Nuclear power is key to our fight against climate change. Despite its potential dangers, it actually has the lowest death rate per gigawatt of power produced by any energy source and is one of the lowest carbon energy sources we have. What’s more, we need its powerful, compact, and on-tap energy nature in our future carbon-neutral energy grids as it fills a critical hole left by solar and wind. But nuclear power has a problem: it is damn expensive and inflexible, causing many to turn their backs on this vital energy source. Fortunately, the US nuclear regulators have just approved a new revolutionary nuclear reactor design that will solve these problems and beckon in a nuclear renaissance. Welcome to the incredible world of NuScale’s groundbreaking Small Modular Reactor (SMR).
SMRs are nothing new. The idea has been floating around for decades. You see, half the reason our current nuclear reactors are so expensive is because each power plant needs a custom design and build. This is to ensure that the reactor meets power demands without being too big (which drives up costs), works well with the local environment, and is safe. But the design and construction can take over a decade, in which time the power demands have changed, and so could the local environment and safety requirements.
SMRs solve this by taking a modular approach. Rather than building one giant reactor that needs to be painstakingly assembled on-site, they make lots of small reactors in a factory and ship them to the site complete. All the nuclear power plants need to do is order however many they need to meet energy demands and install them. This methodology has some staggering advantages. Firstly, as the reactors are being built in a factory, production can be made more efficient, more accurate, and cheaper due to the controlled environment and repeatable processes. Economies of scale also come into play here, as the same reactor design can be used multiple times rather than repeatedly starting from scratch. This means the cost of production could plummet over time.
There are also advantages for the power plant operators too, such as reduced construction times and flexible capacity (in relation to adding or taking away a reactor to meet current demands). Both of these factors will make nuclear power cheaper and more competitive in the renewable energy market.
So if the idea of SMRs is so good and has been around for so long, why don’t we use them yet?
Well, to get reactors small enough to be simply shipped to site, many have had to change the reactor design completely. You see, most commercial nuclear reactors are of the Light Water Reactor (LWR) or Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) design. While these designs are efficient and well-refined after decades of use, they are incredibly bulky and can’t be shrunk down easily. So, to get a reactor design that could be used as an SMR, multiple companies turned to less thoroughly proven concepts such as helium-cooled or molten salt reactors.
However, predicting how fast these new reactor designs will be developed and refined is hard, which means it isn’t easy to know when they will be ready for commercial deployment. There is also the safety issue, as these new designs must prove they aren’t a safety threat before entering production. Furthermore, many of them have to use high-enrichment fuels to function, which means they will produce five times more nuclear waste than current reactors! To read more about this, go to my article “The Future of Nuclear Power Has A Major Problem.”
Overall, these issues have held SMRs back from being given the necessary regulatory backing needed to get off the ground. That is, until now.
On July 29, 2022, the US nuclear regulators certified NuScale’s SMR for operation in the US, making it the first SMR to do so. But how have they achieved this?
Well, unlike almost every other SMR company, NuScale didn’t go for a brand new reactor design and didn’t try to shrink their reactors too much. They use a PWR design, with each module being 20m high and 9m wide. This means the modules aren’t as easily shipped as others (some of which are as small as a shipping container), but because PWRs have been produced at this size before (the same design is used to power nuclear submarines), the technology is already well-established. This means that current practices and regulations work well with the design, so the regulators don’t need to adapt to use it. The icing on top of the cake is that this reactor works with low enrichment fuel (5%), meaning it produces far less nuclear waste than its competitors.
Each of NuScale’s SMRs produces 77 MW, enough to power about 62,00 homes, and a power plant can use up to 12 of them. These reactors are installed in a unique earthquake and aircraft-strike-proof containment building with a water bath for the reactors. This increases safety standards and, in theory, could allow the power plants to be located closer to where they are needed, which would cut down on losses incurred by transmitting the energy over long distances.
But these will soon be put to the test. NuScale is building a power plant at the Idaho National Laboratory with six modules, giving it an output of 462 MW. This plant will be completed by 2029 and begin producing power by 2030. What’s more, this isn’t an experimental site. Power distributors have already purchased this energy, meaning the US will be the first place to use SMRs to power homes.
This site will be an excellent kick-start for NuScale. It will help them get an SMR factory set up and running smoothly, iron out any kinks with the installation process, and demonstrate to the world how quick, cheap, flexible, and powerful their SMR technology is. If all goes well, NuScale will have hundreds of customers lining up to replace their old crumbling reactors with their SMRs.
So, a new era of nuclear power is about to start. It will be cheaper, more flexible, and, overall, far more useful. Combine this with the fact that we can now permanently dispose of nuclear waste in incredible deep boreholes thanks to Deep Isolation (read more about that here), and it seems a nuclear renaissance is imminent. All I can say is thank goodness, as these incredible technologies are arriving just in the nick of time as our world starts to crumble under the immense weight of our collective climate crimes.
https://medium.com/predict/a-new-era-of-nuclear-power-has-just-begun-86476befd0c5
