As we feebly attempt to curb our extraction, transportation, and burning of fossil fuels, calls for more nuclear power grow louder, especially by those who oppose offshore wind.
My colleague Colleen Cronin recently provided an excellent local overview on nuclear power. I want to use this space to examine a largely unproven nuclear energy technology that opponents of offshore wind frequently cite as a better solution to ocean-based turbines.
Big tech companies, such as Amazon and Google, also want to use small modular reactors to feed the insatiable energy appetite of artificial intelligence. The two industry behemoths recently announced agreements with companies that are developing this type of nuclear energy.
(Researchers have concerns about AI’s sizable energy demands. A peer-reviewed analysis published last year found that a continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption will lead to the Nvidia Corp. shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. One and a half million servers, running at full capacity, consume some 85 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than what some small countries use in a year. One terawatt-hour is equal to a million megawatt-hours.)
Small modular reactors (SMRs), also called “advanced reactors,” are defined as 300 megawatts of power or less. They produce about a third of the energy of commercial reactors, which typically generate 1,000 megawatts of electrical power.
The Nuclear Energy Institute supports the development of this technology. Marc Nichol, executive director of new nuclear for the Washington, D.C.-based trade association, recently told me SMRs will play a vital role in decarbonizing our energy and economy.
“Historically, nuclear has been only producing electricity. Well, we know we need to decarbonize non-electric energy sources, as well as industrial processes,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of non-electric uses, and that’s the majority of the carbon emissions in the U.S. We want to be able to decarbonize those, and some operate at very, or need very, very, high temperatures. Non-water-cooled reactors are well suited for that.”
While the large nuclear reactors we are familiar with — Pilgrim, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Vogtle — were or are cooled by water, SMRs include designs that can cool reactor fuel with water, but also with molten salts (table salt), inert gases (helium), or liquid metals (sodium and lead).
Proponents, like Nichol, note SMRs cost less, don’t require massive upfront investment, and can be sited on locations not suitable for larger nuclear power plants. They claim that since SMRs produce less power, there is less residual heat that needs to be removed to safely shut them down in the event of an accident. They note it’s easier to build components off-site and then ship them to the staging location.
SMRs are “really scalable and adaptable to both the amount of power you need, but also the need for power over time,” Nichol said. “That gets into the flexibility of the power levels that these have.”
SMR power plants may require less frequent refueling, every three to seven years, in comparison to between one and two years for conventional nuclear facilities, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Some SMRs are designed to operate for up to 30 years without refueling.
Designs include different types of fuel and coolants, with some 80 commercial SMR designs being developed around the world that target varied outputs and different applications, such as electricity, hybrid energy systems, heating, water desalinisation, and steam for industrial applications.
“Though SMRs have lower upfront capital cost per unit, their economic competitiveness is still to be proven in practice once they are deployed,” according to the IAEA.
Both public and private institutions are “actively participating in efforts to bring SMR technology to fruition within this decade,” according to the international agency. Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s first floating nuclear power plant — docked in the Port of Pevek — began commercial operation in 2020 and is producing energy from two 35-megawatt SMRs.
The IAEA has noted other SMRs are under construction or in the licensing stage in Argentina, Canada, China, Russia, and South Korea.
In the United States, billions of dollars in tax credits for nuclear energy were included in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. (They also include billions for carbon capture, which is nothing more than a fossil fuel boondoggle.)
The Fire Grants and Safety Act is “a BIG win for our nuclear power industry. Included in the bill is bipartisan legislation known as the ADVANCE Act that will help us build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s,” according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The ADVANCE Act directs the federal agency to reduce certain licensing application fees and authorizes increased staffing for reviews to expedite the process. These incentives are subject to congressional appropriations “but will cover the total costs assessed by the NRC for first movers in a variety of areas, including the first advanced reactor to receive an operating or combined license.”
For the past few years the NRC has been reviewing both preliminary information and full applications for SMRs, according to Scott Burnell, the agency’s public affairs officer. He noted the agency certified a small modular design from the NuScale Power Corp. a few years ago.
“This means that design (cooled by water) has been written into our regulations as acceptable for use in the United States,” Burnell wrote in an email. “We’re currently reviewing a slightly larger version of the NuScale design for a similar design approval.”
The NRC has issued construction permits for a demonstration version of a molten-salt design from Kairos Power, which Google is working with, in Tennessee, and is almost finished considering a second construction permit application from Kairos for a two-reactor test version.
The federal agency has also issued a construction permit for a molten-salt research reactor at Abilene Christian University in Texas, is reviewing a TerraPower application for a construction permit to build a 345-megawatt nuclear power plant, cooled by liquid sodium, in Wyoming, and is ready to discuss with Dominion Energy its plans for a small modular reactor in Virginia.
“We’re expecting an application from X-energy (a gas-cooled design) and Dow Chemical for a small modular nuclear power plant at a Dow facility on the Texas Coast,” Burnell wrote, “and we’re ready to discuss with X-energy and Energy Northwest the project that’s part of the Amazon announcement.”
Any U.S. nuclear power plant, regardless of size, must meet NRC requirements to operate, to safely shut down under adverse conditions, and to protect the public if an accident occurs.
“Small modular designs, given the reduced size of the reactor core and other factors, could more easily meet those agency requirements,” Burnell said. “The NRC recently updated its rules to give applicants the option of proving a design’s emergency systems and plans will keep the public safe while requiring less planning by communities around the plant site.”
The Office of Nuclear Energy, an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, has said, “Significant technology development and licensing risks remain in bringing advanced SMR designs to market and government support is required to achieve domestic deployment of SMRs by the late 2020s or early 2030s.”
A May analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis cast doubt on the role of SMRs in near-term efforts to transition away from fossil fuels.
“Small modular reactors still look to be too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning from fossil fuels in the coming 10-15 years,” according to the 23-page document.
The analysis noted regulators, utilities, investors, and government officials “should embrace the reality that renewables, not SMRs, are the near-term solution to the energy transition.”
“As you you probably remember from renewables, they had similar challenges — first-of-a-kind costs were way beyond what the market was willing to pay,” Nichol said. “Government came in with supportive policies to help get them into the market.”
Among the SMR possibilities offshore wind opponents cite are liquid fluoride thorium reactors. Burnell explained that fluorine would be the coolant and thorium would be the fuel.
“That sort of design could be small enough to fit the ‘small modular’ category, but again no one is currently discussing that sort of design with the NRC,” he said.
The most common source of thorium is the rare-earth phosphate mineral monazite, which contains up to about 12% thorium phosphate, but 6%-7% on average. World monazite resources are estimated to be about 16 million tons, with 595,000 tons in the United States.
Thorium has advantages — it produces less waste than plutonium or uranium and remains an attractive option for the future of nuclear energy — but it is also difficult to handle, is a fertile and non-fissile metal, and posses high risks.
The challenges, risks, costs, and benefits of siting, developing, and decommissioning SMRs aren’t unlike those associated with offshore wind. They are both nascent industries, with offshore wind having a decade head start here and a 33-year jump in Europe.
There’s also similarities when it comes to licensing. In regulating the design, siting, construction, and operation of advanced reactors, the NRC employs a combination of regulatory requirements, licensing, and oversight that was developed for large commercial reactors. The licensing process for new, untested reactor designs is a lengthy and costly process — like the one used by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for offshore wind. In recent years, however, the regulatory processes for both have been simplified.
Both SMRs and offshore wind require the mining of materials. Fossil fuels are needed to build both, and to build the concrete or steel containers that hold the reactors’ nuclear waste.
Nuclear energy development, like offshore wind, relies on government subsidies to be economically competitive. Utilities operating nuclear facilities can qualify for a tax credit of $15 per megawatt-hour — a break that could be worth up to $30 billion for the industry.
The U.S. Department of Energy, in June, issued a notice of intent to fund up to $900 million to support nuclear technologies, including SMRs.
(When it comes to fossil fuels, the United States provides a number of tax subsidies to the industry as a means of encouraging domestic energy production, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. These breaks include both direct subsidies to corporations and other tax benefits. Conservative estimates put U.S. direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry at about $20 billion annually. Historically, subsidies granted to the industry were designed to lower the cost of fossil fuel production and incentivize new domestic energy sources. Today, taxpayers continue to fund many fossil fuel subsidies that are outdated, but remain embedded within the tax code.)
In an opinion piece published last year in Undark, Paul Hockenos, writing about SMRs and their mythical allure, noted “proponents envision that they will, one day, be assembled in factories and transported as a unit to sites — like Sears’ mail-order Modern Homes of the early 1900s.”
But to achieve the technology’s economic benefits, Hockenos noted large-scale production of SMRs would be required and initial orders for tens of units would be needed.
In an April post by the director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Ed Lyman examined a handful of small modular reactor claims, alleging: SMRs are not more economical than large reactors; they will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste; they can’t be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, or petrochemical production; and they don’t use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
“Some advocates misleadingly claim that SMRs are more efficient than large ones because they use less fuel,” he wrote. “In terms of the amount of heat generated, the amount of uranium fuel that must undergo nuclear fission is the same whether a reactor is large or small. And although reactors that use coolants other than water typically operate at higher temperatures, which can increase the efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity, this is not a big enough effect to outweigh other factors that decrease efficiency of fuel use.”
Lyman noted that since there is “virtually no experience with operating SMRs worldwide, it is highly doubtful that the novel designs being pitched now would be highly reliable right out of the box.”
To deal with the vast, complex, and rapidly growing problems fixed to the burning of fossil fuels, we need to quickly and substantially reduce our dependence on methane (natural gas, liquefied or not), oil, coal, gasoline, diesel, propane, and kerosene.
To do that, we’ll need a diverse blend of responsibly sited non-fossil-fuel energy, from on and offshore wind to various solar and nuclear technologies. This mix may someday include SMRs, but we can’t afford to wait years, perhaps even a decade or more, for this technology, especially if we have no intention of drastically curtailing our consumption or remaking our economy.
Without action now — you know, all those promises wealthy countries, including the United States, have failed to keep since the first climate conference was held three decades ago — the world could warm by a stunning 3.1 degrees Celsius (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, according to a U.N. report published last month.
If that happens, the results, such as an increases in extreme weather events like heat waves and floods, would be “catastrophic.”
We can’t wait any longer to act. There is no perfect counter to fossil fuel burning.
“We need it all. Nuclear is part of the solution, along with solar and wind and batteries and hydrogen,” Nichol said. “I don’t think we can do it with without nuclear. I think nuclear needs to be a major contributor.”
Note: Every online interaction relies on information stored in remote servers stacked together in energy-sucking data centers worldwide. These centers account for about 1.5% of global electricity use. In September Microsoft announced it would be partnering with Constellation Energy to reopen Three Mile Island, soon to be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, to electrify its growing number of data centers.
Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.
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