A mess of different Small Nuclear Reactor Designs in UK.

By the time SMRs might be deployable in significant numbers, realistically after 2035, it will be too late for them to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The risk is that, as in all the previous failed nuclear revivals, the fruitless pursuit of SMRs will divert resources away from options that are cheaper, at least as effective, much less risky, and better able to contribute to energy security and environmental goals.

No2 Nuclear Power SAFE ENERGY E-JOURNAL No.97, April 2023

More designs of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are beginning to emerge which could rival the Rolls Royce design, so the government has decided to launch its competition to gather further evidence before any firm deals are struck. According to ONR a number of companies have, in recent months, applied to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) for entry into Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process. BEIS is assessing those applications before deciding whether or not to ask ONR to start the GDA process. The plan is for the government to eventually award £1bn in co-funding to the winning SMR design. This money would help the company get through the GDA process.

At least six new SMR designs have applied to BEIS to be entered into the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process. As well as Rolls Royce’s SMR, which has already entered the process. (1) The applicants are proposing to build a range of technologies including fast reactors and high temperature reactors which were built as prototypes in the 1950s and 1960s – but successive attempts to build demonstration plants have been short-lived failures. It is hard to see why these technologies should now succeed given their poor record.

The main claim for SMRs over their predecessors is that being smaller, they can be made in factories as modules using cheaper production line techniques, rather than one-off component fabrication methods being used at Hinkley Point C. Any savings made from factory-built modules will have to compensate for the scale economies lost. A 1,600MW reactor is likely to be much cheaper than 10 reactors of 160MW. And it will be expensive to test the claim that production line techniques will compensate for lost scale economies. By the time SMRs might be deployable in significant numbers, realistically after 2035, it will be too late for them to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The risk is that, as in all the previous failed nuclear revivals, the fruitless pursuit of SMRs will divert resources away from options that are cheaper, at least as effective, much less risky, and better able to contribute to energy security and environmental goals. (2)

The six designs are:

1. GE Hitachi (GEH) submitted an application for its BWRX-300 boiling water reactor in December.
2. 2. The US firm Holtec has submitted its SMR-160 design, a 160MWe pressurised water reactor developed in collaboration with Mitsubishi Electric of Japan and Hyundai
3. 3. US firm X-Energy, working with Cavendish Nuclear, wants to deploy its high-temperature gas reactor in the UK.
4. 4. UK-Italian start-up Newcleo has submitted it lead-cooled fast reactor design. The company says it’s in discussions with the NDA about using Sellafield plutonium and depleted uranium. (3) The Company says it has raised £900m to further its plans which include the establishment of a first Mixed Plutonium-Uranium Oxides (MOX) production plant in France, with another plant to follow later in the UK. (4)
5. 5. UK Atomics – a subsidiary of Denmark’s Copenhagen Atomics – says it has submitted a Generic Design Assessment (GDA) entry application for its small and modular thorium molten salt reactor. (5)
6. 6. GMET, a Cumbrian engineering group which last year acquired established nuclear supplier TSP Engineering, said it is developing a small reactor called NuCell for production at TSP’s Workington facility. (6)

The list makes no mention of an application by NuScale, which has already expressed an interest in building at Trawsfynydd. (7) According to the Telegraph, NuScale’s reactor has received design approval from the US’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) putting it ahead of the competition. (8) However, it was NuScale’s 50 MWe design which was approved by the NRC. That is no longer being pursued by the company. It is applying for a new approval for its 77 MWe design. Although NuScale claimed that the new design was so close to the original that the second approval would be simple, that is turning out not to be the case, as the NRC made clear in its recent letter. (9)

No mention either of the Last Energy micro reactor. The Company has signed a $19 billion deal to supply 34 x 20 MW nuclear reactors to Poland and the UK. These SMRs will be about 2.4 times the cost per MWh of the very expensive Hinkley facility. (10)

Mark Foy, Chief Executive and Chief Nuclear Inspector, Office for Nuclear Regulation, told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in January that he was assuming that ONR will be asked to undertake a number of GDAs for some of the SMR technologies that are currently being considered by BEIS. “Our assessment is that if BEIS determines that two or three technologies need to go through generic design assessment, that work will be done in the next four years, or thereabouts”. (11)

Prof Steve Thomas, Greenwich University, has critically assessed the current enthusiasm for Small Modular Reactors in the UK and elsewhere. He concludes:

“The risk is not so much that large numbers of SMRs will be built, they won’t be. The risk is that, as in all the previous failed nuclear revivals, the fruitless pursuit of SMRs will divert resources away from options that are cheaper, at least as effective, much less risky, and better able to contribute to energy security and environmental goals. Given the climate emergency we now face, surely it is time to finally turn our backs on this failing technology?” (12)

‘Green’ Freeports

Meanwhile, the Inverness Courier reports that the Cromarty Firth and Inverness green freeport hopes to fabricate parts for SMRs and then transport them to the construction site wherever that might be. (13) Highlands Against Nuclear Power (formerly Highlands Against Nuclear Transport) says nuclear should not be part of the Cromarty freeport vision. (14)

The Scottish NFLA convenor, Councillor Paul Leinster wrote to Scottish Government Net Zero Minister Michael Matheson asking him to reject nuclear power at Scotland’s two new Green Freeports and instead make them a hub for renewable technologies to produce power for the nation. (15) Unfortunately, the Minister replied saying he will not be opposed to a nuclear manufacturing facility in a supposed Green Freeport. (16)

Forth Green Freeport has said they have no plans for nuclear power generation at its sites – including Rosyth – after campaigners raised concerns. “The Forth Green Freeport vision for Rosyth is centred around a new freight terminal, offshore renewable manufacturing and green power generating capacity,” said the spokesperson. “The FGF will also enable the development of largescale advanced manufacturing, skills and innovation onsite, alongside a proposed new rail freight connection. This vision and the associated economic and community benefits will boost Fife and the wider region. There are no plans for nuclear power generation on FGF sites.” However, it’s possible FGF is answering the wrong question which is about manufacturing parts for SMRs, not nuclear generation. (17)

There were reports that the Ineos-run facility at Grangemouth was interested in building a Rolls Royce SMR, (18) but the Scottish Government said it would block such a move, (19) Energy Minister, Michael Matheson responded to a letter from Scottish NFLA chair, Councillor Paul Leinster, saying 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 officials have been advised by Ineos that “Small Modular Reactors do not currently form part of their net zero road map for Grangemouth”. (20) The Scottish Tories attacked the Scottish Government for its stance describing it as anti-business. (21  https://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/SafeEnergy_No97.pdf

May 7, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, UK | Leave a comment

The age of small modular nuclear?

the CEO of Rolls Royce described it as “a Lego kit of parts” for building a nuclear reactor. So it’s not actually an Small Modular Reactor , but why not call it one if you can tap government funding by pretending it is?

BY AGREENERLIFEAGREENERWORLD ON APRIL 30, 2023 By Jeremy Williams

There was something of a non-sequitur from Britain’s Chancellor Jeremy Hunt recently. “We don’t want to see high bills like this again,” he said of the country’s current energy costs. “It’s time for a clean energy reset. That is why we are fully committing to nuclear power in the UK, backing a new generation of small modular reactors.”

If I was hoping to bring down energy bills, then nuclear isn’t the first place I’d look. The cost of Hinkley Point C, Britain’s first new nuclear power plant in decades, was originally priced at £16 billion. That made it the most expensive building in the world, and that was before costs began to spiral upwards. The latest estimate is that it will cost £32 billion. So it really doesn’t make much sense for Jeremy Hunt to be promising lower bills with nuclear power.

But maybe it’s not about megaprojects like Hinkley. Maybe, as Hunt suggests, the future lies in the much-vaunted Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). A number of agencies are looking for smaller reactors that can be standardised and therefore built quickly and cheaply – cheap being relative in the world of nuclear. It ought to be cheaper to install a chain of SMRs than to build one massive and bespoke power station.

The theory is that if they are small and they are modular, then SMRs would be closer to a manufactured product than a construction project. That would mean economies of scale, and potentially prompt the kind of decline in costs that we’ve seen in solar or in battery technologies.

But SMRs have been discussed for years. How close are we to seeing them as part of a low-carbon electricity grid?

Let’s start with who is working on the idea. A recent overview of the sector from the OECD includes this map of various projects. It’s not exhaustive, but it shows the major players.

Most of the action is in the US, with other projects in China, Britain, France, Russia and a handful of others. Some of these are private enterprises, particularly the American ones. Elsewhere a lot of the work is coming from state-owned nuclear companies such as EDF in France, or Argentina’s CNEA. Anyone who has invested in nuclear power and research in the past is likely to have an SMR project on a drawing board somewhere.

Is anyone actually building them? Sort of, but only China and Russia have working SMRs so far – a demonstration plant in China, and Russia’s pioneering floating nuclear power station, the Akademik Lomonosov. I wouldn’t consider either of those to be good examples of what SMRs are supposed to be, but they’re the ones that get mentioned. Construction on further plants is underway in both countries, along with Argentina. As the OECD notes, “there are currently no SMRs licensed to operate outside of China or Russia.” Everywhere else, SMRs are in various phases of research, design and planning.

This doesn’t tell us much about how long it’s going to take to bring SMRs into the energy mix. That’s because the big obstacle in nuclear power isn’t technology, but regulation. It’s incredibly difficult and slow to bring a new nuclear technology to market, and rightly so, given its dangers. Licensing a new nuclear design in the US takes five years and costs a billion dollars – and that’s before you even apply to build anything. That’s just to confirm that the design is safe.

Things move incredibly slowly in the nuclear world. The concepts for the European Pressurised Reactor that’s being built at Hinkley Point – and which is considered a new design, were being done in the mid-nineties. So of the long list of companies with concepts for SMRs, how many of those will ever get built, and in how many decades? From a climate change perspective, speed matters. We don’t want to accelerate nuclear power at the expense of safety, but at the moment it is going to take too long to bring any of these new reactors online.

Here in the UK, there is one firm that is synonymous with SMRs, and that’s Rolls Royce. Any article on the subject in the UK will mention Rolls Royce and often illustrate the article with a glossy picture of their proposed design – as I’ve done above. What’s odd about this is that Rolls Royce’s design isn’t a small modular reactor. It’s being called that because it’s a buzzword, but it’s 470Mw in capacity. That’s smaller than Hinkley Point C at 3,300Mw, but it’s a whole lot larger than what is generally called an SMR.

Neither does it use modular reactors to achieve its larger power output. What Rolls Royce is doing is using modular construction techniques to build a traditional reactor a bit quicker. On Michael Liebriech’s Cleaning Up podcast, the CEO of Rolls Royce described it as “a Lego kit of parts” for building a nuclear reactor. So it’s not actually an SMR, but why not call it one if you can tap government funding by pretending it is?

Looking at where we are at the moment, I expect there will be a new generation of smaller nuclear power stations at some point in the future. I expect China will do it first, and that the economies of scale will happen there. If it ever reaches the UK, it will be a few years away.

A more urgent question is whether or not a new generation of nuclear power will happen in time to make a difference to climate change. That looks far less certain.

First published in The Earthbound Report.

May 3, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, UK | Leave a comment