They solve all our climate change-related challenges AND they eat the waste of older generation reactors.
I fail to see why we're not investing in more nuclear over solar and wind (whose components are not usually recycled)
I personally think Gen IV nuclear reactors have stuff-all chance of competing in such a market, but if somebody believes otherwise and wants to put up the dollars to try, all power to them.
One thing SMRs will absolutely not be used for is as peakers, which is where market design matters is most important for keeping the lights on at an affordable cost.
If SMRs are built, I’d expect many of them to be accompanied by batteries (either co-located or elsewhere on the grid) to be used as an alternative to ramping.
Markets without a lot of rules are not free, they are inevitably controlled by the biggest players or cartels.
I love nuclear tech, but it’s just not feasible today compared to other tech.
The ONLY advantage of SMRs is that they are easier to build because only a handful of companies in the _world_ possess technology to build reactor vessels for large-scale PWRs. And none of them are in the US.
So far, the record's not been good for large plants -- they tend to go way over budget and schedule. Case in point: Vogtle.
[1] https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Are-Sm...
Cost overruns at Vogtle and others had inflation as a partial factor but the bigger issues, per the DOE:
"Work began with incomplete designs and managers repeatedly failed to realistically schedule tasks. Experienced workers were in short supply and defective work often had to be redone. Workers quit for other jobs and the COVID-19 pandemic led to high absenteeism."
So a pass on Covid impact but the rest is the result of building a huge bespoke power plant. SMRs change all of that to units of mass production.
I'm sure there's still issues to solve there but if nuclear has a future competing against low cost renewables then that SMRs seem to be the only way forward.
It's simply a question of expertise and experience. The US and Europe have ignored nuclear power for so long, that most expertise was lost long ago. And each new nuclear power plant becomes a unique snowflake.
I'm just saying that it's _possible_ to construct reactors within reasonable timeframes. Russia and China can do that, so can other countries.
This is a completely unrealistic plan, designed to lure investors.
An SMR meltdown will produce enough radioactive contamination to make a small city unlivable, at least for a while. So you'll need a full containment building. You'll need emergency generators, coolant pumps, etc.
Then you have a question of security, an easily accessible reactor will provide a great target for terrorism. So you'll need a perimeter around it with armed guards.
Then there's a question of control. A working reactor requires at least two trained nuclear engineers on duty at all times. So each reactor will likely need around 15 highly specialized engineers. That will have to live within a commuting distance.
Sounds bad already. But that's not all. There's also a question of inspections, something like the NRC can be reasonably expected to regulate several hundred reactors. They are not prepared to inspect many thousands of reactors. And the last thing I personally want is a "self-regulating" nuclear industry.
Any _realistic_ SMR power plant will look just like a regular large nuclear plant, except that it'll have multiple reactor units instead of just one large reactor.
Haven't seen any news from them recently though.
Also, accelerator-driven reactors are just bonkers. They make no freaking sense for power generation. They are being investigated because they can produce very energetic neutrons, in quantities that are large enough to transmute some long-lived nuclear waste.
You need to have a system with cryogenic superconducting magnets and high vacuum within centimeters from a reactor producing at least hundreds of megawatts of power (if not gigawatts) within a volume of several cubic meters. You're basically constructing a fusion reactor at this point.
Oh, and parts of your accelerator close to the reactor will become activated, so you won't be able to do maintenance. ITER (the fusion reactor project) is planning to solve this problem using robots.
Fission reactors solve this by using VERY THICK pipes made of special steel, with careful inspection of every single weld. So once the vessel and its connections are placed, they stay inside the shielded area until it's time to decommission the reactor.
To pay for it, raise taxes on fossil fuels.
Solar, wind, and other renewables are very popular investments right now. There are very clear learning effects visible when implementing them resulting on year on year cost reductions. These investments have a very reliable ROI. A very predictable and quick implementation. And they are easy to scale. That's why so much new capacity is coming online vs. the absolutely pitiful amounts of nuclear being added to the grid. The price gap is basically an order of magnitude and growing. You get about 10x more capacity in renewables for the same money. The realized capacity gap also is much larger for the same reason.