Where Are The SMRs?
By Paul Homewood
While the Government continues to blindly pursue its obsession with offshore wind power, blissfully unaware that the wind does not blow all the time, the Royal Society warn us that there we have dangerously underestimate the need for energy storage, and Hinkley Point faces yet further delays, what on earth is happening with Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs)?
While we dither, it seems that Poland has made up its mind:
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https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Six-SMR-power-plants-approved-in-Poland
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The Polish Ministry of Climate and Environment has already issued decisions-in-principle for the construction of two large nuclear power plants: one for a 3750 MWe plant in Pomerania using Westinghouse’s AP1000 technology, the other for a plant comprising two South Korean-supplied APR1400 reactors in the Patnów-Konin region. So the country could soon have 14 GW of nuclear power.
Rolls Royce still don’t have design approval, but CAPEX has been estimated at £1.8 billion for a 470 MW plant, or £3.8m/MW. By comparison, the cost of Hinkley C is now reckoned to have gone up to £35 billion, about £11m/MW.
Rolls Royce reckon they can generate power at £40 to 60/MWh. If this is so, we should immediately abandon all further subsidies for wind and solar power. .
And it seems that Rolls Royce are expensive in comparison. Thorcon who are still developing their prototype molten salt fission reactor. claim CAPEX of $1m/MW.
I am reliably informed that Hitachi, who already have Canadian design approval, would be somewhere between Thorcon and RR.
So why are we so intent of accelerating down the dead end of expensive, obsolete and unreliable wind power?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The point is , like Biden’s America they want to break the society not make it better. For what other reason than deliberate malicious intent, would anyone bet the farm on bird killing erratic wind, producing penny packets of outrageously expensive electricity and the even more absurd and pointless solar which produces so little it does not even figure?
That is my conclusion as well, “deliberate malicious intent”. I naively used to think I could persuade technically-challenged politicians that their so-called climate solutions would never work, but I now realise that are intent on causing us harm, across a number of fronts. I put this to a bunch of nonentity local politicians last September but needless to say got no reply. The UK government has since bailed out the wind industry with a whopping 66% price increase: https://principia-scientific.com/what-rishi-sunaks-recent-net-zero-back-pedalling-really-means/.
I suppose it is harder for the elites to siphon money from the nuclear bucket than from the wind, solar, and storage buckets.
While nuclear is the low CO2 option, it is also the low payout scheme. Follow the money!
If people have low cost reliable energy, they can independently make decisions in life, they are not as easily controlled as people who are in fear of not having energy that they can afford or even having energy at all or not even food and shelter.
Paul, you would want an untested design of a nuke to be certified, wouldn’t you? The Rolls Royce SMR is not the same as the one in submarines, the Hitachi BWRX300 has never been built, molten salt reactors are equally slideware apart from an experiment in the US in the 50s (I think). China is having a go at a LFTR, but as an experiment
So they are not available to build now off the shelf.
The certification in the UK takes 5 years. RR is two years in, the Holtec and Hitachi designs are just starting.
You can argue it should be faster, but that’s where we are!
not want – duh
For goodness sake!
Paul, you would not want an untested design of a nuke to be certified, would you?
Note to self. Do not post comments while drunk!
Always good advice, Stuart!
Personally I fail to see why it takes so long to approve reactors. Agreed that RR’s modulars are not lifted directly from nuclear subs and plonked down on any piece of land going spare but their expertise in this area must count for something. We need these units if we are ever going to escape from over-priced, environment-destroying intermittent power suppliers.
Is there no longer any sense of urgency in government?
” The certification in the UK takes 5 years. RR is two years in, “
Can site selection be commenced now? Or does the selection process not start until certification is issued?
How long is the manufacturing period? Or does identifying this depend on certification?
Is there such a thing as “outline planning permission” for a nuclear power station? Or does this process depend on certification?
My guess is that nuclear construction in the UK is still shackled by the ghosts of Dungeness B and the costs associated with the AGR construction programme.
Mickey, I’m no more than an armchair expert here, but I believe the sites for the original ill-fated Hitachi and Chinese Hualong 1 1GW-ish reactors were chosen before certification was completed. HMG seem to want to do the usual UK thing of backing all the horses they can find simultaneously, without actually committing to any of them.
My understanding is that the government is paying RR, Holtec and GE Hitachi to get their SMR designs through the first two stages of the certification, and then it might pick one or more of them. RR have had some interest abroad, but a provisional contract from government would help a lot. Cf Holtec, who are advanced with plans to build two of their SMRs at the Pallisades site in Michigan, and GE Hitachi are already contracted to build one at the Darlington nuclear plant in Ontario.
RR were looking at the Oldbury and Berkeley Magnox sites on the Severn – it’s interesting to note that those reactors were about 220MW and 140MW, 2 at each location. So a single, so-called small RR reactor would actually produce more power than both the original reactors added together, on either site!
All 3 companies reckon they can get their first one completed by 2030. If any of that is wrong I’m sure someone will correct me!
Thanks for the detailed reply Stuart B.
The recently publicised cost increases and programme delays for HPC construction must surely mean that SMR could now be prioritised over SXC, although the latter has made a site start with enabling works.
it is becoming more and more obvious that the Masters of the universe don’t want us to have abundant cheap, clean electricity. It is not in their grand plan for us Plebs. We need to fight back as hard as we can. Starting with getting rid of the current uni parties in the UK along with their Blob, whilst draining the swamp in the US.
Nu-Scale have SMR technology that has received design approval from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Construction is due to start soon in Ohio and Pennsylvania. For this system to be “accepted” in the UK not only would it take 4/5 years of Generic Design Assessment by the Office of Nuclear Responsibility but as there are currently no slots available it could not even start the process for several years. Rolls Royce SMR has at least 2 more years of approval to go through and even then prevarication will be the order of the day.
The whole approvals process is so crazy in the UK that if we wanted to build another Sizewell B, we couldn’t as the design is not “approved”!
The system now runs at glacial pace but it does not have to. Construction on Calder Hall started in early 1953 and was commissioned barely more than 3 years later in 1956. Designed for a 20 year life span it actually operated for 47 years to 2003.
It can easily be done for lots of designs if we simply do what Poland has done and accept other developed countries approved designs such as South Korea, Canada, US etc. ….but we won’t and nothing will ultimately get done until emergency forces it.
I now believe Gamecock calls it right, we have become too decadent to get anything done – it may already be too late.
Nail on head, Ray.
After the agonisingly slow process of approval for Sizewell B despite the ubiquity of the design, it was blindingly obvious that a re-think was needed if we ever wanted to build another nuke. Mutual acceptance of other countries’ standards was the no-brainer route to take.
Tragically we have remained mired in the same morass of over-regulation and not-invented-here attitudes which drove over 7000 design changes on HPC, adding 25% more concrete and 30% more steel. If we had to select the EPR, major efforts should have been directed at identifying and addressing the issues which caused the delays and over-runs in Finland and France. Instead it looks as if we just gold-plated them.
” After the agonisingly slow process of approval for Sizewell B despite the ubiquity of the design, “
On a technical basis, what are the key safety issues that currently prevent the construction of a new nuclear power station in the UK as per the Sizewell B design?
Micky R: I can’t give you any specifics as I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough. Ray S may well have more info.
As a general point, the plant was designed over 30 years ago. No doubt there have been developments in PWR design since then which cannot be ignored. Also I would expect that the design, materials and operation of many key components will have evolved – especially in areas like control and instrumentation.
Get rid of nonsensical Linear No Threshold “safety” requirements and see how much money and time that saves.
Oh yes. And make sure Davey, Cameron, May and the rest are fully occupied sewing mailbags.
I totally agree. The LNR was another example of a regulation based on corrupted “science”. Use of the LNR increases design, construction and operational costs by a large amount. I have written articles about it, but as usual in the UK, it is virtually impossible to reverse a regulation, no matter how wrong it is.
There are read across to other industries rising costs with the never ending obsession that safety trumps everything. What happened to ALARP.
It just sickens you that we are so damn clever that we declare a “Climate Emergency” based on false numbers, demand Nett Zero based on false numbers and we fail to look at every possible avenue of potential supply that will meet out Energy needs while maintaining the supply of energy, backing up wind and Solar with a stable base load. No the Government, Opposition and other politicians are absolutely convinced that that with enough wind turbines and solar panels the problem of intermittent supply disappears- if it isn’t blowing in Scotland it will be somewhere else – the wind turbine farm owners do not give a toss as they have locked in subsidies on top of subsidies so the false dream of cheap energy will never be achieved- and when the full impact of Nett Zero is realised with mass unemployment and 1800’s poverty, we can glow in the knowledge that we sacrificed our economy to save the World while the major polluters carried on building a better future for their people. Headline – July 13th 2045 World Aid Day, a popular music fund raising concert to feed the millions of starving in Great Britain.
I feel you’ve hit the nail on the head.
If the Polish government decisions-in-principle what we see as setting an example for the UK government to follow? This is supposed to be what we call a free market?
If there is anything to be said in the above, it will have a chilling effect for private sector investment in the UK. It will need some pretty special comfort blankets (we could call them “subsidies”) to encourage the private sector to try to fit around a dominant nuclear player who receives ample government support to give them a business plan which cannot go bust (as private risk taking should always be at risk of failure).
We are now well down the road back to the CEGB in the UK. I understand it’s going to be called GB Nuclear this time.
“Rolls Royce … CAPEX has been estimated at £1.8 billion for a 470 MW plant …. the cost of Hinkley C is now reckoned to have gone up to £35 billion”
And they say time is a great leveller.
Control, power, call it what you like. The elites want to mould the world to their vision, not let us run off and do what we want.
The job of the dithering Claire Coutinho seems to be to do nothing but produce endless strategy papers.
The grand plan
https://escapekey.substack.com/p/the-grand-plan