Session G01: Nuclear Energy: Small Modular Reactors and Climate Change

Small Modular Nuclear Reactors and the potential for carbon-free energy

SMRs offer the possibility of being able to supply carbon-free energy. However, the economic feasibility has yet to be proven and hence, the time scale of when this might happen is not known. After briefly reviewing what SMRs have to offer, I will discuss the social and economic challenges of large-scale deployment.   

Elements needed in the development of the next generation of reactors.

The global need for decarbonization, energy security, and climate adaptation establishes a diverse set of design features that the next generation of nuclear reactors can enable: power peaking at time-scales of hours, days, and seasonal, production of electricity, dry heat, high temperature heat, propulsion, district heating, and other industrial applications, black start, remote deployment, and power scales from a few Megawatts to tens, hundreds, and thousands of megawatts. This future energy portfolio would require a significant growth and diversification of the nuclear energy sector in the United States, which today includes under 100 operating nuclear power plants, powering steam turbines that produce baseload electricity, with many of the plants designed and built over 40 years ago and improved over the decades. Economic competitiveness of the energy products to be provided by the nuclear reactors, management of technical risk, and the development time of bringing new reactor technology to commercialization are elements to be balanced in responding to a broad range of growing energy needs and in establishing the ability to achieve rapid innovation cycles that allow for future adaptation to the evolution of the energy markets. Development of supply chains and work force needs to occur at the same time with development and testing of new technology elements and new business cases. Testing of new technology requires infrastructure, and hence investment in commercial, as well as national and international infrastructure. For example, employment of new fuels or new materials require irradiation testing; employment of new coolants requires scaled experiments that demonstrate the modeling-predicted behavior of safety systems. When data is not available, either the data gap needs to be engineered around, so that margins to failure are large and the data is not needed for demonstrating safety performance, or the infrastructure for generating the data needs to be available for use, or new infrastructure needs to be built. This talk will discuss features of the next generation of nuclear reactors, the type of energy products that they can be designed to provide, and elements needed for the deployment of new reactor technologies and their associated fuel cycles.   

Can Small Modular Reactors really help mitigate climate change?

Several countries and advocates for nuclear energy are promoting what are called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), a set of theoretical nuclear reactor designs, as a way to mitigate climate change. Policy makers have been putting in place financial and political incentives for building new reactors and associated facilities. As a way to assess the likelihood of SMRs actually contributing to climate mitigation, this talk will first outline the current trends in nuclear energy, especially the declining share of electricity provided by nuclear plants around the world, followed by an account of the experiences with the newest set of large nuclear reactor projects, specifically how the historical problems of high cost, cost escalation, and construction delays have also afflicted these projects. Finally, the talk will present an evaluation of the claims that small modular reactor designs will solve the problems confronting nuclear energy, in particular the high costs of generating electricity at nuclear reactors.