SMR

According to James Conca, a nuclear enthusiast who writes for Forbes, the nuclear industry in the US is "abuzz" with the potential of small modular reactors (SMRs).¹

Conca promotes pseudo-research from the 'Small Modular Reactor Research and Education Consortium', according to which a single SMR has the potential to result in US$892 million (€844m) in "direct economic benefits". In other words, the capital cost estimate is US$892 million. The Consortium estimates that the potential economic benefits from the establishment of an SMR construction business in the US could range from US$34−250 billion (€32.2−236.7b) or more.

Better grounded in reality is a report produced by Nuclear Energy Insider, drawing on interviews with more than 50 "leading specialists and decision makers". The report attempts to put a positive spin on the future development of SMRs, but an air of pessimism is all too apparent, even in the report's title: 'Small Modular Reactors: An industry in terminal decline or on the brink of a comeback?'²

Pessimism is also apparent in comments by the report's lead author, Kerr Jeferies: "From the outside it will seem that SMR development has hit a brick wall, but to lump the sector's difficulties together with the death of the so-called nuclear renaissance would be missing the point."³

In the US⁴:

• Babcock & Wilcox has greatly reduced its investment in SMR development, despite receiving US$111 million (€105m) from the Department of Energy. B&W CEO Jim Ferland said that he sees the future of SMRS as "still being up in the air."

• Westinghouse abandoned its SMR development program in February 2014.
• Warren Buffet's MidAmerican Energy abandoned plans to build an SMR in Iowa after consumer groups prevailed in a legislative battle over 'construction work in progress' legislation that allows utilities to charge higher rates to cover reactor construction costs, even if the reactor is never built.
• NuScale is the only company in the US with any forward momentum − it is aiming to submit documentation to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2016 for design review.

Glenn George from KPMG recently discussed SMR development in the US with Nuclear Energy Insider: "I think that investors are in a wait-and-see mode regarding development of the SMR market. ... Investors will want to see SMR learning-curve effects, but a chicken-and-egg situation is at work: Decreased cost comes from production of multiple units over time, yet such production requires investment in the first place. So it's not surprising that, in the absence of commercial orders, Westinghouse and Babcock & Wilcox have slowed SMR development."⁵

Outside the US, just a few first-of-a-kind SMR projects are under construction − in Argentina (CAREM-25), Russia (KLT-40S) and China (HTR-PM).

The Nuclear Energy Insider report restates the familiar SMR rationale about mass production and streamlined supply chains bringing down costs. But it also calls into question the underlying logic: "SMR concepts face a real challenge in ensuring cost and energy efficiency. Making a power unit smaller also increases the need to have five, ten or even twelve modular reactors working in unison to create the same level of base load electricity as the large PWR's and fossil fuel plants they will replace. In reducing the size of reactor modules you also reduce the amount of thermal energy produced, if an SMR only has an energy efficiency of 30−40% then you require even further units to make up the shortfall."

The report also qualifies the usual SMR rhetoric about economies derived from mass factory production: "Factory assembly of small reactors is one of the core benefits of SMR's. They can be built off site in 'bulk', easily transported and then plugged into an infrastructure network promising a far quicker and cheaper alternative to large PWR's. However, in order to ensure a smooth transition from the drawing board to the construction site there are key questions to be faced in separating the expertise held in a reactor factory and the expertise required to install an SMR when it arrives on site. For an effective SMR supply chain to be developed it will need to be localized − despite the reactors being built off site, a great amount of the on-site infrastructure and materials will still require precision assembly."

If there was any remaining doubt that SMRs are not the 'game changer' they are so often portrayed to be, the report concludes: "Six decades of nuclear development have shown that nuclear energy can only be progressed if 'long-term' strategies are employed across the industry. In an economic climate where there are alternative energies offering far quicker returns on investment, clear questions need to raised and frank discussions held in order to ensure that SMR's do remain a realistic alternative for energy provision."

The report states that notwithstanding the "pervasive sense of pessimism" resulting from abandoned and scaled-back SMR programs, "we believe a more accurate picture is that 2014 has been a teething year, and that the SMR story hasn't even really begun."

Therein lies the problem − the story hasn't begun: no supply chains, no factories churning out identical reactors, and precious few customers. And another familiar problem that has long plagued the nuclear industry: a bewildering array of proposed designs.

SMR push in the UK

The UK has been bitten by the SMR bug. The National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) has produced a feasibility study which argues that SMRs might eventually prove cheaper than large reactors, while also noting unresolved 'detailed technical challenges'. The House of Commons Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change has urged the government to spend public money to develop a demonstration SMR.⁶

Academics Gordon MacKerron and Philip Johnstone from the Sussex Energy Group write: "It [NNL] then suggests a potential UK market of between 7GW and 21GW in 2015, the latter number being frankly not credible under any conceivable circumstances. These hoped-for UK markets are also linked to the idea that the UK could become a major technological player in SMR technology, a view that seems tinged almost with fantasy, given that all significant SMR development to date has been outside the UK."⁶

South Korea's SMART reactor

South Korea may have found a model to unlock the potential of SMRs: collaboration with a repressive Middle Eastern state, extensive technology transfer, and if that fans proliferation risks and tensions in a volatile region, so be it.

On March 3, the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KACARE) to carry out a three-year study to assess the feasibility of building two first-of-a-kind 'System Integrated Modular Advanced ReacTor' (SMART) reactors.⁷

SMART is a 100 MWe pressurized water reactor design which could be used for electricity generation and desalinization. The cost of building the first SMART reactor in Saudi Arabia is estimated at US$1 billion (€947m).⁷

Among other obstacles, the development of SMART technology has only lukewarm support from the South Korean government; it is no longer financially backed by Korea Electric Power Co. (Kepco); there is no intention to deploy SMART reactors in South Korea; and plans to build a demonstration plant in South Korea stalled.

South Korea launched 'SMART Power' on January 29 − an organisation tasked with marketing SMART technology overseas, conducting joint feasibility studies with interested customers, and continuing design work to make the reactor technology "more economically feasible".

KACARE says that SMART intellectual property rights will be co-owned and that, in addition to the construction of SMART reactors in Saudi Arabia, the two countries aim to commercialise the technology and to promote it world-wide.⁸

KACARE states: "Undisputedly, human capacity building for the production of nuclear power within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a national pursuit of paramount importance as it will essentially contribute to the sincerely devoted endeavors to devise a sustainable development future for Saudi generations."⁸

Failing that, the joint partnership − and the extensive technology transfer and training it entails − will take Saudi Arabia a long way down the path towards developing a latent nuclear weapons capability. Saudi officials have made no secret of the Kingdom's intention to pursue a weapons program if Iran's nuclear program is not constrained.⁹

Wall Street Journal reporters noted on March 11: "As U.S. and Iranian diplomats inched toward progress on Tehran's nuclear program last week, Saudi Arabia quietly signed its own nuclear-cooperation agreement with South Korea. That agreement, along with recent comments from Saudi officials and royals, is raising concerns on Capitol Hill and among U.S. allies that a deal with Iran, rather than stanching the spread of nuclear technologies, risks fueling it."¹⁰

A bilateral nuclear trade agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia has stalled because of the Kingdom's refusal to rule out developing enrichment or reprocessing technology. "We've been pressing them to agree not to pursue a civilian fuel cycle, but the Saudis refuse," said Gary Samore, a US government official working on nuclear issues during President Obama's first term.¹⁰

References:

1. James Conca, 16 Feb 2015, 'Can SMRs Lead The U.S. Into A Clean Energy Future?', www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/16/can-smrs-lead-the-u-s-into-a-...
2. Nuclear Energy Insider, 2014, "Small Modular Reactors: An industry in terminal decline or on the brink of a comeback?", http://bit.ly/smrscomeback
3. March 2015, 'SMRs "back on the agenda next year", says new report by Nuclear Energy Insider', www.prweb.com/releases/2015/03/prweb12549421.htm
4. Dan Yurman, 1 March 2015, 'Be careful about rose colored glasses when viewing the future of SMRs', http://neutronbytes.com/2015/03/01/be-careful-about-rose-colored-glasses...
5. Peter Taberner, 3 March 2015, 'SMRs: private investors call for track record and big government orders', http://analysis.nuclearenergyinsider.com/small-modular-reactors/smrs-pri...
6. Gordon MacKerron and Philip Johnstone, 2 March 2015, 'Small modular reactors – the future of nuclear power?', http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/sussexenergygroup/2015/03/02/small-modular-rea...
7. WNN, 4 March 2015, 'Saudi Arabia teams up with Korea on SMART', www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Saudi-Arabia-teams-up-with-Korea-on-SMART-...
8. KACARE, 3 March 2015, 'MOU's Signature', www.kacare.gov.sa/en/?p=1667
9. 18 Sept 2014, 'Saudi Arabia's nuclear power program and its weapons ambitions', Nuclear Monitor, Issue #791, www.wiseinternational.org/node/4195
10. Jay Solomon and Ahmed Al Omran, 11 March 2015, 'Saudi Nuclear Deal Raises Stakes for Iran Talks', www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-nuclear-deal-raises-stakes-for-iran-talks-142...

In the midst of all the news in recent weeks over the deal with Iran, it would have been easy to miss the news that another Middle Eastern state is moving towards acquiring its own nuclear reactors − Saudi Arabia.

In March 2015, following a meeting in Riyadh between South Korean president Park Guen­hye and Saudi's newly­crowned King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KA­CARE) signed a memorandum of understanding to, inter alia, carry out a preliminary study to review the feasibility of constructing Korean Small Modular Reactors in Saudi Arabia.¹ Later the same month, along with Argentina this time, Saudi Arabia set up a joint venture company to develop nuclear technology for Saudi Arabia's nuclear power program.²

Saudi Arabia has had a long-standing, although limited, interest in nuclear technology and these agreements are just the latest developments in that history. Other countries that have signed agreements with Saudi Arabia include France and China. Many more in the nuclear industry are hopeful of profiting from the Gulf country's interest. As Westinghouse chief executive Danny Roderick remarked in 2013, "We see Saudi Arabia as a good market for us."³

The stated arguments for nuclear construction are mostly familiar. As a royal decree from April 2010 put it in the case of Saudi Arabia: "The development of atomic energy is essential to meet the Kingdom's growing requirements for energy to generate electricity, produce desalinated water and reduce reliance on depleting hydrocarbon resources."⁴

Economic comparison

One further argument that is sometimes offered is economic competitiveness: as the President of KA-CARE stated in 2012, "nuclear energy is in many respects competitive with fossil fuels for electricity generation though the initial capital expenditure might be high."⁵

This is a somewhat strange argument to be making. Nuclear power has been struggling to compete in electricity markets around the world and it is hardly likely that in a country with no experience in building nuclear reactors, this world wide trend will suddenly be broken. Therefore, we decided to evaluate these arguments by examining the economics of nuclear power in the case of Saudi Arabia.⁶ Here we summarize our results.

We compared the electricity generation cost from nuclear reactors with three alternatives: natural gas based power plants, solar energy from photovoltaic cells and concentrated solar power stations. What we found was that unless natural gas prices rise dramatically, that would remain the cheapest source of electricity generation − nuclear electricity would be more than twice as expensive than that produced by gas. The reason is simple: the very high capital cost of constructing a nuclear reactor, typically running into several billions of dollars. For example, the latest estimate for one of the three ongoing projects in the United States, in which two new 1,117-MW reactors are being built near Jenkinsville, S.C., is $11 billion.⁷ Electricity from gas would continue to be cheaper even if a relatively high carbon cost (even above $150/ton-CO2 in some scenarios) were imposed.

This large cost difference also negates the oft-made point about the foregone opportunity cost that is said to result from Middle Eastern countries consuming their natural gas resources instead of exporting these. It turns out that when the costs of liquefying and shipping of natural gas are taken into account, a country like Saudi Arabia should be assured of prices well above the current and historical global average for decades before replacing a natural gas plant with a nuclear reactor becomes an economically sound choice. The downward pressure caused by U.S. shale gas expansion and the volatility of the natural gas market does not allow for reasonable confidence in such a high gas price − certainly not enough to sink in billions of dollars into nuclear reactors and natural gas liquefaction facilities.

But in the case of oil, our analysis showed that it does make economic sense to shut down oil based power plants and replace those with nuclear reactors − or natural gas. But Saudi policy makers may have already realized that and nearly 100 percent of installed capacity in recent years is based on natural gas.

Solar power

The surprising result that came out of our analysis was that solar technologies are very competitive with nuclear reactors. The key point is that it would take at least a decade, quite possibly more, for a country like Saudi Arabia to generate its first unit of nuclear electricity, even if the decision were to be made tomorrow, and solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar technologies have both been experiencing dramatic declines in prices.⁸ Based on current trends, the cost of electricity from solar plants would become cheaper than from nuclear plants around the end of this decade or soon after in areas like the Middle East with ample sunshine.

Nuclear reactors, in contrast, are not becoming cheaper. Some studies⁹ find evidence of "negative learning" wherein nuclear costs rise as more reactors are constructed.¹⁰ Past reactor construction projects have often taken longer and have cost more than initially projected; indeed, significant escalation can be taken as inevitable given the nuclear industry's tendency to under-estimate costs and construction times. The best recent example comes from Olkiluoto in Finland, where just the losses that Areva has accrued when compared to the initial contract price exceeds 5 billion euros.¹¹ Commissioning of the reactor has been delayed by nearly a decade compared to initial projections.

The thirteen years or more that it could take to get the Olkiluoto plant to generate electricity is exceptionally long, but the average period it takes to construct a nuclear reactor anywhere in the world is about eight years. This does not include the time spent before construction on building infrastructure, regulatory activities, and so on. In general, one can assume that it would take a decade or even two for a nuclear plant to go from planning to commissioning.

Small modular reactors

The specific reactor design that was the subject of the recent agreement between Saudi Arabia and South Korea is called the SMART, one of the many designs that are called small modular reactors (SMRs). SMRs, with power outputs of less than 300 MWe, are being promoted by nuclear establishments in many countries.

The term small is used to indicate that the power level is much lower than the average power delivered by currently operating reactors. Modular means that the reactor is assembled from factory-fabricated parts or "modules". Each module represents a portion of the finished plant built in a factory and shipped to the reactor site. Modularity is also used to indicate the idea that rather than constructing one large reactor, the equivalent power output will be generated using multiple smaller reactors that allow for greater tailoring of generation capacity to demand.

SMRs such as the SMART are likely to be even more expensive ways of generating electricity than the large nuclear reactors being built today. Small nuclear reactors are cheaper in absolute terms, but they also generate less electricity. When the two factors − smaller overall cost and smaller generation capacity − are taken together, the cost per unit of electricity for small reactors generated turns out to be higher that for large reactors. This is why reactors became larger and larger over the 1960s to the 1980s/1990s. Thus, it seems likely that SMRs will lose out on the economies of scale that standard sized (roughly 1000 MW) reactors benefit from.

SMR proponents claim that because new reactor designs are different, the comparison with traditional reactor costs is invalid and the scaling law does not hold. They also claim that even if there are diseconomies of scale, these can be compensated by the economic advantages accruing from modular and factory construction, learning from replication, and co-siting of multiple reactors.¹²

Despite these claims, detailed and carefully conducted interviews showed that even experts drawn from, or closely associated with, the nuclear industry expect these reactors to cost more per kW of capacity than currently operating reactors.¹³ Therefore, if nuclear power based on large reactors is likely to be expensive, then electricity from the SMART project in Saudi Arabia will be even more non-competitive.

Unless, of course, there are large subsidies involved. In the case of South Korea's deal with the United Arab Emirates, South Korea seems to have subsidized the project substantially; some have estimated the deal with the UAE at being about 20 per cent beneath the industry average.¹⁴ Not surprisingly, the deal was criticized within South Korea as commercially weak and that future customers will demand similar terms.¹⁵

While there is a long history of systematic under-bidding in nuclear projects, especially in the case of countries with ambitious nuclear programs, this sort of subsidization can be done only for the first one or two projects, and cannot be the basis of a large-scale expansion of nuclear power in Saudi Arabia.

In addition to all the problems of nuclear power, solar power is also very appropriate to Saudi Arabia. There is substantial overlap between the electricity demand and solar insolation patterns¹⁶, and there will be little or no need for constructing expensive storage facilities to deal with the fact that the Sun doesn't shine at night.

In summary, the economic case for Saudi Arabia to build nuclear reactors is non-existent unless natural gas prices shoot up or there is some climate agreement that introduces very high carbon costs. To the extent that countries desire to move away from fossil fuels, switching to solar power makes much more financial sense, and one that might seem naturally suited to local conditions.

Now, if only some other Prime Minister or President were to make a visit to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud and explain why solar power might be a better bet than nuclear reactors, small or large.

References:
1. www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Saudi-Arabia-teams-up-with-Korea-on-SMART-...
2. www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Saudi-Arabia-and-Argentina-form-joint-vent...
3. www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2013/11/22/Westinghouse-eyes-...
4. www.neimagazine.com/opinion/opinionnuclear-power-in-the-middle-east-wher...
5. www.arabnews.com/node/408839
6. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544214003284
7. www.thestate.com/news/business/article14658584.html
8. www.mckinsey.com/client_service/sustainability/latest_thinking/solar_pow...
9. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510003526
10. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421507002558
11. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/02/28/tvo-olkiluoto-idUKL6N0LX3XQ2014...
12. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149197009001474
13. www.pnas.org/content/110/24/9686.abstract
14. www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0d0122de-7030-11e0-bea7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2q....
15. www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2014/05/116_81531.html
16. www.icrepq.com/icrepq'10/530-Al-Ammar.pdf

There's an Alice in Wonderland flavour to the nuclear power debate with lobbyists promoting all sorts of non-existent reactor types − an implicit acknowledgement that conventional uranium-fuelled reactors aren't all they're cracked up to be. Some favour non-existent Integral Fast Reactors, others favour non-existent Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, others favour non-existent Pebble Bed Modular Reactors, others favour non-existent fusion reactors, and on it goes.

Two to three decades ago, the nuclear industry promised a new generation of gee-whiz 'Generation IV' reactors in two to three decades. That's what they're still saying now, and that's what they'll be saying two to three decades from now. The Generation IV International Forum website states: "It will take at least two or three decades before the deployment of commercial Gen IV systems. In the meantime, a number of prototypes will need to be built and operated. The Gen IV concepts currently under investigation are not all on the same timeline and some might not even reach the stage of commercial exploitation."¹

Likewise, the World Nuclear Association notes that "progress is seen as slow, and several potential designs have been undergoing evaluation on paper for many years."²

Integral Fast Reactors ... it gets ugly moving from blueprint to backyard

Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) are a case in point. According to the lobbyists they are ready to roll, will be cheap to build and operate, couldn't be used to feed WMD proliferation, etc. The US and UK governments have been analysing the potential of IFRs. The UK government found that the facilities have not been industrially demonstrated; waste disposal issues remain unresolved and could be further complicated if it is deemed necessary to remove sodium from spent fuel to facilitate disposal; and little could be ascertained about cost since General Electric Hitachi refuses to release estimates of capital and operating costs, saying they are "commercially sensitive".³

The US government has considered the use of IFRs (which it calls Advanced Disposition Reactors − ADR) to manage US plutonium stockpiles and concluded that the ADR approach would be more than twice as expensive as all the other options under consideration; that it would take 18 years to construct an ADR and associated facilities; and that the ADR option is associated with "significant technical risk".⁴

Unsurprisingly, the IFR rhetoric doesn't match the sober assessments of the UK and US governments. As nuclear engineer Dave Lochbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists puts it: "The IFR looks good on paper. So good, in fact, that we should leave it on paper. For it only gets ugly in moving from blueprint to backyard."

No-one has cracked fusion yet

Lockheed Martin recently claimed that it "is working on a new compact fusion reactor (CFR) that can be developed and deployed in as little as ten years." Lockheed "anticipates being able to produce a prototype in five years" − which is very different from saying that it will actually build a prototype in five years. According to Lockheed's Tom McGuire, "The smaller size will allow us to design, build and test the CFR in less than a year."⁵
 

Matthew Hole, an academic and Australia's representative on the IAEA International Fusion Research Council, wrote in an October 7 article⁶:

"Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin's announcement this week that it could make small-scale nuclear fusion power a reality in the next decade has understandably generated excitement in the media. Physicists, however, aren't getting their hopes up just yet. ...

"Lockheed Martin claims that its technology development offshoot, Skunk Works, is working on a new compact fusion reactor that can be developed and deployed in as little as ten years. The only technical details it provided are that it is a "high beta" device (meaning that it produces a high plasma pressure for a relatively weak magnetic field pressure), and that it is sufficiently small to be able to power flight and vehicles.

"This isn't enough information to substantiate a credible program of research into the development of fusion power, or a credible claim for the delivery of a revolutionary power source in the next decade. ... Lockheed Martin will need to show a lot more research evidence that it can do better than multinational collaborative projects like ITER. So far, its lack of willingness to engage with the scientific community suggests that it may be more interested in media attention than scientific development."

The World Nuclear Association (WNA) has also thrown cold water on Lockheed's claims."⁷ The 'compact fusion reactor' concept remains "undemonstrated", the WNA notes. Moreover, Lockheed has itself acknowledged that it is "searching for partners" to help advance the technology.

Small Modular Reactors ... a new occupant in the graveyard of the 'nuclear renaissance'

The Energy Green Paper recently released by the Australian government is typical of the small-is-beautiful rhetoric: "The main development in technology since 2006 has been further work on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). SMRs have the potential to be flexibly deployed, as they are a simpler 'plug-in' technology that does not require the same level of operating skills and access to water as traditional, large reactors."⁸

The rhetoric doesn't match reality. Interest in SMRs is on the wane. Thus Thomas W. Overton, associate editor of POWER magazine, wrote in a recent article: "At the graveyard wherein resides the "nuclear renaissance" of the 2000s, a new occupant appears to be moving in: the small modular reactor (SMR). ... Over the past year, the SMR industry has been bumping up against an uncomfortable and not-entirely-unpredictable problem: It appears that no one actually wants to buy one."⁹

Dr Mark Cooper, Senior Fellow for Economic Analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School, notes that two US corporations are pulling out of SMR development because they cannot find customers (Westinghouse) or major investors (Babcock and Wilcox). Cooper points to some economic constraints: "SMR technology will suffer disproportionately from material cost increases because they use more material per MW of capacity. Higher costs will result from: lost economies of scale; higher operating costs; and higher decommissioning costs. Cost estimates that assume quick design approval and deployment are certain to prove to be wildly optimistic."¹⁰

Westinghouse CEO Danny Roderick said in January: "The problem I have with SMRs is not the technology, it's not the deployment − it's that there's no customers."¹¹ Westinghouse is looking to triple its decommissioning business. "We see this as a $1 billion-per-year business for us," Roderick said. With the world's fleet of mostly middle-aged reactors inexorably becoming a fleet of mostly ageing, decrepit reactors, Westinghouse is getting ahead of the game.

Academics M.V. Ramana and Zia Mian state in their detailed analysis of SMRs: "Proponents of the development and large scale deployment of small modular reactors suggest that this approach to nuclear power technology and fuel cycles can resolve the four key problems facing nuclear power today: costs, safety, waste, and proliferation. Nuclear developers and vendors seek to encode as many if not all of these priorities into the designs of their specific nuclear reactor. The technical reality, however, is that each of these priorities can drive the requirements on the reactor design in different, sometimes opposing, directions. Of the different major SMR designs under development, it seems none meets all four of these challenges simultaneously. In most, if not all designs, it is likely that addressing one of the four problems will involve choices that make one or more of the other problems worse."¹²

Likewise, Kennette Benedict, Executive Director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, states: "Small modular nuclear reactors may be attractive, but they will not, in themselves, offer satisfactory solutions to the most pressing problems of nuclear energy: high cost, safety, and weapons proliferation."¹³

Some SMR R&D work continues but it all seems to be leading to the conclusions mentioned above. Argentina is ahead of the rest, with construction underway on a 27 MWe reactor − but the cost equates to an astronomical US$15.2 billion (€12b) per 1000 MWe.¹⁴ And that cost would be greater still if not for Argentina's expertise and experience with reactor construction − a legacy of its covert weapons program from the 1960s to the early 1980s.

So work continues on SMRs but the writing's on the wall and it's time for the nuclear lobby to come up with another gee-whiz next-gen fail-safe reactor type to promote − perhaps a giant fusion reactor located out of harm's way, 150 million kilometres from Earth.

References:
1. www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms/c_41890/faq-2
2. www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN_France_puts_into_future_nuclear_1512091.html
3. www.wiseinternational.org/node/4222
4. www.wiseinternational.org/node/4066
5. www.lockheedmartin.com/us/news/press-releases/2014/october/141015ae_lock...
6. Matthew Hole, 7 Oct 2014, 'Don't get too excited, no one has cracked nuclear fusion yet', http://theconversation.com/dont-get-too-excited-no-one-has-cracked-nucle...
7. WNA, 16 Oct 2014, 'Big dreams for compact fusion reactor', www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Big-dreams-for-compact-fusion-reactor-1610...
8. www.ewp.industry.gov.au/sites/prod2.ewp.industry.gov.au/files/egp/energy...
9. www.powermag.com/what-went-wrong-with-smrs/
10. www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/newreactors/cooper-smrsaretheproblemnotthesolu...
11. www.post-gazette.com/business/2014/02/02/Westinghouse-backs-off-small-nu...
12. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629614000486.
13. http://thebulletin.org/are-small-nuclear-reactors-answer
14. www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Construction-of-CAREM-underway-1002144.html

NM790.4409 Over the last few years, much hope has been invested in what are called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as a possible way to address some of the key problems with existing nuclear reactor designs and fuel cycles and thereby offer a brighter future for nuclear power. Several countries are in the fray to develop SMRs, including the United States, Russia, China, France, Japan, South Korea, India, and Argentina. Several of these countries are providing substantial government support for such reactors. Regulatory agencies in these countries are also in the process of grappling with licensing SMRs, many of which incorporate novel features in their designs. SMR designs typically have power levels between 10 and 300 MWe, much smaller than the 1000–1600 MWe reactor designs that have become standard.

Proponents of SMRs have made extensive claims, directed both at large industrialized countries and developing countries, about the purported benefits of SMRs and their abilities to help meet various social and environmental goals. However, a careful look at the technical characteristics of SMRs suggests SMRs may not be able to solve simultaneously the "four unresolved problems" of costs, safety, waste, and proliferation, identified in a 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study as responsible for the "limited prospects for nuclear power today." The leading SMR designs under development, it turns out, involve choices and trade-offs between desired features and focusing on any one goal, for example cost reduction, might make other goals more difficult to achieve.

SMR families

To simultaneously deliver lowered costs, increased safety, reduced waste, and enhanced proliferation resistance sets a very high bar for SMRs designs. The question is whether existing SMR designs can realize all of these goals? Answering this question is not straightforward. There are a very wide variety of SMR designs with distinct characteristics that are being developed. These designs vary by power output, physical size, fuel geometry, fuel type and enrichment level (and resulting spent fuel isotopic composition), refueling frequency, site location, and status of development. To make some sense of the different designs, Alexander Glaser of Princeton University has proposed that they be categorized into four families.

The first family of SMRs involves reactor designs intended to "get into the game early" and will likely be the first on the market. These are essentially scaled-down standard light water reactors, usually with steam generators located within the same pressure vessel as the reactor itself (integral Pressure Water Reactor or iPWR). Integration of the primary system has been assessed by some analysts to be "the biggest challenge to SMR development". These reactors are typically fueled with low enriched uranium, with enrichment levels of 5% or less. Not only is the enrichment of fuel in the same ballpark as conventional light water reactors, but even the fuel assembly designs are intended to be almost identical to existing designs (although scaled down in height). Because of the similarity of the fuel design, the spent fuel can be reprocessed using traditional and widely understood techniques such as PUREX.

A second family of SMRs involves a design, the high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), that hopes to "succeed the second time around." Earlier attempts at commercializing similar designs failed. These reactors typically use uranium enriched to well above 5 percent as fuel, and graphite as a moderator. Helium or carbon dioxide is often used as the coolant fluid. The fuel for these reactors is usually in the form of TRISO (tristructural-isotropic) particles, which consist of uranium coated with multiple layers of different materials that can withstand high temperatures and are hard − but not impossible − to reprocess.

The next category of reactors attempts to "deal with the waste legacy" while extending uranium resources by using uranium much more efficiently. Reactors in this family are based on the use of fast neutrons without any moderator. They may have long-lived cores, designed not to require refueling for two or more decades, and may be helium or sodium-cooled. Their distinguishing feature is their use of spent nuclear fuel or nuclear waste or even weapon-grade plutonium as fuel.

Lastly, there are designs intended as "nuclear batteries", with long-lived cores that are designed for possibly unattended operation. They are generally targeted at "newcomer" nations with small electric grids interested in developing nuclear power systems or for remote locations in developed countries. These reactors tend to be liquid metal-cooled fast reactors with high enrichment levels required for fresh fuel.

Choices and conflicts

Evaluating all the different SMR designs, even when they are organized in families, against the desired criteria of costs, safety, waste, and proliferation is not straightforward. Each of these criteria has several dimensions, and multiple technical characteristics are needed to effectively implement each criterion.

The economics of nuclear power, for example, is a challenge both because of the high cost of constructing each facility and the high cost of generating each unit of electrical energy relative to other options for meeting the same demand. The two are related but distinct. Even if SMRs might ameliorate the first challenge to some extent, they might make the latter challenge even harder to meet. Conversely, a large energy project might produce lower cost electricity relative to a small power plant but might have difficulty getting off the ground because of the high initial expenditures.

Proliferation resistance is another characteristic that imposes sometimes contradictory requirements. One way to lower the risk of diversion of fuel from nuclear reactors is to minimize the frequency of refueling because these are the periods when the fuel is out of the reactor and most vulnerable to diversion, and so many SMR designers seek longer periods between refueling. However, in order for the reactor to maintain reactivity for the longer period between refuelings, it would require starting with fresh fuel with higher uranium enrichment or mixing in plutonium. Some designs even call for going to an enrichment level beyond 20 percent uranium-235, the threshold used by the International Atomic Energy for classifying material as being of "direct use" for making a weapon. All else being equal, the use of fuel with higher levels of uranium enrichment or plutonium would be a greater proliferation risk, and is the reason why so much international attention has been given to highly enriched uranium fueled research reactors and converting them to low enriched uranium fuel or shutting them down.

Moreover, an SMR design relying on highly enriched uranium fuel creates new proliferation risks – the need for production of fresh highly enriched uranium and the possibility of diversion at the enrichment plant and during transport. Any reduction of proliferation risk at the reactor site by reducing refueling frequency, it turns out, may be accompanied by an increase in the proliferation risk elsewhere.

Technical characteristics and consequences

The multitude of SMR designs that are being developed make it hard to make general statements with wide applicability about how well SMRs as such could meet the requirements for cost, safety waste and proliferation resistance. At the same time, the different designs do have some shared technical characteristics, and these characteristics affect how these reactors might score on different desirable criteria. The table uses the idea of SMR families to summarize some of the broadly shared technical characteristics and their impacts:

The smaller power capacity of SMRs has a largely negative effect on costs. Designers hope that this negative effect possibly could be offset somewhat through economies of mass manufacture or by regulatory authorities relaxing licensing rules. But most experts conclude that it seems unlikely that any such offsets in cost would be sufficient to make these reactors economical.

In addition, there are specific features of each of these SMR types that would tend to increase costs. For example, the lower fuel burnup in iPWRs means that fueling costs would be higher whereas the special materials used to coat the fuel particles in high temperature reactors and non-conventional manufacturing techniques also lead to higher fueling costs.

The small physical size and smaller fissile inventories of SMRs, on the other hand, benefit safety. However, in the case of fast reactors, there are other characteristics that affect safety negatively. These include the potential in the core for accidents involving disassembly and reactivity increase as well as the risks from using molten metals as coolants. Proponents of these reactors argue, not surprisingly, that they are safe, but many others view the use of fast spectrum neutrons and molten metal coolants as a significant disadvantage from a safety perspective.

The use of fast neutrons for these reactors is primarily motivated by waste reduction not safety. Indeed, SMRS based on fast neutrons do produce a lower amount of radioactive waste per unit of electricity generated. The significance of the lower rate of waste generation, however, is debatable. The problem with siting geological repositories for waste disposal has been local and public resistance. The level of resistance is not particularly sensitive to the amount of waste that might be disposed of in the repository. In other words, even if the repository were to be designed to deal with a significantly smaller volume of spent fuel, there may not be a corresponding decrease in opposition to siting the facility.

Proliferation risk, the fourth goal, depends on both technical and non-technical factors. While the non-technical factors are largely not dependent on choice of reactor type, SMRs and their intrinsic features do affect the technical component of proliferation risk. In the case of both iPWRs and fast reactors, the proliferation risk is enhanced relative to current generation light water reactors primarily because greater quantities of plutonium are produced per unit of electricity generated. In the case of HTRs, proliferation risk is increased because of the use of fuel with higher levels of uranium enrichment, but is diminished because the spent fuel is in a form that is difficult to reprocess.

Conclusion

Proponents of the development and large scale deployment of small modular reactors suggest that this approach to nuclear power technology and fuel cycles can resolve the four key problems facing nuclear power today: costs, safety, waste, and proliferation. Nuclear developers and vendors seek to encode as many if not all of these priorities into the designs of their specific nuclear reactor. The technical reality, however, is that each of these priorities can drive the requirements on the reactor design in different, sometimes opposing, directions. Of the different major SMR designs under development, it seems none meets all four of these challenges simultaneously. In most, if not all designs, it is likely that addressing one of the four problems will involve choices that make one or more of the other problems worse.

This is an abridged version of an article published in Energy Research & Social Science 2 (2014) 115–124. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629614000486.

Standardised reactor designs

[Written by Nuclear Monitor staff.]

In addition to the rhetoric about small modular reactors, the nuclear lobby claims that standardised designs and modular construction are 'game changers' for large reactors. The Vogtle / Georgia and Summer / South Carolina projects in the US provide a test of the rhetoric. These AP1000 reactors are being assembled in large modules.¹

A factory in Louisiana operated by Shaw Modular Solutions constructed prefabricated sections for AP1000 reactors but experienced delays due to quality assurance, design and fabrication problems. Now the firms leading the reactor projects are phasing out the Louisiana factory for work on the biggest modules and contracting with new manufacturers. The Vogtle and Summer AP1000 projects are both behind schedule and over-budget.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) officials proposed a US$36,400 (€27,700) fine against The Shaw Group for firing a quality insurance supervisor who warned a potentially faulty part may have been shipped to a project in New Mexico. The fine was dropped after the company agreed to changes. The NRC also said that workers at the Louisiana factory feared raising safety and quality concerns to their supervisors. The NRC concluded that a welder at the Louisiana factory took a qualification test for another worker in 2010, and that a supervisor knew but did not report it.

The now-abandoned plan for new reactors at the Temelin plant in the Czech Republic gives another insight into the rhetoric about standardised designs. The Czech government's nuclear envoy Václav Bartuška has provided an insightful post-mortem of the cancelled Temelin expansion project. He notes that Areva, Westinghouse and Rosatom all argued that their offer would be a standardised design, but none of them in fact was. For example, Areva's EPR in China is 450 MWt more powerful than the one in Finland, and Areva confirmed that only 50% of the nuclear island is the same.²

[1] 26 July 2014, 'Promises of Easier Nuclear Construction Fall Short' http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/promises-easier-nuclear-construction-...
[2] Jan Haverkamp, 27 Aug 2014, 'Czech nuclear envoy has interesting insights into the problems with nuclear power 'www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/czech-nu...

Killing the competition: US nuclear front groups exposed

A new report released by the Nuclear Information & Resource Service details US industry plans to subvert clean energy programs, rig energy markets and climate regulations to subsidize aging nuclear reactors.

A coalition of five organizations was joined by renowned energy economist Dr Mark Cooper to release the report, titled 'Killing the Competition: The Nuclear Power Agenda to Block Climate Action, Stop Renewable Energy, and Subsidize Old Reactors'.

The report details the industry's attacks on clean energy and climate solutions and the key battlegrounds in this new fight over the US's energy future. With large political war chests and armies of lobbyists, the power companies have opened up aggressive fights across the country this year:

* Blocking tax breaks for renewable energy in Congress.

* Killing renewable energy legislation in Illinois by threatening to close nuclear plants.

* Passing a resolution calling for nuclear subsidies and emissions-trading schemes in Illinois.

* Suspending renewable energy and efficiency standards in Ohio for two years.

* Ending energy efficiency programs in Indiana.

* Demanding above-market contracts for nuclear and coal plants in Ohio and New York.

Last year, the closure of several reactors highlighted the worsening economics of nuclear energy. Five reactor shutdowns were announced, and eight new reactors cancelled. The industry's rising costs − with new plants too expensive to build and old plants more and more costly to maintain − came head to head with a brewing energy revolution: low natural gas prices, rising energy efficiency, and affordable wind and solar power. As a result, Wall Street firms reassessed the industry, discovering an industry at risk and predicting more shuttered reactors in the coming years.

Energy economist Dr. Mark Cooper, of Vermont Law School's Institute for Energy and the Environment, published a paper outlining the factors contributing to nuclear energy's poor prospects and highlighting the vulnerability of dozens of reactors. Dr Cooper said: "Nuclear power simply cannot compete with efficiency and renewable resources and it does not fit in the emerging electricity system that uses intelligent management of supply and demand response to meet the need for electricity. Doubling down on nuclear power as the solution to climate change, as proposed by nuclear advocates, is a bad bet since nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways available to cut carbon emissions in the electricity sector. The nuclear war against clean energy is a last ditch effort to stop the transformation of the electricity sector and prevent nuclear power from becoming obsolete."

NIRS, 2014, "Killing the Competition: The Nuclear Power Agenda to Block Climate Action , Stop Renewable Energy, and Subsidize Old Reactors", www.nirs.org/neconomics/killingthecompetition914.pdf

Oldest Indian reactor will not restart

After 10 years in long-term outage, it was reported on September 6 that there will be no restart for the first unit of Rajasthan Atomic Power Station (RAPS-1), located at Rawatbata, 64 km southwest of Kota in the north-western Indian state of Rajasthan. The 100 MW Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor, which was supplied to India under a 1963 agreement with Canada, operated from 1972 to 2004, though with multiple extended shutdowns. Cooperation with Canada was suspended following India's 1974 nuclear weapons test; however design details for the reactor had already been transferred to India.

www.worldnuclearreport.org/Oldest-Indian-Reactor-Will-Not.html

www.deccanherald.com/content/429550/end-road-raps-1.html

Czech Republic: March against uranium in Brzkov

A march against planned uranium mining on September 7 was attended by approximately 200 people. The march was organised by the association 'Our Future Without Uranium', which expresses the disapproval of the Brzkov population with the government's intention to resume uranium mining. During the day citizens signed the petition by the civic association called "NO to Uranium Mining in the Highlands".

www.nuclear-heritage.net/index.php/March_against_uranium_in_Brzkov

What went wrong with small modular reactors?

Thomas W. Overton, associate editor of POWER magazine, writes: "At the graveyard wherein resides the "nuclear renaissance" of the 2000s, a new occupant appears to be moving in: the small modular reactor (SMR). ... Over the past year, the SMR industry has been bumping up against an uncomfortable and not-entirely-unpredictable problem: It appears that no one actually wants to buy one."

Overton notes that in 2013, MidAmerican Energy scuttled plans to build an SMR-based plant in Iowa. This year, Babcock & Wilcox scaled back much of its SMR program and sacked 100 workers in its SMR division. Westinghouse has abandoned its SMR program.

Overton explains: "The problem has really been lurking in the idea behind SMRs all along. The reason conventional nuclear plants are built so large is the economies of scale: Big plants can produce power less expensively per kilowatt-hour than smaller ones. The SMR concept disdains those economies of scale in favor of others: large-scale standardized manufacturing that will churn out dozens, if not hundreds, of identical plants, each of which would ultimately produce cheaper kilowatt-hours than large one-off designs. It's an attractive idea. But it's also one that depends on someone building that massive supply chain, since none of it currently exists. ... That money would presumably come from customer orders − if there were any. Unfortunately, the SMR "market" doesn't exist in a vacuum. SMRs must compete with cheap natural gas, renewables that continue to decline in cost, and storage options that are rapidly becoming competitive. Worse, those options are available for delivery now, not at the end of a long, uncertain process that still lacks NRC approval."

www.powermag.com/what-went-wrong-with-smrs/

India's new uranium enrichment plant in Karnataka

David Albright and Serena Kelleher-Vergantini write in an Institute for Science and International Security report: "India is in the early stages of building a large uranium enrichment centrifuge complex, the Special Material Enrichment Facility (SMEF), in Karnataka. This new facility will significantly increase India's ability to produce enriched uranium for both civil and military purposes, including nuclear weapons. India should announce that the SMEF will be subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, committed only to peaceful uses, and built only after ensuring it is in compliance with environmental laws in a process that fully incorporates stakeholders. Other governments and suppliers of nuclear and nuclear-related dual use goods throughout the world must be vigilant to prevent efforts by Indian trading and manufacturing companies to acquire such goods for this new enrichment facility as well as for India's operational gas centrifuge plant, the Rare Materials Plant, near Mysore."

http://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/indias-new-uranium-enrichment...

Iran planning two more power reactors

The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) plans to build two new nuclear power reactors, Bushehr Governor General Mostafa Salari announced on September 7. The previous week, AEOI chief Ali Akbar Salehi said that Tehran would sign a contract with Russia in the near future to build the two reactors in Bushehr. The AEOI states that the agreement with Russia will also include the construction of two desalination units.¹

One Russian-supplied power reactor is already operating at Bushehr. Fuel is supplied by Russia until 2021 and perhaps beyond. Plans for new reactors may be used by Tehran to justify its enrichment program.

Meanwhile, construction licenses have been issued for the next two nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates by the country's Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation. Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation plans to begin construction of Barakah 3 and 4 in 2014 and 2015 respectively with all four of the site's reactors becoming operational by 2020.²

1. http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13930616001123

2. World Nuclear News, 15 Sept 2014

Depleted uranium as a carcinogen and genotoxin

The International Campaign to Ban Uranium Weapons has produced a new report outlining the growing weight of evidence relating to how depleted uranium (DU) can damage DNA, interfere with cellular processes and contribute to the development of cancer.¹ The report uses peer-reviewed studies, many of which have been published during the last decade and, wherever possible, has sought to simplify the scientific language to make it accessible to the lay reader.

The report concludes: "The users of DU have shown themselves unwilling to be bound by the consequences of their actions. The failure to disclose targeting data or follow their own targeting guidelines has placed civilians at unacceptable risk. The recommendations of international and expert agencies have been adopted selectively or ignored. At times, users have actively opposed or blocked efforts to evaluate the risks associated with contamination. History suggests it is unlikely that DU use will be stopped voluntarily: an international agreement banning the use of uranium in conventional weapons is therefore required."

A report released by Dutch peace organisation PAX in June found that the lack of obligations on Coalition Forces to help clean-up after using DU weapons in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 has resulted in civilians and workers continuing to be exposed to the radioactive and toxic heavy metal years after the war.² The health risk posed by the inadequate management of Iraq's DU contamination is unclear − neither Coalition Forces nor the Iraqi government have supported health research into civilian DU exposure. High risk groups include people living near, or working on, the dozens of scrap metal sites where the thousands of military vehicles destroyed in 1991 and 2003 are stored or processed. Waste sites often lack official oversight and in places it has taken more than a decade to clean-up heavily contaminated military wreckage from residential neighbourhoods. Hundreds of locations targeted by the weapons, many of which are in populated areas, remain undocumented and concern among Iraqi civilians over the potential health effects from exposure is widespread.

The Iraqi government has recently prepared a five year environment plan together with the World Health Organisation and UN Environment Programme but the PAX report finds that it is unclear how this will be accomplished without international assistance.

1. www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/malignant-effects

2. www.paxvoorvrede.nl/media/files/pax-rapport-iraq-final-lowres-spread.pdf

www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/no-solution-in-sight-for-iraqs-radioactive...

Clean-up of former Saskatchewan uranium mill

More than 50 years after the closure of the Lorado uranium mill in Saskatchewan, workers are cleaning up a massive pile of radioactive, acidic tailings that has poisoned a lake and threatened the health of wildlife and hunters for decades. The mill is near Uranium City, where uranium mining once supported a community of up to 5,000 people. Lorado only operated from 1957 to 1961, but during that time it produced about 227,000 cubic metres of tailings that were dumped beside Nero Lake. Windblown dust from the top of the tailings presents a gamma radiation and radon concern. Workers will cover the tailings with a layer of specially engineered sand to prevent water from running over them and into the lake. In addition, a lime mixture is to be added to the lake to counteract the acidity.

In 1982, the last of the mines near Uranium City closed, but tailings from the Lorado site and the Gunnar mine were left untouched. Uranium City has about 100 residents now.

Clean-up work also includes sealing off and cleaning up 35 mine exploration sites. Later, the Saskatchewan Research Council is to begin a cleanup of the Gunnar mine. That project is in the environmental assessment stage. Four million tonnes of tailings were produced at Gunnar during its operation from 1955 to 1963.

The clean-up project is controversial. The Prince Albert Grand Council, which represents a dozen First Nations in central and northern Saskatchewan, said in a written submission for the Lorado and Gunnar projects that many residents favour removal of the tailings rather than covering them up. The Saskatchewan Environmental Society says more investigation should have been done on the feasibility of removing the tailings. It questions how the covering will stand up as climate change delivers more severe weather, and whether government will continue to monitor the sites.

http://lethbridgeherald.com/news/national-news/2014/08/31/tough-conditio...

France: Greenpeace activists given suspended sentences

A French court has issued two-month suspended prison sentences to 55 Greenpeace activists involved in a break-in at France's Fessenheim nuclear power plant in March. Fessenheim is France's oldest nuclear plant. About 20 Greenpeace activists managed to climb on top of the dome of a reactor in Fessenheim. The activists, mostly from Germany but also from Italy, France, Turkey, Austria, Hungary, Australia and Israel, were all convicted of trespassing and causing wilful damage.

Greenpeace has identified Fessenheim's reactors as two of the most dangerous in Europe and argues that they should be shut down immediately. The area around the plant is vulnerable to earthquakes and flooding. Fessenheim lies in the heart of Europe, between France, Germany and Switzerland, with seven million people living with 100 kms of the reactors.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29060086

www.english.rfi.fr/economy/20140905-greenpeace-activists-given-suspended...

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/g...

USA: Missouri fire may be moving closer to radioactive waste

A new report suggests an underground fire at the Bridgeton Landfill may be moving closer to radioactive waste buried nearby. The information comes just days after it was announced construction of a barrier between the fire and the waste will be delayed 18 months. The South Quarry of the Bridgeton Landfill has been smouldering underground for three years. A number of gas interceptor wells are designed to keep the fire from moving north and reaching the radioactive waste buried at the West Lake Landfill. However the wells may have failed according to landfill consultant Todd Thalhamer, who is calling for more tests to determine exactly how far the fire is from the radioactive material.

www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/09/05/report-landfill-fire-may-be-mov...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill

Britain's nuclear clean-up cost explosion

The cost of cleaning up Britain's toxic nuclear sites has shot up by £6bn (US$9.7b, €7.5b), with the government and regulators accused of "incompetence" in their efforts to manage the country's legacy of radioactive waste. The estimated cost for decommissioning over the next century went up from a £63.8bn estimate in 2011−12 to £69.8bn in 2012−13, with more increases expected in the coming years. This increase is nearly all due to the troubled clean-up of the Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sellafield-nuclear-cleanup-bill-w...

Early March, the US Department of Energy (DoE) has announced three public-private partnerships to develop deployment plans for small modular reactor (SMR) technologies at its Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The DoE said that it had signed three separate memorandums of agreement with Hyperion Power Generation, NuScale Power and Holtec International's SMR LLC subsidiary. Hyperion has designed a 25 MWe fast reactor, while Holtec and NuScale have designed small pressurized water reactors with capacities of 140 MWe and 45 MWe, respectively. However, the DoE stressed that the new agreements "do not constitute a federal funding commitment." It said that it envisages private sector funding to be used to develop these technologies and support deployment plans. The DoE added that the agreements are unrelated to its funding opportunity announcement for SMR cost-share projects announced in January.

According to their promoters, small modular reactors are the solution to the problems of high cost and risk. But they are not the nuclear nirvana that the industry seeks.

Having built small reactors to start with - Shippingport, the first commercial power reactor in the United States, was just 60 MW - the industry went to 1,000 MW and even larger sizes precisely because of economies of scale. Reactor power output goes up much faster than the materials and fabrication costs as size increases. Economies of scale also apply to electric generators and steam turbines.  So, the costs per kilowatt would tend to rise, not fall if reactor size is decreased greatly.

Proponents claim economies of scale would be offset by mass manufacturing small modular reactors. It is true that on-site fabrication is a cumbersome and expensive process. However, there have to be dozens or hundreds of orders before anyone will invest in a large factory to churn out reactors. Without that level of demand, small reactors will tend to be custom made - and costly.

Second, and even more importantly, building one or two small modular reactors on a site guarantees high costs. An entire security, administrative, control, and monitoring infrastructure must be built at every reactor location - making each kilowatt more expensive.

One approach would be to prepare a site and its infrastructure for a large number of small reactors. But, if they were all built at the same time, we are back to a large, risky project. If they are built one or two at a time, the first units will be very costly - far more than today's reactors - since a disproportionately large infrastructure would be necessary.

The hype about new reactors is hiding many difficult questions. Burning uranium and generating plutonium just to boil water was never a good idea; it was never destined to be cheap. Why would the U.S. government want to throw more tax dollars after a nuclear dream that is likely to dissolve into a harsh reality?

Source: World Nuclear News, 5 March 2012 / Iowa City Press Citizen, 9 March 2012, Arjun Makhijani
Contact: NIRS

The same industry that promised that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter" is now touting another supposed cure-all for America's power needs:  the small modular reactor (SMR).  The small modular reactor is being pitched by the nuclear power industry as a sort of production-line auto alternative to hand-crafted sports car, with supposed cost savings from the "mass manufacturing" of modestly sized reactors that could be scattered across the United States on a relatively quick basis. The facts about SMRs are far less rosy. 

Proponents of nuclear power are advocating for the development of small modular reactors (SMRs) as the solution to the problems facing large reactors, particularly soaring costs, safety, and radioactive waste.  “Small modular reactors” are defined by the US Department of Energy (DOE) as reactors that would produce 300MWe or less and are made in modules that can be transported. Unfortunately, small-scale reactors can’t solve these problems, and would likely exacerbate them.

There has been a proliferation of proposed Small Modular Reactor designs, but none have applied for certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Com­mission (NRC) yet. The NRC says that it expects to receive its first SMR design certification appli­cation in 2012. The factsheet addresses SMR designs for which the NRC may receive design certification applications in FY2011. It does not include some designs that are being researched but that are not on the NRC list, notably the travelling wave reactor. IEER will produce a separate report later in 2010 on this reactor.

Inherently more expensive?
SMR proponents claim that small size will en­able mass manufacture in a factory, enabling considerable savings relative to field construc­tion and assembly that is typical of large reac­tors. In other words, modular reactors will be cheaper because they will be more like as­sembly line cars than hand-made Lamborghi­nis.

In the case of reactors, however, several offsetting factors will tend to neutralize this advantage and make the costs per kilowatt of small reactors higher than large reactors. First, in contrast to cars or smart phones or similar widgets, the materials cost per kilowatt of a reactor goes up as the size goes down. This is because the surface area per kilowatt of capacity, which dominates materi­als cost, goes up as reactor size is decreased. Similarly, the cost per kilowatt of secondary containment, as well as independent systems for control, instrumentation, and emergency management, increases as size decreases. Cost per kilowatt also increases if each reac­tor has dedicated and independent systems for control, instrumentation, and emergency management. For these reasons, the nuclear industry has been building larger and larger reactors in an effort to try to achieve economies of scale and make nuclear power economically competitive.

Proponents argue that because these nuclear projects would consist of several smaller reactor modules instead of one large reactor, the construction time will be shorter and therefore costs will be reduced. How­ever, this argument fails to take into account the implications of installing many reactor modules in a phased manner at one site, which is the proposed approach at least for the United States. In this case, a large contain­ment structure with a single control room would be built at the beginning of the project that could accommodate all the planned capacity at the site. The result would be that the first few units would be saddled with very high costs, while the later units would be less expensive.

The realization of economies of scale would depend on the construction period of the entire project, possibly over an even longer time span than present large-reactor projects. If the later-planned units are not built, for instance due to slower growth than anticipated, the earlier units would likely be more expensive than present reactors, just from the diseconomies of the containment, site preparation, instrumentation and control system expenditures. Alternatively, a contain­ment structure and instrumentation and control could be built for each reactor. This would greatly increase unit costs and per kilo­watt capital costs. Some designs (such as the PBMR) propose no secondary containment, but this would increase safety risks.

These cost increases are unlikely to be offset even if the entire reactor is manufac­tured at a central facility and some economies are achieved by mass manufacturing com­pared to large reactors assembled on site.

Furthermore, estimates of low prices must be regarded with skepticism due to the history of past cost escalations for nuclear reactors and the potential for cost increases due to require­ments arising in the process of NRC certifica­tion. Some SMR designers are proposing that no prototype be built and that the necessary licensing tests be simulated. Whatever the process, it will have to be rigorous to ensure safety, especially given the history of some of proposed designs.

The cost picture for sodium-cooled reac­tors is also rather grim. They have typically been much more expensive to build than light water reactors, which are currently estimated to cost between $6,000 and $10,000 per kilowatt in the US. The costs of the last three large breeder reactors have varied wild­ly.

In 2008 dollars, the cost of the Japanese Monju reactor (the most recent) was $27,600 per kilowatt (electrical); French Superphénix (start up in 1985) was $6,300; and the Fast Flux Test Facility (startup in 1980) at Hanford was $13,800. This gives an average cost per kilowatt in 2008 dollars of about $16,000, without taking into account the fact that cost escalation for nuclear reactors has been much faster than inflation. In other words, while there is no recent US experience with construction of sodium-cooled reactors, one can infer that (i) they are likely to be far more expensive than light water reactors, (ii) the financial risk of building them will be much greater than with light water reactors due to high variation in cost from one project to another and the high variation in capacity fac­tors that might be expected.

Even at the lower end of the capital costs, for Superphénix, the cost of power generation was extremely high — well over a dollar per kWh since it operated so little. Monju, despite being the most expensive has generated essentially no electricity since it was commissioned in 1994. There is no comparable experience with potassium-cooled reactors, but the chemi­cal and physical properties of potassium are similar to sodium.

Increased safety and proliferation problems
Mass manufacturing raises a host of new safety, quality, and licensing concerns that the NRC has yet to address. For instance, the NRC may have to devise and test new licensing and inspection procedures for the manufacturing facilities, including inspec­tions of welds and the like. There may have to be a process for recalls in case of major de­fects in mass-manufactured reactors, as there is with other mass-manufactured products from cars to hamburger meat. It is unclear how recalls would work, especially if transpor­tation offsite and prolonged work at a repair facility were required.

Some vendors, such as PBMR (Pty) Ltd. and Toshiba, are proposing to manufacture the reactors in foreign countries. In order to reduce costs, it is likely that manufacturing will move to countries with cheaper labor forces, such as China, where severe quality problems have arisen in many products from drywall to infant formula to rabies vaccine.

PBMR

Despite 50 years of research by many countries, including the United States, the the­oretical promise of the PBMR has not come to fruition. The technical problems encountered early on have yet to be resolved, or apparent­ly, even fully understood. PMBR proponents in the US have long pointed to the South African program as a model for the US. Ironically, the US Department of Energy is once again pursuing this design at the very moment that the South African government has pulled the plug on the program due to escalating costs and problems.

Other issues that will affect safety are NRC requirements for operating and security personnel, which have yet to be determined. To reduce operating costs, some SMR vendors are advocating lowering the number of staff in the control room so that one operator would be responsible for three modules. In addition, the SMR designers and potential op­erators are proposing to reduce the number of security staff, as well as the area that must be protected. NRC staff is looking to design­ers to incorporate security into the SMR de­signs, but this has yet to be done. Ultimately, reducing staff raises serious questions about whether there would be sufficient personnel to respond adequately to an accident.

Of the various types of proposed SMRs, liq­uid metal fast reactor designs pose particular safety concerns. Sodium leaks and fires have been a central problem — sodium explodes on contact with water and burns on contact with air. Sodium-potassium coolant, while it has the advantage of a lower melting point than sodium, presents even greater safety issues, because it is even more flammable than molten sodium alone. Sodium-cooled fast reactors have shown essentially no posi­tive learning curve (i.e., experience has not made them more reliable, safer, or cheaper).

The world’s first nuclear reactor to generate electricity, the EBR I in Idaho, was a sodium-potassium-cooled reactor that suffered a partial meltdown. EBR II, which was sodium-cooled reactor, operated reasonably well, but the first US commercial prototype, Fermi I in Michigan had a meltdown of two fuel assem­blies and, after four years of repair, a sodium explosion. The most recent commercial prototype, Monju in Japan, had a sodium fire 18 months after its commissioning in 1994, which resulted in it being shut down for over 14 years. The French Superphénix, the largest sodium-cooled reactor ever built, was designed to demonstrate commercialization. Instead, it operated at an average of less than 7 percent capacity factor over 14 years before being permanently shut.

In addition, the use of plutonium fuel or uranium enriched to levels as high as 20 percent — four to five times the typical enrichment level for present commercial light water reactors — presents serious proliferation risks, especially as some SMRs are proposed to be exported to developing countries with small grids and/or installed in remote locations. Security and safety will be more difficult to maintain in coun­tries with no or underdeveloped nuclear regulatory infrastructure and in isolated areas. Burying the reactor underground, as proposed for some designs, would not sufficiently address security because some access from above will still be needed and it could increase the environmental impact to groundwater, for example, in the event of an accident.

More complex waste problem
Proponents claim that with longer opera­tion on a single fuel charge and with less production of spent fuel per reactor, waste management would be simpler. In fact, spent fuel management for SMRs would be more complex, and therefore more expensive, because the waste would be located in many more sites. The infrastructure that we have for spent fuel management is geared toward light-water reactors at a limited number of sites. In some proposals, the reactor would be buried underground, making waste retrieval even more complicated and com­plicating retrieval of radioactive materials in the event of an accident. For instance, it is highly unlikely that a reactor contain­ing metallic sodium could be disposed of as a single entity, given the high reactivity of sodium with both air and water. Decom­missioning a sealed sodium- or potassium-cooled reactor could present far greater technical challenges and costs per kilowatt of capacity than faced by present-day above-ground reactors.

Not a climate solution
Efficiency and most renewable technologies are already cheaper than new large reactors. The long time — a decade or more — that it will take to certify SMRs will do little or noth­ing to help with the global warming problem and will actually complicate current efforts underway. For example, the current sched­ule for commercializing the above-ground sodium cooled reactor in Japan extends to 2050, making it irrelevant to addressing the climate problem. Relying on assurances that SMRs will be cheap is contrary to the experi­ence about economies of scale and is likely to waste time and money, while creating new safety and proliferation risks, as well as new waste disposal problems.

(This is a shortened version of the factsheet on Small Modular Reactors produced by Arjun Makhijani and Michelle Boyd for the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), September 2010. It is available at: www.ieer.org/fctsheet/small-modular-reactors2010.pdf)

Contact: Leslie Anderson, +1 703 276-3256
Mail: landerson@hastingsgroup.com
Or: info@ieer.org