Canada commits C$970M to SMR nuclear power technology

reuters.com

13 pointseldaisfish2 comments

It's a shame the Candu nuclear technology was abandoned [1]. As the name suggests, it's a Canadian technology. It uses heavy water as a moderator (and coolant) in the core of the reactor. Heavy water is very expensive, about 1 billion dollars per reactor, but it's a one-time investment. The benefit is that the reactor can (and does) use un-enriched Uranium. Nowadays, people think enrichment could be an obstacle in the nuclear renaissance, since the main commercial enrichment plants are in Russia.

The SMR mentioned here does not use this technology. A competing SMR with Candu technology was in the race, but for some reason it lost. Oh, well, at least they are funding another SMR.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

CANDUs have some problems. They're big, they're expensive, they have reliability problems, they're slow, and they have a positive void coefficient (which scares people off more than being an extreme safety issue).

Overall, burning the very finite U235 supply at 50% or so better efficiency is worth it if you're going to have a nuclear program, but they don't achieve the primary/only goal of most civilian nuclear programs which is to subsidize infrastructure for a weapons program with public money and make it more palateable. As such noone really adopts them.

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