SMR economics: an overview

Author:

NM872.4776

Small modular reactors (SMRs) only exist as theoretical constructs. No SMRs exist if a strict definition is applied (modular, factory production of numerous, identical components). Only a few are under construction … or none if a strict definition is applied. Thus meaningful information about SMR economics is nearly non-existent.

The void is filled by propagandists … the SMR market is in the hundreds of billions and SMRs are reviving nuclear power's hope of becoming too cheap to meter. The more-digestible size of small reactors, combined with factory-based modular construction techniques, will solve all of nuclear power's problems at once … which rather begs the question as to why so few small reactors have been or are being built. It also begs the question as to why there is a deep reluctance on the part of SMR developers, the finance sector and governments to finance SMRs.

Fundamental problems

M. V. Ramana summarizes some of the fundamental economic challenges facing SMR developers:¹

"As the name suggests, SMRs produce smaller amounts of electricity compared to currently common nuclear power reactors. A smaller reactor is expected to cost less to build. This allows, in principle, smaller private utilities and countries with smaller GDPs to invest in nuclear power. While this may help deal with the first problem, it actually worsens the second problem because small reactors lose out on economies of scale. Larger reactors are cheaper on a per megawatt basis because their material and work requirements do not scale linearly with generation capacity.

"SMR proponents argue that they can make up for the lost economies of scale by savings through mass manufacture in factories and resultant learning. But, to achieve such savings, these reactors have to be manufactured by the thousands, even under very optimistic assumptions about rates of learning. Rates of learning in nuclear power plant manufacturing have been extremely low; indeed, in both the United States and France, the two countries with the highest number of nuclear plants, costs rose with construction experience.

"For high learning rates to be achieved, there must be a standardized reactor built in large quantities. Currently dozens of SMR designs are at various stages of development; it is very unlikely that one, or even a few designs, will be chosen by different countries and private entities, discarding the vast majority of designs that are currently being invested in. All of these unlikely occurrences must materialize if small reactors are to become competitive with large nuclear power plants, which are themselves not competitive.

"There is a further hurdle to be overcome before these large numbers of SMRs can be built. For a company to invest in a factory to manufacture reactors, it would have to be confident that there is a market for them. This has not been the case and hence no company has invested large sums of its own money to commercialize SMRs. …

"Given this state of affairs, it should not be surprising that no SMR has been commercialized. Timelines have been routinely set back. In 2001, for example, a DOE report on prevalent SMR designs concluded that "the most technically mature small modular reactor (SMR) designs and concepts have the potential to be economical and could be made available for deployment before the end of the decade provided that certain technical and licensing issues are addressed". Nothing of that sort happened; there is no SMR design available for deployment in the United States so far."

None of this is new. Ramana quotes a General Electric analyst who said in 1966: "Nuclear power is a big-plant business: it is most competitive in the large plant sizes."² Ramana goes on to say: "And if large nuclear reactors are not competitive, it is unlikely that small reactors will do any better. Worse, attempts to make them cheaper might end up exacerbating nuclear power's other problems: production of long-lived radioactive waste, linkage with nuclear weapons, and the occasional catastrophic accident."²

Market size

Here are some examples of industry hype about the SMR market:

• Nuclear Energy Insider estimates a global SMR market size of US$500 billion by 2035³ (for comparison, global clean energy investment totaled US$332 billion in 2018 alone⁴).
• The Small Modular Reactor Research and Education 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 or more.⁵
• A 2014 report by the UK National Nuclear Laboratory estimates 65‒85 GW of installed SMR capacity by 2035, valued at £250‒400 billion.⁶
• British companies are urging the government to support the development of an SMR industry that "could create 40,000 skilled jobs, contribute £100bn to the economy and open up a potential £400bn global export market."⁷
• According to the SMR Smart consortium, if the US captures "just" one-third of the global market of 65‒85 GW, SMRs would create tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs in addition to generating billions of dollars in domestic economic activity and tax revenues.⁸
• Elsewhere, SMR Start claims that US exporters of SMR technologies would only need to capture 10% of the global market in order to create tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in tax revenues.⁹
• The global SMR market could be valued at US$1 trillion by 2035 according to the Power Engineering magazine.¹⁰
• According to NuScale: "Conservative estimates predict approximately 55-75 GW of global electricity will come from SMRs by 2035, equivalent to over 1,000 NuScale Power Modules."¹¹

The OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency is more circumspect: it estimates up to 21 GW of installed SMR capacity by 2035 while its low-case scenario has less than 1 GW installed by 2035.¹²

With such riches on offer, numerous companies and countries ‒ including the US, Russia, China, South Korea and Argentina ‒ are said to be in a "race to be the first to market".¹³ If so, they are making haste slowly.

NuScale Chief Technology Officer Jose Reyes said last year: "If NuScale only gets 10-20 percent of that global SMR market, we would have to be manufacturing three to six modules a month. That's $3-6 billion annually, just for the manufacturing of it. There's tremendous opportunity for SMRs globally, and that's only if you get a small percentage of the market."¹⁴ But Reyes is talking about a market that only exists in the imagination of SMR enthusiasts.

In truth, there is virtually no market for SMRs ‒ hence the reluctance of industry and government to make the multi-billion-dollar investments that would kick-start an SMR industry. These are heady times for conference organizers jumping on the SMR bandwagon, and for graphic artists generating images of non-existent SMR designs … but there is virtually no market for actual SMRs.

Will Davis, a consultant to the American Nuclear Society, said in 2014 that the SMR "universe [is] rife with press releases, but devoid of new concrete."¹⁵ The same year, POWER magazine noted that "air seems to be leaking out of the SMR balloon lately."¹⁶ Gordon Edwards from the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility states: "SMR stands for "Small Modular Reactor(s)". It also stands for the Second Make-Believe Renaissance, for it is the latest effort by an increasingly desperate nuclear industry to create a "Nuclear Renaissance". They have already failed once before."¹⁷

In early 2019, Kevin Anderson, North American Project Director for Nuclear Energy Insider, said that there "is unprecedented growth in companies proposing design alternatives for the future of nuclear, but precious little progress in terms of market-ready solutions."¹⁸ Anderson argued that it is time to convince investors that the SMR sector is ready for scale-up financing but that it will not be easy: "Even for those sympathetic, the collapse of projects such as V.C Summer does little to convince financiers that this sector is mature and competent enough to deliver investable projects on time and at cost."¹⁸

Thomas W. Overton, associate editor of POWER magazine, wrote in 2014: "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."¹⁹

Overton explained:¹⁹

"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."

Danny Roderick, then president and CEO of Westinghouse, said in 2014: "The problem I have with SMRs is not the technology, it's not the deployment ‒ it's that there's no customers. ... The worst thing to do is get ahead of the market".²⁰ It would be difficult to justify the economics of SMRs at this point, Roderick said, especially without government subsidies. Westinghouse twice missed out on US government funding to pursue its SMR program, and decided to give up on SMRs in favor of its AP1000 reactors and pursuing its aim of tripling its decommissioning business to reach US$1 billion per year. Westinghouse's enthusiasm for SMRs ‒ and its confidence in the growth of a market ‒ was later revived when the UK government announced that funding would be made available for SMR projects.

So, how many orders would a manufacturer need to go to the financial markets to get funding to build a supply chain to build lots of SMRs? Westinghouse's Danny Roderick said in 2014: "Unless you're going to build 30 to 50 of them [SMRs], you're not going to make your money back."²⁰ Pro-nuclear commentator Dan Yurman wrote in 2016: "The answer, according to David Orr, head of nuclear business development for Rolls-Royce in the UK, ... is a minimum of about four dozen units and six dozen would be better. Those are high numbers which make some proponents of SMRs unhappy. The reason is this estimate means that turning out the first 50 or so SMRs for any firm in the business could be a high wire act."²¹

Costs per MWh

A 2016 report by the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission estimated levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) of US$161/MWh based on the US NuScale SMR design.²² A 2015 NuScale report estimated a LCOE of $98-$108/MWh.²³ And in June 2018, NuScale said it is targeting a cost of just US$65/MWh for its first plant.²⁴ No doubt NuScale's cost estimates will continue to drop precipitously … unless and until it actually builds an SMR plant.

NuScale Chief Technology Officer Jose Reyes said last year: "We're already competitive with natural gas in the UK – it's already the lowest cost next to coal."¹⁴ He meant to say that if NuScale ever develops the ability to churn out large numbers of SMRs (it hasn't yet built one), and if its absurd cost estimates are proven correct, NuScale SMRs will be competitive with gas. Nuscale's construction cost estimate ‒ "about" US$3 billion for a 12-unit plant with a total capacity of 684 MW ‒ is as implausible as its $/MWh claims.²⁵

A 2017 report published by the US-based Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP) provides another example of idiotic SMR hype.²⁶ The report crunched the numbers on eight advanced reactor concepts, four of them meeting the SMR criterion of <300 MW capacity. The report found an average LCOE of US$60/MWh, well below the US$99/MWh expected by the US Energy Information Agency for large PWR nuclear plants entering service in the early 2020s.

This finding "has important strategic implications for the industry and the nation", the EIRP report states, and the cost estimates "suggest that these technologies could revolutionize the way we think about the cost, availability, and environmental consequences of energy generation." With one exception, even the upper estimates were below the US$99/MWh benchmark, reinforcing the revolutionary potential and strategic importance of Generation IV concepts.

But to estimate the costs of Generation IV nuclear concepts, the researchers simply asked vendors (or would-be vendors) to supply the information! The EIRP report did at least have the decency to qualify its useless findings: "There is inherent and significant uncertainty in projecting NOAK [nth-of-a-kind] costs from a group of companies that have not yet built a single commercial-scale demonstration reactor, let alone a first commercial plant. Without a commercial-scale plant as a reference, it is difficult to reliably estimate the costs of building out the manufacturing capacity needed to achieve the NOAK costs being reported; many questions still remain unanswered ‒ what scale of investments will be needed to launch the supply chain; what type of capacity building will be needed for the supply chain, and so forth."²⁶

Lazard's most recent levelized-cost-of-energy analysis gives figures of US$112‒189/MWh for new, large reactors; $29‒56 for wind power; and $36‒46 for utility-scale solar.²⁷ If figures of US$60‒65/MWh could be achieved with SMRs, the electricity they generate would be 2‒3 times cheaper than that from large reactors but still more expensive than wind power and utility-scale solar.

Rolls-Royce claims that its SMRs, if built, will generate power at a cost of £60/MWh (US$77.70/MWh).²⁸ That's highly competitive compared to Lazard's figure for large nuclear … but the estimate is implausible and Rolls-Royce is demanding significant UK government funding to pursue its SMR project and threatening to abandon the project in the absence of government largesse.

Learning curve

Claims the SMRs will be economic rest on unlikely estimates of capital costs and costs per unit of electricity generated. Such claims also rest on purported learning curves and cost reductions as more and more units are built.

But nuclear power is the one and only energy source with a negative learning curve ‒ in some countries, at least.²⁹ Thus if SMRs enjoy a faster (negative) learning curve than large reactors, first-of-a-kind SMRs will be uneconomic and nth-of-a-kind SMRs will become more and more uneconomic at an even faster rate than large-reactor boondoggles like French EPR reactors or the AP1000 projects in the US that bankrupted Westinghouse and nearly bankrupted its parent company Toshiba.

M.V. Ramana writes:³⁰

"SMR proponents argue that they can make up for the lost economies of scale two ways: by savings through mass manufacture in factories, and by moving from a steep learning curve early on to gaining rich knowledge about how to achieve efficiencies as more and more reactors are designed and built. But, to achieve such savings, these reactors have to be manufactured by the thousands, even under very optimistic assumptions about rates of learning. Rates of learning in nuclear power plant manufacturing have been extremely low. Indeed, in both the United States and France, the two countries with the highest number of nuclear plants, costs went up, not down, with construction experience."

Mark Cooper, senior research fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, compares the learning curves of nuclear and renewables:³¹

"Renewable technologies have been exhibiting declining costs for a couple of decades and these trends are expected to continue, while nuclear costs have increased and are not expected to fall. Renewables have been able to move rapidly along their learning curves because they actually do possess the characteristics that allow for the capture of economies of mass production and stimulate innovation. They involve the production of large numbers of units under conditions of competition. They afford the opportunity for a great deal of real world development and demonstration work before they are deployed on a wide scale. These are the antithesis of how nuclear development has played out in the past, and the push for small modular reactors does not appear to solve the problem."

SMRs as 'affordable luxuries', diseconomies of scale

Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a 2013 report:³²

"Unless the negative economies of scale can be overcome, SMRs could well become affordable luxuries: more utilities may be in a financial position to buy an SMR without "betting the farm," but still lose money by producing high-cost electricity. In any event, it would take many years of industrial experience, and the production of many units, before the potential for manufacturing cost savings could be demonstrated.

"In the meantime, as the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board's SMR subcommittee stated in a November 2012 report, "first of a kind costs in U.S. practice will likely make the early [SMR] units considerably more expensive than alternative sources of power. If the U.S. is to create a potential SMR market for US vendors, it will need to do something to help out with such costs". The report pointed out that if the government decided to provide such help, it would have a "panoply of direct and indirect tools available to support the development of an SMR industry" ranging from "funding SMR demonstration plants, perhaps on U.S. government sites (the DOE is a particularly large user of electricity) to a variety of financial incentives" including "continued cost sharing with selected SMR vendors beyond design certification," "loan guarantees," and "production tax credits or feed-in tariffs for those utility generators that are early users of SMR power purchase contracts." …

"DOE officials have referred to this situation as a "Catch-22." The economics of mass production of SMRs cannot be proven until hundreds of units have been produced. But that can't happen unless there are hundreds of orders, and there will be few takers unless the price can be brought down. This is why the industry believes significant government assistance would be needed to get an SMR industry off the ground. …

"In addition to imposing a penalty on the capital cost of SMRs, economies of scale would also negatively affect operations and maintenance (O&M) costs (excluding costs for nuclear fuel, which scale proportionately with capacity). Labor costs are a significant fraction of nuclear plant O&M costs, and they do not typically scale linearly with the capacity of the plant: after all, a minimum number of personnel are required to maintain safety and security regardless of the size."

Standardized modular rhetoric

The M in SMR refers to plans for the manufacture and construction of SMR components (modules) primarily in dedicated factories, with the components then shipped to site for installation. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, "the modularity of SMRs that enables the centralized fabrication of major components of the power unit has several advantages, including the standardization of both components and design, creating significant economies of mass production. Scale economies from modularization are anticipated to stem not only from mass manufacturing of component modules, but also from increases in productivity and efficiency gains as the production of successive modules continues over time."³³

Whether those benefits would be realized in practice is doubtful. Experts interviewed during the preparation of a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science were skeptical about the impact of modular construction on SMR economics: "We challenged experts to identify potential economies of scale in modular construction and the economies of volume associated with factory fabrication that might be exploited in smaller reactors. … However, most experts were skeptical that such economies would completely offset the diseconomies of scale in reactor size."³⁴

A 2014 report produced by Nuclear Energy Insider, drawing on interviews with more than 50 "leading specialists and decision makers", noted that modular factory construction methods don't obviate the need for careful, skilled construction at the reactor destination site: "[I]n 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."³⁵

Transport issues arising from the modular construction model are too often glossed over. Dr David Lowry notes that the UK's so-called Expert Finance Working Group on Small Nuclear Reactors (EFWG)³⁶ "makes no attempt to provide an analysis of how to provide market-based insurance for SMRs, against accidents and terrorist attack on modules in transit to site and in situ; nor how to privately fund SMR radioactive waste management: yet these are real risks for nuclear power, SMRs included. For example, the EFWG (p.11) talks of "road transportable modules which are easily installed on site" but makes no calculation of the exposure to disruption or indeed destruction of such an SMR module being transported on public roads from fabrication facility to operating site, possible hundreds of miles distant."³⁷

The logic (or rhetoric) of modular factory construction vanishes if the factories producing reactor components are systematically underperforming. The Creusot Forge foundry in France is a topical example. Systemic sub-standard processes combined with corruption and cover-ups resulted in an ever-widening scandal. The saga is covered in some detail in the September 2018 World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR).³⁸

This brief excerpt from the WNISR report gives some indication as to the scale of the problem: "On 17 July 2018, EDF sent its assessment of the manufacturing dossiers of 1,142 parts to ASN [France's nuclear regulator] concerning a total of 46 reactors. Examination of these dossiers by ASN is expected to last until the end of 2018. The information released on EDF's website covers, however, only 42 reactors and there is no information on the nature of the 1,142 affected parts. EDF found a total of 1,775 violations of regulatory or contractual requirements, ranging from 16 to 55 per reactor, plus 449 violations of the manufacturer's internal guidelines."³⁸

Reflecting on the failure of Generation III reactor construction projects, the 2015 World Nuclear Industry Status Report states: "The reality may be that nuclear technology is simply not mature enough to standardize yet and there is still a continuing flow of design changes driven by experience of operating plants and technical change that it would be foolish to ignore. The rate of ordering may also be too low for standardization to be feasible. If vendors are receiving only a handful of orders per decade, it seems to make little sense to standardize."³⁹

The same arguments can be applied to SMRs. The report further states that the "attempt to reduce sitework by shifting the workload to factories through modularized design also does not seem to have had the desired effect, and seems to simply have shifted the quality issues from site to module factories."³⁹

Nuclear industry rhetoric about standardized modular construction also extends to large reactors. Michael Shellenberger noted in a 2018 article:⁴⁰

"You might have heard about a new kind of nuclear reactor that promises far greater safety at a much lower cost. How?

• It is much simpler and thus requires "half as many safety-related valves, 83 percent less safety-related pipe and one-third fewer pumps;"
• Its components can be manufactured in a factory and assembled on-site at lower cost rather than built from scratch;
• Its cooling and passive safety features rely on "natural forces, like gravity… rather than relying on mechanical pumps powered by electricity."
• These features mean it will have a very low cost. How low? "Somewhere between $1.4 billion and $1.9 billion" per reactor."

Shellenberger notes that the rhetoric doesn't concern SMRs but Westinghouse's AP1000 reactors, and he goes on to note that AP1000 projects in the US were long-delayed, subject to massive cost overruns, and that one of the two projects was abandoned altogether.

Modular construction models contributed to cost overruns and delays with the AP1000 projects in the US, the doubling of cost estimates for both projects, the abandonment of the VC Summer project in South Carolina, and the near-collapse of the Vogtle project in Georgia (which is 5.5 years behind schedule).^41-44

The kindest thing that could be said about standardized, modular construction techniques is that the promise might yet be realized, to some extent, even if history suggests otherwise. A Southern Co. executive involved in the AP1000 project in Georgia told Associated Press that building in modules might still work despite the problems with the AP1000 projects. "Has it for the first units resulted in a lot of time savings? No. But does it have promise? Yes," he said.⁴³

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44. Andrew Brown, 27 Aug 2017, 'Early signs of 'incompetence at every level' went unheeded as South Carolina rushed toward 'sexy' nuclear future', http://www.postandcourier.com/business/early-signs-of-incompetence-at-ev...