Small Modular Reactors. Are they now unavoidable?

one of the most contentious talking points in today's noisy global conversation about how best to get to a net zero carbon future is of course the dreaded subjective nuclear energy I've looked at nuclear energy a couple of times on this channel in 2019 I considered the question of why large-scale nuclear power has fallen out of favor with some governments and populations and more recently I look specifically at molten salt thorium reactors which developers believe is a technology that addresses the issues of cost safety and waste in both episodes I've tried to give a balanced view of the pros and cons but at the back of my mind only perfectly well that whatever I said and however I said it I could look forward to an inevitable verbal evisceration by angry voices from both ends of an extremely polarized opinion spectrum so a smart person looking for an easy life might conclude that a good idea would be to never touch on the subject of nuclear power again and just focus on all the other forms of low or zero carbon energy technologies that are being developed all over the world so what I thought I'd do this week is to touch on the subject of nuclear power again specifically this time around I'll be doing my very best to offer you good folks a dispassionate fact-based review of the latest industry buzz around a technology known as small modular reactors hello and welcome to just ever think small nuclear reactors are not a new concept the world superpowers have been using them to power naval vessels safely for millions of miles both on and under our seas and oceans since the 1950s back on terra firma our governments have traditionally gone for massive scale centralized nuclear facilities with multidecadal construction times and often with very heavy budget overruns according to this Forbes article the average cost of constructing a nuclear plant had reached 11 billion US dollars by 2018 these things take up a huge amount of land and that limitation coupled with the fact that the majority of citizens are instinctively worried about their safety as meant that nuclear power stations have had to be located well away from big cities and that adds even more cost for high-voltage power cables that take the electrical supply to where it's needed the Fukushima accident back in 2012 caused such a public concern that it very nearly wrecked the global nuclear industry for good and there are some voices in the environmental movement that suggest the demise of the industry would be no bad thing but as this chart from the website our world in data shows statistically at least from an operational point of view nuclear power is one of the safest forms of energy available alongside wind solar and hydropower the IPCC has warned that the world needs to reduce co2 emissions radically by 2030 if we're to stand any chance of avoiding the catastrophic consequences that our current trajectory towards four degrees Celsius of global atmospheric warming will bring in fact the reduction in emissions that we've witnessed so far in 2020 as a result of the global lockdown it's about the scale of reduction that we need to achieve every single year for at least the next decade so in very recent years there's been something of a reconsideration of the role that nuclear power might need to play in our energy mix if we really are going to go cold turkey on our fossil fuel addiction in an assessment report published in May 2019 by the International Energy Agency their executive director dr. Fatih Birol so this if governments don't change their current policies advanced economies will be on track to lose two-thirds of their current nuclear fleet risking a huge increase in co2 emissions wind and solar energy need to play a much greater role in order for countries to meet sustainability goals but it is extremely difficult to envisage them doing so without help from nuclear power the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAA defines small nuclear as under 300 megawatts compared to a traditional full-sized nuclear installation which can produce the equivalent of up to 1,600 megawatts of power enthusiasts of small modular reactors points out that as well as a much smaller footprint SMRs also have better safety faster build times and a unique cost somewhere between 800 million and 3 billion US dollars compared to the 11 billion we just looked at there are currently about 50 different designs in concepts for SMR technology being developed all over the world including the molten salt thorium reactors that we looked at in a recent episode so it'd be impossible and probably not all that helpful to get into the weeds of the technical differences between all of them in this video but according to the World Nuclear Association SMR technology in general has several attractive selling points the wna say that because of the small size and modularity of SMRs they could be almost completely fabricated in factories and then transported and installed as modular and possibly even pre fueled components that strategy will build in significant cost efficiencies in quality improvements in a tightly controlled factory production line environment they also point to passive safety features that they say would make SMR technology attractive to countries with less experience of nuclear power and that some passive safety refers to systems and procedures that don't require active intervention by an operator or any kind of elaborate shutdown mechanism that could fail if it lost electrical power instead these SMI reactors would work in such a way that they could take advantage of natural forces like gravity or buoyancy pressure differences conduction or natural heat convection all of which would cause the nuclear reaction to slow down rather than speed up in the event of an accident or loss of power and as well as greater safety though simpler systems mean less cost and fewer operatives on-site and smaller reactors say the wna me smaller radioactive inventory with the implication that the construction would be inherently safer and will be less nuclear waste produced they point out that many designs are being developed for underground or underwater locations providing greater protection against natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis and man-made disasters like lunatics in hijacked aircraft the very fact that SM ours are modular and small means that multiple units could be installed on the same site and the reduced need for cooling water it would make SMRs suitable for more remote regions the reduced size also means that SM ours could potentially be located in brownfield sites left vacant by decommissioned coal-fired plants and at the end of the reactors working lifecycle their modularity would make removal or on-site decommissioning much easier some developers predict that by 2030 SMRs could be cost competitive with natural gas combined cycle plants or NGC C's Forbes points out the current estimates for levelized cost of electricity from SMRs are around a hundred US dollars per megawatt hour while ng CCS are in the 55 to $85 per megawatt hour range in 10 years though SMR costs could drop below $65 per megawatt hour putting them on par with cheap gas and renewable energy so should we be going all-in for sm our technology as an additional fast-track technology to help renewable energy sources like wind and solar displace fossil fuel carbon emissions in the timescales that the IPCC tellers are necessary well just like everything else in the world of energy technology isn't it a quite as clear-cut as the marketing bonds of any particular industry would have you believe the Union of Concerned Scientists have highlighted some counter arguments that would need to be carefully considered before rushing headlong into what appears to be a global panacea for a sustainable energy future on the issue of safety for example they point out that those passive safety cooling systems are not infallible and in practice in order to achieve regulatory approval developers may well be forced to install secondary active backup systems which would eat up a good chunk of the cost savings over traditional nuclear UCS also argued that because SM R's will have smaller cheaper and less containment systems than current reactors they carry a higher risk of hydrogen explosions more robust containment similar to existing plants would minimize this risk but again it would add significantly to the overall cost they also point to the proposal to utilize underground installation as an extra safety measure the UCS agree that this would indeed offer greater protection from earthquakes tsunamis and jumbo jets but they suggest that it also increases the constructions vulnerability to flood damage and floods are something that we're seeing more and more of as our climate continues to warm the UCS say that why it's true that on an individual level smaller reactors are likely to be inherently safer than larger ones they also generate less power than larger reactors so we'll need more of them to meet the same energy needs and lots and lots of small nuclear reactors in multiple locations may want presents a higher risk than a small number of large centralized plants especially if plant owners try to cut costs by reducing supports therefore safety equipment per reactor and of course the virtue of scalable modularity that the world nuclear Association is Spanish Durley err is only really a valid argument up to 300 megawatts if modules are combined to result in an installation of more than 300 megawatts it effectively seeks to be a small modular reactor and become a medium or full size nuclear power station so opponents might be forgiven for suspecting that this is a way to slip nuclear power stations into the energy mix through a loophole in policy and regulation and then there's that point about siting SMR reactions in remote locations modularity would certainly make them transportable and installations wouldn't necessarily even have to be connected to a large electrical grid so you really could reach some of the furthest flung and least hospitable territories in places like Alaska and Siberia or the vast tracts of Africa that are still without electrical supply today in fact was a subcategory defined by the IAEA has very small reactors or VSM RS which are units proposed for provision of less than 15 megawatts designed especially for just such remote communities but according to this 2018 United Nations analysis by 2050 almost 70% of the entire human population will live in densely populated cities served by distributed smart grids with demand spikes smoothed out greatly by millions of vehicles and devices that will by then be capable of giving energy back to the grid as well as receiving it that may make the need for SMS redundant in the longer term nevertheless some of the world's largest energy consumers are pursuing the technology China plans to raise domestic nuclear energy output from 43 gigawatts to 300 gigawatts by 2030 part of that strategy is a floating SMR system called the ACP 100 earmarked for installation in the island province of Hainan Russia is also getting in on the game launching its first floating nuclear power station academic Lomonosov by the end of the year and India is looking carefully at the potential of SMR technology to although in a recent Q&A with news outlet nuclear Asia Secretary of the Indian Department of Atomic Energy Kay envious said that while the Indian Dae has design teams working on SMRs they already have the resources fairly well occupied in the construction of previously planned traditional reactors and they'll take priority before SMR is seriously considered in that country over in the States the Department of Energy has a cooperative agreement with a private company called new scale which will provide them with up to 217 million dollars in matching funds to support the accelerated development of their SMRs and similar agreements are in the pipeline with domestic reactor design is like BW XT empower and SMR invent tech that's a profound shift from the government-controlled nuclear industry we have today perhaps unsurprisingly the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are working alongside the current administration's Department of Energy to eliminate what they refer to as regulatory hurdles to facilitate funding mechanisms and licensing opportunities in order to encourage the deployment of SMR by these private corporations nuclear power plants driven largely by a corporate profit incentive might be tempted to cut corners by using inferior materials or of course by the time on corporate strategy of shedding jobs when the numbers don't add up and that risks making remote locations less safe and more worryingly it may even leave them vulnerable to attack by bad actors with the potential for nuclear proliferation and of course the inconvenient question of nuclear waste won't disappear with SMR technology either SMR still fundamentally work in the same way as traditional nuclear power stations and nuclear waste is still a byproduct according to the IAEA zone analysis there's about 35 million cubic meters of solid radioactive waste currently in existence just over 28 million cubic meters of that has been permanently disposed of in sites that will remain no-go areas for anything between 10,000 and 100,000 years the remaining 6 million cubic meters or so is being held in storage awaiting final disposal including untreated nuclear waste in the United States that's been sitting in interim storage since the 1940s despite all that though the simple fact remains that SMR technology can provide base load energy provision in place of fossil fuel at the cop 26 climate summit now reschedule for 2021 all participating nations will be required to confirm and put in place their nationally determined contributions towards achieving global net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as part of that Herculean task countries will seek to utilize all forms of very low in the zero carbon energy sources available to them and the reality in many cases is that small modular nuclear reactors may well be called upon to plug some of the baseload gaps left by a rapid move away from gas and coal fire power plants as usual with any video that contains the words of nuclear and energy in the same sentence I'm expecting that there will be strong views on both sides of the argument here I what I presented today is somewhere approaching a balanced assessment that's certainly how it was intended but I'll be keen to hear your thoughts in the comments section below that's it for this week but before I go I just want to let you know about some new work being carried out by an organization over in the u.s. called the Center for behavior and climate to adapt selected just have a think videos into educational self teaching modules on their already well-established website this is a completely non financial arrangement I don't pay them to use my footage and they don't pay me to promote their website it's simply an extra resource that we hope will be useful to individuals and educators it's a more easily get cross some of the concepts around climate change that I present on this channel the first modules now online and it's based on a recent episode we did on blue carbon and there are plans for several other modules to be developed over the coming months their website address should hopefully be scrolling across your screens right now and you could also click on the link that I'll leave in the description box below this video I also need to give a big thank you to the channels supporters over at patreon without whom these programs simply would not happen and a special shout out to the folks who joined the patreon team since last time with pledges of $10 or more a month they are Gaea of a bali jonathan Alsop chris Devenish nikola Leonel Oh Ron Kidder an alien DeRuyter and Michael Beckett and of course thanks to everyone else who's joined our patreon page since our last video you can get involved with all of that if you want to by visiting WWE and Comm forward slash just ever think and you can also help the channel massively by hitting the like button and by subscribing both of which raise the channels visibility with the youtube search algorithm and ensure the messages get to more and more people each week dead easy to subscribe you just need to click down there or on that icon there and don't forget to hit the bell icon so you get notified about new content as always thanks very much for watching have a great week and remember - just have a think see you next week [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 255,665

Rating: 4.8774948 out of 5

Keywords: Small Modular Reactors, SMR, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, NuScale, Climate change, climate crisis, sustainable energy, renewable energy

Id: yofGtxEgpI8

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DV82XL]

Discussion of the pros and cons of the technology

[u/firestaf]

What do y'all think of GE Hitachi's BWRX-300 as being a competitor to NuScale's design?

[u/Deuteron85]

Pros if they are innovative, gen4 like. Molten salts, sodium or lead. I don't want a PWR on a can (I'm looking at you, NuScale) . Nevertheless, I don't think acutal designs are cost effective.

[u/arguse27]

I see that there are quite a few differing opinions on SMRs here - can someone explain the cons to me? Is it just the fact that licensing/regulation is expensive and these don’t put out the 1GW that older reactors do?