It’s time to temper the enthusiasm for a large fleet of small nuclear reactors populating the globe, according to Sharon Squassoni, George Washington University research professor of international affairs. Her work at GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs focuses on nuclear energy and weapons.
George Washington University
In a report – “New nuclear energy: assessing the national security risks” — issued late last month (April 23), Squassoni writes, “The nuclear energy future that is being proposed now – small, flexible reactors distributed everywhere for many uses besides electricity – will not reduce, but will add to the national security risks that are unique to nuclear energy.”
The push to expand nuclear power as a key component of combating global warming comes at a bad time for safety and nuclear proliferation protection. She writes that “cooperation among key states essential to minimize the safety, security and proliferation risks of nuclear energy is at an all-time low.”
The top security threats from nuclear power, according to the report, are weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Today, a “network of agreements, treaties and voluntary understandings” exists to limit the threats. It isn’t perfect, as India and Pakistan in the past and Iran and North Korea today demonstrate. The Ukraine war has skyrocketed the risks of sabotage, coercion, and weaponization.
Despite this shaky structure, the status quo has largely held. In part, says Squassoni, “the concentration of nuclear power in fewer than three dozen countries worldwide has also helped limit these risks.” The spread of small reactors, and the move to new uses for these units, “will present more targets across the globe and some of these will be in countries with fragile governance and limited experience and resources.”
The spread of nuclear to applications beyond generating electricity such as district heat, hydrogen production, and desalination “will require fuels and technologies that require reprocessing — a sensitive fuel cycle technology that increases proliferation risks” and “proliferation risks will inevitably rise.”
The announced goal of tripling nuclear capacity by 2050, promoted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, writes Squassoni, “coincides with the disintegration of cooperation, the unraveling of norms and the loss of credibility of international institutions that are crucial to the safe and secure operation of nuclear power.” That means the U.S. must eschew a nuclear “great power competition” with Russia and China.
“Above all,” she asserts, “the United States needs to weigh nuclear solutions to climate change against other low-carbon options that pose fewer national security risks and may be more resilient to disruption.”
“The landscape of SMRs, for the moment, is largely fictional. With so few SMRs operating, it is hard to tell whether their reality will meet expectations.” — Sharon Squassoni
Squassoni also pours some cold water on the hot topic of the virtues of small modular reactors: “The landscape of SMRs, for the moment, is largely fictional. With so few SMRs operating, it is hard to tell whether their reality will meet expectations. Although they are marketed as new and advanced, SMRs so far feature few true innovations among the scores of designs.”
With some 83 SMR designs now being touted around the world, the only commonality is that the capacity is capped at 300 MWe. In 2020, the IAEA defined SMRS as reactors “whose components and systems can be shop fabricated and then transported as modules to the sites for installation as demand arises.”
The “modular” rubric is misleading, writes Squassoni. “Modular construction implies cost-savings. Large reactor projects typically require significant onsite construction. While specialty components (like reactor pressure vessels, turbines, etc.) are fabricated off-site, they are typically assembled, welded, and tested on-site. Design changes often contribute to considerable delays, which raise financing costs, already one of the major cost-drivers in nuclear plant construction.”
Modular construction in nuclear is nothing new. “Both the United States and the Soviet Union constructed and operated transportable reactors for naval and military purposes in the 1950s and 1960s. It is no accident that the only modularly constructed reactor operating commercially so far is the Russian floating barge, Akademik Lomonosov.”
Another claimed advantage of SMRs is the “plug and play” concept. “The idea is that once an SMR package is procured (possibly two, four, six or twelve reactors for the NuScale VOYGR), a utility could add identical capacity to match electricity demand as it grows.” The problem? “It is not clear whether the plug-n-play approach will lower costs, given uncertainties about how control rooms and emergency planning might be able to accommodate additional modules.”
So far, there is little that is particularly “advanced” about SMRs, according to Squassoni. “For example, Argentina’s 32-MWe CAREM reactor was publicly announced in 1984, but the first concrete was only poured in 2014 and first criticality is now targeted for 2027.”
So far, with only two examples – China’s two-unit high-temperature gas reactor (HTR-PM) and Russia’s floating nuke – don’t demonstrate “appreciably shorter incubation periods than their larger cousins. The HTR-PM took nine years from design to grid connection, relying on the earlier HTR-10 test reactor begun in the 1980s but it is still not commercially operated, and the second unit has yet to be connected to the grid; the Akademik Lomonosov took more than 12 years from design to grid connection, even though its reactor design rested on two generations of designs, most recently from 1980-vintage nuclear-powered icebreakers.”
–Kennedy Maize