Enlarge / The facility shown in this architect’s rendering will not be built.
Nuclear energy provides energy that is largely free of carbon emissions and can make an important contribution to tackling climate change. But in most industrialized countries, the construction of nuclear power plants is significantly exceeding estimated costs and is years ahead of schedule.
One hope to change this is the use of small, modular nuclear reactors that can be built at a central production facility and then transported to the site of their installation. But on Wednesday, the company and utility planning to build the first small, modular nuclear power plant in the United States announced they were canceling the project.
Go small
Small modular reactors require multiple steps to potentially reduce costs. Their smaller size makes it easier for passive cooling systems to take over when power is lost (some designs simply leave their reactors in a pond). Additionally, the primary components can be built at a central facility and then delivered to various plant sites, allowing much of the production equipment to be reused across all sites where the reactors are deployed.
The US has approved a single design for a small, modular nuclear reactor developed by the company NuScale Power. The government’s Idaho National Lab helped build the first NuScale installation, the Carbon Free Power Project. Under the plan, the national laboratory would service some of the first reactors at the site and a number of nearby utilities would purchase power from the remaining reactors.
However, as renewable energy prices dropped dramatically, the economics of the project deteriorated and supporters began to withdraw from the project.
The final straw came Wednesday when NuScale and its primary utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough additional utility partners and was therefore canceled. In a statement, the pair accepted that “it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscriptions to proceed with deployment.”
NuScale CEO John Hopkins tried to put a positive spin on the event, saying, “Our work with the Carbon Free Power Project over the past decade has brought NuScale technology to commercial readiness; Reaching this milestone is a tremendous achievement that we will continue to pursue with future customers.” But none of these potential customers had progressed a project anywhere near as far as the Carbon Free Power Project, so it is now uncertain whether whether the company can build commercial reactors before the end of the decade.
The same now applies to nuclear energy in general in the USA. There are no large reactors planned, and recent projects of this kind have either been canceled or gone horribly over budget. And although several other reactor designs are being considered for separate projects, none have cleared the hurdle of approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.