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Scepticism in Canada, about the government’s push for small nuclear reactors.

Canada pegs its energy future on nuclear power, but not everyone’s buying it,  Canada’s National Observer, By Charles Mandel  May 12th 2021  “………….   Gorman, along with the rest of the nuclear industry, pins the country’s future decarbonization efforts on a new breed of nuclear power known as small modular reactors (SMRs). 

……… To date, not a single SMR has been built in Canada, but no matter, the technology is the current darling of nuclear power circles…. Currently, 12 proposals for SMR development are winding their way through the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s (CNSC) pre-licensing vendor review process, which enables CNSC staff to provide feedback on proposed designs at a company’s request. But not a single project has yet been approved.

That hasn’t stopped the Canadian federal government from actively promoting a shift to SMRs………

For the time being, any vision of SMRs is largely aspirational. A Conference Board of Canada report in March on SMRs outlined that from concept to commercialization, the technology will require about a billion dollars of development expenditure. The same report noted that as an emerging technology, costs are still uncertain, and the “risky pre-commercial phase needs capital investment, but governments will be reluctant without major private capital commitment.”

It’s early days for financing the technology. For instance, one infusion of federal funds, the $50 million granted to New Brunswick’s Moltex Energy in mid-April, only supports research and development, employee recruitment and the expansion of academic, research and supply chain partnerships, not the physical construction of that firm’s SMR.

Beyond financial considerations, the Liberal government will have a tough time convincing environmentalists to embrace the merits of SMRs, or any nuclear power, as a clean energy source. More than 100 groups have signed a letter issued by the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) condemning the government’s push to pursue nuclear power and SMRs. Among their concerns are that SMRs are more expensive to develop than renewable energy and that the reactors are “dirty and dangerous,” creating new forms of radioactive waste that are especially dangerous to manage.

As the SMR developments move forward, the environmental groups will have a chance to make their views heard during the public consultations that will have to take place as part of the environmental review phase of licensing each SMR.

For now, however, nothing is slowing the momentum. In mid-April, the Canadian Nuclear Association triumphantly announced Alberta was joining Ontario, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan in the development of SMRs.

…….. there are signs Europe is now shifting away from nuclear power. In 2019, solar installed capacity exceeded nuclear for the first time in the EU, with 130 gigawatts versus 116 gigawatts,  according to the World Nuclear Industry Status annual report, which provides independent assessments of global nuclear developments. And a technical expert group convened in the EU chose not to recommend nuclear energy when asked to advise on screening criteria that would substantially contribute to climate change mitigation or adaptation while “avoiding significant harm” to other environmental objectives.

May 13, 2021 Posted by | Canada, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

Small nuclear reactors- a very problematic ”solution” to climate change

The controversial future of nuclear power in the U.S. National Geographic, 5 May 21, ”……………. In the U.S., a company called NuScale has recently received design certification approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its SMR, the first and only company to do so. Its reactor is a miniaturized version of a traditional reactor, in which pressurized water cools the core where nuclear fission is taking place. But in the NuScale design, the whole reactor is itself immersed in a pool of water designed to protect it from accidental meltdown.

NuScale hopes to build 12 of these reactors to produce 720 megawatts at the Idaho National Laboratory as a pilot project. It’s been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, which has approved up to $1.4 billion to help demonstrate the technology. NuScale plans to sell the plant to an energy consortium called Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems.

Last year, eight of the 36 utilities in the consortium backed out of the project, citing the cost. The company recently announced the project would be delayed to 2030, and the cost would rise from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion.

Nuclear opponents point to this latest disappointment as yet another example of why nuclear isn’t up to the task.

“If your first SMR isn’t built until the late 2020s, and then you have to turn it on, not to mention set up a whole new global supply chain, are you going to reach zero emissions by 2035?” asks IEER’s Makhijani. “You can’t make a significant contribution in time.” He adds that the industry’s long history of overruns and delays are especially problematic when considering climate commitments. “There’s no room for significant mistakes.”

……. The future of nuclear power will depend in part on how well it can balance a grid that increasingly relies on renewables…..   Unlike gas turbines, which can be turned on and off in seconds to “follow the load,” reactors take an hour or more to cut their production in half.

It’s not that reactors can’t follow the load; they’re just slower. “They can and do, because they have to,” Buongiorno says. “It’s just never an attractive economic proposition.”

Last fall, the DOE awarded $80 million each to two companies working on advanced reactor designs intended in part to address this problem. 

The first, TerraPower, a startup founded by Bill Gates, is working on a sodium-cooled reactor………   The second grant went to a company called X-energy for a gas-cooled reactor that operates at very high temperatures.

……  The high-level radioactive waste they produce, however, would need to be transported to a centralized location for management.

.. none of these new designs are moving quickly enough to meet Biden’s targets. DOE officials called their decision to support these two pilot projects, which aim to be fully operational by 2028, “their boldest move yet.”

Meanwhile, there’s a more direct way to balance the variability of renewables: store electricity in batteries. The market for utility-scale battery storage is exploding; it increased by 214 percent in 2020, and the EIA predicts that battery capacity will surge from its current 1,600 megawatts to 10,700 by 2023.

Makhijani thinks nuclear power isn’t going to be needed to balance the grid. A study he conducted in 2016 for the state of Maryland found that increased battery storage, combined with incentives to consumers to reduce their electricity use at peak times, would almost allow utilities to balance the variability of renewables.

They’d just need to store a little energy as hydrogen, which can be produced by running renewable electricity through water and then converted back to electricity in a fuel cell. That process is currently very expensive, Makhijani says, but “as long as it’s not giant amounts, it’s affordable.”……

May 6, 2021 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

Canada’s push for small nuclear reactors effectively stops real action on climate change.


Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Are Mostly Bad Policy, “………So Who Is Advocating For SMRs & Why? Clean Technica, ByMichael Barnard, 3 May 21,

At present we see SMR earmarked funds in both Canadian and US federal budgets, $150 million in Canada and 10 times as much in the US, mostly for research and development with the exception of over a billion to NuScale to, in theory, build something. In Canada, four provinces — Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan — have joined forces in an SMR consortium. Bill Gates’ Terrapower has received another $80 million, as has X-Energy from the US DOE.

The failure conditions of small modular reactors are obvious. The lack of a significant market is obvious. The lack of ability to create a clear winner is obvious. The security costs are obvious. The lack of vertical scaling to thermal efficiency is obvious. The security risks and associated costs are obvious. The liability insurance cap implications are obvious. So why is all of this money and energy being thrown at SMRs? There are two major reasons, and only one of them is at all tenable.

Let’s start with the worst one. The Canadian provinces which are focused on SMRs are claiming that they are doing this as a major part of their climate change solutions. They are all conservative governments. Only one of those provinces has a nuclear fleet, although New Brunswick has one old, expensive, and due-to-retire reactor, as well as a track record of throwing money away on bad energy ideas, like Joi Scientific’s hydrogen perpetual motion machines. One of the provinces, Ontario, has been actively hostile to renewable energy, with the current administration cutting up 758 renewables contracts and legislating a lack of recourse as a very early act after election.

So why are they doing this? Because it allows them to defer governmental climate action while giving the appearance of climate action. They can pander to their least intelligent and wise supporters by asserting that renewables aren’t fit for purpose, while also not doing anything about the real problem because SMRs don’t exist in a modern, deployable, operable form yet.

The other major reason gets back to renewables as well. 15 years ago it was an arguable position to hold that renewables were too expensive, would cause grid reliability issues and that nuclear in large amounts was necessary. That’s been disproven by both 15 years of failures of nuclear deployments, but more importantly plummeting costs and proven grid reliability with renewable generation. Now almost every serious analyst agrees that renewables can economically deliver 80% of required grid energy, but there is still debate from credible analysts about the remaining 20%.

Mark Z. Jacobson and his Stanford team are at the center of this debate. Since the late 2000s, they’ve been publishing regular studies of increasing scope and sophistication on the thesis of 100% renewables by 2050. The 2015 publication saw a lot of pushback. At the time, my assessment of the fundamental disagreement was that the people who published a criticism of it thought the last 20% would be too expensive, and that both nuclear and carbon capture and sequestration would be necessary and scaled components.

Personally, I’ve done various aspects of the math, looked at grid reliability and transformation data from around the world, and looked at ancillary services requirements, and I think Jacobson and team are right. Further, that since we all agree that renewables are fit for purpose for 80% of the problem we should deploy them as rapidly as possible.

However, it’s very reasonable to make a side bet or two to ensure coverage of that last 20%. I don’t mind research dollars spent on SMRs, which is all most of the SMR expenditures amount to, outside of the Nu Scale bailout (which is added to the Ohio $1.3 billion bailout, which is added to the annual $1.7 billion overt federal subsidy, which is added to the annual hidden $4 billion security subsidy which is added to the $70 billion unfunded cleanup subsidy, which is added to the uncosted and unfunded taxpayer liability). Spending a few tens of millions of dollars in rich countries to ensure that we have that last 20% bridged is reasonable.

But the people asserting that SMRs are the primary or only answer to energy generation either don’t know what they are talking about, are actively dissembling or are intentionally delaying climate action.  https://cleantechnica.com/2021/05/03/small-modular-nuclear-reactors-are-mostly-bad-policy/

May 4, 2021 Posted by | Canada, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

Misguided funding for small nuclear reactors

Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Are Mostly Bad Policy, Clean Technica  By Michael Barnard 3 May 21,

People asserting that SMRs are the primary or only answer to energy generation either don’t know what they are talking about, are actively dissembling or are intentionally delaying climate action.

Like hydrogen, small modular nuclear reactors have been seeing a resurgence of interest lately. Much of that is driven by governmental policies and investments focusing on the technology. Much of it comes from the nuclear industry. And inevitably, some comes from entrepreneurs attempting to build a technology that they hope will take off in a major way, making them and their investors a lot of money.

Most Of The Attention & Funding Is Misguided At Best, & Actively Hostile To Climate Action At Worst

First, let’s explore briefly the world of small modular nuclear reactors (SMNR) or small and medium reactors (SMR). The most common acronym is SMR, but you’ll see both.

As it says on the box, they are nuclear generation devices, specifically fission nuclear. That means they use radioactively decaying fissile materials, fuels, to heat a liquid which creates steam which drives steam turbines to generate electricity. Technically, they are like a coal generation plant, but with the heat provided by the decay of uranium instead of the burning of long-buried plant matter.

There are a handful of differences between them and traditional nuclear generation reactors. The biggest one is that they are smaller, hence the ‘small’ and ‘medium’ in the names. They range from 0.068 MW to 500 MW in capacity, with the International Atomic Energy Association using small for up to 300 MW and medium for up to 700 MW.

Despite the buzz, this is not new technology. The first nuclear generation plant was a Russian 5 MW device that went live in 1954. Hundreds of small reactors have been built for nuclear powered vessels and as neutron sources. This is well trodden ground. Most of the innovations being touted were considered initially decades ago.

In the seven decades since the first SMR was commissioned, 57 different designs and concepts have been designed, developed and, rarely, built. Most of the ones which are built are doing what nuclear reactors do, getting older without new ones being built to replace them.

The Russian models are far-north icebreaker power plants being considered for land-based deployment in remote northern towns, with the Siberian one at end of life. The Indian ones are 14 small CANDU variants in operation, most decades old now. The Chinese one is coming up to end of its 40-year life span as well.

The Argentinean model has been in construction on and off for over a decade with work stoppages, political grandstanding, and monetary problems. It may never see the light of day.

The Chinese HTR-PM, under construction for the past decade, is the only one with remotely new technology. If commissioned, it is expected to be the first Gen IV reactor in operation.

And to be clear, this isn’t a technology, it’s many technologies. Across the decades, 57 variants of 18 types have been put forward. None of the types can be considered to be dominant.

Claims About SMRs Don’t Withstand Advocates for SMRs typically make some subset of the following claims:

They are saferThey can be manufactured in scaled, centralized manufacturing facilities so they will be cheaperThey can provide clean power for remote facilities or communitiesThey can be deployed onto decommissioned coal generation brownfield sitesThey can be built faster.

Safety concerns aren’t why nuclear is failing in the marketplace, economics are why nuclear is failing in the marketplace…….. .  https://cleantechnica.com/2021/05/03/small-modular-nuclear-reactors-are-mostly-bad-policy/

May 4, 2021 Posted by | business and costs, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

Poor prospects for small nuclear reactors (SMRs) as a cure for climate change

The nuclear industry and the U. S. Department of Energy are promoting the development of SMRs, supposedly to head off the most severe impacts of climate change. But are SMRs a practical and realistic technology for this purpose?

To answer, two factors are paramount to consider – time and cost. These factors can be used to divide SMRs into two broad categories:
Light water reactors based on the same general technical and design principles as present-day power reactors in the U.S., which in theory could be certified and licensed with less complexity and difficulty.

Designs that use a range of different fuel designs, such as solid balls moving through the reactor core like sand, or molten materials flowing through the core; moderators such as graphite; and coolants such as helium, liquid sodium or molten salts.

On both counts, the prospects for SMRs are poor.

EWG 25th March 2021

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/why-small-modular-nuclear-reactors-wont-help-counter-climate-crisis

May 3, 2021 Posted by | climate change, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

Mobile nuclear reactors? Scathing report slams ‘disturbing’ military program

Mobile nuclear reactors? Scathing report slams ‘disturbing’ military program, Times, 1 May 21, Todd South The author of an academic report on Pentagon plans to build mobile nuclear reactors to power future combat bases called the effort “extremely disturbing” and “based on a lie.”

The report released Thursday slams the Pentagon and Army G-4, logistics — specifically the Army office’s 2018 report that lays out the potential uses and needs for such mobile nuclear reactors in future operations.

Alan J. Kuperman wrote the 21-page report titled, “Proposed U.S. Army Mobile Nuclear Reactors: Costs and Risks Outweigh Benefits,” in his role as coordinator of the University of Texas at Austin’s Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project.

“They don’t reduce casualties, they increase costs and they increase threats to the lives of U.S. service members,” Kuperman said.

The program, known as “Project Pele,” is prototyping the mobile advanced microreactor concept under the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office……..

The DoD spokesman pointed out that the project is part of a collaboration involving the Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and private industry. Project Pele is not being designed for a specific military service branch but does include experts across defense for a variety of requirements.

Army officials for G-4 deferred comment on the program to DoD……..

Congress approved funding for prototype reactors and the Army awarded $40 million in contracts to three nuclear reactor companies in March 2020 for Project Pele, according to the NPPP report.

Kuperman struck at the Army’s rationale, calling the project unnecessary and dangerous. He counters some of the main justifications that have been provided by DoD and Army reports:


  • High cost     – Kuperman said the Army’s claims that nuclear power can provide cheaper electricity for powering future forward bases is “based on unrealistic assumptions.” Those include that such a reactor would have low construction costs and operate for 18 hours a day over 40 years. The more likely scenario is a mobile reactor would run for half that time over about 10 years, meaning nuclear electricity could cost 16 times more than estimates and still seven times more than diesel-generated power.
  • Vulnerability to missile attacks – The report points to the 2020 missile attack on forces at al-Asad air base in Iraq. Even with warnings hours ahead of time, more than 100 U.S. personnel suffered traumatic brain injury from the 11 strikes that hit the facility. And the missiles were 10 times more accurate than the Army has predicted in its report on the vulnerability of reactors to precision strikes. The service admits that a direct hit on a reactor would destroy the device. Kuperman notes that even the Army’s plans to protect the reactors, by burying them underground, could inadvertently cause meltdowns by impeding air cooling and causing overheating. A similar strike on an similar such future base with a reactor could cause far more devastating consequences.

  • Captured reactors     – Should a U.S. base housing a mobile reactor be overrun or abandoned, the radioactive waste from the reactor could be used in “dirty bomb” terror attacks.
  • No mission for reactors – One of the chief purposes of pursing such reactor programs was to reduce casualties from diesel transport to remote bases. But Defense Department data shows a dramatic drop in casualties of five per 1 million gallons of fuel delivered in 2005 to nearly zero by 2013.
  • High-energy weapons don’t need reactors – Kuperman states that the justification that future high-energy or laser weapons that the Army hopes to have protecting bases don’t require a reactor to power. “A high energy weapon would have to be fired millions of times to justify a reactor,” Kuperman said. “In reality such a weapon would be fired perhaps hundreds of times in its lifetime.”
  • Transport problems – The Army wants to air deliver these reactors to combat posts. Kuperman questions the “regulatory nightmare” that would create. The program calls for initial tests flying the reactors domestically to run then returning them, and their radioactive waste, to another domestic location. Foreign transport would require approval of countries airspace traversed and the approval of a host nation where the reactor would be placed, he said. Other Army recommendations include truck or rail transport domestically and either ship or over-the-ocean flights to friendly ports to then move the reactors again via truck or rail.

  • Army Times     reported on the proposed program in 2019, which had drawn backlash from the Union of Concerned Scientists and its then-director of the Nuclear Safety Project, Edwin Lyman, who called the proposal, “naïve.”The original proposal, approved by the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office asked for industry solutions in January 2019 on providing a less than 40-ton small, mobile nuclear reactor design that could operate for three years or more and provide 1 to 10 megawatts of power.Planners want the reactor to fit inside a C-17 cargo plane for air transport to theater. More recent moves have reduced the power output to 5 megawatts……..

Lyman notes a major failure with one of the original eight designs in 1961 when a core meltdown and explosion of the ML-1 reactor in Idaho killed three operators.

The three deployed to Antarctica, Greenland and Alaska proved “unreliable and expensive to operate,” Lyman wrote in his response to the Army’s 2018 report on the mobile reactor program.Lyman told Army Times on Thursday that a number of those old reactors required decades of decommissioning and one used at Fort Belvoir, Va., near Washington D.C. is finally scheduled for decommissioning in late 2021……….. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/30/mobile-nuclear-reactors-scathing-report-slams-disturbing-military-program/

May 1, 2021 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, spinbuster, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Following Biden climate summit, USA govt keen to promote and export Small Nuclear Reactors

A Spotlight on Advanced Nuclear after the White House Climate Summit– JD Supra, 30 Apr 21. -”…….. With the nuclear ban lifted by the Development Finance Corporation for investment in innovation projects, the U.S. government acknowledged the importance of nuclear in the transition to [?] clean energy in developing economies. 

………..  the Department of State announced the launch of its Foundational Infrastructure for the Responsible Use of Small Modular Reactor Technology (FIRST) Program. Through an initial $5.3 million investment, this program will strengthen international collaboration between the U.S. and partner countries seeking to deploy nuclear energy in their clear energy initiatives. This cooperation includes supporting the deployment of advanced nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors (SMRs),…….

May 1, 2021 Posted by | politics, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The nuclear menace from under the seas and from high in the sky- theme for May 21

Why would anyone persist in pushing Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) and pretending that they can solve climate change, when they clearly cannot?

Well, the answer is – if you’re a toxic macho nuclear zealot or a nuclear weapons corporation – ( Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics etc)- this myth about SMRs is manna from heaven.

It means that the tax-payer, not private enterprise investors, will take over the SMR push – and the military-industrial-complex will race away with nuclear sites and weapons in space, and with powerful killer nuclear submarines.

Meanwhile those billionaire nuclear gurus – Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, , Richard Branson, Jack Ma and othes , will be laughing all the way to the bank, as they promote ”peaceful, nuclear-powered” space travel.

The global media promotes the joy and delight of space travel, rarely acknowledging its intimate connection with militarism. And there’s a crazy sort of national pride – hubris in being in the space race.

The space race to what? Apart from the obvious – nuclear war and annihilation, there’s the danger of ecosystem plutonium pollution from accidents and leaks, drastic accidents, and the gobbling up of public funds that might otherwise go to the public good – health, education, welfare, climate ation – heck – even good international relations!

The USA and Russia have long been in a toxic competition to militarily control the world especially by nuclear submarines. There’s a strange and unwarranted confidence that nuclerar submarines are ”clean” and somehow ”safe”. That’s because they release their radioactive trash unseen, into the world’s ocean waters. When they have an accident, well they just sink, and their poisonous mess is invisible. Dead nuclear submarines seem to be no trouble, hidden on the sea floor. Now that the world has become (a bit) aware of the radioactive danger of nuclear submarines, the dead ones lie in port, as nobody really knows what to do with them, how to clean up the nuclear mess.

In this time of pandemic, it is urgently necessary to put the brakes on NATO, and Russia – in regard to the increasing danger to the world, of nuclear submarines. Even more than cruise ships, they can be a hot-bed of coronavirus – making them even more unsafe in a number of ways.

May 1, 2021 Posted by | 2 WORLD, Christina's themes, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, weapons and war | 3 Comments

USA: Small nuclear reactors cannot meet the critical climate need – now, or ever

The critical need for deep carbon pollution reductions this decade calls on us to focus on the low-carbon technologies we have now. And those are wind and solar. SMRs will be a dollar short and a day too late. They cannot meet critical climate deadlines, not by 2030 or 2035, and likely never.

Advanced Nuclear Dreaming in Washington State, CounterPunch, PATRICK MAZZA  19 Apr 21, It was once known by one of the most inadvertently appropriate acronyms ever, WPPSS, the Washington Public Power Supply System.  “Whoops!,” as they called it, in the early 1980s brought on what was then the worst municipal bond default in U.S. history trying to build five nuclear reactors in Washington state at once, completing only one.

But faith in the nuclear future lives on at “Whoops!,” today rebranded as Energy Northwest. On April 1, the day perhaps also inadvertently fitting, the consortium of Washington state public utilities announced a move aimed at the first advanced nuclear reactor deployment in the U.S. Energy Northwest will partner with Grant County Public Utility District, a member utility serving a desert county in the center of the state, and X-energy, a leading developer of the nuclear industry’s bright shining hope, the small modular reactor (SMR)…………….

The WPPSS default was part of the first wave of nuclear failures in the U.S. In the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, approximately 100 proposed nuclear plants were cancelled. Recent years have seen a second round of failures. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 put $25 billion in nuclear subsidies on the table. That jumpstarted all of four nuclear reactors, two each in Georgia and South Carolina.  The only way Wall Street would touch the projects was to make ratepayers carry the risk by paying for “work in progress” before the first watt is delivered. South Carolina ratepayers won’t even see that. Cost overruns killed the project there in 2017 after $9 billion was thrown away, setting up a political and court fight over whether ratepayers will continue to be soaked.  The last two standing, Georgia’s Vogtle plants, were to have cost $14 billion and come on line in 2016-17. Now costs have doubled to $28 billion and scheduled completion this year and next is considered unlikely.

IS THE SMR A SOLUTION?

SMRs are the nuclear industry’s answer to avoid such failures in the future. Instead of being custom-built and individually licensed, SMRs are intended to cut costs by licensing a single design manufactured at a plant and sent for final assembly to their operating site.  Smaller than the 1,000-megawatt-plus plants with which we’re familiar, SMRs are 100 MW or less, and designed with safety features to prevent meltdowns such as experienced at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011. Though there are questions about that, as covered below…………..

CAN THE SMR SAVE THE CLIMATE?

For now, the question is whether SMRs such as X-energy’s can really revive the nuclear industry, and most importantly, provide a climate solution with low-carbon electrical power in a meaningful timeframe. The answer, by simple logic, is no

…………Though deep carbon cuts must start quickly, the Washington state partnership gives a completion date for its SMR pilot project as 2027-28. Considering the nuclear industry’s track record, delays and cost overruns are likely. And that would only be the beginning of a long-process to create the entire manufacturing supply chain needed to make SMRs an economical alternative. If they can be. The key issue is economies of scale.

“Power generation scales on volume of the reactor vessels,” notes Arjun Makhijani, who has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, with a specialization in nuclear fusion, from the University of California at Berkeley. “The materials and labor scale more slowly.  That’s a basic reason that there are economies of scale and big reactors were built.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) cites a study which shows that a reactor with 1,100 MW capacity would cost three times as much to build as a 180 MW plant, but produce six times the electricity, “so the capital cost per kilowatt would be twice as great for the smaller plant.”

SMRs lose those economies of scale, but proponents hope to make that up with mass manufacturing and licensing, avoiding costs of custom-built plants.

ROCKY ROAD TO MASS PRODUCTION

“The road to such mass manufacturing will be rocky,” Makhijani and M.V. Ramana write in a recent article, “Why Small Modular Reactors Won’t Help Counter the Climate Crisis.” “Even with optimistic assumptions about how quickly manufacturers could learn to improve production efficiency and lower cost, thousands of SMRs, which will all be higher priced in comparison to large reactors, would have to be manufactured for the price per kilowatt for an SMR to be comparable to that of a large reactor.”

That sets up “a chicken-and-egg economic problem,” they write. “Without the factories, SMRs can never hope to achieve the theoretical cost reductions that are at the heart of the strategy to compensate for the lack of economies of scale. But without the cost reductions, there will not be the large number of orders to stimulate the investments needed to set up the supply chain in the first place.”………….

WE DON’T NEED NUCLEAR

The world is running out of time to address all the concerns facing SMRs and advanced reactor designs in general.

“If you look at the cold facts from a climate point of view we have a shortage of time and money. New reactors cannot help materially,” Makhijani told The Raven. “How are we going to have a carbon-free electricity system by 2035 in which SMRs will play a significant role when the first one isn’t even supposed to come on line till the late 2020s? Those who are advocating new nuclear reactors should address the time constraint, and whether we can do it without nuclear. If we could not do it without, that would be another question. But we can. So there should be no question.”

Many studies document the capacity of wind and solar to replace fossil fuel electricity. The challenge of varying sunlight and wind speeds is met with a smart grid that can adjust energy demand to available supply and link diverse geographies. So when the wind is blowing on the Great Plains, it can supply juice while clouds block sunlight in Chicago. For times when none of that is sufficient, storage in many forms can be used, from batteries to pumped storage reservoirs. Even household water heaters. If all else fails, backup generators fueled with stored hydrogen can be brought into play.  Hydrogen can be electrolyzed from water through solar and wind energy that would otherwise go unused because generation exceeds the demands of the grid.


Mark Jacobson of Stanford has done many studies documenting the capacity of wind, water and solar to meet all energy needs. A NOAA study showed carbon pollution from electricity could be cut up to 80% from 1990 levels by 2030, largely with wind and solar, needing no new nuclear and energy storage, while actually cutting electricity costs. That would require building a continental grid with efficient high-voltage DC lines to link diverse geographies. A study done by Makhijani for the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research, of which he is president, lays out a path to zero carbon electricity in Maryland.

ANOTHER WHOOPS?

Despite towering obstacles facing SMRs, from economic chicken-and-egg problems of ramping up production, to unsolved waste and proliferation issues, to remaining safety questions, the nuclear faithful at Energy Northwest soldier on. Yes, they now have operated a nuclear plant successfully since the 1980s, though questions have been raised about earthquake hazards in light of emerging seismic knowledge. Washington state has enacted a goal of 100% clean electricity by 2045, and nuclear advocates see it filling a role.  In any event, new nuclear power from SMRs will be incapable of supplying a significant portion of low-carbon energy until well into the 2030s, even if economic and other issues are resolved.

All that time, any new nuclear reactors will be facing continuing cost declines in wind, solar and storage, as well as increasing deployment of smart grid technologies and advanced long-distance power transmission. If the Washington state partnership’s SMR installation actually is built and operated, with the 2027-8 timeline likely to be stretched out and the projected $2.4 billion cost figure likely to be exceeded, it could well be a costly white elephant, a relic of faith in a technology whose time has passed. The critical need for deep carbon pollution reductions this decade calls on us to focus on the low-carbon technologies we have now. And those are wind and solar. SMRs will be a dollar short and a day too late. They cannot meet critical climate deadlines, not by 2030 or 2035, and likely never.  https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/19/advanced-nuclear-dreaming-in-washington-state/

April 24, 2021 Posted by | climate change, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | 1 Comment

”Advanced” nuclear reactors not necessarily better. NuScale’s ”small” nuclear reactors not really small

  Johnson Loves Pie in the Sky nuClear News N0. 131 April 2021 ………….. NuScale In Jan 2021, a UK company, Shearwater, announced a partnership with US NuScale to develop 3GW hybrid off-shore wind/SMR plant to produce electricity & hydrogen. (9) The NuScale option, whether as a standalone plant or a hybrid with offshore wind, suffers from the fact that while the individual reactors are small, they are designed to be in as cluster of 12 – about 1GW capacity – making it effectively a large reactor. Until a project being built in the USA is completed and operating efficiently and economically, it will remain an unproven and risky investment. 
The NuScale SMR design is further ahead than Rolls Royce’s, since they have been working on it since 2003. It is a 77MW reactor designed to be deployed in clusters of 12 – so 924MW altogether. NuScale has only one potential project – Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) – with USDOE funding for part of the project but not sufficient investors yet for rest of project. 

M.V. Ramana (Liu Institute for Global Issues, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, The University of British Columbia) argues that higher construction and operational costs per unit of    electricity generation capacity will make electricity from SMRs more expensive than electricity from large nuclear power plants. An assessment of the markets for these technologies, suggests they are inadequate to justify constructing the necessary manufacturing facilities. (10) 
Economics of scale would suggest that SMRs would be more expensive per unit of electricity than large-scale reactors. Proponents argue that they can make up for the lost economies of scale by savings through mass and modularized manufacture in factories and resultant learning. Learning in this context refers primarily to the reduction of cost with increased construction. It is often quantified through a learning rate, which is defined as the percentage cost reduction associated with a doubling of units produced. Sustained learning would require just one or two standard reactor designs to be built in large quantities. However, there are roughly six dozen SMR designs are in various stages of development in multiple countries.

Although there is no data on jobs from SMRs—because SMRs have not been deployed at any meaningful level to measure employment figures—the literature is clear that nuclear power generates fewer jobs than renewables like solar and wind energy per unit of energy generated. (11) (12) 
Several advocates have argued that SMRs are capable of load following to balance intermittent renewables. From a technical point of view, shutting down, restarting, or varying the output power are all more challenging for nuclear power plants, especially water-cooled reactors, compared to other electricity sources. Further, although load following may be technically possible, operating reactors in this mode would decrease their economic competitiveness. The challenge arises from the fact that nuclear power plants have high fixed (capital) costs. Therefore, it makes more economic sense to operate them continuously near their maximum capacity in order to improve the return on investment. Given the already poor economic prospects for SMRs, this penalty will essentially rule out deployment of these technologies in a load-following mode.   

Ramana concludes that pursuing SMRs will only worsen the problem of poor economics that has plagued nuclear power and make it harder for nuclear power to compete with renewable sources of electricity. The scenario is even more bleak as we look to the future because other sources of electricity supply, in particular combinations of renewables and storage technologies such as batteries, are fast becoming cheaper. Finally, because there is no evidence of adequate demand, it is financially not viable to set up the manufacturing facilities needed to mass produce SMRs and advanced reactors. All of these problems might just end up reinforcing The Economist magazine’s observation from the turn of the century: ‘‘nuclear power, which early advocates thought would be ‘too cheap to meter’, is more likely to be remembered as too costly to matter’’.

 Professor Dave Elliott is also sceptical about claims that SMRs can reduce costs. Delivery of power at £40-60/MWh is promised, but there is still some way to go before any project actually goes ahead and we can see if the promises hold up in practice. He says most designs are basically variants of ideas proposed, and in some cases tested, many decades ago, but mostly then abandoned. The most developed is the NuScale reactor, which is basically PWR technology. Rolls Royce is also promoting a mini-PWR design, which, it is claimed, will be ready for grid use by 2030. Some of the other SMR proposals are less developed and may take more time to get to   that stage. But it is claimed that one of the more novel design, the Natrium fast reactor system, proposed by Terrapower and backed by Bill Gates, will be on line this decade. Given that this makes use of liquid sodium and molten salt heat storage, that is quite a claim.

If they are going to be economically viable, some say that SMRs will have to be run in Combined Heat and Power ‘Cogen’ mode, supplying heat for local used, as well as power for the grid. That implies that they will have to sited in or near large heat loads i.e. in or near urban areas. Will local residents be keen to have mini-nuclear plants nearby? That issue is already being discussed in the USA, with some urban resistance emerging. A key issue in that context is that it has been argued that since they allegedly will be safer, SMRs will not need to have such large evacuation zones as is the norm for standard reactors, most of which are sited in relatively remote area. (13)


  “Advanced” is not always better The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), examines all the proposed new types of reactor under development in the US and fails to find any that could be developed in time to help deal with the urgent need to cut carbon emissions. 

The US government is spending $600 million on supporting these prototypes. While the report goes into details only about the many designs of small and medium-sized reactors being developed by US companies, it is a serious blow to the worldwide nuclear industry because the technologies are all similar to those also being underwritten by taxpayers in Canada, the UK, Russia and China. This is a market the World Economic Forum claimed in January could be worth $300 billion by 2040. Edwin Lyman, who wrote the report, and is the director of nuclear power safety in the UCS Climate and Energy Program, thinks the WEF estimate is extremely unlikely. He comments on nuclear power in general: “The technology has fundamental safety and security disadvantages compared with other low-carbon sources.” He says none of the new reactors appears to solve any of these problems. The industry’s claims that their designs could cost less, be built quickly, reduce the production of nuclear waste, use uranium more efficiently and reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation have yet to be proved. The developers have also yet to demonstrate that the new generation of reactors has improved safety features enabling them to shut down quickly in the event of attack or accident. (14)   

One of the industry’s ideas for using the power from these reactors to produce “green hydrogen” for use in transport or back-up energy production is technically feasible, but it seems likely that renewable energies like wind and solar could produce the hydrogen far more cheaply, the report says. 


“Advanced” reactors often present greater proliferation risks, says Lyman. “In many cases, they are worse with regard to … safety, and the potential for severe accidents and potential nuclear proliferation. ‘Advanced’ Isn’t Always Better”. (15) 
Lyman says, if nuclear power is to play an expanded role in helping address climate change, newly built reactors must be demonstrably safer and more secure than current generation reactors. Unfortunately, most “advanced” nuclear reactors are anything but. A comprehensive analysis of the most prominent and well-funded non-light-water reactor (NLWR) designs   concluded that they are not likely to be significantly safer than today’s nuclear plants and pose even more safety, proliferation, and environmental risks than the current fleet. (16)    https://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/nuClearNewsNo131.pdf

April 24, 2021 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, UK, USA | Leave a comment

Britain’s unlikely-to-succeed bet on Rolls Royce small nuclear reactors

 

…..Advanced Modular Reactors are unlikely to be available before 2045 if ever – much too late to be any help in tackling the climate emergency. .….

Small Modular Reactors s will only proceed if the risk to RR money is minimal. That means RR will only put serious effort into design development with government guarantees given now, before the design exists, and it has been reviewed by ONR, a demonstration plant has been completed, and costs are known. 

SMRs will only proceed if the risk to RR money is minimal. That means RR will only put serious effort into design development with government guarantees given now, before the design exists, and it has been reviewed by ONR, a demonstration plant has been completed, and costs are known. 

UK taxpayers would have to provide a large proportion of the cost of design development, navigating the regulators design assessment and assist in the setting up of component production lines. It would also have to guarantee orders for a minimum of 16 reactors, which, even on Rolls Royce’s unrealistic cost estimate, would be a commitment to spend nearly £30bn before it has progressed beyond a conceptual design.

Johnson Loves Pie in the Sky nuClear News N0. 131 April 2021, We saw in June 2020 (nuClear News No. 126) how the Nuclear Innovation and Research Advisory Board (NIRAB) has been advising the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) that we need three streams of nuclear product development and deployment:

 • large-scale Light Water Reactors (LWRs), which are currently available and suitable for baseload electricity generation;
 • small modular reactors (SMRs), which are based on the same proven technology and can offer additional flexibility to meet local energy needs;

 • advanced modular reactors (AMRs), which typically have a higher temperature output, enabling them to contribute to decarbonisation through heat and hydrogen production, as well as generate electricity at competitive costs. 

Small modular and advanced nuclear reactors are proposed, supposedly, as potential ways of dealing with some of the problems of large nuclear reactors —specifically economic competitiveness, risk of accidents, link to proliferation and production of waste. Yet Gregory Jaczko, Former Chair US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says Advanced Nuclear Technologies should only be supported “if they can compete with renewables & storage on deployment cost & speed, public safety, waste disposal, operational flexibility & global security. There are none today.” (1) 

The UK Government’s Policy Paper on ‘Advanced Nuclear Technologies’ (ANTs) specifies two broad categories of ANT. Firstly, Generation III water-cooled reactors similar to existing nuclear power station reactors but smaller, it calls Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). This is despite the fact that the Rolls Royce design which it is supporting is 470MW – much larger than the maximum 300MW defined by IAEA as small.   

  Secondly, Generation IV which use novel cooling systems or fuels to offer new functionality (such as industrial process heat) it calls Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs). (2) 

In July 2019 the UK Government gave an initial £18m to Rolls-Royce to help them develop the design for an SMR. This was to be matched with funding from the consortium led by Rolls-Royce (and including Assystem, SNC Lavalin/Atkins, Wood, Arup, Laing O’Rourke, BAM Nuttall, Siemens, National Nuclear Laboratory, and Nuclear AMRC). (3)

A year earlier, in June 2018, as part of the UK government’s £200 million Nuclear Sector Deal, £56 million was put towards the development and licensing of advanced modular reactor designs. Eight non-light water reactor (non-LWR) vendors each received £4 million to perform detailed technical and commercial feasibility studies. Those vendors were Advanced Reactor Concepts, DBD, LeadCold, Moltex Energy, Tokamak Energy, U-Battery Developments, Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC), and Westinghouse Electric Company UK. (4) This was Phase One of the Advanced Modular Reactor (AMR) Feasibility and Development Project. Then in July 2020 Phase Two was announced with 3 AMRs receiving a share of £40m: U-Battery (4MW hig   temperature reactor), Westinghouse (450MW lead-cooled fast reactor) & Tokamak (fusion). A possible further £5m was also made available to regulators to support this. (5) In November 2020, Boris Johnson’s 10 Point Plan confirmed the Government’s commitment to advancing large, small and advanced reactors, and announced an Advanced Nuclear Fund of up to £385 million which included:


 • funding of up to £215 million for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs); • up to £170 million for Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs); • up to £40 million to develop regulatory frameworks and support UK supply chains to help bring these technologies to market.

According to the Energy & Climate Change Intelligence Unit (ECIU) the investment in small modular reactors (SMRs) was less than expected. “If I was in the SMR game I’d be disappointed with this because £2bn support for a small initial fleet of reactors has been paired back to just over £500M.” (6) 


Professor Steve Thomas says the 3 AMRs are unlikely to be available before 2045 if ever – much too late to be any help in tackling the climate emergency. (7) 

The Rolls Royce (RR) SMR design is still at an early stage. It was only announced in 2016. It is slightly larger than the first unit at Fukushima (470MW vs 439MW) and much larger than the Trawsfynydd Magnox reactors, which were 250MW. Rolls Royce claims the first reactor could be operational by 2030, but it’s hard to see how this can be achieved. Even if achieved it is probably too late. By 2030 only Sizewell B and possibly Hinkley Point C will be operating and if the UK is to meet its targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 68% by 2030 and 78% by 2035, we should by then be well on the road to a low carbon economy with a limited nuclear capacity   

  Thomas says SMRs will only proceed if the risk to RR money is minimal. That means RR will only put serious effort into design development with government guarantees given now, before the design exists, and it has been reviewed by ONR, a demonstration plant has been completed, and costs are known. 

Rolls-Royce told the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee in 2016 that 7GW of power would “be of sufficient scale to provide a commercial return on investment from a UKdeveloped SMR, but it would not be sufficient to create a long-term, sustainable business for UK plc.” Therefore, any SMR manufacturer would have to look to export markets to make a return on their investment.

 Rolls Royce is making extraordinary demands on the UK Government that it must commit to before further significant development work takes place. Thomas says RR would need:   

  •  Exclusive access to UK market; 

• Matched funding (minimum) up to end of Generic Design Assessment;   
  Sharing of costs for production line facilities (to produce 2 reactors per year); 

• Guaranteed orders for 7GW (16 reactors).

 UK taxpayers would have to provide a large proportion of the cost of design development, navigating the regulators design assessment and assist in the setting up of component production lines. It would also have to guarantee orders for a minimum of 16 reactors, which, even on Rolls Royce’s unrealistic cost estimate, would be a commitment to spend nearly £30bn before it has progressed beyond a conceptual design. The first plant must be made using production lines so all 16 reactors must be ordered now & by the time the first is completed, another 8 will be on their way. (8)   

 Rolls Royce claims a construction time of 4 years & costs (after 5 units) of £1.8bn (£3800/kW), which means electricity at £40-60/MWh. These claims are extraordinary but very similar to those made for Hinkley Point C. In 2000, it had been claimed the EPR would be built in four years or less and would cost $1000/kW (about £800/kW). In fact, all EPR’s that have been built have gone far over budget and all will take much more than 4 years to construct. The latest cost estimate for Hinkley Point C is about £27bn (2020 money) or about £8400/kW. Rolls Royce’s claims must therefore be taken with a very large pinch of salt. 

Steve Thomas comments: 
“The UK Government’s ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ 10-point plan of November 2020 seemed to include a major strengthening of the commitment to Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). However, closer examination shows much of the money is far from committed and the focus is on technologies that have little chance of contributing to meeting the UK’s target of zero-carbon by 2050. There remains no firm commitment to the Rolls Royce SMR and it must be hoped the government is unwilling to gamble the huge sums of money Rolls Royce is demanding to be promised if it is to progress the design from the early stage it is currently at.”   ………   https://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/nuClearNewsNo131.pdf


April 24, 2021 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, UK | Leave a comment

Washington’s nuclear industry a costly failure for ratepayers. Now they’re about to fail again, with small nuclear reactors

Advanced Nuclear Dreaming in Washington State, CounterPunch, PATRICK MAZZA  19 Apr 21……………..The WPPSS default was part of the first wave of nuclear failures in the U.S. In the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, approximately 100 proposed nuclear plants were cancelled. Recent years have seen a second round of failures. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 put $25 billion in nuclear subsidies on the table. That jumpstarted all of four nuclear reactors, two each in Georgia and South Carolina.  The only way Wall Street would touch the projects was to make ratepayers carry the risk by paying for “work in progress” before the first watt is delivered. South Carolina ratepayers won’t even see that. Cost overruns killed the project there in 2017 after $9 billion was thrown away, setting up a political and court fight over whether ratepayers will continue to be soaked.  The last two standing, Georgia’s Vogtle plants, were to have cost $14 billion and come on line in 2016-17. Now costs have doubled to $28 billion and scheduled completion this year and next is considered unlikely.

IS THE SMR A SOLUTION?

SMRs are the nuclear industry’s answer to avoid such failures in the future. Instead of being custom-built and individually licensed, SMRs are intended to cut costs by licensing a single design manufactured at a plant and sent for final assembly to their operating site.  Smaller than the 1,000-megawatt-plus plants with which we’re familiar, SMRs are 100 MW or less, and designed with safety features to prevent meltdowns such as experienced at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011. Though there are questions about that, as covered below.

X-energy’s proposed plant is 80 MW. The Washington partnership envisions clustering four to make a 320-MW complex, with costs estimated at $2.4 billion. Half is to come from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP), and half from private investors, apparently leaving ratepayers out of the picture this time.

ARDP in 2020 made two $80 million grants to advanced nuclear reactor developers, one to X-energy, and the other to TerraPower, a venture in which Bill Gates has invested. The latter, slated to be 345 MW, aims at eventual scales as large as today’s plants, so it is not an SMR. The TerraPower liquid-sodium cooled reactor concept has its own set of issues. Liquid-sodium reactors have suffered operating difficulties and fires, and pose potential weapons proliferation hazards. The Raven will look at TerraPower in a future post……..

ROCKY ROAD TO MASS PRODUCTION

“The road to such mass manufacturing will be rocky,” Makhijani and M.V. Ramana write in a recent article, “Why Small Modular Reactors Won’t Help Counter the Climate Crisis.” “Even with optimistic assumptions about how quickly manufacturers could learn to improve production efficiency and lower cost, thousands of SMRs, which will all be higher priced in comparison to large reactors, would have to be manufactured for the price per kilowatt for an SMR to be comparable to that of a large reactor.”

That sets up “a chicken-and-egg economic problem,” they write. “Without the factories, SMRs can never hope to achieve the theoretical cost reductions that are at the heart of the strategy to compensate for the lack of economies of scale. But without the cost reductions, there will not be the large number of orders to stimulate the investments needed to set up the supply chain in the first place.”

That is leaving aside the prospect of a design defect being discovered after many SMRs have been deployed. In the 1990s, multiple Westinghouse-built reactors suffered common steam generator problems, resulting in lawsuits. “If an error in a mass-manufactured reactor were to result in safety problems, the whole lot might have to be recalled, as was the case with the Boeing 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner jetliners,” Makhijani and Ramana write. “But how does one recall a radioactive reactor? What will happen to an electricity system that relies on factory-made identical reactors that need to be recalled?”

The economic hurdles of SMRs posed by its competitors are overwhelming.

“Lazard, a Wall Street financial advisory firm, estimates the cost of utility-scale solar and wind to be about $40 per megawatt-hour,” Makhijani and Ramana write. “The corresponding figure for nuclear is four times as high, about $160 per MWh – a difference that is more than enough to use complementary technologies, such as demand response and storage, to compensate for the intermittency of solar and wind.”

While costs for competitors declines, nuclear costs continue to escalate. Cost for a proposed Idaho project by NuScale, another SMR developer, has doubled from an estimated $3 billion in 2015 to $6.1 billion in 2020  “long before any concrete has been poured,” Makhijani and Ramana note……….  https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/19/advanced-nuclear-dreaming-in-washington-state/

April 24, 2021 Posted by | business and costs, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

Bill Gates and 28 other billionaires pushing their small nuclear reactors, on the pretext that they’re ”clean”

Billionaires leading push for nuclear reactors in Canadian mining

By Joyce Nelson, Rabble, April 19 2021https://rabble.ca/news/2021/04/billionaires-leading-push-nuclear-reactors-canadian-miningThis is part two of a two-part series on small modular reactors.

In January 2019, Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, warned that the Trudeau government has a “desire to build small modular nuclear reactors [SMRs] all over Canada, especially in the North, to support the accelerated exploitation of natural resources.” Edwards included an excerpt from Nuclear Energy Insider, published January 16, 2019, which stated: “Canada’s large mining sector is seen as a key early market for SMR plants as operators look to reduce carbon emissions and costs.”

That “early market” for small modular reactors has been cleverly targeted by a key lobby group. As I wrote for Watershed Sentinel, Bill Gates and 28 other billionaires and “high-net-worth” individuals launched the Breakthrough Energy Coalition at the 2015 Paris climate talks to lobby for small nuclear reactor development as “clean technology” in dozens of countries, including Canada.

This billionaires’ nuclear club has been working closely for years with Natural Resources Canada in the push for small modular reactors, especially for use in off-grid mining………………….

With Gates and his billionaires’ nuclear club backing KoBold, it’s likely that their off-grid mining projects would welcome government financing for small modular reactors.

When asked about the situation, Mining Watch Canada’s Jamie Kneen told me by email:

“On the one hand, the mining industry faces so much risk in the markets that it’s unlikely to add to that risk by jumping on an unproven technology [like SMRs]. On the other hand, the mining industry is used to leaving masses of toxic waste behind for others to deal with — and getting away with it — so it’d be a perfect fit.”

Three political parties are fully against small modular reactors: the NDP, the Bloc Québécois, and the Green Party — worth remembering if the federal budget causes an election.

This is part one of a two-part series on small modular reactors. Read part one here.

Freelance writer Joyce Nelson is the author of seven books. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca

https://rabble.ca/news/2021/04/billionaires-leading-push-nuclear-reactors-canadian-mining

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Canada, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | 2 Comments

Trudeau government’s extraordinary push for small nuclear reactors – tax breaks, no environmental assessment …

Budget may reveal extent of federal support for risky new nuclear reactors. Rabble.Ca   Joyce Nelson 15 Apr 21, Across Canada, environmentalists and First Nations will be closely watching the April 19 release of the federal budget to see just how far the Trudeau Liberals will go in their push for small modular reactors (SMRs).

In September 2020, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Seamus O’Regan endorsed SMRs and stated that there is “no pathway to net zero [carbon emissions] without nuclear,” which prompted David Suzuki to famously tell the CBC: “I want to puke.”

Apparently, many share that feeling.

More than 100 Indigenous and civil society groups across Canada are now opposed to the new nuclear reactors, which are being pushed by the federal government and four provinces — Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick and Alberta — as so-called “clean energy” and a supposed solution to climate change.

These governments argue that the reactors would be the replacement for diesel in remote communities and for use in off-grid mining, tar-sands development, heavy industry, and as exportable expertise in a global market.

But opponents call SMRs “dirty, dangerous and distracting” from real climate solutions.

Even before the budget, the Trudeau Liberals have already taken several steps to advance development of the reactors, especially for use in off-grid mining.

Steps towards small reactors

The feds endorsed the March 2019 Canadian Minerals and Metals Plan, drawn up by federal, provincial and territorial governments. That plan urges governments to “accelerate efforts to develop and adopt clean energy sources, especially for northern, remote and isolated communities that rely on diesel” and “continue to study the feasibility of small modular reactors in mining operations, as well as the potential market for this technology.”

Then, in September 2020, Canada and the U.S. agreed to collaborate on the financing and production of rare-earth and other key metals, which are necessary for a wide range of products including batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles, AI, and weaponry.

After the December 2020 release of the “SMR Action Plan,” the federal government also decided that there would be no environmental impact assessments for small modular reactors, and that tax incentives should be given for this so-called “clean technology.”

The recent mandate letter to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland directs her to “cut tax rates by 50 per cent for companies that develop and manufacture zero-emission technology” in order to “make Canada a world leader in clean technology.”

As rabble.ca noted, “[t]he Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) has just given a green light to the preferred industry solution for disposal of nuclear reactors — entomb and abandon them in place, also known as ‘in-situ decommissioning.’ This paves the way for the introduction of a new generation of ‘small modular’ nuclear reactors or SMRs.”

While this would be a disaster for the environment and nearby communities, it would be a boon for the nuclear industry and the off-grid mining sector, which would not have to deal with the fallout and repercussions of such nuclear waste once a mining project is finished.

Important policy change

On December 7, 2020 the Hill Times published an open letter to Treasury Board from more than 100 women leaders across Canada, stating:

“We urge you to say ‘no’ to the nuclear industry that is asking for billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to subsidize a dangerous, highly polluting and expensive technology that we don’t need. Instead, put money into renewable, energy efficiency and energy conservation.”………….. https://rabble.ca/news/2021/04/budget-may-reveal-extent-federal-support-risky-new-nuclear-reactors

April 20, 2021 Posted by | Canada, politics, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

No market for small nuclear reactors, so no justification for setting up factories to make them.

IEEE 9th March 2021, Small modular and advanced nuclear reactors have been proposed as potential ways of dealing with the problems—specifically economic competitiveness, risk of accidents, link to proliferation and production of waste—confronting nuclear power technology. This perspective article examines whether these new designs can indeed solve these problems, with a particular focus on the economic challenges.

It briefly discusses the technical challenges confronting advanced reactor designs and the many decades it might take for these to be commercialized, if ever. The article explains why the higher construction and operational costs per unit of electricity generation capacity will make electricity from small modular reactors more expensive than electricity from large nuclear power plants, which are themselves not competitive in today’s electricity markets.


Next, it examines the potential savings from learning and modular construction, and explains why the historical record suggests that these savings will be inadequate to compensate for the economic challenges resulting from the lower generation capacity. It then critically examines arguments offered by advocates of these technologies about job creation and other potential uses of energy generated from these plants to justify subsidizing and constructing these kinds of nuclear plants. It concludes with an assessment of the markets for these technologies, suggesting that
these are inadequate to justify constructing the necessary manufacturing facilities.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9374057

March 25, 2021 Posted by | 2 WORLD, business and costs, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

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