Is there any progress on those Small Nuclear Reactors (SMR)? The promise was 3-5 year builds for one unit and allowing builds in parallel to deploy multiple units and hooking them up to form practical larger plants. But it seems it cooled a bit now? It would appear to be perfect for the EU situation and there would be a lot of money and interest I guess. It is just hard to find concrete and up to data information.
China has built a couple HTR SMR[1] and is also currently building a PWR SMR[2]. And in the United States, Nuscale is looking to have the UAMPS project starting to supply energy in 2029[3].
It is all fluff. SMR means many more moving parts for the same aggregate output.
No nuke can begin to approach the opex, never mind capex, of renewables + storage. So, each dollar put toward nukes produces proportionally less energy, and brings climate disaster nearer.
During the ten years from breaking ground to turning on, the money spent on coal in the meantime would pay for as much solar as needed to match the nuke's output, but the solar would begin producing and displacing carbon immediately.
Soon, even new nukes will be mothballed except where government coercion and taxes force people to pay extra for their output.
> It is all fluff. SMR means many more moving parts for the same aggregate output.
You say that, but NuScale spent half a billion dollars of only private money to get the NRC approval for their SMR [1]. If they thought the SMR was uneconomical, would they have done that?
> They think that government will guarantee income of their customers. As is customary, for nukes.
Actually, you think they think. Do you have any evidence though?
Because I have evidence of the contrary.
They are a publicly traded company. They need to disclose their business rationale in their SEC filings, which are posted online [1]. If they lie in their statements, they are liable to go to prison (like the CEO and CFO of Enron). And they clearly are at risk of a class action lawsuit. It is very unlikely you'll find intentional outright lies, or intentional material omissions in SEC filings, not just in the case of NuScale, but of all publicly traded companies in general.
So, I took a look at their more important filings, e.g. [2]. The statement about Government funds is on page 209:
UAMPS, our first customer, has received a $1.4 billion DOE cost-share award to support deployment of a NuScale LLC VOYGR-6 power plant.
Such a plant has a capacity of 0.5 GW. $1.4 billion is not unreasonable at all for 0.5 GW, it is even competitive with solar (the utility-scale cost of solar is about $1 BN/GW, but the capacity factor is only about 30%, so you end up with a cost of about the same capital cost for 1 GWh, but nuclear is steady, while solar is not). You will not find any mention that NuScale thinks they can extract more than that from the Government. Instead you'll find the opposite:
We may be unable to charge UAMPS, our first customer, for some costs we have incurred and we may be required to reimburse UAMPS if we fail to achieve specified performance measures.
NuScale obviously does not expect to coerce money from ratepayers. Their customers, as I said, do: UAMPS, here.
But you demonstrate my point: you and I are being made to kick in a $1.4B subsidy to UAMPS, thence to NuScale. NuScale didn't risk anything: that $0.5B was tripled via their first "sale", without a single kWh delivered to anybody. They have been on the public teat all along.
