As a huge fan of nuclear power, I never felt like NuScale style 'SMR' were all that great of an idea.
Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction and that you can start small and scale a location, but on the other side you lose that again because you lose the economics of scale that traditional PWR gets.
I really believe we should be a nuclear society by now, and that regulations both around reactors and fuel availability prevented this from happening. In the 1960 lots and lots of innovative reactors were build, often with relatively low budgets at that. The amount of untapped potential in nuclear energy is incredible. We don't need fusion, fission is plenty energy dense, if we can't figure out how to make fission practical, we want with fusion either.
Yet here we are in the year 2020 and we are still building new PWR reactors. But the reality is, in the US it is essentially impossible to build anything else. Regulations are designed so that the only reactor that can really get approval is a PWR.
If you attempt to build anything new, you have to basically pay the government to study your design and after a unknown amount of time and money, the government might develop a new regulatory framework. By the time that happens of course you have run out of money already, no buissness plan that depends on the government figuring out how to regulate a new type of reactor would ever really happen.
The good thing at least is that the DoE in the last 5 years seem to have realized that their whole approach was a problem and they have done a lot of good things to try to change. Outside of the US the energy sector is government controlled or to small for a nuclear reactor startup to have a large enough market to make a new reactor worth it.
Canada has established itself as basically the only viable place for new reactor development, with Terrestrial Energy and Moltex Energy (moved from Britain to Canada because regulation).
So, good luck to NuScale, I hope they can prove me wrong and deploy many of these in an economical way.
Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction and that you can start small and scale a location, but on the other side you lose that again because you lose the economics of scale that traditional PWR gets.
I really believe we should be a nuclear society by now, and that regulations both around reactors and fuel availability prevented this from happening. In the 1960 lots and lots of innovative reactors were build, often with relatively low budgets at that. The amount of untapped potential in nuclear energy is incredible. We don't need fusion, fission is plenty energy dense, if we can't figure out how to make fission practical, we want with fusion either.
Yet here we are in the year 2020 and we are still building new PWR reactors. But the reality is, in the US it is essentially impossible to build anything else. Regulations are designed so that the only reactor that can really get approval is a PWR.
If you attempt to build anything new, you have to basically pay the government to study your design and after a unknown amount of time and money, the government might develop a new regulatory framework. By the time that happens of course you have run out of money already, no buissness plan that depends on the government figuring out how to regulate a new type of reactor would ever really happen.
The good thing at least is that the DoE in the last 5 years seem to have realized that their whole approach was a problem and they have done a lot of good things to try to change. Outside of the US the energy sector is government controlled or to small for a nuclear reactor startup to have a large enough market to make a new reactor worth it.
Canada has established itself as basically the only viable place for new reactor development, with Terrestrial Energy and Moltex Energy (moved from Britain to Canada because regulation).
So, good luck to NuScale, I hope they can prove me wrong and deploy many of these in an economical way.