COVER STORY | SMRs
Are SMRs on the cost curve?
To win a place in a distributed, decarbonised energy industry and reduce costs SMRs have to be a familiar sight to investors and consumers. Are we getting there?
THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY HOPES THAT small modular reactors (SMRs) will become familiar workhorses of the energy system; supplied as a package, delivered in modules that can be quickly and easily assembled on-site and providing heat or power to neighbouring customers or to the grid as a whole. In theory, using a small modular technology that is
Janet Wood
Expert author on energy issues
quickly rolled out in numbers allows the supply chain to make efficiencies, builds operating experience for owners and investors alike and drives the technology down the “cost curve”. That process has become familiar in the energy industry as wind turbines, solar PV and batteries have been rolled out in numbers that have risen from a few hundred units to become a mainstay of the energy industry in less than two decades. In fact the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted in its March report that between 2010 and 2019 “sustained decreases” saw unit costs fall by 85% for solar PV, by 55% for wind power and by 85% for lithium ion batteries. That came with deployment at the end of the period 10 times that at the start for solar PV. Can nuclear SMRs follow the same route? Or has the industry’s current scattergun approach limited its opportunity to follow other clean energy technologies down the cost curve?
There are several consistent aspects to technologies that
have successfully negotiated the curve. They are (initially) small; a single familiar technology has been used; it has been rolled out in numbers; they can be accommodated on a variety of sites; experience of the first projects has been quickly absorbed; and that data has given third party financiers confidence to invest in follow-on projects. Lithium ion batteries, for example, are being rolled out at gigawatt scale, yet the largest installations, housed in facilities very like shipping containers, contain arrays of familiar small batteries. Innovation has been required in operating them as a mass array, integrating them with the grid, developing markets for the services they can offer (response, rather than baseload power) and modelling and managing the best operating regimes. Now there is ‘market pull’ as electricity system operators value the services they can provide. SMRs are still at the ‘market push’ stage. The
International Nuclear Energy Agency (IAEA) says it is aware of more than 80 designs that have been mooted, but its Advanced Reactors Information System (ARIS) lists 48 reactor designs in the SMR category that are at some point in the design phase. In fact, nearly a dozen of those actually fall outside IAEA’s own SMR definition, which puts
Above: The Linglong 1 SMR is already under construction in China 16 | April 2023 |
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