Small Modular Reactor Puns

"Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then."

https://cleantechnica.com/2021/05/03/small-modular-nuclear-reactors-are-mostly-bad-policy/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59201945

Rolls Royce have been developing SMRs, targeting the change to a net-zero economy. These reactors are much smaller than conventional reactors and aim to be able to be mass produced.

The UK government has placed a lot of focus on nuclear power, and this will most likely be the next step in producing a net zero economy.

I hold 1000 shares at £1.075.

Press Release:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211214005565/en/NuScale-Power-the-Industry-Leading-Provider-of-Transformational-Small-Modular-Nuclear-Reactor-Technology-Announces-Plans-to-Go-Public-via-Merger-with-Spring-Valley-Acquisition-Corp

Investors Presentation:

https://mc-67443a0a-0a3b-4888-8568-874354-cdn-endpoint.azureedge.net/-/media/Nuscale/Files/Investors/2021/investor-presentation-12142021.ashx?rev=76223e62b2444518a22f8029bf978469&hash=C1C6DD85D44D6C20D9BF30312F52B183

In a bid to gain energy independence from Russia and help reach the target of net zero emissions, would you support small modular nuclear reactors in your country?

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China continues to stake its claim as the world’s biggest proponent of new nuclear energy technology, connecting its first small modular reactor to the power grid.

China Huaneng Group Co.’s 200-megawatt unit 1 reactor at Shidao Bay is now feeding power to the grid in Shandong province, the China Nuclear Energy Association said in a WeChat post. A second reactor is undergoing tests before being connected and putting the plant into full commercial operations in the middle of next year.

The plant is the world’s first pebble-bed modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, heating up helium instead of water to produce power. It’s a so-called fourth generation reactor, designed to shut down passively if something goes wrong -- in contrast to active systems that may not be able to trigger safety measures if power fails, which is what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan a decade ago.

No country in the world is investing in nuclear power like China, which is expected to pour as much as US$440 billion into new plants over the next decade and a half and overtake the U.S. as the top generator of nuclear electricity.

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At 200 megawatts, the small module reactors -- or SMRs -- are about one-fifth the size of China’s first homegrown reactor design, known as Hualong One. It’s that size, and the flexibility and cost savings it promises, that have nuclear experts most excited about SMRs. The U.S., U.K. and Russia are also in advanced stages of manufacturing the technology, according to Fitch Solutions.

In a future electricity system dominated by wind and solar generation, smaller reactors will be better placed than the behemoths of the past to balance out the intermittency of renewable energy sources, according to Wood Mackenzie Ltd. And because of their size and safety features, they can be built at a central facility and delivered to where the generation is needed, potentially allowing for economies of scale to develop to bring down construction costs.

“SMRs should be less costly to build and operate, faster to implement and have shorter shutdown times during refueling than traditional nuclear plants,” Jefferies analyst Bolor Enkhbaatar said in a Dec. 20 research note.

If the technology develops, they could even be dropped into the boilers of existing coal power plan