Small reactors, big hang-ups

attract customers for its “relatively new and unproven” SMR technology as quickly as it expects, “or at all,” and that “acquiring customers may be more expensive than currently anticipated.”

Energy technology expert Michael Barnard, writing recently for CleanTechnica, pointed out that basic physics may be the fatal flaw of SMR technology. It’s not that SMR can’t work — they do — it’s that they necessarily “forego efficiency of vertical scaling,” and will thus never likely make economic sense when compared to more conventional energy options.

Any type of thermal plant — that is, one that creates steam to drive generating turbines — has increased thermal efficiency, and therefore cost efficiency, the larger the boiler is, Barnard explained. When SMR technology was first considered in the 1950s and 1960s because it worked so well in naval submarines and surface ships — where costs are irrelevant — it was found to be fundamentally uneconomical, which is why every country in the world that uses nuclear power moved toward reactors of gigawatt-scale. No matter how improved, nothing about the SMR concept can change that, which has already been recognized by some developers — Barnard cites the Bill Gates-backed Terrapower as an example — which have quietly moved away from SMR designs to ones that are closer to one gigawatt in capacity.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that SMRs, just like Bitcoin, only look like a solution because they are “cutting-edge” technology, and in the actual application are an unsatisfactory alternative to established and familiar technologies. It is perhaps an appropriate irony that the location of the planned NuScale VOYGR plant, the Idaho National Laboratory, was the site of the failure that ended the first effort to explore SMR technology in the US, the famous SL-1 accident in 1961. SMRs are certainly far safer now — that accident killed the three operators of the unit — but in every other respect certainly still seem to be as problematic as ever.