I first heard of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors in 2017. Since the designs being offered were very similar to the early reactors of the 1950’s and 1960’s, many of which failed to produce electricity, the idea seemed to be just that. An idea.
The nuclear industry is, for all intents and purposes, a dying industry. It continues to exist on government loans and assurances, not only in Canada but in France, United States, the UK, and around the world. There has been no new private investment in nuclear power since 1978.[i]
In the early 2000’s, the industry promoted a “nuclear renaissance”. There were going to be faster, less expensive builds. The renaissance turned into a fizzle as one by one the promised nuclear power plants (NPP) failed to meet their targets.
A notable failure in reaching the goals, “faster, less expensive”, the Olkiluota power plant in Finland, was eventually turned on in April 2023[ii]. Construction on it began in 2005 with scheduled completion in 2009. The cost rose from an estimated 3 billion Euros to 11 billion. It was plagued by failed supply chains and sloppy installations.
Westinghouse in the United States and Areva in France each declared bankruptcy over their builds, in both cases, after soaking up billions in federal funding. In the end only one of four planned reactors, the Vogtle 3 has been completed.
The media interest in Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) seemed sudden in 2020. By 2023, they dominated the conversations about nuclear power.
The sale-pitch for SMRs.
People were attracted to their claims of producing “safe, clean, and emissions-free” electricity to act as "baseload" "when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow".
The claim that we need nuclear power for “baseload” energy is an unclear concept that implies quick energy is available when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. People who already rely on nuclear power know that nuclear power cannot be ramped up quickly or turned off easily and safely. How have the rest of us not noticed that when nuclear fails it depends upon coal and gas? Baseload? The province of Saskatchewan (which plans to host an SMR) already have hydro power and can readily import more from Manitoba. Furthermore, battery storage is becoming much more of a possibility.
Nuclear power simply cannot be turned on quickly. During the famed blackout over New York and Toronto in 2003, nine US nuclear stations were shut down. During the first three days after restarting, their output was a mere 3% of normal and after twelve days, they were still at only 50% of their capacity[iii]. The claim of its capability to produce “baseload” energy is baseless.
“Clean, Green and Emissions-Free” say the industry media.
The claim that it is “emissions-free” is false. In June 2010, the Advertising Council of Canada ruled that it was inaccurate and unsupportable to call CANDU reactors “emission free”. While SMRs are not projected to emit the identical wastes[iv] to that of a CANDU reactor because they will be using different fuel, all nuclear power plants emit radioactive hydrogen as tritium.
Accompanying the tritium will be a host of other radioactive gases and particulate matter including krypton and carbon dioxide (using carbon-14). Usually the tritium is released in a planned event but occasionally the release is accidental. It is usually described as “low-energy beta emitter with a short half-life of 12.3 years” and dismissed as having “no immediate danger”.
If the tritium stayed outside our bodies it would be of little concern but oxygen doesn’t know whether it is combining with tritium or normal hydrogen when it forms water. Our bodies are 93% water. The “low-energy beta” particle has enough energy to break chemical bonds when it is sitting right beside them.
A half-life of 12.3 years means that half of the tritium has turned into or “decayed” into helium, a non-radioactive gas in 12.3 years. Half of it remains. Aside from wondering what our bodies would do with helium (the decay element of tritium) in places where there should be hydrogen, at seven half-lives only 1% of a radioactive element remains[v], at ten half-lives it becomes undetectable. Neither 86 nor 123 years would be considered a “short” length of time.
So nuclear power is decidedly not “emissions-free”. What about the other claim that nuclear power is clean and green?
From the environmental standpoint, “clean” energy is a relative term. “Clean energy is produced when the process of creating it emits fewer pollutants than the process for generating fossil fuel-based energy” (IPPC). Since no one has figured out how to deal with the long-lived poisonous wastes left over from the nuclear power production of electricity, neither of the adjectives “clean” nor “green” can be applied to nuclear power.
The fuel for Small Modular Reactors will be different than the fuel used in Canada’s CANDU reactors. The waste will also be different. The current DGR (Deep Geological Repository) proposal is not designed for SMR waste.
There are many companies and over a hundred different reactor blueprints proposed. For the most commonly proposed SMR, a boiling-water reactor, Canadian-mined uranium would be shipped to Eunice, New Mexico, enriched and then shipped back to Canada for manufacture into fuel. (Need it be pointed out that mining and shipping is not carbon neutral?) After it was “used” in a reactor, it would be “reprocessed” which means that it is stripped of its plutonium by acid baths. Only the plutonium is “recycled” as fuel for the SMR while the waste has now become even more corrosive as an acidic radioactive soup. The plutonium could also be used by a state or a non-state actor (a terrorist) to create a nuclear bomb.
Does “reprocessing” decrease the amount of waste? Not by much, even by weight. Does extracting plutonium and re-using it for fuel qualify as “recycling” when all the other transuranics, activation products and broken pieces of uranium still remain?
“Spent” fuel is a misnomer. Of the uranium-235 in fuel, only approximately 5% will have undergone the nuclear reaction that produces heat. The reaction slows down and then stops because the broken pieces of uranium and other elements effectively block neutrons from continuing the reaction. It becomes clogged with its own wastes.
Is nuclear a source of green energy? According to several sites on the internet, “green energy” is any energy type that is generated from natural resources such as sunlight, wind or water. From the tech giant, TWI, “the key factor about these energy sources are that they don’t harm the environment through factors such as releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”[vi]
By these definitions, nuclear power is not green.
The greenhouse gasses released during the mining, transportation and refining of uranium plus the construction of the nuclear power plant will take years to “pay back” by non-carbon-emitting nuclear energy. The amount of carbon required for full decommissioning and monitoring of the waste is still unknown.
The nuclear industry claims that nuclear power is reliable.
Nuclear power plants require downtime for refueling and maintenance – an average of one out every 18 months of operation is required. They require “back-up” power on site (Fukushima’s failure). Of the 132 nuclear power plants built in the USA, 21% were permanently and prematurely closed because of failed reliability or cost problems and another 27% have at least once been closed unexpectedly for one year or more[vii]. Most nuclear power plants run at 90% their full capacity. In fact, physicist and environmentalist, Amory Lovins, characterized nuclear power plants as “intermittent”[viii] because of both the planned outages and the unexpected sudden fails.
“Refurbishment”[ix], meaning replacements of the miles of tubes within the plant and upgrading safety requirements, occurs within about 30 years after the nuclear power plant is first turned on. It may require a couple of years off-line.
Finally, Small Modular Reactors are expensive.
No one contends that this is not so. Not only are they expensive but not one has ever been built on time or on budget. The provincial government of Saskatchewan (a province with only one million people) has already agreed to pay $50 million for research and development and expects to put another $5 billion dollars into the building of a single 300 MW reactor by 2030. (The moving target for completion has been moved to 2035.)
The belief in a market for SMRs where none exists has dollar signs in politicians’ eyes. Their so-called “modular” manufacture will still require transportation of units 100 tons or more. Their large up-front carbon footprint will not be affected for decades. Dr. Edwards of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility has characterized them as “power-point reactors”, present only in theory.
Why?
As an emergency room physician, I did life-saving functions first. Air, Breathing, Heart. If the patient was hemorrhaging, we fixed that before we worried about the broken leg. If this is a climate emergency, and many scientists believe it is, we need to do the fast easy things first – energy efficiency, conservation and fast builds like wind, solar and geothermal.
We cannot first invest in esoteric, as yet to be developed, reactors that have not even seen the light of day yet.
So why are politicians so hell-bent on nuclear reactors however small or “micro”?
Lobbying can have an enormous effect on politicians. In April 2023, a small group of citizens representing at least a dozen NGO’s spent a week trying to speak to as many politicians in Ottawa (the seat of the Canadian federal government) as we could. We heard that they had been lobbied by the nuclear industry on a monthly basis and sometimes the Member of Parliament admitted that we were the first to provide a different point of view.
Besides lobbying, could the attraction of nuclear be that it puts them into the “nuclear club”? Plutonium for sale? The rarefied air of the nuclear weapons’ states? Is this the attraction and the reason that otherwise smart people are diverted from a path to real “clean, green and emissions-free” energy and conservation?
Nuclear power, whether small modular reactors or the customary large reactors, is a distraction from the real task at hand, getting to zero.
[i] [i]MacAlister, Terry (April 9, 2008). "Westinghouse wins first US nuclear deal in 30 years". London: Guardian News and Media Limited. April 9, 2008
[ii] I’ve been informed that it is still encountering problems and this much-vaunted start as it claims on line may not actually have happened.
[iii] https://web.archive.org/web/20110927101054/http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly.
[iv] 2-propenoic acid, ammonia, aromatic hydrocarbon resin, benzene, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrazine, morpholine, nitrogen oxides, phosphoric acid and quarterly ammonium compounds, sulphur dioxide, suspended particulate matter, as well as tritium and krypton.
[v] https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/isotopes.html#halflifeexample
[vii] https://web.archive.org/web/20110927101054/http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly.
[viii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amory_Lovins Accessed 20.5.23
