NuScale SMR

I’ve written before about Small, Modular nuclear Reactors (SMR’s), particularly the model developed by NuScale in the USA which, three years ago, got the go-ahead from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and looked to finally produce a success where there had been so much failure.

Bzzzttt… Wrong:

Turns out, NuScale was a house of cards. The UAMPS project’s price tag more than doubled and the timeline was pushed back repeatedly until it was seven years behind schedule. Finally, UAMPS saw the writing on the wall and wisely backed out in November, 2023. After losing their customer, NuScale’s stock plunged, it laid off nearly a third of its workforce, and it was sued by its investors and investigated for investor fraud. Then its CEO sold off most of his stock shares. 

Well nuts!

UPDATE: H/T to reader “spam”: looks like they’re far from dead, even with all the problems listed above.

Because that article is from a newspaper in the Super Left state of Oregon it takes a predictable line about nuclear reactors:

A recent study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded that small modular nuclear reactors are still too expensive, too slow to build and too risky to respond to the climate crisis.

Crisis? But of course.

While the nuclear industry tries to pass itself off as “clean,” it is an extremely dirty technology, beginning with uranium mining and milling which decimates Indigenous lands.

Indigenous lands! But of course.

Has this woman ever seen a Lithium mine, or any of the other vast pits that produce all the other metals, especially rare-earth metals, required to make wind turbines and solar panels?

Does she especially know about the ones owned by China in another part of the world filled with “Indigenous lands”.

She should have noticed because some huge wind farm projects in Britain have recently been cancelled due the exploding costs of those inputs:

Building a wind turbine requires significant amounts of steel, copper, and aluminium, all of which doubled or tripled in price between 2020 and 2023. Turbine manufacturers have raised prices in an effort to recover recent losses. This affects the profitability forecasts of wind energy developers like Ørsted and the viability of each of their projects.

Meanwhile in China, it appears they’ve finally done the tech of Molten Salt reactor that I preferred compared to NuScale’s old-fashioned uranium rods and boiling water:

In the remote expanse of the Gobi desert stands the first thorium (Th) reactor ever built. Last year, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences showed that this two-megawatt reactor could power up and operate without a glitch, and they have now achieved another first—successfully reloading it while it was still running.

I see the USA is mentioned in that article:

Nuclear tech company Core Power is planning an enormous floating network of these power plants within the next decade. 

Sounds a bit OTT, but we’ll see what happens.

In any case the brutal reality of Net Zero is that globally and in most cases nationally, we’re not going to get there without nuclear power. But apparently it’s going to take massive increases in power prices, brownouts, blackouts, industries fleeing high energy costs and barely dented use of fossil fuels for all that pain anyway, before voters wake up.