Over the four years or so that I've been making videos for this channel
I've occasionally delved into the world of nuclear energy I've considered the general outlook for
the nuclear industry in the 21st century and I've looked in more specific detail at how technologies
like thorium molten salt reactors and small modular reactors work. All of which you can
jump back and have a look at using the links I've left in the description section of this video.
Deriving energy from a nuclear fission reaction has always been a contentious issue largely as
a result of concerns about cost, safety and waste disposal. And of course it remains that way today.
Many of those concerns are not confined to environmental activist groups either, there's
real debate within the energy sector itself about the wisdom of pursuing a nuclear strategy
as renewables like wind and solar continue to rapidly gain market share
in many parts of the world. Recently Rolls-Royce has decided to throw its hat into the ring with an
announcement that they'll be developing their own design for a small modular reactor which
they claim will not only provide essential 24 7 zero carbon base load power for our energy sector
but could also provide off-grid solutions for data centres, green hydrogen production, synthetic
aviation fuels, desalination and industrial heat. Quite a portfolio of options isn't it?
So are Rolls-Royce bringing us a triumphant panacea for the climate crisis
or could this prove to be a costly distraction on the road to true decarbonisation?
Hello and welcome to just have a think. If Rolls Royce were going after an architectural award
then the computer renderings of their proposed nuclear power stations
would certainly be a very good starting point. They look great don't they? Beautifully landscaped
into the rolling green countryside just outside the towns and cities of the very near future.
And Rolls-Royce are no newcomers to nuclear technology either. They're the largest employer
of nuclear engineers and scientists in the UK and they've been supplying compact nuclear reactors
for naval submarines for decades. So they definitely know how to build them. In a recent
interview, Rolls-Royce SMR Chief Executive Tom Sampson explained the four key criteria
that were set in place when the project got underway back in 2016... "low-cost, deliverable,
global and scalable and importantly investable." Each site will be about the size of two football
pitches which is only a tenth of the footprint of a typical existing nuclear power facility.
That small footprint means the power stations can be built on what's known as a seismic raft
which insulates it from any unexpected land movement during its operational lifetime.
In the construction phase the entire site will sit inside a protective canopy which will not
only minimise local noise and air pollution but also protect the site itself from the elements.
Current nuclear construction sites can lose as much as 40 percent of scheduled working
hours each year as a result of adverse weather conditions but these canopies will allow work to
continue at the Rolls-Royce sites 24 hours a day 365 days a year. And that level of consistency
means Rolls-Royce reckon they can have a site up and running and generating power within four
years from breaking ground instead of the 20 plus years that larger centralized plants tend to take.
And they claim each facility will be good for 60 years of 24 7 base load power provision.
The reactors themselves will be so compact and about 16 metres long and 4 metres in diameter
that it'll be possible to manufacture them in purpose-built factories and transport them to
site by truck or train. Power generation capacity will be as much as 470 megawatts - enough to run a
couple hundred thousand homes at a claimed levelized cost of electricity, or LCOE,
of about eighty five dollars per megawatt hour. According to the latest numbers from industry
analysts Lazard, that compares very favourably with the typical cost of existing nuclear power
which comes in at between 118 and 192 dollars per megawatt hour.
It also competes with the LCOE of other base load power producers like coal and gas. The
UK government is enthusiastically backing the initiative with funding of 210 million pounds
and there's also investment from French bank BNF and US nuclear giant Exelon. in November 2021
Rolls-Royce submitted their design to the UK's generic design assessment regulatory process,
one of the toughest technical and safety standards in the global nuclear industry.
If they can get through that then they hope to have their first site built and operational
in the early 2030s with at least 16 more to follow during that decade at a cost of about 2.4 billion
each. But what about that safety, I hear you shout. Wouldn't we be risking disaster by placing
all those nuclear reactors right next to major population centres? Well, long-term historical
data clearly show that despite high profile accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl
and Fukushima, nuclear is actually by far the safest form of non-renewable power ever developed.
This chart from Our World in Data shows the number of deaths from accidents and air pollution
that each technology has caused for every terawatt hour of energy it's produced globally.
So safety concerns about the operation of nuclear power plants appear to be more about
public perception than real world experience. Nevertheless, in keeping with most of the more
than 50 different designs for small modular reactors around the world, Rolls-Royce's system
incorporates what they call passive safety features which allow them to describe their
reactors as walk away safe. In other words there'd be no requirement for any human interaction
in order for the reactors to shut down safely if ever there were to be an incident. Essentially SMR
reactors work in such a way that they take advantage of natural forces like gravity,
buoyancy, pressure differences, conduction or natural heat convection, all of which cause
the nuclear reaction to slow down rather than speed up in the event of an accident or loss
of power. So according to the developers of these devices a meltdown or explosion is just impossible
with these modern designs, and according to the World Nuclear Association or WNA, SMRs by
definition have a smaller radioactive inventory which means less nuclear waste is produced. In
a recent webinar, Rolls Royce SMR Director of Strategy and Business Development, Alan Woods,
explained that the management of radioactive waste materials is factored into their designs right
from the drawing board stage which means that waste from their SMRs is designed to be stored on
site permanently with no possibility of it getting airborne or leaching into soil or waterways.
Despite all of these apparent features and benefits though there still seems to be some
considerable unease in some quarters about the sudden trend for small nuclear reactors
like those being developed at Rolls Royce. In an interview with the BBC's today programme,
Paul Dorfman, chairman of an industry think tank called the Nuclear Consulting Group,
said "if nuclear eats all the pies which it's looking to be doing we won't have enough money to
do the kinds of things we need to do which we know practically and technologically we can do now."
In other words if we remind ourselves that the timeline for urgent reductions in carbon dioxide
emissions is 2030, then these small modular reactors are not going to play any part in that
crucial challenge at all, and it would arguably be far better to plough all available government
and private investment into the rapid expansion of solar wind and energy storage technologies. If we
go back to that Lazard chart showing levelized cost of electricity for various energy sources
then we find that utility scale wind and solar are already way cheaper than anything else available
and technological solutions already exist that can overcome renewables intermittency, like smart
grids, long distance high voltage transmission lines and energy storage sharing between regions.
And despite reassurances about waste management the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEA
calculates that there's about 38 million cubic metres of solid radioactive waste currently in
existence, more than 30 million cubic metres of which has been permanently disposed of in sites
that will remain no-go areas for anything between 10 and 100 000 years. The remaining seven million
or so cubic metres is being held in storage awaiting final disposal including untreated
nuclear waste in the United States that's been sitting in interim storage since the 1940s.
So although it's fair to say that containment technology is well developed, well understood
and well managed, it's far less certain how we propose to maintain that diligence in perpetuity,
or how well the radioactive waste would continue to be managed if hundreds of new nuclear reactors
started popping up outside towns and cities all over the world, as some enthusiasts are proposing.
There are also those who simply question the economic viability of small nuclear power plants.
This guy is Michael Barnard. He's the founder of another industry think tank called The Future is
Electric and a strategic advisor and board observer for Agora Energy Technologies, who
specialize in carbon dioxide capture and energy storage solutions like redox flow batteries.
Given those credentials, I guess it's not surprising that someone like him
might be somewhat disparaging about a potentially competitive technology, but he really pulls
no punches in this May 2021 article written for Clean Technica. Barnard argues that for economies
of scale to kick in a manufacturing facility usually has to build hundreds or thousands
or even millions of the same thing and have a projected future market for hundreds or thousands
more. It's what economists call Horizontal Scaling. But every country engaged in SMR research
has its own preferred technologies and its own companies to support, so that kind of horizontal
scaling at global level is extremely unlikely. Rolls-Royce strategic director Alan Woods himself
pointed out that his company would never look to supply Russia or China for example,
which are potentially two of the biggest markets available. And as well as horizontal scaling
advantages that are likely to be missed by SMR technology, there are also vertical scaling
problems. According to Barnard, thermal generation units get more efficient as they get bigger,
at least up to a point anyway. That's why most coal and nuclear generation is closer on a per
boiler or reactor basis to a gigawatt of capacity rather than a couple of hundred megawatts.
Much of that scaling apparently has to do with things like the diameter of pipes to optimize the
efficiency of fluid and steam transfer bigger pipes move a lot more fluid with relatively
little increase in material costs. Small modular reactors won't get any of that scaling benefit.
Barnard also points out that brownfield sites like disused coal power plants, which is where
SMRs are often proposed to be cited, have major security exposures. Nuclear technologies and
fuels are highly proscribed and limited due to nuclear non-proliferation strategic goals.
Radioactive material is highly sought after by terrorist groups for dirty bombs which means the
entire supply, operational and waste chain in the nuclear industry requires what Barnard refers to
as 'Significant overlapping circles of defence'. Those very costly requirements won't go away
just because nuclear reactors are smaller. And then there's the long-term issue of
decommissioning, which Barnard suggests is a billion dollar, 100-year venture, based
on evidence from reactors in several countries that are going through that process right now.
There's no reason to suppose that SMRs wouldn't require the same duration and proportional
clean-up costs when their time is up. A much more obscure consideration and certainly one that most
of us probably wouldn't have even thought about is the cost of insurance. No nuclear reactor in the
world is protected solely by a private insurance plan like the ones you and I have on our homes. In
reality, every country that has nuclear power has got legislation capping private liability
for developers and insurers and putting the rest of the liability onto the taxpayer. Although the
Fukushima accident really was a one in a million freak set of circumstances, the total liability
for that disaster has nevertheless run into the trillion dollar region. According to Barnard the
number of countries willing to sign up to that kind of exposure is decreasing not increasing.
The bottom line is that a majority of experts now agree that renewables could economically deliver
about 80 percent of grid energy requirements. But that still leaves a 20% gap, which is more
than enough to have catastrophic consequences if it's not adequately filled. Industry analysts like
Tony Seba of Rethink X, and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University,
Mark Jacobson, who wrote this comprehensive study of our global energy future,
argue that the plummeting cost of renewables that we saw in the Lazard LCOE chart coupled
with those transmission technologies that I mentioned earlier mean that with the right level
investment there's no reason why renewables can't fulfill 100% of our global energy requirements.
In fairness to the folks at Rolls-Royce, they themselves are major proponents of renewables
like wind and solar and they've never suggested that their SMR system should be anything other
than a vital base load complement to those technologies, and even Michael Barnard concedes
that it's very reasonable to make a side bet or two to ensure coverage of that last 20%.
So perhaps the answer to today's conundrum lies somewhere in the middle ground between two points
of view. I know this is a topic that usually generates quite strong opinions one way or
another, so if you've got views or insights, or industry experience that you can share,
then why not jump down to the comments section below and leave your thoughts there.
That's it for this week though. As always, a big thank you to the folks at Patreon
who keep these videos completely independent and ad free.
You can get involved in all that, and help choose future video topics in monthly content polls
at patreon.com/justhaveathink. And you can hugely support the channel's development
absolutely for free by subscribing and hitting that like button and notification bell. You
can do that very easily just by clicking down there or on that icon there. As always, thanks
very much for watching, have a great week and remember to just have a think. See you next week.