NUCLEAR PROMISE | SMRS & ADVANCED REACTORS
Left: Last year, the motto in Atlanta seemed to be that the nuclear community has now won the political battle
targets without stable nuclear baseload might be possible but extremely costly, the Atlanta speakers reasoned. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the downsides of stable and rather inflexible baseload in the decentralised and renewables- dominated grids of tomorrow were not explored.
Earning credibility Legitimacy alone is not enough, however, if the promise- makers fail to convince key stakeholders of the ability of the technology to effectively tackle the problem. The concern of the industry’s ability to deliver was even more acute in 2023 than the year before. Where to find the requisite resources and abilities to complete the SMR designs, persuade investors, rebuild supply chains, pass through the regulatory maze, and then eventually construct new reactors at the pace needed to satisfy the demand, and – according to a pledge by a group of over 20 countries at COP 28 – triple the global nuclear capacity by 2050? Historical experience of the radical downscaling of electricity growth forecasts in the mid-1970s calls for caution. Yet, if demand does indeed shootsthrough the roof, how is the SMR industry to compete with its rivals, for the needed resources, for both highly skilled and unskilled workforce?
The industry question of “can we deliver?” had by 2023
surpassed the concerns for cumbersome safety regulation as an obstacle to SMR deployment. Gone were the previous year’s complaints about “too much democracy” in safety regulation, instead the regulators and government speakers now openly challenged the industry. Ramzi Jammal, Chief Regulatory Operations Officer at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), pointed out that international regulatory harmonisation was well underway, including plans to set up an International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) to assist regulators in embarking countries. Jammal had a scathing message to the industry: “You are behind us, let me tell you bluntly… Get your act together, standardise the codes and move on in that direction. Otherwise, you are going to get something you are not going to like!”. Björn Peters, the co-founder of Dual Fluid, developing a lead-cooled SMR, echoed Jammal: once the industry comes up with a truly good design, “licensing will follow, politics will follow”, but the real challenge is to “convince… in each utility the top 20 people or so to buy a few” reactors.
The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Julie Kozeracki made an almost desperate plea for action: “At LPO (DOE’s Loan Programs Office), I have 300 billion dollars in loans that almost nobody wants, for nuclear deployment.” With a pinch of sarcasm, Kozeracki noted that “the nuclear industry really loves press releases, they love MoUs, they love letters of intent. But I can’t finance a supply chain or build a workforce on a press release. I need signed contracts!”
Convincing investors The SMR promise is still far from proving its credibility in the eyes of investors. Symptomatic was that Westinghouse, with its AP300, had replaced NuScale as the 2023 conference’s opening showcase. NuScale’s recent troubles – the steady decline of its share price since August 2022, the cancellation in November 2023 of its planned first-of-a-kind project in Idaho, for the lack of subscribers – illustrate the fragility of the promise of new, even light-water, reactor designs. The absence of Rolls-Royce, another posterchild from the 2022 conference, points in the same direction. But why should investors believe that this time all will
be different, that the industry has learned its lessons and that SMR projects will not run vastly over time and over budget, like the recent AP1000s in the US and EPRs in Europe? By educating the finance community, answered Kalev Kallemets, director of the Estonian SMR start-up Fermi Energia. “The public has moved on, but the financing has not… in nuclear, we are living in the post-traumas. It’s important to bring that very conservative field of finance also to the 21st century.” However, the recipe based on the “deficit model” – that citizens must be educated, and thus liberated from their “irrational fears” – has not worked with the general public and is unlike to work with the finance community. A more serious initiative is the plan to establish an International Bank for Nuclear Investment (IBNI), presented in Atlanta by its chairman Daniel Dean as a “long-term partner and pro-industry, pro-market and pro-investor supporter and enabler of SMR/Gen IV stakeholders”. Crucially, IBNI would establish “a globally recognised and harmonised” set of standards and criteria for SMR technologies, thereby seeking to help scale-up and commodify SMR delivery across the world. Consultants and pro-nuclear climate activists Kirsty
Gogan and Eric Ingersoll, from Terra Praxis, painted even bolder visions of scaling up via “productisation”. Their vision of a move away from cumbersome, risky, and
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