Small Modular Reactors?

If you were buying a new car, wouldn't you check it out against its competitors, ask others about their experiences and review accident records of the model? Would you buy something that has never been built before, has no track record and is made by an industry that has never delivered either on time or within budget?

Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are an idea, not a reality. The idea is to create a small nuclear reactor than can be built centrally and transported to the location where it is needed. They could be “popped” down beside rural communities across the countryside. The World Nuclear Association's web site seems to imply that the science is sound and that there are hundreds of them either being built or in service – but also, in fact, “in January 2014, Westinghouse announced that it was suspending work....it could not justify the economics of its SMR without government subsidies.”

The nuclear power industry is the ultimate scam; the government subsidizes the building and commissioning of the power plant and cost of insurance while the industry walks away with the money. Jobs? There are more jobs in almost any other method of producing energy.

Problems are multitude. First of all, “small” is relative and in the realm of nuclear reactors hardly at all. Second: they still need water for coolant, lots of it and so need to be situated near water. Third: they must have a minimum base load electricity demand to work – they are very clumsy at powering up or down in response to needs. Fourth: with an accident record of five meltdowns in thirty years wasting thousands of square miles of farmland for hundreds of years, does it make sense to even enter the field? A “small nuclear” meltdown will still be a meltdown.

The issue of security with all these "little" nuclear power plants planted all over the place is never mentioned.

Is nuclear power green? When all of the input (construction, mining, milling, transporting), after-put (decommissioning) and waste management is taken into account, nuclear power is decidedly “ungreen”. Does it have less impact upon the environment than dirty coal? The people around Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island don't think so.

Premier Brad Wall in Saskatchewan has been sold a bill of goods - 

PS.  From the Nuclear Monitor, April 23, 2015: "The term small is used to indicate that the power level is much lower than the average power delivered by currently operating reactors. Modular means that the reactor is assembled from factory-fabricated parts or “modules”. Each module represents a portion of the finished plant built in a factory and shipped to the

reactor site. Modularity is also used to indicate the idea that rather than constructing one large reactor, the equivalent power output will be generated using multiple smaller reactors that allow for greater tailoring of generation capacity to demand.

SMRs such as the SMART are likely to be even more expensive ways of generating electricity than the large nuclear reactors being built today. Small nuclear reactors

are cheaper in absolute terms, but they also generate less electricity. When the two factors − smaller overall cost and smaller generation capacity − are taken together, the cost per unit of electricity for small reactors generated turns out to be higher that for large reactors.

This is why reactors became larger and larger over the 1960s to the 1980s/1990s. Thus, it seems likely that SMRs will lose out on the economies of scale that standard sized (roughly 1000 MW) reactors benefit from.