Michael Barnard's title was "Small Nuclear Reactor Advocates Refuse to Learn the Lessons of the Past". I would contend that they have learned the lessons very well. They have learned how to spin information to the public so that it appears new. They have learned that legislators are an easy prey with government money and they know how to get it.
Much of the interest is driven by governmental policies and investments focusing on the technology. Much of it comes from the nuclear industry. Some comes from entrepreneurs hoping that their technology will take off in a major way, making them and their investors a lot of money.
Much of this post is paraphrased or directly quoted from Michael's excellent article - which I have also tweeted and facebooked and which can be accessed here: https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/small-nuclear-reactor-advocates-refuse-to-learn-the-lessons-of-the-past-8ca1af3293c3 Because I was in the process of writing a blog with the same general approach, I've lost track of a lot of who wrote what but inserted quotation marks where it is clearly Michael's words.
"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."
Michael then explores briefly "the world of small modular nuclear reactors (SMNR) or small and medium reactors (SMR)". The most common acronym is SMR.
"They are nuclear generation devices, nuclear fission thermal generation. They use fissile material heat emissions, to heat a liquid which creates steam which drives turbines to generate electricity."
"The biggest difference between them and traditional nuclear generation reactors is that they are smaller, hence the ‘small’ and ‘medium’ in the names." According to the International Atomic Energy Commission, small is any reactor with a capacity less than 300 MW and medium for up to 700 MW.
"This is not new technology. The first nuclear generation plant in the world 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 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, Indian ones are 14 small CANDU variants decades old, and one Chinese plant is at the end of its 40-year life span.
An Argentinean model has been in construction on and off for over a decade and 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.
What we are being sold isn’t just one technology, it’s many technologies. A literal Heinz-57 variants of 18 types have been promoted. None are dominant.
"Advocates for SMRs typically make some subset of the following claims:
· They are safer
· They can be manufactured in scaled, centralized manufacturing facilities so they will be cheaper
· They can provide clean power for remote facilities or communities
· They can be deployed onto decommissioned coal generation brownfield sites
· They can be built faster
None of these are good arguments."
"First, traditional nuclear is safe already, due to passive safety features in the majority of operational reactors and lots of attention to management and operations. Chernobyl was a bad design. Fukushima was due to deeply bad siting and operational decisions. Those siting and operational decisions have resulted into a cost which is likely to be around a trillion US Dollars to the overall Japanese economy when all the bills are counted. SMRs aren’t immune to bad siting and bad operational decisions.
"Nuclear is not failing in the marketplace because of safety concerns although those are still real, economics are why nuclear is failing in the marketplace.
"Second, In order for economies of scale to kick in, a manufacturing facility has to build hundreds, thousands or millions of the same thing and have a projected future market for hundreds or thousands more. The field is littered with 18 different types of technologies and many competing designs within those types. There is no coherent single technology which will dominate the field. Each country engaged in SMR research has its own preferred technologies and its own companies to support. "
The nuclear industry should be faced with at least as much scrutiny as anyone else that wants money to start their business. If they are as good as their proponents say, maybe they should compete on the T-V show, Dragon’s Den?
"No scaled manufacturing, no cost reductions. NuScale’s expressed hope is to get its cost of generation down to only double the current wholesale cost of wind and solar generation, around $65 per MWh.
"Third, both remote communities have major security exposures. As nuclear technologies and fuels are highly proscribed and limited due to nuclear non-proliferation strategic goals, and as concentrated radioactive material is highly desirable for terrorists for dirty bombs, the entire supply, operational and waste chain requires significant overlapping circles of defense.
"These requirements don’t go away because the nuclear reactors are smaller.
Per reactor allocation of all security costs for US fleet. Table by Michael Barnard published in 2021.
"And these security costs are big, and mostly hidden in federal, state, and municipal subsidies.Remote areas still require these additional security costs, and they will likely be higher simplydue to the additional challenges of securing remote areas with high transportation costs.
"There will be no fast deployment of SMRs. They need to be standardized, shippable units. Right now, the units under construction. Nu Scale is promising an unrealistic 12 units in operation by 2029, but the $1.4 billion bail-out it received after several municipalities walked away from the rising costs and schedule don’t suggest that’s realistic.
"Are there other problems with SMRs?
"Yes, yes there are, three of them.
1. They can’t take advantage of vertical scaling. As discussed, they cannot achieve economies of manufacturing scale due to the sheer number of competing technologies and lack of any strategy to resolve the issue. In addition to failing the horizontal scaling challenge, they don’t scale vertically either. Most energy production becomes more efficient as the plants become larger – there is an optimum diameter of pipes for efficient fluid and steam transfer. Bigger diameter pipes move a lot more fluid more efficiently. Gates’ Terrapower is designing a 1,200 MW capacity reactor, so they seem to have received the vertical scaling memo but this just puts them back into the same cost problem as normal reactors.
2. Decommissioning a nuclear reactor is a billion USD, 100-year venture. I’ve heard it said that they were small enough to be buried in situ. That was wishful thinking. US data suggests that a clean-up or decommissioning would cost $70 billion of taxpayers’ dollars in addition to the amount that is put aside during operation for clean-up. The other suggestion is that the reactors would be returned to a centralized processing site for decommissioning. This totally begs sanity – no one would ship the highly radioactive nuclear core from an old nuclear power plant across the country. Furthermore no country in the world has managed to build a centralized nuclear waste repository, so this is deeply unlikely.
3. No nuclear reactor is commissioned with private insurance. Every country with a nuclear generation fleet has enacted legislation which caps private liability at some level and puts any liability above that level onto the shoulders of taxpayers. In the US at present that’s $13 billion for the entire sector, around $131 million per reactor. These sound like big numbers, but as was pointed out earlier, Fukushima’s liability is in the trillion USD range.
So who Is advocating For SMRs & why?"
At present we see SMR-earmarked funds in both Canadian and US federal budgets, mostly for research and development with the exception of over a billion to NuScale to, in theory, build something. Four provinces in Canada — Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan — have signed MOU with SMR development.
The conditions for failure of small modular reactors are obvious. "The lack of a significant market is obvious. No one wants them. In a Heinz-57 field, the lack of ability to create a clear winner is obvious. The security costs are obvious. The lack of vertical scaling for 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?
Let’s start with the worst perspective. The Canadian provinces which focused on SMRs call this a major part of their climate change solutions. New Brunswick has an 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. Ontario has a nuclear fleet and been actively hostile to renewable energy, to the extent that the current administration cut up 758 contracts on renewables to the tune of $250,000,000. Furthermore, the government legislated a lack of recourse. All of them have premiers with no education beyond high school and negative attitudes to science and to education.
They are deferring real governmental climate action while claiming the appearance of climate action. They pander to their least wise supporters by asserting that renewables won’t work for their purpose, while SMRs aren’t even in a modern, deployable, operable form yet.
At one time it could be argued that renewables were too expensive, that they would cause grid unreliability and hence that nuclear was necessary. This been disproven by nuclear deployment failures, and plummeting costs and proven reliability of renewables. Every serious analyst agrees that renewables can economically deliver 80% of required grid energy. A debate exists about the remaining 20%.
A Stanford research team is at the centre of this debate. Since the late ‘00s, they’ve been publishing regular studies of increasing scope and sophistication on the thesis of 100% renewables by 2050. Their 2015 publication saw a lot of push-back. People thought that nuclear would be necessary. As in-stream hydro, improved storage and various geothermal accesses have illustrated, some of these same analysts are now saying it’s the last 10% of the problem which is the challenge.
It will take to work to integrate renewables into our energy grid in sufficient numbers to bring their total to 80 - 90%. Our energy research dollars should be directed towards solving the problems that arise as we transition to sustainable renewable energy instead of supporting a dying industry.
If we are really worried about that last 10-20%, research dollars can be spent on SMRs, which is all most of the SMR expenditures amount to. (On the other hand, the 1.4 billion dollar NuScale bailout strains credibility especially when it 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 un-costed and unfunded taxpayer liability).
I have come to the conclusion that 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. They may believe their own media spin.
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