most enthusiasm for small modular reactors, have something else in common: Their wish to go on extracting oil and gas that scientists say needs to be kept in the ground if the 1.5°C limit is not to be breached.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the fossil fuel lobby in all three countries is keen to support nuclear power as “one of the answers to climate change.” Unlike renewables that can be deployed quickly, new nuclear power is decades away, providing breathing space for a dying industry to go on exploiting fossil fuels while nuclear power plants are built.
Jonathon Porritt, chair of the U.K.’s Sustainable Development Commission between 2000 and 2009 and founder member of Forum for the Future, is scathing about the plans of the U.K. government and Rolls Royce.
He says taking the SMR through the Generic Design Assessment process takes at least four years, more likely five, and even if it passes it will take years to build, given the need to find sites and seek planning permission amid likely public opposition.
To be generous, Porritt said, it would be 2035 before the first was commissioned, let alone the five to 16 reactors Rolls Royce wants to build.
“It is therefore of zero benefit in terms of meeting the (British) government’s own target of a 78% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how many times ministers bang this particular drum, or how many times deplorably gullible journalists in the BBC, Financial Times, Times, and the Daily Telegraph suck it all up. Moonshine is still moonshine.”
“It’s all such a pathetic waste of time—and of taxpayers’ money,” he added. “Whatever the time scale, SMRs will never compete with renewables plus storage.”
Porritt went on to discuss tidal stream energy using undersea turbines rather like wind turbines, which two British companies are developing with some success, and the even greater potential of using the tidal range—the height difference between low and high tide—to generate electricity to generate electricity through traditional turbines. Since Britain has the second-highest tides in the world after Canada and is surrounded by the sea, it has huge potential—but is ignored by the U.K. government.
“If our government was genuinely serious about energy security (instead of finding ways of propping up Rolls-Royce to support our nuclear weapons program), tidal power would be top of its list,” Porritt concluded.
Not all publications, however, agree with the mainstream British press about nuclear power. Under the headline “Nuclear Power Won’t Save the World—It Won’t Even Help”, published in the Green Energy Times, climate writer and retired computer engineer George Harvey said the cost estimates and timetables for nuclear power were never realistic.
“All told, we might say that putting money into nuclear power goes beyond being a monumental waste,” he wrote. “It detracts from the overarching issue of dealing with climate change by making that money unavailable for dealing with the problem using less expensive, more reliable energy that can be built far more quickly.”
New Name- Same Scam. NuScale small nuclear reactors become ‘VOYGR”, universities co-opted.
NuScale SMR plants become VOYGR 03 December 2021,
NuScale Power’s small modular reactor (SMR) power plants are to be named VOYGR, the company has announced. The company is working towards commercialising the technology and aims to be ready to deliver the first VOYGR plant to public power consortium Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems’ Carbon Free Power Project by the end of the decade………
UAMPS earlier this year said it expects to submit a combined licence application for the Carbon Free Power Project – currently envisaged as a six-module plant – to the NRC in 2024. The plant is to be located on a site at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Idaho National Laboratory…….
Training centre
NuScale has now opened a third university-based centre to provide training and outreach opportunities through simulated, real-world nuclear power plant operation scenarios. The NuScale Energy Exploration (E2) Center, opened in collaboration with the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, is at the Center for Advanced Small Modular and Micro Reactors located in College Station, Texas, and uses state-of-the-art computer modelling within a simulation of the control room of a 12-unit NuScale power plant control.
Previous E2 Centers were opened at Oregon State University, in November 2020, and at the University of Idaho, in August 2021. The centres are supported by a 2019 DOE grant to broaden the understanding of advanced nuclear technology in a control room setting. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/NuScale-SMR-plants-become-VOYGR
France joins the Small Nuclear Reactor frenzy, bringing out its odd version ”NAAREA”
French engineering group Assystem has signed a cooperation agreement with
newly-created French micro-reactor developer Naarea to build its
ultra-compact eXtra Small Modular Reactor (XSMR). Dassault Systèmes is to
supply Naarea with a cloud-based platform on which to virtually design the
1 to 40 MW molten salt reactor. Naarea expects the first units of XSMR to
be produced by 2030.
The company says its ultra-compact molten salt reactor uses “the untapped potential of used radioactive materials, and thorium, unused mining waste.” Naarea noted, “The current stocks of these two wastes will supply the energy needs of humanity for thousands of years, and reconcile humanity with its future.”
World Nuclear News 3rd Dec 2021
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Assystem-to-cooperate-with-Naarea-on-micro-reactor
Canada to get its version of the mythical beast – the Small Nuclear Reactor – GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) BWRX-300
Ontario Power Generation (OPG) will build a GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) BWRX-300 small modular reactor (SMR) at its Darlington Nuclear Station in Clarington, Ontario, marking a major triumph for the nuclear vendor in a stiff competition for the much-watched utility-scale project.
OPG announced the selection of the GE Hitachi BWRX-300 SMR over competitors X-energy and Terrestrial Energy in a live stream on Dec. 2. The utility said it will now work with GE Hitachi on the SMR engineering, design, planning, preparing the licensing and permitting materials, and performing site preparation activities. The companies are targeting a “mutual goal of constructing Canada’s first commercial, grid-scale SMR, projected to be completed as early as 2028.” Site preparation, which will include
“installation of the necessary construction services,” is slated to begin in the spring of 2022, pending appropriate approvals. OPG additionally said it will apply to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
(CNSC) for a License to Construct the SMR by the end of 2022.
Power Mag 2nd Dec 2021
Gordon Edwards discusses a Canadian documentary on the ”Nuclear Revival” and small nuclear reactors.
Gordon Edwards, 1 December 21, On November 24, 2021, APTN broadcast a half-hour TV documentary about High Level Nuclear Waste in Canada, with some extra attention paid to the new, unorthodox irradiated fuels that would result from the proposed new reactors called SMRs. Here is a link to the program, entitled Nuclear Revival: https://youtu.be/uLhPwAWejzc
A couple of observations that crossed my mind while watching the report by Journalist Christopher Read –
(1) The fuel bundles should be thought of as CONTAINERS of the actual radioactive wastes, which are locked up inside those solid bundles. There are many different radioactive elements (all of them human-made, most of them not found in unspoiled nature) that can escape from the fuel bundles as gases, liquids or solids. They all have different chemical and biological properties but they are all cancer-causing elements and can damage genetic materials like DNA molecules.
Even though the fuel bundles may not move an inch from where they have been emplaced, these other materials can leak out or leach out and find their way to the environment of living things. Time is on their side!! Damaged fuel bundles are analogous to a broken bottle – the container is still there, but the contents (some at least) have escaped.
(2) Concerning SMRs, even if these new nuclear reactors all worked very well, which is doubtful, they will be terribly expensive and very slow to reach a level of commercial deployment (and profitability) – at least 10 to 20 years – so they are too costly and too slow to respond to the climate crisis TODAY.
Solar and wind are much cheaper than nuclear, they are proven and can be quickly deployed, while energy efficiency measures are even cheaper and even faster to implement. We do not yet know how much progress can be made using these alternatives but clearly they should have the first priority – with nuclear as a wait-and-see backup possibility which very likely will not be needed at all (as in the case of Germany, which has phased out nuclear – nearly finished – and now is focussed on phasing out coal, using renewables and efficiency.)
UK government secretive about its Net Zero strategy, especially on tax-payer funded projects like small nuclear power plants.
UK refuses to release document showing Net Zero Strategy CO2 savings, New Scientist, 1 December 2021, By Adam Vaughan
The UK government Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has turned down a freedom of information request that would allow independent scrutiny of its plan for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
The UK government has refused a freedom of information request to release a spreadsheet showing how much its landmark Net Zero Strategy will cut carbon emissions for individual measures, such as backing a new nuclear power station and fitting new electric car chargers.
Withholding the document smacks of “secrecy and subterfuge” and prevents the public from being able to interrogate the estimated impacts of the measures, says Ed Matthew at climate change think tank E3G.
The publication of the government’s Net Zero Strategy on 19 October was a key moment ahead of the COP26 climate summit, laying out in detail how the UK plans to reach its 2050 commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years.
Previous government blueprints for decarbonisation, such as the 2020 10-point green plan and 2017 clean growth strategy, have spelled out estimates of exactly how much individual policies will cut emissions. But the Net Zero Strategy failed to provide any such breakdown, which observers said showed a lack of transparency that hampered independent scrutiny.
Government officials conceded that there was a spreadsheet containing all the figures, but said they wouldn’t release it. Now, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has refused a freedom of information request by New Scientist to publish the document. It declined the request on the grounds that it involves the disclosure of internal communications…………….
The strategy does show top-level estimates of how much emissions will change for different sectors, such as power, buildings and farming, between now and 2050. But it doesn’t break down individual measures, including backing new hydrogen production or developing new small nuclear plants, both of which will be supported by hundreds of millions of pounds in public funding.
“Ministers are behaving like a shady dealer asking customers to buy a product without seeing it first,” says John Sauven at Greenpeace UK. He is calling on BEIS to publish the spreadsheet: “The best thing would be for the government to release the numbers behind the plan and allow experts to kick the tyres on it”.
The document is likely to include estimates of how extensively various technologies will be employed and their impacts on greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. There may be a mismatch between what the government has committed to publicly, such as a Conservative party manifesto pledge to quadruple offshore wind capacity by 2030, and the estimates that are being withheld, for example………..
New Scientist has appealed the decision not to publish the document. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2299318-uk-refuses-to-release-document-showing-net-zero-strategy-co2-savings/#ixzz7Drfyfmii
Global heating brings easier Arctic passage for Russia’s floating nuclear power plant to open up Arctic for more fossil fuel mining, more global heating.
World’s first floating nuclear power plant fuels Russia’s Arctic ambitions Ft.com Remote Siberian port lies at centre of plans to open up shipping and reach valuable resources © Nastassia Astrasheuskaya/FT | The Akademik Lomonosov nuclear power plant Share on twitter (opens new window) Share on facebook (opens new window) Share on linkedin (opens new window) Save Nastassia Astrasheuskaya in Pevek YESTERDAY
Moored off the small Arctic town of Pevek is the Akademik Lomonosov — the world’s first floating nuclear power plant and a sign of how President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions for Russia’s far east are taking shape. This port on the northern coast of Siberia was once notorious as a Soviet gulag. These days it is part of Moscow’s plan to open up a major shipping lane through the Arctic and bring natural resources within easier reach. Pevek’s harbour is only ice-free for four months a year but is intended to become a hub for commercial shipping on the so-called Northern Sea Route as climate change gradually eases the passage through the Arctic. And the power provided by the Akademik Lomonosov is intended to help Pevek become a gateway to Chukotka, a region close to Alaska and rich in gold, silver, copper, lithium and other metals…………
Few in Pevek seem concerned by the nuclear reactor in the harbour. “Fear? We have none. Perhaps Russians are not afraid of anything any more. We have seen and lived through everything. We have to be optimistic,” said Igor Ranav, a locally born businessman. “We were told the plant is made with the latest technology and it is safe, and I hope so.”
Development of the NSR is in the hands of Rosatom, the state nuclear corporation. As well as commissioning the Akademik Lomonosov, Rosatom is also in charge of nuclear-powered icebreakers that the company expects will help to open up year-round Arctic navigation by the middle of the decade. …………
Developing Chukotka along with the rest of the Arctic has long been a goal for Putin and Russia, which this week is hosting a plenary meeting of the Arctic Council, where the eight countries of the region are represented. “Russia should expand through the Arctic, as this is where it has its main mineral resources,” Putin said in 2017, when Russia first produced liquefied natural gas in the Arctic and exported it via the NSR. ……………
By mid-century, the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institut expects ice levels to lose another two-thirds in the summer, and to halve in winter. The warming ocean is expected to help cut shipment cost. Less ice means fewer icebreakers and faster journeys.
The warming ocean is expected to help cut shipment cost. Less ice means fewer icebreakers and faster journeys…………….. https://www.ft.com/content/f5d25126-94fc-41fc-bc35-341df0560f4d
The nuclear consequences of cyber vulnerabilities
The nuclear consequences of cyber vulnerabilities, https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/the-nuclear-consequences-of-cyber-vulnerabilities/ Wilfred Wan |Researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), 29 Nov 21,
A recent report about a massive cyber surveillance campaign allegedly conducted by Russian intelligence against US government agencies reflects disturbing trends in cyberspace. The number of reported data breaches in 2021 is on pace to set a record, with government entities constituting the most targeted sector, and global supply chains increasingly impacted. The planning and sophistication that characterizes some of these operations in recent years also suggest more frequent State-level involvement, underlining the fact that cyber—or information security—capabilities increasingly constitute part of national strategic toolkits.
Operations in cyberspace have also targeted elements of the nuclear weapons enterprise across states. Recent known cases include the discovery in December 2020 of “long duration activity” against the US National Nuclear Security Administration (responsible for the management of the US stockpile), and in April 2021 of operations against a firm linked to the design of Russian nuclear submarines. In neither instance was there any indication that functions related to nuclear weapons systems were impacted.
Yet these revelations should heighten concerns beyond the states targeted, as the existence of these operations could have implications for potential nuclear weapon use. Cyber operations of the kind cited are unlikely to cause detonation events directly. Yet operations that successfully interact with nuclear forces can undermine states’ confidence in their nuclear deterrence capability or credibility, which can trigger forceful military response and even prompt ‘use it or lose it’ nuclear dilemmas. The clearest path to this end involves intrusions into weapons systems themselves. This is not far-fetched. In limited testing with “relatively simple tools and techniques”, the US Department of Defense in 2018 “routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities” in their weapons systems under development. Other nuclear-armed states are likely to be similarly vulnerable.
Other infringements on deterrence include cyber operations that impact nuclear command, control, and communication. Increased digitalization is likely to create new vulnerabilities, exacerbated by reliance on the supply chain. Even systems isolated from the internet can be compromised. The militarization of cyberspace—and a legacy of Cold War electronic warfare — also raises the possibility that adversaries could now induce the kind of malfunctions (such as erroneous warnings in early warning systems) that in the past have fuelled several nuclear ‘close calls’. Additionally, cyber operations that amplify conventional capabilities to evade radar and air or missile defence may increase nuclear force vulnerability, real or perceived.
The reason why such intrusions may escalate to a scale even beyond the intentions of perpetrators centres on a lack of clarity around so-called cyber ‘red lines’. Several nuclear-armed states have acknowledged the possibility of escalation linked to the cyber domain, or in their nuclear doctrines open the door to use in response to cyber operations. Further precision on thresholds is generally absent, with deliberate ambiguity held in service of deterrence credibility. Yet notions of achievable strategic stability are undermined by the secretive nature of cyber operations, the many potential points of entry for cyber operations, and context-dependent concepts such as ‘critical infrastructure’. Cyber-nuclear interactions open the door for misperception, miscalculation, or misunderstanding.
Reducing cyber-nuclear risks requires preventing interactions between cyber operations and nuclear forces; it also requires mitigating the consequences of interactions when they do take place. Developments in cyber space suggest the potential development of voluntary ‘rules of the road’ that can support the former. Last month the US and Russia submitted a joint resolution to the UN General Assembly (co-sponsored by 104 States) on responsible behaviour in cyberspace. Cyberspace policy also features in ongoing US-Russia strategic stability talks; President Biden in June 2021 had provided President Putin a list of critical infrastructure sectors meant to be “off-limits” from cyber operations. Such negotiations of State behaviours would be significant but would only address part of the risk picture.
It is incumbent on nuclear-armed states to strengthen the cyber security of their weapons and related systems and to elaborate standards across the entirety of their supply chains. Dialogue among nuclear-armed and nuclear-allied states can inform common understandings of risk perceptions, and chip away at the ambiguity around red lines. States can also look to establish guard rails through the conflict-prevention toolkit. In fact, information exchange around cyber military exercises, memorandums of understanding on engagement with communications and radar systems, and political declarations that nuclear command and control lies outside cyber bounds can build a foundation for formal agreements down the line.
Cyber-nuclear interactions are likely to increase given trends in the militarisation of the cyber domain and the digitalisation of nuclear weapons systems. The secrecy across both domains presents significant challenges: not only in their regulation but also to underlining the urgency of the situation and creating the prerequisite momentum for such action. After all, the cyber equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis is unlikely to ever play out in public. Yet the very real risk of cyber-nuclear interactions driving inadvertent nuclear war should provide ready incentive for immediate action.
Wilfred Wan is the co-author of a new UNIDIR report on The Cyber-Nuclear Nexus: Interactions and Risks.
”Nuclear Revival” for Canada? Gordon Edwards discusses the latest propaganda.
Gordon Edwards, 27 Nov 21, Christopher Read’s latest half-hour documentary on the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) discusses its efforts to convince some small community in Ontario to receive all of Canada’s high level radioactive wastes for deep burial.
These are the most toxic materials ever produced by any industry. Of the hundreds of kinds of radioactive poisons contained in the used nuclear fuel, only a handful existed on Earth in significant amounts before 1939. They are created in large quantities inside nuclear reactors.
NWMO is owned by the same companies that make the radioactive poisons in the first place – and they have no intention of stopping. They want to keep right on mass-producing the highly dangerous byproducts indefinitely. Because they have to wait 30 years before moving these deadly wastes – they are literally and figuratively “too hot” to move sooner — there will always be a catastrophic amount left unburied at the surface no matter how fast they bury the older, somewhat cooler wastes.
Meanwhile they will be burdening communities with a permanent radioactive legacy, including contamination caused by unpacking and repackaging millions of embrittled fuel bundles right at the surface, beside the proposed waste dump. Any damage to any of these fuel bundles during handling, even small cracks, will allow radioactive materials to escape and some of it will inevitably enter the sir we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, or the soil we walk on.
New reactors are untested, exorbitantly expensive, and will take 10 to 20 years to become available, if ever. They are a DDD = Dirty, Dangerous Distraction from the real job of cutting greenhouse gases now, not 10 years from now. Energy efficiency and renewables can be implemented in a single building season. Wind and solar and efficiency measures are far cheaper and much faster to implement than new nuclear.
When your house is on fire, it is time to grab a bucket or a fire hose and pour water on it – out the fire out! This is no time to sit down and design a new, improved sprinkler system for future use.
Climate change is here now. Action is urgent.
Investing in new nuclear plants is just “kicking the can down the road”. Canada’s Environment Commissioner points out that Canada has the worst record for fighting climate change of any country in the G7, as our greenhouse gas emissions have increased steadily since Trudeau was first elected in 2915. Five of the G7 countries have reduced their GHG emissions, while the sixth has increased GHG emissions at a much slower rate than Canada has.
To invest in unproven and dangerous nuclear plants now will guarantee that no progress will be made for at least 10 to 20 years, minimum. And it will give us more radioactive waste, much of it even more dangerous than the waste we already have. Can we afford to encourage this kind of behaviour with lavish government subsidies?
Small modular reactors not the solution
Small modular reactors not the solution – German nuclear authority assessments,
NEWS10 Mar 2021, Kerstine Appunn, Using a large fleet of small modular reactors (SMR) to secure climate neutral electricity supply in the future – as proposed by billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates – poses many unsolved problems and security risks, two researcher assessments commissioned by the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE) have found according to a report by Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). SMR proponents claim that, once produced in bulk, these small plants are cheaper and safer thanks to advanced reactor designs and can be operated with converted short-lived radioactive materials, solving the waste problem. But the two reports, seen by SZ, conclude that SMR “carry enormous risks with regard to the proliferation of weapons-grade materials and will probably never be as cheap as their advocates claim”, Michael Bauchmüller writes.
The paper by the Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut) found that in order to replace the 400 or so large reactors today, “many thousands to tens of thousands of SMR plants” would have to be built. But this raises questions for proliferation, the spread of dangerous nuclear material.
The second assessment by researchers from the Institute for Safety and Risk Sciences, at the Vienna University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, on nuclear waste aspects of SMR found in three scenarios that a repository for nuclear waste would remain necessary, and that the amount of low and medium level radioactive waste would increase “massively” during the dismantling of nuclear facilities.
Germany will shut down its last nuclear power plant by the end of 2022, according to the government’s phase-out legislation which is supported by a majority of the population. After the nuclear disaster in Fukushima ten years ago, Angela Merkel’s government decided to accelerate the phase-out of nuclear power in Germany where opposition to nuclear plants was one of the key causes leading to the founding of the country’s Green Party. Nuclear power is compensated for by expanding renewable sources wind, solar PV and biogas, as Germany strives for a climate neutral power supply by 2040 or 2050 at the latest.
Hurdles ahead for Rolls Royce small nuclear reactor development.
“SMR proponents argue that they can make up for the lost economies of scale by savings through mass manufacture in factories and resultant learning. But, to achieve such savings, these reactors have to be manufactured by the thousands, even under very optimistic assumptions about rates of learning.”
The Rolls Royce SMR design is not exactly small at 470 MWe.
SafeEnergy E Journal No.92. December 21 Rolls Royce’s Small Modular Reactors On 9th November the Government announced that it would back the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor with £210m in funding. Matched by private sector funding of over £250 million, this investment will be used to further develop SMR design and start the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process
The Government claims that SMRs have the potential to be less expensive to build than traditional nuclear power plants because of their smaller size, and because the modular nature of the components offers the potential for parts to be produced in dedicated factories and shipped by road to site – reducing construction time and cost.
But the reason why existing reactors are large is precisely to derive economies of scale: why smaller reactors should be more economic is problematic. Nuclear proponents allege that assembly-line technology will be used in reactor construction but this has yet to be shown in practice anywhere in the world.
Some say that SMRs are little more than wishful thinking. For example, Professor MV Ramana ‒ Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia – states:
“SMR proponents argue that they can make up for the lost economies of scale by savings through mass manufacture in factories and resultant learning. But, to achieve such savings, these reactors have to be manufactured by the thousands, even under very optimistic assumptions about rates of learning.” (1)
The Rolls Royce SMR design is not exactly small at 470 MWe. It is proposing to build 16 reactors at an expected cost around £1.8bn – £2.2bn and producing power at £40-60/MWh over 60 yrs. (2)
As well as the Government funding, Rolls-Royce has been backed by a consortium of private investors. The creation of the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) business was announced following a £195m cash injection from BNF Resources, and Exelon Generation to fund the plans over the next three years.(3)
Rolls Royce has submitted the SMR design to the GDA regulatory process, in a bid to secure clearance from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the UK’s nuclear and environmental regulatory bodies. It expects the process to take around four to five years, during which time it plans to “engage in a range of parallel activities” including the SMR factory development, potential siting for future nuclear plants, and “commercial discussions”. (4)
Before the ONR approval process begins, the company must first get clearance from the government to submit its designs, which is expected by around March next year. (5)
As expected, Moorside, Wylfa and Trawsfynydd have all been mentioned as potential sites for an SMR. Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen also wants Hartlepool to be on the list. (6) https://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/SafeEnergy_No92.pdf
What might trip up the Rolls Royce plan for small nuclear reactors?
Fix the Planet newsletter: Can small nuclear power go big? Small modular reactors are being pitched as an affordable and fast way to decarbonise power grids but questions about the technology abound, New Scientist EARTH, 25 November 2021, By Adam Vaughan
”……… nuclear power did have a showing in Glasgow, at official events in the conference, deals on the sidelines and cropping up as a subject during press briefings.
One new technology popped up a few times: small modular reactors (SMRs), mini nuclear plants that would be built in a factory and transported to a site for assembly. A UK consortium led by Rolls-Royce wants to build a fleet in the country to export around the world as a low carbon complement to renewables. During COP26 the consortium received £210 million from the UK government. More private investment is expected soon.
Yet questions abound. Why should this technology succeed where large nuclear plants have failed to take off in recent years, beyond China? If they are small, will they make a sizeable enough dent in emissions? And will they arrive in time to make a difference to a rapidly warming world?……
What exactly is planned?
The reactors that Rolls-Royce SMR wants to build have been six years in development, with their roots in ones the company previously built for nuclear submarines. Despite being billed as small, the new reactor design is fairly large. Each would have 470 megawatts of capacity, a good deal bigger than the 300 MW usually seen as the ceiling for an SMR.
The consortium hopes to initially build four plants on existing nuclear sites around the UK. Ultimately it wants a fleet of 16 , enough to replace the amount of nuclear capacity expected to be lost in the UK this decade as ageing atomic plants retire. Later down the line, the SMRs could be exported around the world too.
Alastair Evans at Rolls-Royce SMR. says the first SMR would cost about £2.3 billion and could be operational by 2031. Later versions may fall to £1.8 billion, he claims. That may seem cheap compared to Hinkley, but an offshore wind farm with twice the capacity costs about £1 billion today, and that figure will be even lower in a decade’s time………….
What might trip them up?
SMRs have been in development for years but have made little inroads to date. The UK government has been talking about them for much of the past decade, with nothing to show. Progress elsewhere around the world has been slow, too. Outside of Russia there are no commercial SMRs connected to power grids. Even China, one of the few countries that has built new nuclear plants in recent years, only started construction of a demo SMR earlier this year, four years late. It wasn’t until last year that leading US firm NuScale had its design licensed by US authorities.
Paul Dorfman at the non-profit Nuclear Consulting Group, a body of academics critical of nuclear power, says the nuclear industry has always argued economies of scale will bring down costs so it is hard to see why going small will work. He says modularisation – making the reactors in factories – will only bring down costs if those factories have a full order book, which may not materialise. “It’s chicken and egg on the supply chain,” he says. He also notes the plants will still create radioactive waste (something another potential next gen nuclear technology, fusion, does not). And he fears nuclear sites near coasts and rivers will be increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as storm surges as seas rise.
What’s next? The Rolls-Royce SMR group this month submitted its reactor design for approval by the UK nuclear regulator, a process that could take around five years. It now needs to pick three locations for factories and start constructing them. The group also needs to win a Contract for Difference from the UK government, a guaranteed floor price for the electricity generated by the SMRs…….. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2299113-fix-the-planet-newsletter-can-small-nuclear-power-go-big/
Nuclear fusion for UK – to save the dying nuclear industry, and UK as a nuclear weapons state?
SafeEnergy E Journal No.92. December 21, Fusion Four sites in England and one in Scotland are on the final shortlist of sites to be the home of the UK’s prototype fusion energy plant. The government is backing plans for the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (Step) with a final decision on its location expected at the end of 2022. The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) hope the plant will be operational by the early 2040s. The five shortlisted sites are: Ardeer, North Ayrshire; Goole, East Riding of Yorkshire; Moorside, Cumbria; Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire; Severn Edge, Gloucestershire; They were whittled down from a longlist of 15 sites, which included Chapelcross near Annan and Dounreay. (1 …………
The Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has said that this latest effort to extol the virtues of nuclear fusion as a “low carbon” source of energy is to keep the industry “alive” due to the UK being a “nuclear weapon state”. (5)………https://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/SafeEnergy_No92.pdf
Are small nuclear reactors actually small, safe, economic ?
Can Small Nuclear Reactors Really Help The Climate? QuickTake, Jonathan Tirone 27 Nov 2021 (Bloomberg) — Much of the world has been turning away from nuclear power, with its aging plants, legacy of meltdowns and radioactive waste. But some governments, big companies and billionaires including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are convinced the technology can help save the planet.
1. How small is small? Of the more than 70 such reactors that the International Atomic Energy Agency lists as in some stage of design or development, the smallest are less than 5 meters (16 feet) in diameter and 10 meters in height. (The plant that would be built to operate the reactor would be bigger, of course.) SMRs typically have less than 300 megawatts of generating capacity, about a third of that of existing reactors.
…………. Do SMRs already exist? The only ones currently in commercial operation are two 35-megawatt units on a floating power plant deployed by Russia in the Arctic in 2020. China expects to begin trials in 2026 on an SMR being built near an existing power plant on Hainan island. The first commercial SMR project in the U.S., planned for the site of the Idaho National Laboratory, will consist of six reactors capable of producing a combined 462 megawatts. It’s supposed to be operational by the end of this decade.
…………….. smaller reactors would ideally be located closer to population centers, increasing the possible danger from an accident. And like their larger brethren, SMRs produce radioactive waste that must be stored safely for centuries.
………….. What are the economic challenges? Cost competitiveness is an uphill climb. U.S. manufacturer NuScale Power LLC, to cite one example, is aiming for an SMR that can sell power for $55 per megawatt-hour. Yet wind power in much of the world is now about $44 a megawatt-hour, solar is $50, and in some regions, renewable energy will be below $20 a megawatt-hour by the end of the decade, according to BloombergNEF. A 2020 study by professors at the University of British Columbia found that on a lifetime basis, the cost of electricity produced by SMRs could be 10 times greater than the cost of electricity produced by diesel fuel.
Who’s investing in SMRs? Electricite de France, China National Nuclear, Japan’s Toshiba and Russia’s Rosatom are pushing SMR designs, as is NuScale. Gates and Buffett have teamed up to build and test a reactor at an abandoned coal plant in Wyoming. Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc raised 455 million pounds ($608 million) to fund the development of SMRs, with almost half of the financing coming from the U.K government.
Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/quicktakes/can-small-nuclear-reactors-really-help-the-climate-quicktake
Nuclear Fusion Recedes Into Far Future For The 57th Time
Fusion Recedes Into Far Future For The 57th Time, Clean Technica, Fusion has an amazing future as a source of energy. In space craft beyond the orbit of Jupiter sometime in the next two centuries. By Michael Barnard, November 9, 2021 Fusion has an amazing future as a source of energy. Which is to say, in space craft beyond the orbit of Jupiter, sometime in the next two centuries. Here on Earth? Not so much. At least, that’s my opinion.
Nuclear electrical generation has 2.5 paths. The first is nuclear fission, the part that is the major electrical generation source that provides about 10% of the electricity in the world today.
And then there’s fusion. Where fission splits atoms, fusion merges them. Instead of radioactive fuel, there’s a lot of radioactive emissions from the merging of things like hydrogen-3, deuterium, and tritium that irradiates the containment structures. Lower radioactive waste that doesn’t last as long, but still radioactive waste for those who think that’s a concern…….
fusion generation of electricity, as opposed to big honking nuclear weapons using fusion, is a perpetual source of interest. When Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, talked about nuclear being “too cheap to meter” in 1954, he was talking about fusion, not fission. Like everyone since the mid-1950s, he assumed that fusion would be generating power in 20 years.
And so here we are, 67 years later. How is fusion doing?
Let’s start with the only credible fusion project on the planet, the ITER Tokamak project. It’s been around for decades. It planted its roots in 1985 with Gorbachev and Reagan. 35 countries are involved. Oddly, ITER isn’t an acronym, it’s Latin for “The Way,” a typically optimistic and indeed somewhat arrogant assumption about its place in the universe.
It’s supposed to light up around 2040. That’s so far away I hadn’t bothered to think much about it, as we have to decarbonize well over 50% of our economy long before that. As a result, I had a lazy read on it. I had assumed, as most press and indeed pretty much everyone involved with it asserted, that it would be generating more energy than it consumed, when it finally lit up…………..
ITER will require about 200 MW of energy input in total running as it creates 500 MW of heat. But the exergy of heat means that if it were tapped, it would only return about 200 MW of electricity. So it might be a perpetual motion machine, but one that wouldn’t do anything more than keep its lights running as long as you fed it tritium, about $140 million worth of the stuff a year.
And it gets worse. ITER is planning at the end of this process to maintain this for less than 3000 seconds at a time. That’s 50 minutes. This is at the end of the process. As they build up to less than an hour, mostly they’ll be working on fusion that lasts five minutes, several times a day. It’s a very expensive physics experiment that will not produce climate-friendly energy. It’s going to teach us a bunch, which I completely respect, but it’s not going to help us deal with climate change.
I expected more from ITER. Not much more. I mean, it is a million-component fission reactor expected to light up in 2040 and not generate any electricity at that point. But I had assumed based on all the press that it would generate more electricity than it used to operate if you bolted a boiler and some turbines to it, even if it were grossly expensive. Apparently not. Just grossly expensive, no net new electricity………..
However, ITER is not the only fusion reactor in the game. There are startups! And we all know startups make no promises that they can’t keep and are excellent at disclosure.
Like Helion. They have a photo-shopped peanut asserting it’s a 6th prototype with regenerative power creation that’s never achieved fusion that is backed by Peter Thiel! It just received $500 million more of VC funding, with an option to get up to $2.2 billion if they hit their targets!
I’m not sure if I could have made up a paragraph less likely to make me think that there was some there there.
The website is likely intentionally lacking in anything approaching detail. It’s low-information and VC friendly, which in the energy space is Thiel’s jam. He’s the guy who, despite being partnered with Elon Musk, has never realized that electrical generation was already being disrupted by wind and solar. His acolytes in startups disrupting energy crashed and burned, because he and they never bothered to do the hard work of understanding how electricity actually works at grid scale. At least Musk was solid on solar, although he got the wrong end of it and hasn’t quite figured that out yet.
While Helion has achieved 100 million degrees Celsius, it’s with a high-energy laser pulse — not new ideas, in fact 1950s ideas, just easier now — and they are incredibly coy about duration. The assumption to be taken is that it lasts for a picosecond at a time. They talk about their prototype having worked for months, but that means it’s maintaining a vacuum and occasionally creating plasma, a precursor to fueled fusion. Many years and tens of millions of dollars in, they are promising the moon, and soon. And to be clear, they are well behind on their initial schedule…………..
fusion generating electricity appears to be as far away as ever. https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/09/breaking-news-fusion-recedes-into-far-future-for-the-57th-time/
1 This Month
Shut down the radiation-damaged Heysham nuclear reactors now
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
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