When it comes to nuclear power plants, is smaller better? Significant players in the nuclear business have been touting small modular reactors (SMRs) for more than a decade as a way to get new nuclear plants into the U.S. electricity ecosystem.
Giants such as Babcock & Wilcox and Westinghouse have touted their designs, invested millions, and ultimately failed. The U.S. Department of Energy has been pushing and funding SMR development, with little results.
DOE made a conditional commitment to a Fluor-controlled startup, NuScale, which has a design that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has tentatively blessed, for up to more than a billion dollars for 10 years, late in the Trump administration. But that’s like National Football League player contracts: it’s not guaranteed. NuScale has been having severe problems lining up customers for its plan to build it multi-unit SMR project on a DOE reservation in Idaho.
Backers of SMRs have been hanging their argument on their claims that the smaller reactors (up to 300 MW) would be a cheaper way than conventional, big-ticket 1,000-MW conventional light-water reactors, which are fading from the U.S. scene, to fight global warming, as nukes generate no greenhouse gases.
Skepticism about SMRs has been growing for years, and a new report from the Environmental Working Group pours more cold water on SMRs. Written by long-time anti-nuclear activist and analyst Arjun Makhijani and M.V. Ramana, the report concludes that “the prospects for SMRs are poor.” Makhijani is a PhD nuclear engineer and Ramana a PhD nuclear physicist at Princeton University.
They lay out two general reasons why they don’t believe SMRs are a climate answer: “time and cost.”
*Scale economies, the reason conventional nuclear reactors are large. “Proponents of SMRs claim that modularity and factory manufacture would compensate for the poorer economics of small reactors. Mass production of reactor components and their manufacture in assembly lines would cut costs. Further, a comparable cost per kilowatt, the argument goes, would mean far lower costs for each small reactor, reducing overall capital requirements for the purchaser.”
Unlikely, Makhijani and Ramana argue. “At a fleet-wide level, the learning rate in the U.S. and France, the two countries with the highest number of nuclear plants, was negative – newer reactors have been, on the whole, more expensive than earlier ones. And while the cost per SMR will be lower due to much smaller size, several reactors would typically be installed at a single site, raising total project costs for the purchaser again.”
*Mass manufacturing problems. “If an error in a mass-manufactured reactor were to result in safety problems, the whole lot might have to be recalled, as was the case with the Boeing 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner jetliners. But how does one recall a radioactive reactor? What will happen to an electricity system that relies on factory-made identical reactors that need to be recalled?
“These questions haven’t been addressed by the nuclear industry or energy policy makers – indeed, they have not even been posed. Yet recalls are a predictable and consistent feature of mass manufacturing, from smartphones to jet aircraft.”
*Déjà vu all over again, in the words of the great American philosopher Yogi Berra. “The track record so far points to the same kind of dismal economic failure for SMRs as their larger cousins.” They cite the record of NuScale’s Idaho proposal, where the cost estimate for the design “has already risen from around $3 billion, in 2015, to $6.1 billion, in 2020, long before any concrete has been poured.”
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)