Here’s an interesting, short paper on the economics of small-scale nuclear reactors. A telling snippet:
The study team pursued this issue further to assess how the risk of a large investment relative to the size of the company would affect the business case for a power plant. Figure 3 depicts a rough estimate of the relationship between the weighted average cost of capital that a company would be expected to bear as a function of project size to compensate for the risks that a large investment could pose to the company as a whole. This model helps to explain why power producers would be interested in SMRs even if other nuclear plants could be built at a lower per-kilowatt cost
Either countries and companies that are pouring money into SMR, e.g. Samsung, are run by fools or they think there must be some practical utility in them.
Yes, that’s a spot-on reasoning from the consumer side (utilities) for SMR over the 1 GW+ plants today.
A couple of replies from the last post.
1. The Chinese didn’t pursue thorium molten salt reactors as an act of genius foresight in a planned economy; there’s a video from the head of the project who candidly admits it is because China has no other choice. China is not blessed with shale gas, their renewable resources are not enough and far away from where people live, and they cannot run a trade deficit of $100 billion-plus worth of goods (and the power to produce them) like the US. China also likes clean air, so cutting coal use is a must. That leaves nuclear, and necessity is the mother of invention.
2. When it comes to the US; the most important impediment is priorities. If something is important, regulations can be changed (just look at the reaction to COVID), litigation can be banned. The US had a running test molten salt plant from 1965-1969; a running head start of 40 years. Yet investment in it was abandoned for 50 years.
It is tragic because this type of engineering research is the type of infrastructure investment that is a good fit for the Federal Government — recall “the atoms for peace” project that led to existing nuclear power plants. Yet nothing from Washington despite the current cries for infrastructure.
“The study team pursued this issue further to assess how the risk of a large investment relative to the size of the company would affect the business case for a power plant.”
Shorter: Don’t put it all on red.
The difference between 1965, probably America’s peak, and today is 60 years of accumulated welfare state entitlements, large-scale regulation of everything, especially NIMBY environmentalism, and a massive accumulation of bureaucrats. Money is dissipated without result in both the private sector and public sector. Innovation is simply strangled.
NASA and DARPA are good examples. They were unable to develop hypersonic missiles, which Russia did develop and is deploying on land, on warships, and on aircraft. In fact, both Russia and China have achieved leads over the US in a wide range of technologies, 5G/AI integration, space… And their lead is expanding with rapid innovation in everything. The Chinese space program embarrasses the US daily with manned space station, suborbital aircraft, moon robots/samplers with samples returned to China, Mars rovers…
The Chrysler Building was constructed in 2 years(1928 to 1930) (after a decade of redesign and ownership changes).
The Empire State Building was constructed in 1 year 45 days (1930 to 1931).
The original World Trade Center, 7 buildings, was constructed in 6 years (open 1972).
The new One World Trade Center took 11 (2004 to 2015)years, mostly in paperwork. It is smaller in capacity than the original, and the occupied levels are lower.
Please note that in the 1930’s design calculations were done by hand with slide rules and mechanical adding machines. Structural engineering theory was mostly complete, and high quality steel was routinely available, but construction technique used rivets, which are heated red-hot and hammered into place one at a time.
Modern designs use computers which do calculations in minutes rather than months, and steel beam to column connections are done rapidly either by welding or bolting.
So, in civil engineering there has been innovation but the accumulated regulations have strangled the application of it. By the way, China excels in civil engineering, too, and all the great civil engineering project of the last decade or two are in China. BRI/OBOR is basically a civil engineering project, and larger than anyone in the US can contemplate doing.
All the regulation crap will also prevent the construction of new nuclear power stations in the US. We will merely shutdown our existing ones as they age (NY just shut one down prematurely.). The largest commercial company doing nuclear power design, operation, and construction is Russia’s Rosatom.
It is to weep.
Look at the bright side, Bob. We’ve eliminated poverty, have a crack public education system, and we would never be so foolish as to let our bureaucrats fund gain of function research with dangerous viruses.
So we got that goin’ for us.
“The study team performed an initial estimate of the costs of SMRs Relying on very limited publicly available data. SMR design, licensing, and detailed engineering are in an early stage. Therefore, these estimates have a significant amount of uncertainty. Using information available from vendors, the authors arrived at a best achievable overnight cost estimate of $4,700/kWe, based on a fully mature SMR industry and six generic 100-MW SMRs of built-out plant capacity at a site.2 This estimate is higher than a comparable one made by this study team in a separate study of the construction of gigawatt- scale AP1000s currently being developed in the U.S.3 Factoring in owner’s costs, contingencies, interest during construction, fuel, operations and maintenance costs, the best achievable levelized cost of electricity from this plant was calculated at $61/MWh.4 The report emphasizes that these costs are assumed to be at the end of learning process that will drive down costs though repetitive construction and manufacturing of standardized designs.”
So what the paper really says is that if everything goes well sometime in the future once all of the problems are figured out and we know how to make SMRs cost effective because we are then making lots of them, they will be cost effective. Hard to argue with that.
Steve