STAND is convinced that the untried and purely speculative Small Modular Reactor (SMR) programme recently announced by the Government will not only fail but will divert resources from tried and tested renewables. 

 

Here at STAND we consider the whole issue of SMR’s to be of critical importance, both to Severnside, where 4 such reactors are mooted for the decommisioned Oldbury site (soon to be inundated by rising sea levels), and for the nation as a whole. Because of this we have created this whole new section on the viability of SMR’s, where over the coming months you can keep abreast of the arguments for and against. 

 

Incidentally, according to the Berkeley Stakeholders Group meeting which STAND attended recently, these reactors are NOT small. Each one is the size of the old Oldbury reactor, and it is proposed there will be 4 of them on the site!

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A consortium led by Rolls-Royce has announced plans to build up to 16 mini-nuclear plants in the UK. It says the project will create 6,000 new jobs over the next five years. The prime minister is understood to be poised to announce at least £200m for the project as part of a long-delayed green plan for economic recovery. The company's UK "small modular reactor" (SMR) group includes the National Nuclear Laboratory and the building company Laing O'Rourke. In 2022, it received £18m to begin the design effort for the SMR concept.

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WHAT IS A MODULAR NUCLEAR PLANT?

 

Rolls-Royce and its partners argue that instead of building huge nuclear mega-projects in muddy fields we should construct a series of smaller nuclear plants from "modules" made in factories. The aim is to re-engineer nuclear power as ‘a very high-tech Lego set’. The components would be broken down into a series of hundreds of these modules which would be made in a central factory and shipped by road to the site for assembly. The objective is to tackle the biggest problem nuclear power faces: the exorbitant cost. EDF says Sizewell C will provide electricity for six million homes and create 25,000 jobs at a cost of £23 billiion. So, Rolls-Royce and its partners are saying: let's make them smaller and make lots of them so that we get really good at it. Each plant would produce 440 megawatts of electricity - roughly enough to power Sheffield - and the hope is that, once the first few have been made, they will cost around £2bn each. The consortium says the first of these modular plants could be up and running in 10 years, after that it will be able to build and install two a year. Boris Johnson’s government always said new nuclear is going to be a key part of Britain's future energy system.

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THE PROBLEMS WITH SMALL MODULAR REACTORS. 

 

 1. It still would not solve perceived difficulties such as “what happens when the wind drops?”. Nuclear cannot be instantly fired up at will and in fact takes 3 to 4 days from start up to electricity production. That is why an expansion of nuclear power will put a brake on the research and development of renewable energy production and storage. Any nuclear power plant must be used as base load – it cannot just be turned on and off like a tap in the same way renewables can. 

 

2. They are NOT small – they are talking about enough electricity for Sheffield as an example. 

 

3. They are not low carbon (as explained elsewhere on this site) 

 

4. There is still radioactive waste – which they do not mention in their promotional papers. Greenpeace and other environmental groups say small nuclear power stations pose similar risks of radioactive releases and weapons proliferation as big ones. 

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Greenpeace UK's chief scientist, Doug Parr, said that if the government wanted to take a punt on some new technology to tackle climate change it would be better off investing in hydrogen or geothermal power. 

 

"As the government tries to whip up investment for the latest generation of reactors, it is striking how many of the nuclear industry’s speculative claims are being repeated by ministers as fact,” he said. “The hype seems to have been enough to convince our government that nuclear’s last gasp is in fact a new dawn, but at their radioactive cores SMRs remain the same bad bet. “SMRs have no track record, but initial indications are that the familiar problems of cost overruns and delays will be repeated, and the accumulation of unmanageable waste will continue.” Parr added: “By continually obsessing about nuclear, the government is taking its eye off the net zero ball, which will have to be delivered through a predominantly renewable, modern electricity grid. No number of SMRs will fix the government’s lacklustre effort to address issues of delayed connections, smart local grids and home efficiency.”

 

And there are other reasons to question the SMR concept, says Prof MV Ramana of the University of British Columbia in Canada. He is a physicist and an expert on nuclear energy policy who has studied small modular reactors. He said UK SMR's 10-year time-scale for its first plant may prove optimistic. The one constant in the history of the nuclear industry to date is that big new concepts never come in on time and budget, he said. He is sceptical that the factory concept can deliver significant cost savings given the complexity and scale of even a small nuclear plant. Smaller plants will have to meet the same rigorous safety standards as big ones, he points out. He said that where the concept has been tried elsewhere - in the US and China, for example - there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to those of large nuclear power stations. Finally, he questioned whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMRs says the first will be ready. "Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," said Prof Ramana.

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Steve Thomas, an emeritus professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich, said: “Yet again, the British government has proved credulous to the claims of the nuclear industry that a new generation of technology will solve all the problems of its predecessors. 

 

 “SMRs are a long way from being commercially ready and at best will be as uneconomic as existing technology and at worst won’t even be technically feasible. The answers to reaching net zero with electricity are already available – energy efficiency and renewables. This announcement will only divert time and resources from these.”

Read the full article here: Guardian, 18 July 2023