Gordon Edwards “Small Modular Reactors,” a clip from 146: Recap 3, Dec 2020
Metta Spencer: Everybody knows what a nuclear reactor is, but not everybody has heard of small modular nuclear reactors. Gordon Edwards: It’s a marketing ploy. They want people to buy reactors but the reactor population worldwide has not grown in the last 25 years. The actual contribution of nuclear energy to global electricity production has declined during that same 25-year period from 17% down to 10% today. The nuclear industry is fighting for their life.
Back in 2001 they launched what they called a “nuclear renaissance.” They were going to build thousands of new large reactors around the world. That was a fiasco. Only a few were built—one in Finland, four in southern New United States, and one in France, and the cost escalation was enormous. The companies even went bankrupt. Areva, which was involved in the Finland project, went bankrupt and so did Westinghouse, which was in the South Carolina reactor construction. So now they’ve said, Look, we can’t sell these large reactors so let’s try small ones.
Spencer: I hadn’t heard about the large ones. We’re talking about supersize? Edwards: They’re about 1000 megawatts—larger than most Canadian reactors but fairly standard for American and French reactors. Germany is phasing out of nuclear power completely; they have already shut down eight of their 17 reactors and will finish shutting them down by the middle of this decade.
Spencer: They think they can make up the difference with renewable energy?
Edwards: That’s right. They are leaders in wind power and solar energy. In fact, wind and solar energy are going off the charts, they’re increasing so rapidly and are so much cheaper, while nuclear is on the decline. Renewables have become cheaper than the nuclear option.
The cheapest thing of all is just simply energy efficiency, plugging the holes. As Amory Levin said, if you can’t keep hot water in your tub, maybe you don’t need a larger hot water tank. Maybe all you need is a plug. My friend Ralph Torrie, who’s an analyst of renewable energy, has pointed out that it’s like the move from incandescent light bulbs to LED light bulbs. They use 80 percent less electricity and you don’t even notice the difference. If we did the same thing with electric heating and turned to heat pumps, we would have a similar sharp reduction in energy demand. Torrie has calculated that if a large province like Quebec converted its electrical heating systems to ground heat pumps, we would have enough surplus electricity to run a whole electrified transportation sector without building any new electrical production facilities.