Small Modular Nuclear Reactors. The Verdict

Small Modular Nuclear Reactors are yet another apparently promising 'silver bullet' style solution to the Net Zero challenge. All the reliable, safe, baseload power of large centralised nuclear power stations but without the huge cost overspends and crippling project delays. What's not to like, eh? Great on paper...but do Small Modular Nuclear Reactors pass the 'sniff test' in the real world?

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[charlespaynter]

My father, soon to be 91 and now totally blind is addicted to the 'Just have a think' output. Unable to read, this kind of resource is invaluable in keeping him refreshed, bright, alert and mentally active. Hearing about where modern technology is heading and all the amazing things that are happening helps give us all hope for the future in these troubling times. Thank you for taking the time and effort to broadcast this extremely interesting and informative content and allowing people like my father to engage & carry on living their best lives 👏

[perryallan]

You are so correct that the entire concept of SMR's was fatally flawed from the start just on the economics alone; and the mass production dreams were only ever a fantasy.

I'm an experienced nuclear plant engineer who is very pro-nuclear and has researched the history of nuclear power plants... and the fact is that the answers were known decades ago.

For starters the concept of "mass produced" SMR's with main components transported to local sites with minimal field assembly was 1st proposed in 1955 in the annual conference on the potential of nuclear power plants (held in Europe that year - not sure which country).

The 1st ever demonstration SMR was a 22 MWe thorium fuel cycle based BWR in Elk River Minnesota (USA) which many people were talking about could be erected in many small communities in the USA. Online 1964, Shutdown 3.5 years later in 1968 due to major design issues.

However, it had already been deemed uneconomical as a power plant just due to staffing cost alone.

For the record the USA built 17 commercial nuclear power plants in the 1960's - 1970's which would be considered SMR sized today. All of them were shut down decades ago as they were not economical to operate against the large nuclear power plants built at the same time (I am unsure of the details for the rest of the world; but, understand that the same pattern followed in other countries unless there were unique locations where building larger plants did not make any sense).

As an aside: did you note that Elk River was a thorium fuel cycle (there is nothing new about thorium and the current proponents are not talking about its historical issues identified from the USA's failed attempts to develop it as a fuel source). The USA went whole hog into developing thorium as a nuclear fuel source in the 1960's - 1970's to see if it would work. Along with all the test reactors it was run in around the world the USA built and operated 2 test molten salt reactors and the Shippingport demo/test power plant (PWR 60 MWe) which showed a successful breeding thorium core could be designed and put into most of the existing PWRs in the world -).

The USA then built 4 commercial thorium fuel cycle power plants of BWR, PWR, and HTGR designs. In all cases thorium did not work out (there were both technical and economic issues with thorium fuel cycle reactors) - and at least 3 of the reactors were converted to U235 fuel which worked better and was cheaper. Note if thorium is such a good choice now why are we not putting it into PWRs at this time - as at least we know that the reactor designs work well and we now have passively safe PWRs?

Anyway back to SMRs (regardless of fuel source): By the end of the 1970's it was known that the concept of SMRs were dead unless it was for some kind of geologically isolated area where they only needed a small power plant and transmission line construction was impractical.

If you double the size of a nuclear power plant it only takes about 40% more materials and in many cases the plant staff size does not even change. At some point the staffing size does increase modestly.

As for the failed NuScale Idoho plant. 6 SMR reactors of 77 MWe output was the claimed plans (462 MWe). What is interesting is that only the 50 MWe version was licensed by the NRC and there was an expectation that the NRC would quickly license the 77 MWe version which they thought could be done during the early site preparation period: Utah Utilities & NuScale was well into the "Pre-License review" of the 77 MWe design and had received good feedback. But the License application was never submitted after they received the construction quote and the pre-licnese review was terminated.

The quote came in at about $9.5 Billion to construct, with an estimated $1 Billion+ inflation adjustment during the construction period.

In reality this would have been about the same price to build a single Westinghouse AP-1000 (about 1150 MWe) and the staffing for the plant would have been about the same.

As for the $55 raising to $89 per MWhr for electricity cost. That was after $4 Billion from the US government for SMR development grants - so the real cost rose to well over $100 per MWhr (where a single unit AP-1000 could be built for significantly less than half of that).

Note on AP-1000 construction cost: Yes a lot more was spent at VC Summer and Voglte. But the USA (and Europe with the EPR) had not built nuclear power plants in so long that no contractors and very few workers understood how to build them - and also a number of suppliers shipped fake certified components and materials to site that could not be used - or had to be tore out and replaced. Massive cost and schedule delays, and lots of lessons learned. The Idaho NuScale project used the same contractors to quote that had learned their lessons with the Vogtle AP-1000s which is why they could quote so much better (and if those contractors are used before they forget - the next USA nuclear plant will be built much cheaper and much more closer to schedule than Vogtle 3 & 4).

By the way China built 4 AP-1000's with an average construction time of about 6 years. They had a delay and cost overrun on their 1st one as they were not used to working with the Westinghouse design - but once they understood it - no noticeable delays or cost overruns (and Chinese construction standards and contractors for nuclear are just as good - if not better - than their western counterparts. No shortcuts, no fake materials, and the workers understand high quality nuclear construction standards and practices). I did a consulting job for one of the Chines AP-1000 plants; and was impressed.

China is now building 6 more AP-1000s (they have a licensed copy) and at least 2 other countries are starting construction on AP-1000s- and at least 15 more AP-1000s are in the planning stage worldwide.

The Westinghouse AP-300 benefits from the fact that the controls and many smaller components are exactly the same ones being produced for the AP-1000's which provides a cost savings both up front and for repair parts and service down the road. No other SMR proposal can claim the same advantage.

As for mass production - it will never happen for a nuclear power plant.

1) At a minimum you need a proven plant design that is known to work economically for many decades - and in the history of nuclear power plants most initial designs did not work very well at all. There is not a single SMR plant that has a proven plant design - and it will be many decades after one goes on line before we know (we only have great PWR designs now based on the lessons learned of over 4 decades of operation of about 100 unique PWR power plant designs worldwide (76 different light water designs in the USA alone). A lot of design ideas that looked good in concept did not work out and there are many early shutdown plants as it was too costly to modify the plant to a different design. Now we can pick out which design idea worked for each component, structure, and system.

2) The design of the components and overall plant must be identical for each plant. Never going to happen as each nuclear power plant site must be designed for "worst case" LOCAL earthquakes, flooding, storms, etc. No one wants to pay for a plant that is designed to handle all the worst case conditions that exist somewhere in the world. It would be massively overbuilt and expensive.

3) As for mass production. I put the number at a minimum of 500 identical units a year - for at least 10 years to make it economical to even build an automated plant. We don't need that many nuclear power plants (even if only 50 MWe each).

4) Those sketches and concepts of building skids in a frame and assembling them onsite has been tried at least twice for fossil plants. Total cost and schedule disaster. One of those ideas that looks good as a concept, but requires a level of quality and dimensional control that so far has not been demonstrated to exist. It's cheaper to just build a normal seismically designed metal framework for the site, bring in the preassembled major components (Like has always been done) and field built connecting piping and wiring.

By the way, we disagree about the cost of solar and wind. I will post separately on that.

[moletrap]

Just love that you are updating all these techs. Thank you.

[MichaelSmith-ijut]

As someone who is small and modular himself, this technology has always appealed to me

[thomaskerkhoff]

Always appreciate your carefully researched content presented in an eminently understandable manner. Fully Charged is fortunate to have your leading presentations in London.

[ethan-]

Just giving this a boost for the algorithm. Thanks for the video as always.

[stevehayward]

Excuse my ignorance but werent SMR's were supposed to be truckable hence the name "Small".
The "SMR's" illustrated today by yourself look huge, slightly smaller than a current large Nuclear power plants.

[trueriver]

I think you're exactly right about small modular nukes arriving too late to the party to be part of the solution.

[Hologram]

You missed quite a few SMR technologies. BWRX-300 for example, which is based off well established BWR technology has major backers like Ontario Power Generation. You missed the CAREM reactor under construction in Argentina. You miss KIROS and TerraPower. You missed the HALUE production rampup.

I'm not sure why you think you need to make 10k of something before you start seeing cost reductions. Airplanes see cost reductions after the first 5-10.

You're right that SMR economics is currently the biggest hurdle, but it isn't nearly as gloomy as you make it appear. It seems you might have been looking for failures rather than genuinely looking at the potential.

[coldwarveteran]

Thanks for your continuing supply of things to think about.

[photosbyernesto]

Looking at the images of the Chinese SME reactors, it strikes me that "small" and "modular" are relative terms... They still look like they need a lot of work and materials to build and implement. It's not really like you can build a bunch of these and have them on the shelf for use in various locations! So, I tend to agree that perhaps larger reactors might still be the way to go, where nuclear power is the only real option for a country or location...

[andyl]

At the end of the day we need something that works and can be deployed now. Like it or not, the pipeline for nuclear is strewn with bureaucracy and overwhelming cost and simply stating that nuclear is safe doesn’t change either that or the fact it’s safe precisely because of so much of that cost. As Dave said, solar and wind work and they’re ridiculously cheap; in Australia we have issues during the day because so much solar floods the grid.

Keep working on nuclear research - sure - but we don’t have years to sit on our hands waiting for a pipe dream.

[tedbomba]

Why is it that so many ' private ' companies seem to always want, or even demand, that the taxpayers need to underwrite their for profit business ? Subsidies and long-term tax abatement are the most popular of late and are often handed out like candy here in the USA. In the long term, when these businesses are making huge profits, they seem to forget that we even exist.

[tomarmstrong]

This channel has more valuable common sense understandable and can do information than any other on YouTube.

[philipdavis]

Whenever anyone tells me that modular reactors are the future and the only problem is that nobody has invested enough in them, I point to the worlds major navies. SMR's have been used in nuclear subs for nearly 70 years now. All the major powers have spent countless billions on trying to make cost effective small reactors for subs, aircraft carriers and other military ships - the military advantages of these are enormous. And yet virtually no progress has been made by any of them - the latest subs from all the major powers are still using the same basic technology as the original nautilus (apart from some experimental designs like the Soviet reactor for the Alfa subs), and if anything, they are falling behind to the latest generation of hybrid and AIP propulsion systems. And this is in an area where cost isn't much of a consideration.

[GregI-frpk]

The NuScale SMR situation is disappointing however for many experienced power engineers the materials issues associated with molten salt amongst other technology issues looked rather challenging. I am not suprised about the status of NuScales' solution.

Nuclear plants as you note work very well once operational.A key issue is the 8-10 increase in costs since the 1970's.One of the key drivers of the cost (up to 50% of it) is the financing costs resulting from highly protracted construction times. SMR's an embryonic technology in aspects attempting to not just reduce equipment costs but also dramatically reduce construction times.In principle that should be achievable but should be far easier if we can leverage proven nuclear technology.

You didn't mention the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 which is a smaller version of their NRC-licensed ESBWR” .
The BWRX-300 incorporates a range of cost-saving features, including natural circulation systems, smaller, dry containment, and more passive operational control systems. The estimated capital cost of a BWRX-300 is $2250/kWe for series production after initial units are built. The design aims to limit onsite operational staff numbers to 75 employees to achieve an estimated O&M cost of $16/MWh or ~1.6C/KwH.


Westinghouse are following a similar track using a scaled down version of their AP1000 tech which is running well in China and I believe may be considered for UK sites in the 2030's.

We're entitled to have some scepticism about the cost claims based on history however Ontario Power Group are installing four of the GE Hitachi units over the next few years at their Darlington site.OPG have a lot of experience in Nuclear power & have run a strong fleet of CANDU based reactors for many years.The current average cost of electricity in Ontario is C$0.141 per kWh which by global standards is highly competitive.

I note your comment that Solar/Wind/Storage + Hydro are a complete energy solution however other proponents of this view such as Mark Jacobson have been thoroughly debunked by experienced engineers & scientists. I believe your comment about this being a low cost solution is questionable when full system (LSCOE costs vs LCOE) are considered as per this paper by Robert Idel.


If the energy supply challenge is going to be solved its not going to be just one type of technology but its going to require everything we have today plus some emerging technologies including Enhanced Geothermal, Natural Hydrogen & even in some cases SMR's.

I

[JeffBilkins]

Can you do an episode about infrastructure capacity problems in the energy transition? Here in NL there is trouble and companies and new projects can't get new power connections because the grid is full and it takes forever to expand it (because of environment, staff shortage everywhere etc).

[markotrieste]

It was clear from the beginning. Current reactors are behemoths exactly because they have to spread out the huge overhead costs. Making reactors 10 times smaller wouldn't cut it, a calculation any honest bookkeeper coud come up with. Adding exotic technology (molten salt, thorium, you name it) can only increase the financial risks. SMR work well only were cost is not a problem, e.g. US Navy.

[andyphillips]

Most Nations that have existing Nuclear are still promoting/ maintaining this technology as a way of safeguarding their own aging arsenal.

[rickrys]

You may have noticed in 2023 China installed 216GW of solar PV power which is more than the US installed in its entire US history.