Thursday, June 27, 2024

NRC Names New Chief Financial Officer

Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: 24-054 June 27, 2024
CONTACT: Office of Public Affairs, 301-415-8200
NRC Names New Chief Financial Officer

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission today announced the selection of Owen F. Barwell as the agency’s new Chief Financial Officer, effective July 14, 2024.

Barwell has more than 35 years’ experience in both federal service and the private sector, including in scientific research, non-profit and professional services. He comes to the NRC from a role as Chief Financial Officer at Independence Hydrogen, Inc., a veteran-owned company developing low-carbon hydrogen recycling projects. Previously, he was CFO for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a research and development center operated on behalf of the Department of Energy, where he was responsible for financial, budget and acquisition functions.

“Owen brings significant business acumen and experience leading large and complex financial programs to this important role,” said NRC Chair Christopher T. Hanson. “His past experience in the energy sector is particularly important at this dynamic time of change in the nuclear industry. I welcome him to our agency.”

Barwell’s resume includes stints as Acting CFO and Deputy CFO for DOE, where he was responsible for the department’s strategic plan, budget, finance and accounting, corporate business systems and led approximately 500 staff and contractors. Earlier in his career, he served as a senior advisor at NASA, helping to implement a major initiative to improve business systems and processes. He also worked as a principal consultant at PwC Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers in both London and Washington, D.C.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Lancaster (UK).

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world

Sunday, June 23, 2024

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/21/artificial-intelligence-nuclear-fusion-climate/?utm_medium=email

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution.

As power needs of AI push emissions up and put big tech in a bind, companies put their faith in elusive — some say improbable — technologies.

By  and 

June 21, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

The mighty Columbia River has helped power the American West with hydroelectricity since the days of FDR’s New Deal. But the artificial intelligence revolution will demand more. Much more.

So near the river’s banks in Central Washington, Microsoft is betting on an effort to generate power from atomic fusion — the collision of atoms that powers the sun — a breakthrough that has eluded scientists for the past century. Physicists predict it will elude Microsoft, too.

The tech giant and its partners say they expect to harness fusion by 2028, an audacious claim that bolsters their promises to transition to green energy but distracts from current reality. In fact, the voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use — including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants.

In the face of this dilemma, Big Tech is going all in on experimental clean-energy projects that have long odds of success anytime soon. In addition to fusion, they are hoping to generate power through such futuristic schemes as small nuclear reactors hooked to individual computing centers and machinery that taps geothermal energy by boring 10,000 feet into the Earth’s crust.

Tech companies had promised “clean energy would be this magical, infinite resource,” said Tamara Kneese, a project director at the nonprofit Data & Society, which tracks the effect of AI and accuses the tech industry of using “fuzzy math” in its climate claims.

“Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom,” Kneese said. “This should be alarming to anyone who cares about the

As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world’s most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source.

Data centers, the nondescript warehouses packed with racks of servers that power the modern internet, have been around for decades. But the amount of electricity they need now is soaring because of AI. Training artificial intelligence models and using AI to execute even simple tasks involves ever more complicated, faster and voluminous computations that are straining the electricity system.

A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 million laptops running eight hours every day, based on data shared publicly by the company.

The data-center-driven resurgence in fossil fuel power contrasts starkly with the sustainability commitments of tech giants Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, all of which say they will erase their emissions entirely as soon as 2030. The companies are the most prominent players in a constellation of more than 2,700 data centers nationwide, many of them run by more obscure firms that rent out computing power to the tech giants.

“They are starting to think like cement and chemical plants. The ones who have approached us are agnostic as to where the power is coming from,” said Ganesh Sakshi, chief financial officer of Mountain V Oil & Gas, which provides natural gas to industrial customers in Eastern states.

Tech companies are confronting this dilemma with bravado. Artificial intelligence thinkers like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, a major backer of Microsoft’s fusion start-up partner Helion, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who invests big in other fusion efforts, say breakthroughs in energy are achievable.

The companies also argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption. They say AI is already being harnessed to make the power grid smarter, speed up innovation of new nuclear technologies and track emissions.

Microsoft was the only one of the four major firms driving the AI boom to answer detailed questions from The Washington Post about their energy needs and plans. Google, Amazon and Meta offered limited statements.

“If we work together, we can unlock AI’s game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need,” Microsoft said in a statement.

The tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power every time a big data center comes online to cancel out its emissions. But critics see a shell game with these contracts: The companies are operating off the same power grid as everyone else, while claiming for themselves much of the finite amount of green energy. Utilities are then backfilling those purchases with fossil fuel expansions, regulatory filings show.

Amazon says it has been “the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for four straight years.” Google wrote that it is using AI “to accelerate climate action,” which is “just as crucial as solving for the environmental impact associated with it.”

As for Microsoft, the company said that “by 2030, we will have 100% of our electricity consumption, 100% of the time, matched by zero carbon energy purchases.”

Left unmentioned are the heavily polluting fossil fuel plants that become necessary to stabilize the power grid overall because of these purchases, making sure everyone has enough electricity.

In the Salt Lake City region, utility executives and lawmakers scaled back plans for big investments in clean energy and doubled down on coal. The retirement of a large coal plant has been pushed back a decade, to 2042, and the closure of another has been delayed to 2036.

Among the region’s mega energy users is Meta. It’s building a $1.5 billion data center campus outside Salt Lake City that consumes as much power as can be generated by a large nuclear reactor. Google has purchased 300 acres across the street from Meta’s data center and plans its own data center campus. Other data center developers are frantically searching for power in the area.

The region was supposed to be a “breakthrough” technology launchpad, with utility PacifiCorp declaring it would aim to replace coal infrastructure with next-generation small nuclear plants built by a company that Gates chairs. But that plan was put on the shelf when PacifiCorp announced in April that it will prolong coal burning, citing regulatory developments that make it viable.

“This is very quickly becoming an issue of, don’t get left behind locking down the power you need, and you can figure out the climate issues later,” said Aaron Zubaty, CEO of California-based Eolian, a major developer of clean energy projects. “Ability to find power right now will determine the winners and losers in the AI arms race. It has left us with a map bleeding with places where the retirement of fossil plants are being delayed.”

A spike in tech-related energy needs in Georgia moved regulators in April to green-light an expansion of fossil fuel use, including purchasing power from Mississippi that will delay closure of a half-century-old coal plant there. In the suburbs of Milwaukee, Microsoft’s announcement in March that it is building a $3.3 billion data center campus followed the local utility pushing back by one year the retirement of coal units, and unveiling plans for a vast expansion of gas power that regional energy executives say is necessary to stabilize the grid amid soaring data center demand and other growth.

In Omaha, where Google and Meta recently set up sprawling data center operations, a coal plant that was supposed to go offline in 2022 will now be operational through at least 2026. The local utility has scrapped plans to install large batteries to store solar power.

These concrete developments in energy markets contrast with tech companies’ futuristic promises. A recent Goldman Sachs analysis of energy that will power the AI boom into 2030 did not even consider small nuclear plants or futuristic fusion generators.

It found data centers will account for 8 percent of total electricity use in the United States by 2030, a near tripling of their share today. New solar and wind energy will meet about 40 percent of that new power demand from data centers, the forecast said, while the rest will come from a vast expansion in the burning of natural gas. The new emissions created would be comparable to that of putting 15.7 million additional gas-powered cars on the road.

“We all want to be cleaner,” Brian Bird, president of NorthWestern Energy, a utility serving Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, told a recent gathering of data center executives in Washington, D.C. “But you guys aren’t going to wait 10 years … My only choice today, other than keeping coal plants open longer than all of us want, is natural gas. And so you’re going see a lot of natural gas build out in this country.”

The big name tech firms try to inoculate themselves from blame for contributing to global warming with accounting techniques. They claim that all the new clean energy they buy has the effect of wiping out emissions that otherwise could be attributed to their operations.

Critics charge the arrangements often fall short.

“If data centers are claiming to be clean, but utilities are using their presence to justify adding more gas capacity, people should be skeptical of those claims,” said Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University’s Zero Lab, which focuses on decarbonization.

One example is an agreement announced in March, after Amazon signed a contract to buy more than a third of the electricity generated by one of the nation’s largest nuclear facilities, the Susquehanna power plant in Luzerne County, Pa.

“That deal disturbed a lot of people,” Zubaty said. “When massive data centers show up and start claiming the output of a nuclear plant, you basically have to replace that electricity with something else.”

Tech companies acknowledge big new sources of clean power need to be found. At the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland in January, Altman said at a Bloomberg event that, when it comes to finding enough energy to fuel expected AI growth, “there is no way to get there without a breakthrough.”

It remains unclear where, or when, those breakthroughs will arrive. Google recently powered up a futuristic geothermal power plant in the northern Nevada desert that harnesses heat from deep underground.

The developer of the geothermal plant, Fervo Energy, credits Google with jump-starting a promising energy solution that some day might provide the electricity equivalent of multiple nuclear plants. But Fervo CEO Tim Lattimer acknowledges that kind of output is not likely until well into the 2030s.

Fervo’s Nevada plant produces about the amount of power it takes to keep the lights on at a few thousand homes. The next Fervo plant, in Utah, is expected to be fully operational in 2028 and will generate roughly the amount of energy it takes to run one large data center.

Altman, meanwhile, is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop small nuclear plants that could be built right on or near data center campuses. Altman’s AltC Acquisition Corp. bankrolled a company Altman now chairs called Oklo, which says it wants to build the first such plant by 2027.

Gates is the founder of his own nuclear company, called TerraPower. It has targeted a former coal mine in Wyoming to be the demonstration site of an advanced reactor that proponents claim would deliver energy more efficiently and with less waste than traditional reactors. The project has been saddled with setbacks, most recently because the type of enriched uranium needed to fuel its reactor is not available in the United States.

Some experts point to these developments in arguing the electricity needs of the tech companies will speed up the energy transition away from fossil fuels rather than undermine it.

“Companies like this that make aggressive climate commitments have historically accelerated deployment of clean electricity,” said Melissa Lott, a professor at the Climate School at Columbia University.

Microsoft hopes to supercharge that deployment through its partnership with fusion start-up Helion. The site being considered for the generator in Chelan County, Wash., is just a plot of sagebrush so far. It’s not certain the unit will be built.

For now, Helion is building and testing prototypes at its headquarters in Everett, Wash. Scientists have been chasing the fusion dream for decades but have yet to overcome the extraordinary technical challenges. It requires capturing the energy created by fusing atoms in a magnetic chamber — or in Helion’s case, a magnetized vacuum chamber — and then channeling that energy into a usable form. And to make it commercially viable, more energy must be produced than is put in.

Helion’s assembly facility features floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with endless boxes of capacitors, aluminum-coated devices that store energy, some of which Helion employees spend hours a day assembling by hand. The floors and walls are stark white. Massive, sea-foam green fusion generator components dot the factory floor.

A sense of optimism infuses the experimental work. “I know it can make electricity,” said Helion CEO David Kirtley. “The question is, can we take that electricity out of fusion and do it such that the cost of electricity is lower than everything else.”

On a video screen in the space where Helion is building its control room is a live feed from a camera in a neighboring warehouse where the seventh Helion prototype, Polaris, will be tested. It is surrounded by borated concrete walls that block neutrons from escaping.

Helion, among several fusion start-ups, uses helium-3, a molecule that is rare on Earth but abundant on the moon. Kirtley says the company’s process actually generates more of the molecule as a byproduct, creating fuel to make yet more fusion electricity.

But there is deep skepticism in the scientific community that Helion or other fusion start-ups will be sending juice to the power grid within a decade, much less the kind of too-cheap-to-meter, safe electricity the tech companies are chasing.

“Predictions of commercial fusion by 2030 or 2035 are hype at this point,” said John Holdren, a Harvard physicist who was White House science adviser during the Obama era. “We haven’t even yet seen a true energy break-even where the fusion reaction is generating more energy than had to be supplied to facilitate it.”

Promises that commercial fusion is around the corner, he said, “feeds the public’s belief in technological miracles that will save us from the difficult task of dealing with climate change … with the options that are closer to practical reality.”

But Chelan County, known for its apple orchards and abundant hydro power, has another problem. While there is enough hydropower generated there to send electricity throughout the West Coast, most of it has already been claimed decades into the future. In their quest to sustain the data center boom fueled by Microsoft and its competitors, county planners are hopeful Helion will actually beat the odds and start sending electricity to the region’s power grid, which Microsoft would then purchase.

Helion has raised expectations with assurances that its contract with Microsoft is binding, and it will have to pay serious financial penalties to the tech giant if it does not quickly create fusion electricity. But pressed for the particulars of the contract, Kirtley responds with a measure of opacity that is typical among tech leaders chasing historic clean-energy breakthroughs.

“We’re past the details I can talk publicly about,” he said.

correction

An earlier version of this story mischaracterized an International Energy Agency study of energy use for internet searches powered by artificial intelligence. The IEA compared Google searches with searches performed by ChatGPT, the AI chatbot, not a "ChatGPT-powered search on Google." The article also gave an incorrect location for the headquarters of energy firm Eolian. The company is based in California not Texas. This article has been corrected.

About this story

Photo editing by Haley Hamblin. Design editing by Betty Chavarria and Christian Font. Editing by Christopher Rowland. Copy editing by Jeremy Lang. Project editing by KC Schaper. Additional support from Jordan Melendrez, Kathleen Floyd and Victoria Rossi.

Friday, June 21, 2024

French energy prices plummet as renewable power surges, nuclear plants offline

French energy prices go negative as renewables surge, prompting shutdown of nuclear plants

Analysts had predicted that energy prices would turn negative during the course of this Summer.

News Desk  |  June 18, 2024

danish company to produce 1 000mw through wind power photo file

Danish company to produce 1,000MW through wind power. PHOTO: FILE


French energy prices have reportedly plummeted into negative territory due to an excess of renewable energy production.

Day-ahead prices reached a record low of -€5.76 per megawatt-hour in an Epex Spot auction, prompting several French nuclear plants to go offline ahead of the weekend, Bloomberg reported.

This decrease is attributed to the significant increase in wind and solar power generation, coupled with an anticipated decline in weekend demand.

As a result, Electricite de France, a state-owned utility company, has been compelled to deactivate several nuclear reactors. Already, three plants have been halted, with plans to take three more offline.

According to Bloomberg, this occurrence is not uncommon and often happens on weekends in France, as well as being observed across Europe, including in Spain and the Scandinavian region.


Across the continent, efforts to reduce carbon emissions in energy grids have led to a rapid expansion in renewable energy infrastructure.

However, the lack of advanced battery technology and adequate investment in energy storage solutions has created inefficiencies in pricing during periods of surplus energy.

In related news, SEB Research reported in May that negative prices have also affected Germany, where solar energy supply has surpassed demand.

Energy market researchers and analysts AleaSoft and SolarPower Europe had earlier in April attributed the negative price trend to the pandemic, low demand, insufficient storage solutions, and inadequate energy planning. They had predicted that the situation would likely persist into the summer.

Reuters noted that the situation in France differs from that in other countries in the region due to the slower deployment of renewable energy. Paris has installed approximately 45 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity, which lags behind the targets set by the European Commission.

There could be a further slowdown ahead due to recent political challenges, as the far-right party in France appears poised to win domestic elections.

If the National Rally party secures victory, it has pledged to reduce subsidies for renewable energy and halt

NRC approves delaying Peach Bottom Unit 1 decommissioning potentially until the 22 century; Constellation sites "increased risk, " "irradiated graphite," and the lack of a "vessel design."

In summary, PBAPS-1 is a one-of-a-kind reactor, a stand-alone design unlike any other in the United States, and the world, that results in site-specific factors that challenge decommissioning and license termination. Specifically, the special characteristics of irradiated graphite which are multi-faceted, the lack of vessel design that would support flooding to provide the standard dose and contamination protective barrier, the original materials and manufacturing methods that introduce unknown trace elements and required updates to analytical methods to support “virgin” graphite analysis all must be addressed to ensure the health and safety of the public is maintained.

These nuances of PBAPS-1 present increased risk for decommissioning activities to achieve license termination. In fact, the most closely related and only other graphite moderated HTGR in the United States, FSV, encountered radiological conditions beyond what was predicted despite following all the normal decommissioning processes and was forced emergently to re- design the plan and ultimately flood up the reactor vessel. The PBAPS-1 vessel was not designed to support flooding the cavity. The only other two experimental reactors built along with PBAPS-1 are either temporarily entombed or continue in SAFSTOR operation as their owners in Europe work to find a suitable process to manage dry decommissioning for their graphite moderated HTGRs. (Constellation Letter to the NRC, May 13, 2024)

Thursday, June 20, 2024

NRC Amends Licensing, Inspection, and Annual Fees for Fiscal Year 2024

Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: 24-051 June 20, 2024
CONTACT: David McIntyre, 301-415-8200

NRC Amends Licensing, Inspection, and Annual Fees for Fiscal Year 2024

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is amending its regulations for the licensing, inspection, special projects, and annual fees it will charge applicants and licensees for fiscal year 2024.

The FY 2024 final fee rule published today in the Federal Register, reflects a total budget authority of $944.1 million, an increase of $16.9 million from FY 2023. Under the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, the NRC is required to recover to the maximum extent practicable, approximately 100 percent of its total budget authority, with exceptions for excluded activities. A proposed fee rule was published for public comment on Feb. 20. The final rule becomes effective Aug. 19.

After accounting for the exclusions from the fee-recovery requirement and net billing adjustments, the NRC must recover approximately $808.3 million in fees in FY 2024. Of this amount, approximately $202.2 million will be recovered through service fees under 10 CFR Part 170, and approximately $606.1 million will be recovered through annual fees under 10 CFR Part 171.

Compared with FY 2023, annual fees are increasing for fuel facilities, spent fuel storage/reactor decommissioning activities, non-power production or utilization facilities, the one NRC uranium recovery licensee, the Department of Energy’s transportation activities, and Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act Program, and all materials users fee categories. The annual fees for operating power reactors do not exceed the cap established by NEIMA and are decreasing from FY 2023 levels.

The final fee rule includes a change in the hourly rate charged for services, affecting licensees and applicants. The NRC has increased its hourly rate from $300 to $317, and license application fees have been adjusted accordingly. The NRC is also amending its payment methods to align with the Treasury Department’s “No-Cash No-Check” policy by removing paper forms and facilitating electronic payments through www.pay.gov.

The NRC estimates that the FY 2024 annual fees will be paid by 94 operating commercial power reactors, three non-power production or utilization facilities, 124 spent nuclear fuel storage and decommissioning reactor facilities, eight fuel cycle facilities, one uranium recovery facility, and approximately 2,400 nuclear materials licensees.

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Fwd: Our Changed Advocacy Landscape + UCS Press Release (with Ed Lyman Statement) on ADVANCE Act

UCS: “ADVANCE Act” Actually a Retreat on Nuclear Power Safety: Statement by Edwin Lyman, Nuclear Power Safety Director, Union of Concerned Scientists, UCS press release, Jun 17, 2024. https://www.ucsusa.org/about/news/advance-act-retreat-nuclear-power-safety 


Statement by Dr. Edwin Lyman, Director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) on the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act (ADVANCE Act) addition to legislation to reauthorize federal firefighter programs:
 
“It’s extremely disappointing that, without any meaningful debate, Congress is about to erase 50 years of independent nuclear safety oversight by changing the NRC’s mission to not only protect public health and safety but also to protect the financial health of the industry and its investors. Just as lax regulation by the FAA—an agency already burdened by conflicts of interests—can lead to a catastrophic failure of an aircraft, a compromised NRC could lead to a catastrophic reactor meltdown impacting an entire region for a generation.”

“Make no mistake: This is not about making the reactor licensing process more efficient, but about weakening safety and security oversight across the board, a longstanding industry goal. The change to the NRC’s mission effectively directs the agency to enforce only the bare minimum level of regulation at every facility it oversees across the United States.”

“Passage of this legislation will only increase the danger to people already living downwind of nuclear facilities from a severe accident or terrorist attack, and it will make it even more difficult for communities to prevent risky, experimental reactors from being sited in their midst.”

Saturday, June 15, 2024

NRC Issues Confirmatory Order to Curium US

Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: III-24-016 June 14, 2024
Contact: Viktoria Mitlyng, 630-829-9662 Prema Chandrathil, 630-829-9663

NRC Issues Confirmatory Order to Curium US

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a Confirmatory Order to Curium US documenting an agreed upon set of actions to address 10 apparent violations of NRC requirements that occurred at the Maryland Heights, Missouri, facility.

The company, with North American headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, is licensed to manufacture and distribute Mo-99/Tc-99m generators, which are used for medical applications such as the diagnosis of heart disease and cancer.

The violations occurred when a technician, as part of cask cleaning and preparation duties, opened a cask containing a contaminated metal component without following the requirement of placing it in the containment chamber that provides radiation shielding. Other workers and parts of the facility were contaminated because the company failed to follow NRC requirements.

There were no exposures exceeding NRC limits for the workers and no exposures to the public.

The company’s officials requested Alternative Dispute Resolution with the NRC. This process uses a neutral mediator to reach agreement about corrective and preventative actions to be taken by the company, which then does not receive a Notice of Violation or a Civil Penalty from the NRC.

The order documents the commitments made by Curium to implement corrective actions, such as revising multiple company procedures and training personnel.

The agency’s January inspection report describes the circumstances of the violations and Curium’s actions following the incident.

E.yman on SMNRs: long, but conversational and easy to read. Loaded with talking points and information


Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know
About Small Modular Reactors
April 30, 2024    Ed Lyman.  Director, Nuclear Power Safety
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMISSION

Even casual followers of energy and climate issues have probably heard about the alleged wonders of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).  This is due in no small part to the “nuclear bros”: an active and seemingly tireless group of nuclear power advocates who dominate social media discussions on energy by promoting SMRs and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis.  But as I showed in my 2013 and 2021 reports, the hype surrounding SMRs is way overblown, and my conclusions remain valid today.
Unfortunately, much of this SMR happy talk is rooted in misinformation, which always brings me back to the same question: If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?

What are SMRs?
SMRs are nuclear reactors that are “small” (defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less), can be largely assembled in a centralized facility, and would be installed in a modular fashion at power generation sites.  Some proposed SMRs are so tiny (20 megawatts or less) that they are called “micro” reactors.  SMRs are distinct from today’s conventional nuclear plants, which are typically around 1,000 megawatts and were largely custom-built.  Some SMR designs, such as NuScale, are modified versions of operating water-cooled reactors, while others are radically different designs that use coolants other than water, such as liquid sodium, helium gas, or even molten salts.
To date, however, theoretical interest in SMRs has not translated into many actual reactor orders.  The only SMR currently under construction is in China.  And in the United States, only one company—TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates—has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a permit to build a power reactor (but at 345 megawatts, it technically isn’t even an SMR).
The nuclear industry has pinned its hopes on SMRs primarily because some recent large reactor projects, including Vogtle units 3 and 4 in the state of Georgia, have taken far longer to build and cost far more than originally projected.  The failure of these projects to come in on time and under budget undermines arguments that modern nuclear power plants can overcome the problems that have plagued the nuclear industry in the past.
Developers in the industry and the US Department of Energy say that SMRs can be less costly and quicker to build than large reactors and that their modular nature makes it easier to balance power supply and demand.  They also argue that reactors in a variety of sizes would be useful for a range of applications beyond grid-scale electrical power, including providing process heat to industrial plants and power to data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, petrochemical production, and even electrical vehicle charging stations.
Here are five facts about SMRs that the nuclear industry and the “nuclear bros” who push its message don’t want you, the public, to know.

  1. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
In theory, small reactors should have lower capital costs and construction times than large reactors of similar design so that utilities (or other users) can get financing more cheaply and deploy them more flexibly.  But that doesn’t mean small reactors will be more economical than large ones.  In fact, the opposite usually will be true.  What matters more when comparing the economics of different power sources is the cost to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity, and that depends on the capital cost per kilowatt of generating capacity, as well as the costs of operations, maintenance, fuel, and other factors.
According to the economies of scale principle, smaller reactors will in general produce more expensive electricity than larger ones.  For example, the now-cancelled project by NuScale to build a 460-megawatt, 6-unit SMR in Idaho was estimated to cost over $20,000 per kilowatt, which is greater than the actual cost of the Vogtle large reactor project of over $15,000 per kilowatt.  This cost penalty can be offset only by radical changes in the way reactors are designed, built, and operated.
For example, SMR developers claim they can slash capital cost per kilowatt by achieving efficiency through the mass production of identical units in factories.  However, studies find that such cost reductions typically would not exceed about 30%.  In addition, dozens of units would have to be produced before manufacturers could learn how to make their processes more efficient and achieve those capital cost reductions, meaning that the first reactors of a given design will be unavoidably expensive and will require large government or ratepayer subsidies to get built.  Getting past this obstacle has proven to be one of the main impediments to SMR deployment.
Another way that SMR developers try to reduce capital cost is by reducing or eliminating many of the safety features required for operating reactors that provide multiple layers of protection, such as a robust, reinforced concrete containment structure, motor-driven emergency pumps, and rigorous quality assurance standards for backup safety equipment such as power supplies.  But these changes so far haven’t had much of an impact on the overall cost—just look at NuScale.
In addition to capital cost, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs will also have to be significantly reduced to improve the competitiveness of SMRs.  However, some operating expenses, such as the security needed to protect against terrorist attacks, would not normally be sensitive to reactor size.  The relative contribution of O&M and fuel costs to the price per megawatt-hour varies a lot among designs and project details, but could be 50% or more, depending on factors such as interest rates that influence the total capital cost.
Economies of scale considerations have already led some SMR vendors, such as NuScale and Holtec, to roughly double module sizes from their original designs.  The Oklo, Inc. Aurora microreactor has increased from 1.5 MW to 15 MW and may even go to 50 MW.  And the General Electric-Hitachi BWRX-300 and Westinghouse AP300 are both starting out at the upper limit of what is considered an SMR.
Overall, these changes might be sufficient to make some SMRs cost-competitive with large reactors, but they would still have a long way to go to compete with renewable technologies.  The levelized cost of electricity for the now-cancelled NuScale project was estimated at around $119 per megawatt-hour (without federal subsidies), whereas land-based wind and utility-scale solar now cost below $40/MWh.
Microreactors, however, are likely to remain expensive under any realistic scenario, with projected levelized electricity costs two to three times that of larger SMRs.

2. SMRs are not generally
safer or more secure
than large light-water reactors.
Because of their size, you might think that small nuclear reactors pose lower risks to public health and the environment than large reactors.  After all, the amount of radioactive material in the core and available to be released in an accident is smaller.  And smaller reactors produce heat at lower rates than large reactors, which could make them easier to cool during an accident, perhaps even by passive means—that is, without the need for electrically powered coolant pumps or operator actions.
However, the so-called passive safety features that SMR proponents like to cite may not always work, especially during extreme events such as large earthquakes, major flooding, or wildfires that can degrade the environmental conditions under which they are designed to operate.  And in some cases, passive features can actually make accidents worse: for example, the NRC’s review of the NuScale design revealed that that passive emergency systems could deplete cooling water of boron, which is needed to keep the reactor safely shut down after an accident.
In any event, regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features.  For example, the NRC has approved rules and procedures in recent years that provide regulatory pathways for exempting new reactors, including SMRs, from many of the protective measures that it requires for operating plants, such as 

  • a physical containment structure, 
  • an offsite emergency evacuation plan, and 
  • an exclusion zone that separates the plant from densely populated areas.  
  • It is also considering further changes that could allow SMRs to 
  • reduce the numbers of armed security personnel to protect them from terrorist attacks and 
  • reduce the number of highly trained operators to run them. 

Reducing security at SMRs is particularly worrisome, because even the safest reactors could effectively become dangerous radiological weapons if they are sabotaged by skilled attackers.  Even passive safety mechanisms could be deliberately disabled.
Considering the cumulative impact of all these changes, SMRs could be as—or even more— dangerous than large reactors.    For example, if a containment structure at a large reactor reliably prevented 90% of the radioactive material from being released from the core of the reactor during a meltdown, then 

  • a reactor 5 times smaller without such a containment structure could conceivably release more radioactive material into the environment, even though the total amount of material in the core would be smaller.  And if the 
  • SMR were located closer to populated areas with no offsite emergency planning, more people could be exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation.

But even if one could show that the overall safety risk of a small reactor was lower than that of a large reactor, that still wouldn’t automatically imply the overall risk per unit of electricity that it generates is lower, since smaller plants generate less electricity.  

  • If an accident caused a 250-megawatt SMR to release only 25% of the radioactive material that a 1,000-megawatt plant would release, the ratio (of kW/hr) of risk to benefit would be the same.  

And a site with four such reactors could have 

  • four times the annual risk of a single unit, or an 
  • even greater risk if an accident at one reactor were to damage the others, as happened during the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan.

3. SMRs will not reduce 
the problem of what to do
with radioactive waste.
The industry makes highly misleading claims that certain SMRs will reduce the intractable problem of long-lived radioactive waste management by generating less waste, or even by “recycling” their own wastes or those generated by other reactors.
First, it’s necessary to define what “less” waste really means.  In terms of the quantity of highly radioactive isotopes that result when atomic nuclei are fissioned and release energy, small reactors will produce just as much as large reactors per unit of heat generated.  (Non-light-water reactors that more efficiently convert heat to electricity than light-water reactors will produce somewhat smaller quantities of fission products per unit of electricity generated—perhaps 10 to 30%—but this is a relatively small effect in the scheme of things.)  And for reactors with denser fuels, the volume and mass of the spent fuel generated may be smaller, but the concentration of fission products in the spent fuel, and the heat generated by the decay products—factors that really matter to safety—will be proportionately greater.
Therefore, entities that hope to acquire SMRs, like data centers that lack the necessary waste infrastructure, will have to safely manage the storage of significant quantities of spent nuclear fuel on site for the long term, just like any other nuclear power plant does. 

  • Claims by vendors such as Westinghouse that they will take away the reactors after the fuel is no longer usable are simply not credible, as there are no realistic prospects for licensing centralized sites where the used reactors could be taken for the foreseeable future.  
  • Any community with an SMR will have to plan to be a de facto long-term nuclear waste disposal site.

4. SMRs cannot be counted on
to provide reliable and resilient
off-the-grid power
for facilities, such as data centers,
bitcoin mining, hydrogen or
petrochemical production.
Despite the claims of developers, it is very unlikely that any reasonably foreseeable SMR design would be able to safely operate without reliable access to electricity from the grid to power coolant pumps and other vital safety systems.  Just like today’s nuclear plants, SMRs will be vulnerable to extreme weather events or other disasters that could cause a loss of offsite power and force them to shut down.  In such situations a user such as a data center operator would have to provide backup power, likely from diesel generators, for both the data center AND the reactor.  And since there is virtually no experience with operating SMRs worldwide, it is highly doubtful that the novel designs being pitched now would be highly reliable right out of the box and require little monitoring and maintenance.
It very likely will take decades of operating experience for any new reactor design to achieve the level of reliability characteristic of the operating light-water reactor fleet.  Premature deployment based on unrealistic performance expectations could prove extremely costly for any company that wants to experiment with SMRs.

5. SMRs do not use fuel
more efficiently than large reactors.
Some advocates misleadingly claim that SMRs are more efficient than large ones because they use less fuel.  In terms of the amount of heat generated, 

  • the amount of uranium fuel that must undergo nuclear fission is the same whether a reactor is large or small.

And although reactors that use coolants other than water typically operate at higher temperatures, which can increase the efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity, this is not a big enough effect to outweigh other 

  • factors that decrease efficiency of fuel use.

Some SMRs designs require a type of uranium fuel called “high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU),” which contains higher concentrations of the isotope uranium-235 than conventional light-water reactor fuel.  Although this reduces the total mass of fuel the reactor needs, that doesn’t mean it uses less uranium nor results in less waste from “front-end” mining and milling activities: in fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.
One reason for this is that HALEU production requires a relatively large amount of natural uranium to be fed into the enrichment process that increases the uranium-235 concentration.  For example, the 

  • TerraPower Natrium reactor which would use HALEU enriched to around 19% uranium-235, will require 2.5 to 3 times as much natural uranium to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity than a light-water reactor.  
  • Smaller reactors, such as the 15-megawatt Oklo Aurora, are even more inefficient.  

Improving the efficiency of these reactors can occur only with significant advances in fuel performance, which could take decades of development to achieve.
Reactors that use uranium inefficiently have disproportionate impacts on the environment from polluting uranium mining and processing activities.  They also are less effective in mitigating carbon emissions, because uranium mining and milling are relatively carbon-intensive activities compared to other parts of the uranium fuel cycle.

Finalé
SMRs may have a role to play in our energy future, but only if they are sufficiently safe and secure.(1)  For that to happen, it is essential to have a realistic understanding of their costs and risks.  By painting an overly rosy picture of these technologies with often misleading information, the nuclear bros are distracting attention from the need to confront the many challenges that must be resolved to make SMRs a reality—and ultimately doing a disservice to their cause.

About the author
Edwin Lyman is an internationally recognized expert on nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism as well as nuclear power safety and security. He is a member of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management, and has testified numerous times before Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

(1) Fission energy is safe if and only if all devices work, everybody does their job, no plant or repository is in any battle — conventional or not, and no quantity of fissionable material is in the hands of the ignorant   No Acts of God permitted.

— Hannes Alfvén