The DOE doles out another $900 million for SMRs

And it’s not going to be close to nearly enough

October 16, 2024, Reuters news service reports that the US Department of Energy (DOE) is dangling another $900 million in federal government applications in its bid to stimulate construction activity for new nuclear power plants on the many false promises of Small Modular Reactors (SMR).

This next wave of federal nuclear initiative subsidies comes from Congress’ 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and as the DOE envisions it, in two tiers. In the first tier, as much as $800 million will be awarded to those considered to be the prime mover teams of utilities, reactor vendors, construction companies and end users. Another $100 million will go to addressing additional SMR deployments by closing the “gaps” that continue to stymie a certainty for the advancement of the nuclear industry production agenda that now targets “overly burdensome” regulatory oversight of public safety, security and environmental protection focused on design and licensing. This includes discouraging the nomination and appointment of NRC Commissioner candidates branded by industry champions as “zealots” for safety.

The nuclear industry and its tireless promoters now claim that SMRs are more likely to achieve a stubbornly elusive “nuclear renaissance” than previous attempts with large scale reactors that proved futile to reliably finance and deploy a thousand Generation II light water reactors by 2000 according to President Nixon starting in the 1960s, then again hindered by industry “no confidence” in its own cost of construction projections for the Generation III designs launched by Congress in 2005.  Now, a majority bipartisan Congress have declared that a Generation IV of new reactors and SMRs need to be steamrolled with the “Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act of 2024,” or ADVANCE Nuclear Act. The ADVANCE Act itself has established that in the first year, the NRC Mission Statement will be redirected from its mandate to protect public safety and the environment to its new mission to  “promote the societal benefits of nuclear power.”

In so doing, SMR technology is now once again being deemed by its champions to provide;

1) “Simpler designs”

Seeing, however, is believing. One of the DOE’s pilot pet SMR projects is currently limited to only one reactor design to has actually received a design safety certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  And that effort has neither been simple nor actually “certified.” After more than 16 years of development, that example would be the Portland, Oregon-based NuScale Power Corporation’s 50-megawatt electric (MWe) small modular and conventional pressurized water reactor. However, that design’s commercial economics have proved to be unworkable as well as the antithesis of what has been the traditional engineering pursuit of building nuclear power plants on “economies of scale.” [Bigger reactors make more electricity at least cost per measures of concrete, steel, cable, etc.]

Moreover, the 50 MWe design concept was only conditionally “certified” by the NRC pending the resolution of at least three unresolved design safety issues. Ironically, rather than resolve those safety issues, NuScale abandoned commercializing the 50 MWe design because of those safety issues (design of the reactor shielding wall, containment leakage from the combustible gas monitoring system, and steam generator stability). Very like those same safety concerns have transferred over to an uprated design.

Indeed, NuScale now seeks a design uprate for the SMR to a 77 MWe unit. Uprating a nuclear power plant to a larger power capacity is not a simple process because it causes more material stress to critical components and weak links within the reactor systems. Amid this clumsy shuffle, uncertainty and the loss of reliable completion cost projections and time-to-completion, NuScale’s only viable contract agreement with the Utah Association of Municipal Power Suppliers (UAMPS) in several western states was mutually dissolved as the would-be customers took to the exit ramps.  Since then, NuScale has yet to receive a design certification from the NRC for the uprated design. Preceding the collapse of its only contractual construction and operation deal, NuScale launched a public offering on the New York Stock Exchange and is now besieged with irate stockholder class action lawsuits.

2) “Inherent safety”

Just as there is nothing “simple” about complex and redundant atomic power systems, “There is no such thing as safe nuclear power,” states M.V. Ramana, a physicist and Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA), University of British Columbia.

Not all of us have forgotten that the Enrico Fermi Unit 1 near Detroit, Michigan was a 69 MWe sodium cooled liquid metal fast reactor (“fast reactors” are now referred to as “advanced”) that started construction in 1956 and  was operational in 1963.  It is Fermi 1 that also had a partial loss of coolant accident when the operational vibrations resulted in a loose part blocking the flow of liquid sodium coolant causing two nuclear fuel rods in the reactor core to melt down on October 5, 1966. The nuclear accident resulted in Fermi 1’s very short commercial operation record.  The Fermi 1 nuclear accident was also not an isolated incident among those other small nuclear reactors.

Ramana points out that the risks, no matter how remote, of nuclear power are unforgiving. The radiological consequences of a nuclear accident, in terms of the long-term contamination of land, air and water, long term loss of agriculture production, long-term dislocation of potentially very large populations and accompanied by indefinite economic losses of large commercial and industrial sectors, and prompt and long term deleterious impacts on biological health with potential intergenerational consequences.

In a September 4, 2024 Guardian interview with Ramana by Maya Goodfellow, it is very reasonable to understand, “The safest assumption is that radiation, even at the lowest levels, is dangerous. This is true for waste, too, which remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and cannot currently be safely managed in the longer term, meaning it could contaminate the biosphere at some point.”

3) “Scalable power to meet demand”

The claim that SMRs can more reliably and at competitive cost deliver scalable power has not been proven or demonstrated given its practically non-existent commercial operating history. As such, those nuclear power plants that did manage to deploy represent an extravagantly costly and unreliable diversion from renewable energy as the proven most cost-effective and  scalable energy resource when coupled with energy storage, efficiency and conservation.

Amory Lovins, Stanford University, has long held that renewable energy, efficiency and conservation are the most reliable and cost-effective scalable energy resources. Scalable power is more effectively, more reliably and at least cost delivered through renewable energy.

For example, Lovins argues, “Grid-scale battery storage additions, as noted at the start of this paper, rivaled gross nuclear build in 2000, then far outpaced it, with 358 GW / 1 TWh to be added by 2030111. It’s scalable, resilient, and blackstartable112, stabilizes113 grids better than rotating machines114 (as renewables can too115), and as noted below, has run grids up to GW scale for prolonged periods. This option is often profitable, competes with option #8 up to at least 8 h of storage duration, but is currently far from the cheapest solution; it’ll become much cheaper, but probably achieve only a cost around the midrange of these ten options.”

Ultimately, Small Modular Renewables, integrated with energy storage, conservation and efficiency are already proving to be the most cost effective generator per unit of energy, that is also the fastest and more reliably deployable, as well as environmentally friendly and sustainable.

4) “Less costly” SMRs that can be mass produced off of factory assembly lines

Again, M.V. Ramana, physicist and educator, in his essay, “The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Power: Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so,” takes on the argument with nuclear promoters head on that SMRs aren’t  the “perfect solution” to nuclear power’s financial risks by construction schedules that can grow with demand as well as power up and power down incrementally with demand.

Ramana takes a close documented look at SMR development in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and “As the history makes clear, small nuclear reactors would be neither as cheap nor as easy to build and operate as their modern proponents are claiming they would be.”

To achieve such level of economic savings as argued by nuclear proponents, SMRs would have to be manufactured by the hundreds, if not thousands, with high upfront factory costs that are most unappealing to investors. The previously cited as the NuScale /UAMPS  collapse suggests, despite federal government support for extravagant industry subsidies as a precondition for developing SMRs may not prove sustainable.  Even that support will not guarantee the “sky is the limit” for nuclear power is economically and politically sustainable on the market as the cost of renewable energy continues to go down and the rising cost of nuclear energy becomes unstainable.

Photo: U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm