NuScale Power the canary in the small modular nuclear reactor market
SMRs are being marketed as a solution to the climate crisis, but they’re already far more expensive and take much longer to build than renewable and storage resources – that we already have.
Utility Dive, David Schlissel, 21 Mar 23, Davis Schlissel is the Institute for Energy Economics anf Financial Analysis director of resource planning analysis.
NuScale is hoping to be among the first of about a dozen companies trying to take advantage of the much-hyped market for small modular nuclear reactors or SMR. So far, however, the Oregon-based company is looking like the first canary in the coal-mine.
Considered a leader in the new technology, NuScale is marketing its SMR project by claiming that the reactor design project will save time and money – persistent problems for traditional large nuclear plants.
But NuScale and the Utah Municipal Power Systems, its partner in an SMR project planned for Idaho, announced early in January, that the target price for the power from their proposed modular reactor had risen by 53% from $58/MWh to $89/MWh……..
The announcement has serious implications for all would-be SMR manufacturers………………
the new $89/MWh target price already means that power from the NuScale SMR will be much more expensive than renewable and storage resources even with an estimated $4.2 billion in tax-payer subsidies.
……………………………….. The gap is only going to get larger as the costs of building SMRs rise and costs of renewables and storage continue to decline.
………….. Using SMRs as backups for renewables will not be financially feasible
………………………………….evryone – utilities, ratepayers, legislators, federal officials and the general public, should be very sceptical about theindustry’s current claim that the new SMRs will cost less and be built faster than previous designs. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuscale-power-small-modular-reactor-smr-ieefa-uamps/645554/
European Tiny Modular Reactor Deal Starts With Absurdly Expensive Electricity
Already 2.4 times as expensive as very, very expensive Hinkley. First of a kind, so very likely to double or more in price. Very unlikely to be built before 2040 due to long-tailed risks.
Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.
By Michael Barnard, 25 Mar 23, https://cleantechnica.com/2023/03/23/european-tiny-modular-reactor-deal-starts-with-absurdly-expensive-electricity/
Supposedly a European energy deal has been reached in which a US firm sells a bunch of tiny nuclear reactors to European countries at an enormous price per GW. It’s hard to think that anybody would ink the deal as described.
It was a Bloomberg piece, and Bloomberg normally gets the facts right, although Bloomberg New Energy Finance gets the framing right far more often. And a bit of evaluation seems to confirm the basics. So let’s tear it apart.
Let’s start with small modular nuclear reactors (SMR). The premise is that they will be a lot cheaper than big nuclear reactors because, you know, modularity. Anything you can manufacture in large numbers drops in price, typically by 20% to 27% for every doubling of units. That’s a truism known as Wright’s Law after the first management consultant who observed it, the experience curve per Boston Consulting Group which happily stole and rebranded it or just the learning curve.
There are a bunch of problems with this premise when it comes to nuclear electricity generation. I’ve written about them, had my content peer-reviewed and included in text books, and debated them with nuclear industry proponents for audiences of a couple of hundred institutional investors likely representing funds worth close to a trillion, so I’m just going to quote myself:
Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.
As I discussed with Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, megaprojects expert and author of How Big Things Get Done recently, small modular reactor firms are trying to hunt for an optimized point on the continuum between the efficiencies of big thermal generation and modularity, and I don’t think they are going to find it.
And that’s really true for Last Energy if this reporting is remotely accurate. So what’s the story? Well, apparently they’ve signed a $19 billion deal to supply 34 nuclear reactors that are 20 MW each. Apparently they are going to at least Poland and the UK, although regulatory approval stands in their way.
The first thing that caught my eye was the MW capacity. 34 reactors of 20 MW each only adds up to 680 MW of nameplate capacity. That’s smaller than a billion dollar offshore wind farm that takes ten months to build.
Side note: Nuclear nameplate capacities are usually reported with units of MWe, or megawatts of electricity. That’s because their thermal energy output is perhaps three times the size, but meaningless, as all we care about is the electricity. I just stick with MW usually because the best comparison is to wind and solar which don’t create and waste a lot of heat. However, at 20 MWe, the tininess of the reactor and related thermal generation suggests that the efficiency of turning heat into electricity is probably much worse. That’s the point about thermal generation liking to scale and why everyone building nuclear went bigger in the 1970s and 1980s so that it wouldn’t be as expensive.
So, 20 MW. Is that accurate? I went to their public website, and sure enough, that’s the size. It’s their only claimed product, although they have built and delivered none of them anywhere.
The second thing that caught my attention was the eye-watering price tag, $19 billion. That seems really high even for nuclear, and especially high for only 680 MW.
Maybe this would be reasonable if nuclear normally had capacity factors of 20%, and this tech was operating at 90%, but nuclear globally runs about 90% of the time. It has high uptime, which proponents overstate as an advantage, but is the reality. You can’t actually operate nuclear less than 90% of the time and have it be reasonably priced due to the cost of building the stuff.
How does this compare? Let’s pick the British Hinkley Point C nuclear expansion, one of the most expensive and slowest in the developed world. It is so expensive that the developers demanded and got about $150 per MWh wholesale guaranteed for 35 years with inflation bumps. This when offshore wind energy is running around $50 per MWh wholesale and onshore wind and solar are running around $30 per MWh wholesale. Yeah, Hinkley is absurdly expensive electricity.
Let’s take a walk through memory lane. Hinkley was supposed to deliver electricity for about $24 per MWh when it was originally proposed in 2008, and be in operation by now. Five times the cost per MWh accounting for inflation, so a clear miss. And the current plan is pretending that in 2027 it’s going to be grid-connected, but that’s undoubtedly 2028 at earliest, 20 years after it was originally set in motion, and 11 years after start of construction. So far, so nuclear.
Hinkley’s current cost projection — five years from grid connection, so incredibly likely to rise by billions — is about $40 billion. That’s a lot of amortization per MWh, hence the remarkably high wholesale price. As a reminder, Iceland, which runs 100% on renewables, is delivering consumer retail prices lower than this wholesale price. All of Canada is providing consumer rates below this wholesale cost, although recent news makes it clear that nuclear heavy Ontario are subsidizing consumer rates by US$4.4 billion annually to prevent revolt. Hmmm, is this a trend?
Surely Hinkley must be turning out to be more expensive than this SMR deal? Well, no. Hinkley is building two big, complex, next-generation EPR reactors with 1,630 MW capacity each. That’s 3,260 MW total capacity. That’s almost five times the capacity of the Last Energy SMRs. For only two times the cost.
The ratio is pretty clear. These SMRs will be about 2.4 times the cost per MWh of the very expensive Hinkley facility. All else being equal — and the only reason we have to think this won’t be equal is that nuclear costs always rise, so the $19 billion is likely to be closer to $40 billion — this is already about $360 per MWh wholesale prices for electricity.
What’s the consumer retail price of electricity in the UK? About $340. What about coal heavy Poland? $181.
Yes, the very first announcement of a nuclear deal, probably well over a decade before anything might be connected to the grid, has wholesale rates well over consumer retail rates today.
On original – image of project categories which meet time, budget, and benefits expectations vs ones that don’t, from How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner -(nuclear is the worst!)
This is the first version of new material from Flyvbjerg and his team. They have assembled over 16,000 megaprojects’ worth of data on budget, schedule, and asserted benefits vs actuals over 25 categories of projects. This is a view by likelihood of cost overruns. The top of the chart has the least likely categories to go over budget once the shovel hits the ground. The bottom has the categories most likely to go over budget, often by multiples of the original projections. You’ll note where nuclear lies.
SMRs are attempting to fix that by making a bunch of smaller, repeatable reactors instead of big ones. As I pointed out earlier, they are foregoing the efficiencies of being big enough to receive the benefits of physics for thermal generation in order to hunt for a point where modularity optimizes costs and risks sufficiently to make it economically viable.
However, at 2.4 times the cost per MWh of one of the most expensive nuclear generation projects on the planet, clearly they are nowhere near the field, never mind anywhere near the goal. As Flyvbjerg points out several times, first of a kind projects have massive long-talked risks, and Last Energy’s announcement has first of a kind in big neon screaming signage over every part of the deal.
Already 2.4 times as expensive as very, very expensive Hinkley. First of a kind, so very likely to double or more in price. Very unlikely to be built before 2040 due to long-tailed risks. Who exactly signed a deal like this, and why?
UPDATE:
Comments from Lyle Morton, Vice President of Marketing & Communications, Last Energy: Reaching out to clarify an important detail regarding the Last Energy announcement. The $19bn is not a cost figure but the total value of the electricity under contract over the duration of the 4 contracts — which range from 20-24 years.
My take: That’s still a ridiculous $160-$170 per MWh wholesale by the initial terms of the deals before all of the inevitable problems with first of a kind deployments. Even at $160-$170, I’ll believe this only when I see it in operation, at the price point specified, and delivering benefits as promised. I won’t be holding my breath.
The UK Budget pushes nuclear and CCS, and the military link with small nuclear reactors is now overt
‘nuclear submarines would be too costly to build and maintain without an “industrial base” largely funded by elevated consumer electricity bills’.
Renew Extra Weekly, 26 Mar 23
The UK spring budget announced investment of £20bn spread over the next two decades in carbon capture and support for nuclear, with a commitment to ‘spades in the ground on these projects from next year’ as energy security secretary, Grant Shapps, put it
…………………………………. boosting our own sources of clean generation is a must to shield us from future price shocks’. But it’s hard to see how investing in CCS will help- that is fossil based. And, like nuclear, it’s expensive. …………………………………………..
There was very little .. comfort….. in the Budget Red Book, even in the ‘Green Industries’ section (p.64-65). That focussed on CCS/CCUS and nuclear, with SMRs an initial target for the new Great British Nuclear programme, and nuclear ‘to be included in the green taxonomy, subject to consultation, encouraging private investment’.
No mention of the negative impact of the windfall tax (EGL) on renewables. Indeed there is no direct mention of renewables anywhere in the text, and no mention of energy saving, apart from indirectly via 2 year extension of the Climate Change Agreement scheme.
,…………………………………. Greenpeace said: ‘This misguided Budget shows the stranglehold fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies have on this government’.
……………………………………………………… For the moment, since the chancellor said in his budget speech that nuclear was ‘vital to meet our net-zero obligations’, he will be launching ‘the first’ competition for small modular reactors, to be run by Great British Nuclear and ‘completed by the end of this year’. Though Carbon Brief noted that, actually, ‘the government previously launched a £250m competition for small nuclear in 2015, but no winners were announced. Since then, it has offered various pots of money, including “up to” £210m for Rolls Royce to develop its reactor design and “up to” £170m for “advanced” modular reactors.’
In parallel, the Government will be looking to the inclusion nuclear power in the UK ‘Green Taxonomy’. But this isn’t a done deal yet, there will be consultation, and, as was pointed out in an answer to a Parliamentary Question from Carolyn Lucas, ‘with the support of the independent Green Technical Advisory Group and stakeholder engagement, we will take the time to get the taxonomy right to ensure it is usable and effective’. That may lead to quite a debate, as has happened in the EU where the inclusion of nuclear (and gas) in its green taxonomy has been very contentious.
In the UK context, would inclusion actually help? Not everyone thought so- from an investment perspective, the problems were economic not environmental. But, quite apart from being expensive, there were, actually, some environmental issues. Nuclear is low carbon, but not zero carbon. It leads to dangerous waste residues. The pro-nuclear lobby these days sets that against its assumed role in support of variable renewables, but that may not be realistic: nuclear plants are inflexible and get in the way- see my earlier post.
And so the somewhat tired old nuclear debate goes on. With though a new extension- a military and civil nuclear interaction. In the recent Defence Review, the government said that ‘we will proactively look for opportunities to align delivery of the civil and defence nuclear enterprises, seeking synergies where appropriate to ensure a coherent demand signal to our industry and academic partners.’ For University of Sussex Prof. Andy Stirling, that confirmed his view that ‘nuclear submarines would be too costly to build and maintain without an “industrial base” largely funded by elevated consumer electricity bills’.
It certainly does provide more evidence for co-dependence, with ‘joint expansion’ also possibly in mind. Well, whatever the intent, it’s arguably good that the military-civil link is now overt rather than hidden. But it does open up all sorts of strategic issues.
https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-uk-budget-pushes-nuclear-and-ccs.html
Bad news for NuScale.
The unpredictable costs of nuclear have stung another US pioneer. NuScale, which received regulatory approval in January for its Voygr design, is the first SMR to get final approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for deployment in the US.
At the same time as it announced approval, however, NuScale that the cost of its systems has expanded, so it now expects to deliver electricity at $90 per MWh, instead of the $55/MWh it initially promised.
That’s significant because, despite receiving $4.2 billion in subsidies, NuScale is now promising electricity which is much more expensive than that from renewable sources such as solar and wind. Without funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and previous government schemes, NuScale’s power would be around $120/MWh, according to Utility Dive.
From : Last Energy claims to have sold 24 nuclear reactors in the UK for £2.4 billion
Last’s 20MW disposable power plants join a queue of six companies selling SMRs in Britain more https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/last-energy-claims-to-have-sold-24-nuclear-reactors-in-the-uk-for-24-billion/
Rolls Royce marketing its mini nuclear reactors to Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, but deals could collapse
Rolls-Royce could build mini-nuclear reactors in Sweden and Finland under
plans being explored by Helsinki’s national energy company. Finnish
government-owned utility Fortnum has signed an early stage deal with
Rolls-Royce’s nuclear power business to explore uses of its small modular
reactors (SMRs) in the two Nordic countries. Shares in Rolls-Royce jumped
over 6pc in London on the news, amid a broader market rally.
The early stage deal comes as Rolls-Royce awaits a UK government decision on whether
to buy the reactors, which are smaller and cheaper than full scale plants.
Rolls-Royce’s 470MW units cost £1.8bn each. As well as the Finns, the
Czech government is also considering purchasing the technology as part of
efforts to decarbonise energy systems. Despite international interest,
Rolls-Royce has warned that deals may collapse unless Britain signals it
backs the technology by placing its own orders.
Telegraph 21st March 2023
Mini nuclear reactors all the rage, but are they the answer?
Mini nuclear reactors have appeared on the scene as an exciting prospect since the
spring budget, but how do they weigh up to traditional plants?
London-based start-up Newcleo laid out plans over the weekend to raise £900mln to build
small reactors in the UK on the back of the news. US-based developer Last
Energy then announced it had signed a deal to sell 24 of its mini nuclear
plants to UK customers on Monday, with these set to cost just £100mln
each.
Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC, a key player in the industry and the only
firm with SMR tech currently going through the UK’s regulatory process,
said it welcomed the government’s new stance, meanwhile.
What it may not
welcome is heated-up competition, though, with Newcleo among six rival
firms which have already applied to enter the UK’s stringent SMR design
assessment process, and the announcement likely to prompt more –
including Last Energy. Cavendish Nuclear/X-Energy, GE-Hitachi Nuclear
Energy, GMET Nuclear, Holtec Britain, UK Atomics, mark the others which
have submitted applications for their tech, though none are set to match
the size and output of Rolls-Royce’s.
Proactive Investors 21st March 2023
Lesson from Fukushima: Collusion in the nuclear domain
Nuclear power became an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society. Its regulation was entrusted to the same government bureaucracy responsible for its promotion.”
Canada has not heeded these warnings. ……. The CNSC, mandated to protect the public and the environment, lobbied government to abolish full impact assessments for most “small modular nuclear reactors” (SMN
By Gordon Edwards & Susan O’Donnell | Opinion | March 13th 2023 https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/13/opinion/lesson-fukushima-collusion-nuclear-domain
—
This month marks the 12th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, when three nuclear reactors in Japan suffered catastrophic meltdowns.
A tsunami knocked out the reactors’ cooling systems. The plant was shut down, but radioactivity sent temperatures soaring past the melting point of steel.
Radioactive gases mingled with superheated steam and explosive hydrogen gas, which detonated, spreading radioactive contamination over a vast area; 120,000 people were evacuated and 30,000 are still unable to go home.
Radioactively contaminated water from the stricken reactors has accumulated in 1,000 gigantic steel tanks, and despite objections from China, Korea and local fishers, Japan plans to dump it into the Pacific Ocean soon.
What caused this catastrophe? Most people blame the tsunami. The commission of investigation in Japan concluded otherwise. In its report to the National Diet, the commission found the root cause was a lack of good governance.
The accident “was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO [the nuclear company], and the lack of governance by said parties. They effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly ‘man-made.’ We believe that the root causes were the organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty rationales for decisions and actions…”
The commission chairman wrote: “What must be admitted — very painfully — is that this was a disaster ‘made in Japan.’ Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity… Nuclear power became an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society. Its regulation was entrusted to the same government bureaucracy responsible for its promotion.”
Canada has not heeded these warnings. After Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015, his government did away with environmental assessments for any new reactors below a certain size, thus eliminating scrutiny by civil society. This leaves all decision-making in the hands of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) — an agency previously identified by an expert review panel as a captured regulator.
The CNSC, mandated to protect the public and the environment, lobbied government to abolish full impact assessments for most “small modular nuclear reactors” (SMNRs).
Back in 2011, in the midst of the media frenzy about the triple meltdown, Canadians were testifying at federal environmental assessment hearings for up to four large nuclear reactors to be built by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) at Darlington, about 50 kilometres east of Toronto’s edge. The Fukushima disaster was cited repeatedly as a warning.
The panel approved OPG’s plan, but the Ontario government was thunderstruck by the price tag, reputed to be over $14 billion per unit, and cancelled the project.
Now OPG wants to build a smaller reactor at the Darlington site. Since a full impact assessment has been ruled out, CNSC is using the report from 12 years ago as the basis for public interventions. The reactor now proposed (the BWRX-300) has no similarity to any of the reactors that were under consideration then or to any operating today in Canada. Ironically, it is a “miniaturized” version of those that melted down at Fukushima.
CNSC is legally linked to the minister of Natural Resources, who is also tasked with promoting the nuclear industry at home and abroad. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warns that regulators must be independent of any agency promoting the industry.
One day after Canada’s Infrastructure Bank gave OPG a $970-million “low-interest loan” to develop the BWRX-300 at Darlington, the minister boasted to a Washington audience that it would soon become Canada’s first commercial SMNR.
CNSC president Rumina Velshi lauded the speed at which the licensing is proceeding, saying that Canada would be the first western country to approve an SMNR built for the grid.
CNSC is at least two years from approving the reactor. Nevertheless, OPG held a ground-breaking ceremony at Darlington in December. The licence to construct seems a foregone conclusion. When asked, CNSC freely admitted that from the day of its inception, it has never refused to grant a licence for any major nuclear facility.
Government, regulator and industry are already on board. Collusion? Or just co-operation?
Gordon Edwards is president and co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, a not-for-profit corporation established in 1975. He is a retired professor of mathematics and science at Vanier College in Montreal.
Susan O’Donnell is an adjunct professor at St. Thomas University and a member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick.
Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor project running out of cash
3 March 2023 https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsrolls-royce-smr-faces-financial-problems-10648145
UK-based Rolls-Royce SMR says its £500m ($600m) small modular reactor (SMR) programme will run out of cash by the end of 2024, Reuters has reported. Alastair Evans, Government & Corporate Affairs Director at Rolls-Royce SMR noted: “We aren’t asking the government to make an order (for the nuclear units) today but we need to start negotiations on a deployment plan by the middle of this year. We are facing a cliff edge, by December 2024 the money will have run out.” This would put at risk UK government plans to use SMRs to boost energy security and achieve climate targets.
The 470 MWe Rolls-Royce SMR design is based on a small pressurised water reactor. The design was accepted for Generic Design Assessment review in March 2022 and Rolls-Royce SMR expects to receive UK regulatory approval by mid-2024. A Rolls-Royce-led UK SMR consortium aims to build 16 SMRs. The consortium – which includes Assystem, Atkins, BAM Nuttall, Jacobs, Laing O’Rourke, National Nuclear Laboratory, the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and TWI – expects to complete its first unit in the early 2030s and build up to 10 by 2035.
Rolls-Royce’s SMR development business received a commitment of £210m from the UK government in 2021 but talks on how the projects would be funded are yet to start. Rolls-Royce’s new CEO Tufan Erginbilgic said recently that there was a sense of urgency in its engagement with government. “We built a capable team (and) without any project, sustaining that team will be a big challenge,” he told reporters after the group published full-year results. He noted that it was vital to move quickly, given that rival companies were developing similar technology.
“It is important that we engage therefore with the UK government urgently, and for a project that we can deploy as soon as possible,” he said. Rolls Royce and shareholders in the SMR business – advisory firm BNF Resources Ltd, US Energy company Constellation and Qatar Investment Authority have invested a total of around £280m.
This and the government money have been used to build the business, which employs some 600 staff across Derby, Warrington and Manchester. The funds have enabled it to start the regulatory process to approve the reactor design and identify sites for plants and factories. In November 2022, Rolls-Royce identified four sites with the potential to deploy multiple SMR units: Trawsfynydd (requiring agreement with Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) – and the Welsh Government); Sellafield (NDA land availability to be confirmed); Wylfa-South (requiring agreement with Horizon Nuclear Power); and Oldbury-North (also requiring agreement with Horizon Nuclear Power).
Rolls-Royce hopes to build the reactors in UK factories. In July 2022, the company announced six potential locations for the factory, shortlisted from more than 100 submissions from local enterprise partnerships and development agencies. They were: Sunderland in Tyne and Wear, Richmond in North Yorkshire, Deeside in Wales, Ferrybridge in Yorkshire, Stallingborough in Lincolnshire and Carlisle in Cumbria. David White, newly appointed Chief Operating Officer of Rolls-Royce SMR, said another two locations – Shotton in Deeside (Wales) and Teesworks in Redcar (North East) – had been added to the list.
The Dream of NuScale Small Nuclear Reactors Hangs in the Balance
Wired, 27 Feb 23
A cluster of reactors that are just 9 feet in diameter is supposed to start a nuclear energy resurgence. Mounting costs may doom the project.
JORDAN GARCIA, A deputy utilities manager in Los Alamos, New Mexico, is facing an energy crunch that is typical in the American West. For decades, the county-run utility relied on a cheap and steady mix of coal and hydroelectric power. But the region’s dams are aging and drought-parched, and its coal plants are slated to retire.
The county is aiming to fully decarbonize its grid by 2040, and the city has been tapping more solar lately, but batteries are arriving slowly, and Garcia worries about heat waves that strain the grid after the sun goes down. Wind power? He’d take more of it. But there aren’t enough wires stretching from the state’s windy eastern plains to the mesa-top community. “For us it’s pretty dire,” he says.
For the past few years, Garcia has been counting on a unique nuclear experiment to come to the rescue. In 2017, Los Alamos signed up to join a group of other local utilities as an anchor customer of the first small modular reactors, or SMRs, in the US, created by a company called NuScale. The design, which calls for reactors only 9 feet in diameter, had never been built before, but the initial cluster planned in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was promised to be much cheaper than a full-scale reactor and to offer affordable carbon-free energy 24/7.
To Garcia, this felt like a homecoming. Los Alamos, a town with the motto “Where discoveries are made,” is the birthplace of the atom bomb, and experimental reactors ran not far from downtown for much of the 20th century. But it had never actually used nuclear power to keep the lights on.
This month, Los Alamos and other local utilities across the West were facing a weighty decision: whether to pull the plug on their nuclear dream. NuScale had informed members of the group, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS, that the estimated costs of building the six 77-MW reactors had risen by more than 50 percent to $9.3 billion. For Garcia, that translated into a jump in the cost of energy from $58 to $89 per megawatt-hour.
…………… Without extra subsidies from the new Inflation Reduction Act—on top of $1.4 billion already committed to the project by the US Department of Energy—the price to energy users in places like Los Alamos would have doubled.
…………. The project’s power output is only 20 percent subscribed, and UAMPS says it will need to reach 80 percent for planning and construction to proceed next year.
Many a “nuclear renaissance” has fizzled.
…………….. Only two [large nuclear] reactors are being built in the US: a pair of 1100-MW units at the Vogtle plant in Georgia, now seven years delayed and $20 billion over their $14 billion budget.
NuScale hopes its smaller reactors can avoid that fate……… Last month, the company was the first of dozens of companies working on SMRs to have a design approved by US regulators. That makes NuScale first in the race to leap from a “paper napkin” reactor, as critics sometimes deride SMRs, to a real one, though the Idaho project involves a revised design that will need its own approval.
The project has hit roadblocks before. It began with 36 utilities signed on, but that number has fluctuated and dropped to 27 last year. In 2020, several municipal utilities dropped out in response to a construction delay and cost increases. Some later rejoined the project after the US Department of Energy upped its commitment to offset some of the costs.
Critics say those price revisions are a sign SMRs are heading down the same path as projects like Vogtle. For nearly a century, the nuclear power industry’s mantra was that building bigger plants would drive down costs. While existing plants aged and new construction withered, SMR companies began promoting a different philosophy, says David Schlissel, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Fiscal Analysis, claiming that constructing many small reactors would teach builders how to make them more cheaply.
But the evidence for progress is flimsy, says Schlissel, who notes that his 50-year career has spanned many a “nuclear renaissance” that fizzled. When that philosophy was applied in France, where dozens of reactors were built in the 1980s, costs still increased. Claims that “modularity” will help make construction construction more efficient are also suspect, he adds. The new Vogtle reactors involved nearly 1,500 “modular” components that were largely constructed offsite.
Schlissel also believes that NuScale’s current estimates are rosy because they rely on the approval of its newer design that uses less steel, one of the materials driving the cost increases. But regulators may not back that approach, he says. Towns should get out while they can, he advises, before costs climb higher still, and seek out alternatives like geothermal and battery storage. “Let the buyer beware,” he says.
……………….. officials in Morgan, Utah, a small town in the Wasatch Mountains north of Salt Lake City, decided to make a quick exit from the project…….
This year, the city realized it had new alternatives to the rising costs of nuclear power. While the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to help offset the costs of the Idaho plant, it also includes funds to help rural communities start their own energy projects. Bailey wants the city to become more self-reliant, installing its own solar panels and batteries that reserve power overnight.
In this round, Morgan was the only defector, though another Utah city, Parowan, reduced its commitment from 3 MW to 2 MW—just enough to cover the loss of its coal power. But the new agreement with utilities, negotiated during a two-day meeting with UAMPS members this winter, sets the project under a ticking clock. It includes requirements that the price hold steady at $89 per megawatt-hour, and—most worrying to utilities that want the project to succeed—that the project be at least 80 percent subscribed by next year. If it doesn’t hit that threshold, towns will get a refund on most of their expenses so far.
At this point, the utilities have sunk relatively little of their own money into the project, but that will change in 2024 as the project begins to seek site-specific building approvals followed by actual construction. To get the project fully subscribed, the group is talking with utilities elsewhere in the Northwest, where NuScale is competing with other SMR startups, including the Bill Gates–backed TerraPower, which recently signed a feasibility agreement with PacifiCorp, a private utility. Webb of UAMPS says he is optimistic about where the negotiations are headed.
…………………….. For now, the Los Alamos county council voted to formalize a long-planned increase of their share of the NuScale plant’s power, from 1.8 MW to 8.6 MW. Garcia hopes it will help encourage other utilities to take a chance on sparking a nuclear renaissance. https://www.wired.com/story/the-dream-of-mini-nuclear-plants-hangs-in-the-balance/—
UK: big talk about small nuclear reactors, but not much is happening, really.
Over 3000GW of renewables are already in place globally, compared to only 394 GW of nuclear, with wind and solar now romping further ahead around the world. By 2050, the BNEF says the global power system will be dominated by wind and solar (75% of production), with nuclear at just 9%, down from 10% now. If it makes it to 24% nuclear by then, the UK will be a bit of an outlier.
“……………………………….Graham Stuart, now a Minister of State at the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero…..- ‘what I can say is that we are absolutely committed to nuclear as a significant share of our electricity because we need that baseload and are committed to driving it forward.’
So that’s a positive ‘go’ signal, although funding is still a major problem, and, despite much talk, progress on the proposed ‘24 GW of nuclear by 2050’ programme seems to have slipped behind.
As NuClear News 141 reported, at the end of November last year, the Government was said to be about to announce proposals to set up a new body called Great British Nuclear (GBN), which would develop a network of small modular reactors (SMRs), as well as promote new large reactors. Grant Shapps, the Business Secretary, was due to make the announcement on 29th November. But it was delayed because of a row with the Treasury over funding.
And by January, The Times was reporting that a deal on SMR funding was unlikely to materialise for at least another 12 months. A senior government source said the Treasury would not sign off on any orders or significant funding for SMR work until the technology had approval from the Nuclear Regulators Generic Design Assessment, which was not expected, until 2024.
In addition to the proposed Rolls Royce SMRs, four of which are planned initially, several other SMRs are also now in the race for UK deployment, some from overseas. They include GE Hitachi’s 300MW boiling water reactor, and Holtec’s 160MWe pressurised water reactor, developed in collaboration with Mitsubishi and Hyundai. The USA’s NuScale, the most advanced project so far, has also expressed interest in UK sites for its mini PWR.
Potential UK sites for new SMRs include Trawsfynydd in Wales and Heysham and Oldbury in England, but, given the funding issues, it will evidently be a while before anything happens on SMRs, or indeed, in terms of new larger projects, after Sizewell C. Though some help with funding may yet be on hand. According to the Telegraph, nuclear projects may soon to be classed as ‘green’ or ’sustainable’ investments, clearing a way for more institutional investors and environment-focused funds to back them. The Telegraph says there are also hopes that use can be made of the Government’s green gilts green savings bonds.
Is nuclear really green? Not many greens think so, and given the risks, costs and delays associated with it, nuclear is often not popular with investors. There have been some delays with the only currently live new projects in the UK, the Hinkley Point C EPR being built by EdF, although nothing so far on the decade-long delays with the ongoing EPR projects in France and Finland. EDF now say the Hinkley EPR should start up in 2027. However, to be on the safe side, the deadline for starting up its major CfD payment (after which, under the contract rules, it would not be eligible for CfD payments) has been extended to 2036 from 2033.
…………………….. EDF has recently admitted that Hinkley Point C final cost is likely to be £31-32bn, up from the £18 bn estimated initially. Sizewell ought to benefit from construction lessons learned from Hinkley, but, although RAB pushes the financial risks onto consumers, there are still many investment uncertainties about the project.
Finance may be a key issue for EDF in the UK, but it is if anything even more of an issue for it in France, where it is facing major problems, with a huge repair bill and loss of income as plants are shut for safety checks and power has to be imported. As a result, with energy security being a key issue these days, nuclear no longer looks reliable. ………………………
With a handful of other nuclear projects being considered around the world, including some SMRs, and Russia and China also pressing ahead with larger plants, the UK isn’t the only country with ambitions for nuclear expansion. However, globally, the likely scale of nuclear expansion is relatively small in total, compared with the vast scale and rapid pace of renewables expansion.
Over 3000GW of renewables are already in place globally, compared to only 394 GW of nuclear, with wind and solar now romping further ahead around the world. By 2050, the BNEF says the global power system will be dominated by wind and solar (75% of production), with nuclear at just 9%, down from 10% now. If it makes it to 24% nuclear by then, the UK will be a bit of an outlier. https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2023/02/uk-nuclear-news.html
Rolls Royce’s financial problems, as it plans to make small nuclear reactors for the British government.
Rolls is complex: it can’t seem to decide whether it has three, four, or
five divisions. It has its fingers in too many pies.
Among its many projects: it makes engines for luxury yachts. It provides back-up power to
solar farms in the Atacama desert. It has built an enormous new jet engine
called the UltraFan at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds, without
knowing which model of plane might actually use it (Rolls insists the tech
developed for Ultra Fan is already finding its way into existing engines).
Oh, and it has an arm that wants to build small modular nuclear reactors
(SMRs) for the British government — tech derived from the reactors it
makes for the Royal Navy.
So much for the diagnosis, but what can
Erginbilgic do to heal the patient? This week he is expected to announce
restructuring — though not job cuts, yet — and a strategic review. This
may stop short of selling off divisions, but could see Rolls seek out more
partners.
Times 19th Feb 2023
Small modular nuclear reactors: a good deal for Southwest Virginia?
FEBRUARY 16, 2023 By Rees Shearer, https://www.virginiamercury.com/2023/02/16/small-modular-nuclear-reactors-a-good-deal-for-southwest-virginia/
In announcing his 2022 Virginia Energy Plan, Gov. Glenn Youngkin said, “A growing Virginia must have reliable, affordable and clean energy for Virginia’s families and businesses.” The governor’s plan to promote and subsidize small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) in Southwest Virginia fails all three of the governor’s own criteria:
- SMRs can’t be reliable, when they cannot reliably be built and brought on line in a predictable and timely fashion.
- SMRs can’t be affordable, because nuclear power is close to the costliest of all forms of electric power generation.
- SMRs can’t be clean, since they produce extremely toxic high- and low-level nuclear waste, which has no safe storage or disposal solution.
Appalachia has long served as a sacrifice zone for rapacious energy ambitions of other regions. Southwest Virginians have had reason to hope that would change as opportunities for low-cost solar development emerged in recent years. Instead, politicians like Youngkin are making too-good-to-be-true promises about SMRs, sidelining opportunities to promote solar, which can produce power in a matter of weeks, not decades.
Imposing SMRs on Southwest Virginia is disturbing. My father worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s. The promise the nuclear industry and the government touted then, “electricity, too cheap to meter,” has never been realized. Tennessee Valley Authority and other utilities abandoned nuclear plants under construction, leaving costly monuments to that folly and sticking electricity customers with the bill.
It’s not at all clear that SMR technology will succeed, or when. Levelized cost charts of electric power generation rate nuclear as among the very most expensive means to generate electric power at utility scale. If nuclear waste management, insurance and decommissioning costs are included, actual costs are far higher. (Some of these costs are already socialized for nuclear power, such as insurance in the Price-Anderson Act.)
The first commercial SMR is not expected to be completed until 2029, but already its developers have raised the target price of its power by 53%. This is not a surprise; nuclear power construction history documents an extremely strong correlation between new designs and cost increases and project delays. Indeed, the Lazard analysis shows that nuclear is the ONLY grid-wide generation source to increase in price between 2009 and 2021. The increase was 36%!
Nuclear waste and reprocessing are also serious concerns. Make no mistake, un-reprocessed nuclear waste, for all practicable purposes, is forever. The fact that we have become accustomed to risk does not, by any means, reduce risk. Nor will SMRs generate less waste than their larger forbears. Indeed, a recent Stanford University study concluded that “small modular reactors may produce a disproportionately larger amount of nuclear waste than bigger nuclear plants.”
Safeguarding this waste is already costing taxpayers and utility customers tens of billions of dollars. Since the United States has failed to designate a central storage facility, nuclear power plants are forced to continue to store the waste in pools on site.
Yet nuclear waste recycling, known as reprocessing, is no panacea. In November, the governor spoke in Bristol in support of recycling nuclear waste from SMRs: “I think the big steps out of the box are the technical capability to deploy in the next 10 years and on top of that to press forward to recycling opportunities for fuel.” He may have had in mind BWX Technologies of Lynchburg, which is beginning reprocessing of uranium at its Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin, Tennessee, for nuclear weapons.
Transportation of SMR nuclear wastes along Virginia mountain roads or railroads across the border to Erwin presents further risk of accident and contamination. Longstanding concerns about transportation and security of nuclear wastes have never been adequately addressed.
Given these questions about cost, practicality and safety, the governor’s choice of SMRs as the cornerstone for future energy development in the coalfields of Southwest Virginia risks leaving residents here with nothing. This is especially worrisome as it pulls state support from proven, cheaper and more readily deployable solar and energy storage applications.
It also redirects government resources away from homegrown economic projects, like the New Economy Program, based on cleaning up and repurposing unrestored mine lands for a burgeoning utility solar energy industry, employing local residents and adding productive purpose to restored land and benefiting the tax base.
Counties across eastern and Piedmont Virginia are benefiting from a property tax bonanza flowing from utility-scale solar development. Coalfield counties are being told to ignore a sure solar bet and place their few economic development chips on a risky, unproven, costly, pie-in-the-sky energy prospect.
Why should SWVA be forced to endure the burden of risky and more costly electric energy, subsidized by the state to benefit powerful corporations, which seek to exploit our region and its people? Why indeed, while the rest of Virginia benefits economically from low-cost, safe solar energy?
This same shell game occurred when state mining regulation allowed mountaintops to be blown away and thousands of acres of forestland despoiled. Once again, government officials are choosing to make decisions that benefit the interests of corporations outside the region instead of the people who actually live here.
Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB) informs Senate with analysis of “advanced” small nuclear reactors
On Feb. 14, our Coalition made our case against SMRs to the MLAs on the Climate Change and Environmental Stewardship committee of the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick. Our presentation used the best scientific analysis to critique the “advanced” SMRs for development in New Brunswick. CRED-NB core member Susan O’Donnell presented on behalf of the Coalition. Our written presentation in English is HERE (and HERE in French). The video of the session is on YouTube, HERE. Check out the video to learn more about the SMR plans and what our elected representatives have to say about them.
There were 13 presentations over two days. Other presentations to watch for are, on Feb. 14: J.P. Sapinski, M.V. Ramana. On Feb. 15: Gordon Edwards, Chief Hugh Akagi + Chief Ron Tremblay + Kim Reeder, and Louise Comeau + Moe Quershi. Each has a one-hour time slot, with 20 minutes by presenters followed by 40 minutes of Q&A with the MLAs on the committee. The full schedule of presentations is HERE. The link to the video archive is HERE (scroll through or search to find the webcast archive from Feb. 14 and 15).
*on Thursday, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research released the report from the SMR study:
The link to the national report is here:
tiny pdf button top right of this page:
https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/SRSR/report-3/
The report recommends that the federal government pay half the development costs of SMRs
*Today the front page of the business section of New Brunswick’s Telegraph Journal has this story, attached:
Moltex wants $250 million in public funds (half its development costs)
Scotland’s Minister Matheson reassures the Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) that no small nuclear power station will be permitted near Grangemouth refinery.
The Scottish Nuclear Free Local Authorities have been reassured by a recent
reply from Scottish Government Net Zero Minister Michael Matheson that
Small Modular Reactors are not under consideration at the Grangemouth
refinery complex.
Following media speculation that INEOS was contemplating
co-locating an SMR next to its colossal refinery to power operations, the
Convenor of the Scottish NFLA, Councillor Paul Leinster, wrote to the
minister expressing grave concerns that the combination of a nuclear power
station next to the chemical refinery represents ‘a disaster
waiting-to-happen’.
Covering an area of 1,700 acres and with 2,000 staff,
INEOS’s own website describes Grangemouth as a ‘world-scale
petrochemicals plant’ which produces about 7 million tonnes of fuels, much
of which is used in Scotland, and 1.4 million tonnes of other products per
year. These products are synthetic ethanol, ethylene, propylene,
polyethylene and polypropylene used in the food packaging, construction,
automotive and pharmaceutical industries.
In his letter, Cllr Leinster
described an accident involving an SMR and the INEOS refinery as ‘a
monumental calumny for Scotland against which any Hollywood disaster movie
would pale by comparison’. To the NFLA, ‘it would be madness to partner a
nuclear power plant with Scotland’s biggest explosive chemical factory’.
In his response, dated 12 January, Michael Matheson was quick to reassure the
NFLA that Scottish Ministers ‘remain committed’ to their ‘long-standing
government policy to withhold support for any new nuclear power stations to
be built in Scotland’ and that officials have been advised by INEOS that
‘Small Modular Reactors do not currently form part of their net zero road
map for Grangemouth’.
NFLA 17th Feb 2023
Rolls Royce’s “small” nuclear reactor will occupy 5.3 acres.
The UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities have today received a reply
from Rolls-Royce as to just how big their proposed ‘Small’ Modular
Reactor will be.
During last year’s World Cup, the NFLA’s then Chair,
Councillor David Blackburn, wrote to Tom Samson, Chief Executive Officer at
Rolls-Royce, to point out the general state of confusion amongst nuclear
activists, pro- and anti-, alike, with media reports claiming that an SMR
would occupy a surface area amounting to between ‘one and a half and ten
football pitches’ and asking for clarification.
Now Dan Gould, Head of Communications at Rolls-Royce SMR, has provided a final score – 5.3 acres –
an area ‘incorporating the entirety of the SMR unit’.
NFLA 16th Feb 2023
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