Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Economics

Why are smaller reactors attracting so much interest?

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Small modular reactors (SMRs) are gaining increased attention as a major opportunity in clean power production. They are a welcome tool in the necessary transition from an energy system dominated by hydrocarbon combustion to one that produces more power for more people with dramatically reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

As a partner in Nucleation Capital, a venture capital fund that focuses on the commercial opportunities that are anticipated by advanced nuclear technologies and power systems, I thought it would be useful to discuss reasons why so many are eager for the arrival of the growing slate of smaller nuclear reactors that are under development. For important reasons there are few mentions of individual companies.

Like traditional large nuclear reactors, SMRs generate power from fission. They don’t produce any air pollution components like NOX, SOX, mercury or fly ash. Unlike large reactors, which were built as large infrastructure projects, the expectation is that SMRs can be constructed more quickly from prefabricated components so that they can be rolled out at an increasing rate once they have completed a necessary product demonstration phase.

Some energy observers see SMRs as the appropriate evolution of nuclear for use with a more distributed grid. Others believe the sector has been widely “hyped” in online energy forums but won’t be available in the time frame needed to address climate change. So how should those for whom the term SMR is just now entering their lexicon think about this technology?

Why does fission excite anyone?

Uranium and thorium are two of nature’s most incredible clean energy storage assets. If completely fissioned, a handful of nuclear fuel weighing a kilogram contains more stored energy than 50 large tanker trucks filled with petroleum.

At the current diesel fuel price of $5.60 per gallon, 50 trucks can carry more than $3,000,000 worth of fuel. In contrast, nuclear power plant owners pay approximately $1,700 per kilogram of fuel in the form of finished assemblies.

The tiny waste production per unit energy released is an inherent aspect of concentrated fission reactions. Unlike combustion, all ingredients needed for fission are contained inside fission fuels. (Combustion needs an external source of oxygen in greater masses than the fuel itself.) The mass of fission wastes is slightly less than the mass of fission fuel; the mass of combustion wastes are about 2.5 times the mass of input fuel.

No fission product wastes need to be routinely removed to allow the reaction to continue operating for its design fuel cycle. None need to be discharged to the environment. Fission reactors are clean enough, safe enough and independent enough to operate inside sealed submarines carrying crews of several dozen people. Those submarines have gone to every part of every ocean on the planet.

Fission even works in the vacuum of deep space.

Those physical and economic facts almost beg power plant designers to think about building a wide variety of machines in order to use that amazing source of energy in as many parts of the diverse global energy markets as possible. Power systems using combustion fuels range in size from model trains to multi GWe power stations. Fission-based power systems need sufficient size to support a chain reaction, and to provide adequate shielding, but that still leaves a wide spectrum of potential applications and sizes.

Today, advanced nuclear innovators are designing reactors that will meet the needs of a much broader range of energy users than traditional nuclear could previously address.

Why did fission reactor unit size get so large?

The earliest reactors were small; the core of EBR-I (Experimental Breeder Reactor I) was roughly the size of cylinder that could snuggly contain an American football. It produced a 1.5 MW of heat and 200 kW of electricity. That was enough to power the building that housed it.

Rod Adams at EBR-I behind a replica of the first four lights powered by fission electricity

But since the dawn of the First Atomic Age, the primary design trend has been to strive for ever larger units in hopes of reducing the cost of the electricity they generate. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, engineering degree programs taught that the “economy of scale” meant that equipment cost did not grow as rapidly as capacity.

For example, a pump that could produce ten times as much flow should only cost four times as much based on cost computations using input materials.

Design engineers learned by experience that bigger factories, bigger refineries and bigger mines could produce cheaper commodity products.

Seeing nuclear power plants as electricity factories, they could not help but believe that achieving economy of scale required them to design ever larger reactors and to place them in increasingly large groups at massive power stations.

There is a diseconomy of scale with super-sized units

Hinkley Point C foundation

Larger units can successfully use the economy of scale to lower the cost per unit of output but it isn’t the only kind of scale that can drive down costs. Ever larger units can also run into diseconomies of scale that plague mega-projects in construction, mass transit, sports complexes, and airports.

The experience of the industry in building the Vogtle AP1000s shows that there is such a thing as too large. In contrast, the economies of scale that we believe will aid in the appeal of SMRs takes the form of mass production and is expected to enable the construction of SMRs to more closely follow the declining cost curves experienced by wind and solar projects.

How can smaller reactors be produced and operated economically?

After observing the challenges associated with building only very large nuclear plants, there is a growing field of nuclear system developers who consider nuclear power plants to be a product, not a factory. A phrase that is repeatedly heard at gatherings of modern nuclear system developers is “We want to build airplanes, not airports.”

Entrepreneurial companies that see nuclear power systems as products understand that “scale” means building large quantities of the same product. They need to be positioned to meet the needs of a sufficient number of customers who want to buy enough machines to provide the opportunity to capture cost reductions from “experience curves” where cost declines as a result of cumulative product volume.

One advantage of smaller systems is the improved ability to use factory manufacturing techniques. Of course, the components used in conventional large reactors are produced in factories, but then they are individually shipped to the site to be assembled into an operating plant. With reactors that have the size and complexity closer to that of large ships or commercial aircraft, it is possible to assemble and transport complete or nearly complete products.

Factory workforces have many advantages over site construction workforces. They can improve productivity by repeating similar tasks regularly, They can live and work in cities served by mass transit. They can implement quality assurance techniques and environmental consistence systems that are difficult to achieve at remote large plant assembly sites.

Several of the entrepreneurial advanced nuclear companies are looking to scale their businesses using a hybrid approach. They recognize the need to build large quantities of their power- and heat-generating machines but they have found that there’s a limited universe of customers who want to operate nuclear power systems under current and foreseeable oversight regimes.

One solution to this problem is “Energy as a Service.” Companies can build, own and operate a fleet of their own small modular reactors to produce electricity and heat as the products they sell to willing customers. At least some of the companies following this path are keenly aware that there are numerous advantages to co-locating a significant number of the members of their nuclear fission fleets on each site they develop.

That statement is especially true under current regulatory requirements for security, oversight and quality assurance. Large numbers of smaller units on a single site also take advantage of repeatable, consistent work for the inevitable site-specific parts of erecting a power station. They can share transmission and cooling infrastructure, training, emergency response and administrative facilities.

One more variation on the SMR business model is the detectable emergence of developers that want to build on skills they’ve gained in deploying, owning and operating other kinds of power systems. They believe that certain SMRs, once designs are approved, can be readily integrated by project developers that specialize in engineering, permitting, construction, local politics, working with regional operators, and developing logistical supply chains for projects that blend clean energy production for local grids with water purification, carbon capture, hydrogen production and other revenue opportunities.

What about the waste for small modular reactors?

Lindsay Krall, Rodney Ewing and Allison Macfarlane recently published a paper titled Nuclear Waste from Small Reactors in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science describing the larger surface to volume ratio of smaller reactors as a disadvantage.

Aside: Neutron Bytes published an article with extensive commentary on the study; though there is some overlap between that article and this one, this contains a few additional points of interest. End Aside.

The paper authors chose to conduct their study using publicly available information on three (out of dozens) small modular reactor designs. They looked at an early version of the NuScale Power Module, Terrestrial Energy’s IMSR™, and Toshiba’s 4S (a reactor system that has not been actively marketed since 2011.)

To the surprise of the lead author, that paper received unusual attention from the press.

 I didn’t really know how the article would be released. There was a copy of the paper circulated to the media or to the press some five days in advance of the article’s publication. So, reactor developers were contacted by the press about the article before it was even published. As a scientist, I was just thinking, “Oh, thank God, this paper got accepted, and I don’t have to work with it anymore.” But then the release of the paper shocked me.

Diaz-Maurin,François Interview: Small modular reactors get a reality check about their waste, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jun 17, 2022

The attention was likely related to press releases issued by the host institutions before the study was actually published.

Both NuScale and Terrestrial Energy challenged the study’s conclusions about their systems. Dr. Jose Reyes, NuScale CTO, wondered about the way advanced copies of the study were released to the press and asked PNAS editor-in-chief May R. Berenbaum if PNAS had implemented a new policy about paper promotion.

It seems likely that summaries of the paper’s tenuous conclusions will be repeatedly introduced into discussions of small modular reactors. If not fully understood, the assertions about increased waste production might hamper SMR deployment.

The paper stated that smaller cores leak a larger portion of the fission neutrons and those neutrons activate structural materials. It also stated that increased neutron leakage leads to lower fuel efficiency because a reactor with increased neutron leakage needs a higher concentration of fissile material to maintain criticality.

Discussions with several nuclear design engineers that are not working on SMRs confirmed that those statements contained some truth and were worth consideration, but also described how they did not tell the complete story about waste generation from smaller nuclear plants.

Those design engineers pointed out that a marginal increase in the amount of waste generated per unit energy output would not make much of a difference in the effort needed to address long term storage or disposal of radioactive materials.

The paper expressly ignored the potential to reduce radioactive waste by recycling material and fuel.

This study also neglects to consider reprocessing, recycling, and dilution because these treatments will not eliminate the need for the storage, transportation, treatment, and disposal of radioactive materials.

Krall, L.M.; Macfarlane A.M.; Ewing, R. C. “Nuclear waste from small modular reactors” PNAS Vol. 119, No. 23 May 31, 2022

In her interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dr. Krall pushed back on the headlines that emphasized the high end of the range of estimates offered. She said that high end estimate of increased waste generation only applied to sodium, a coolant proposed for use by several small and advanced reactor developers.

…for a sodium-cooled reactor, for instance, that sodium coolant is likely to become low-level waste at the end of the reactor’s lifetime, because it becomes contaminated and activated during reactor operation. So, the “up to 30 times more waste” that’s been driving the headlines, it’s mostly the sodium coolant.

Diaz-Maurin,François Interview: Small modular reactors get a reality check about their waste, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jun 17, 2022

For sodium waste, reuse in new reactors has the potential for a dramatic decrease in waste that needs to be processed for disposal, but only if there is a growing population of sodium-cooled reactors.

The potential for reuse of sodium from reactors is limited. The most likely utilization would be as a reactor coolant, but there are currently no LMFRs being constructed where sodium waste is available. (Emphasis added)

IAEA Radioactive Sodium Waste Treatment and Conditioning, Jan 2007. p. 46

Small reactors also have some advantages in fuel and nuclear plant material systems that include recycling. They are going to be easier to disassemble for some of the same reasons that they will be easier to assemble. Recycling factories can be less costly when designed to handle a more steady flow of smaller pieces and parts.

The Krall et. al. study also did not credit advanced reactors with fuel efficiency gains that arise from using operating temperatures that are significantly higher than those that are possible in large light water reactors.

Few of the teams designing SMRs point to reductions in waste generation as a major selling point, but quite a few of the designers point out the potential that fast reactors have for using recycled materials from the current used nuclear fuel stockpile and describe the efficiency gains from reactor systems that are capable of achieving much higher temperatures than conventional light water reactors.

Engineering is a profession that recognizes tradeoffs. Improvements in one design measure often results in a reduced performance in another design measure. Establishing priorities and determining the best overall choices requires expert, detailed knowledge that often isn’t available to outside academics. Small modular reactor developers and their backers have evidently determined that improving passive heat removal, constructibility, financial performance and customer acceptance are more important than the potential for a marginal increase in waste generation.

Waste from smaller modular reactors needs to be well managed, but neither the waste nor the misleading media headlines that appear to detract from the clear benefits of this emerging technology, should be seen as significant hurdles to their successful development.

What makes smaller nuclear power systems so exciting?

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Let me start by dispelling the notion that I think smaller, modular, manufactured nuclear power systems – often called SMRs or micro reactors – are the be all and end all solution to anything, including climate change or energy security.

Though not THE solution, they have the potential to be a crucial, uniquely capable part of a fully-integrated, 0% emission climate-solving grid. 

The best of the breed build on lessons from aircraft manufacturing, submarine construction, electric vehicles, wind & solar and even computers. They are leavened with six decades worth of experience in building, operating and maintaining extra large nuclear systems. They address some of the public relations challenges that have plagued very large reactors.

Some of the system designers are paying close attention to the social science lessons and teachings of groups like “The Good Energy Collective” and designing their systems with customer needs and wants in mind. They often state that they are planning to build reactors that people want to buy. Many of the people or communities interested in buying those reactors are planning to live, work, and play right next to the power system. (Regarding the “play” part of that statement – at least one of the proposals I’ve seen includes directing the waste heat from the power system to a community swimming pool.)

Economy of series production & operation

As former submarine engineer officer who also had the rare opportunity to plan and budget for fleet level nuclear power training, maintenance and construction programs, I have a personal understanding of how economies of series production and standardization work to help keep costs under control and schedules predictable.

It is enlightening to see how much costs fall when you can train a group of operators in a common speciality and send them out to several dozen plants that have identical equipment, spare parts lockers and layouts. It’s also easy to see how maintenance procedures can be written once and used by all and how alterations can be planned, reviewed and implemented. These are just a few of the examples I can list. Rules protecting confidential information prevent me from sharing quantified details. Space prevents me from listing other examples.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has made anything that people learn to do things with experience or that doing the same thing repeatedly produces better results the more often the task is done. Those learning curve-related improvements don’t require mass production of thousands or millions of units, they start improving cost and performance with the second unit.

Widely cited literature from thought leaders like Clay Christensen (Innovators Dilemma and other works) show that there is a relation between costs and doubling of cumulative unit production.

The modern renewable industry – wind and solar energy collection systems – demonstrate the utility of replication. Starting from the high cost systems of the early 2000s, the industry took advantage of tax credit and mandates originally designed to help them build markets and achieve scale economies. Their impressive cost reduction performance is more attributable to the economy of learning by doing than it is to technological innovations and new inventions.

Aside: Some of the techniques used for the dramatic cost improvements in wind and especially solar power systems are not actions that we will to use to drive down nuclear costs. The sector has an admirable tradition of paying living wages to people who eagerly accept the responsibilities that come with high quality work and a strong safety culture. It also does not concentrate its manufacturing in countries with lower standards. End Aside.

Of course, cost and schedule improvements that result from experience can be lost, team relationships can be broken and skills can atrophy with a lack of practice. Smaller nuclear power systems will not be immune to these advantages and vulnerabilities. But unlike far larger plants that might be able to serve five, ten, or even fifteen years worth of electricity demand growth with a single unit, smaller systems will need numerous units to be steadily brought into service.

Smaller nuclear systems do not replace extra large power plants

Some challenge the idea that we should add small reactors to our product catalog. They believe that we know how to build large reactors, we have proven that we can operate them with incredible safety records and each one can make a big difference in both energy supply security and CO2 emissions. They claim that smaller reactors make the tasks more difficult and that many of the smaller reactors still need many years of operating experience to catch up with larger units.

SMRs and micro reactors are not intended as replacement products for situations when customers want large or very large power units. They are an addition to the options list for those who want or need their power in smaller quantities or who want to learn how to build and operate nuclear plants in a more gradual fashion.

Some object to those of us who characterize modern nuclear power systems as “advanced” because they claim we have done them all before. While it is true that world nuclear energy history includes projects that envisioned or actually used many of the potential combinations of fuel form, coolant, fuel enrichments, and secondary power systems, it isn’t true that they explored all available technological advances. Today’s designs benefit from innovations and developments that were not available back when some of the original research and testing was done.

The fact that there was a thriving market for electric cars that took off in the 1890s, even before the Model T years, does not make the Tesla any less advanced of a vehicle.

Aside: There are numerous smaller and micro reactors that are already in operation today. Two most recently completed examples are Russia’s Akademil Lomonosov and China’s HTR-PM. But the hundreds of reactors that have propelled naval vessels in a half dozen or more countries for decades also demonstrate many of the principles that make commercial SMR worthy of excitement. Indian PHWRs also have many of the characteristics of modern SMRs, including power rating. End Aside.

Note: The Wright Brothers and Henry Ford built internal combustion engines 120 or more years ago. That does not negate the statements by current automobile manufacturers that their power plants are advanced or modern. Modern electric vehicles may be descended from earlier products built on roughly the same combination of features, but they are still marvels of advanced technology.

Security, Insurance and Non-Proliferation

Some claim that rules aimed at ensuring security and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons will make smaller systems unaffordable. They overlook the efforts that are going into the system designs to make security easier to implement, the ways that safeguards are being designed into the systems and the fact that some of the rules are being changed because responsible leaders have recognized that they do not actually improve safety or security. Some of them were implemented with the express purpose of slowing nuclear energy development. The immediacy of climate change is stimulating efforts to identify and alter requirements that serve primarily to undermine nuclear economics.

There are even some who cling to the shibboleth claiming that nuclear energy is somehow subsidized because it has a specially designed group insurance program under the 1957 Price Anderson Act (as amended over the years.) While there are changes needed in that Act, it has never been a subsidy for nuclear energy. The truth is that insuring nuclear power plants has never cost taxpayers a dime in paid damages and the insurers that specialize in providing the required commercial insurance have been hugely profitable by collecting premiums and rarely, if ever, paying a claim.

When opponents point to the long-term costs of the accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi as a reason to believe that nuclear plants are under insured, they have some basis in fact. But most of the nuclear-related cleanup costs associated with that accident have been self imposed by the Japanese national, prefecture and local governments. They set radiation exposure standards that were much more stringent than already conservative international standards. Simply using international standards for radiation doses would have greatly reduced evacuation and relocation costs. Basing those actions on a more complete understanding of radiation and its risks would have virtually eliminated costs of actions taken outside of the plant fences.

Rebuilding an area decimated by an earthquake and tsunami isn’t cheap, but it shouldn’t be attributed to events at an industrial facility that did not harm its neighbors.

Are SMRs a good investment?

The answer is, it depends. As with every industry that is experiencing a new generation of technological innovation, some entrepreneurial teams are progressing well, successfully pitching their vision to investors, building their teams, executing against their milestones, learning from set-backs, adjusting to regulatory and market conditions and keeping their eye on the ball. And others not so much.

At Nucleation Capital, the partner team has a combined total of several decades spent investigating and observing the growing potential for advanced nuclear power production. We know that nuclear energy is clean enough to run inside sealed submarines full of people and safe enough for caring parents to not worry when their children work in close proximity to an operating nuclear power plant. We also know that commercial nuclear plants have amassed an admirable safety and reliability record.

That gives us tremendous hope and confidence that great teams will emerge that can learn from our historical performance, from the navy and otherwise, and that new designs will emerge that competitively meet the challenge to deliver clean energy reliably and cost-effectively with newer implementations of amazing carbon-free technology. But we also recognize that not every design will work as hoped or be well-suited to the market demand that exists. Not every team will have what it takes to be successful in a complex market.

Furthermore, we understand the concerns that many people have about the unknowns regarding new designs and the risks of deploying many more small reactors in an widening array of applications. Just as with the deployment of electric vehicles which cannot succeed on the basis of a car design alone but must be matched with a robust national grid of charging stations, this next generation of nuclear ventures will need to solve for an array of related challenges, including nuclear fuel production, long-term waste handling and storage, spent fuel transportation and reprocessing, among other things.

Fortunately, there are quite a lot of groups and entities that are eager to work on these issues, so that new nuclear systems can help us address climate change, provide humanity with reliable power in a climate-stressed world and also succeed in winning public support. There are valid concerns and there are good ways to address them. We also believe that we will have more success overcoming these concerns if coalitions of people across all spectrums participate in helping to solve them collaboratively. 

We are very pleased to be in a position to talk with founders, get briefed on detailed, often non-public information and discuss with them their development goals and challenges, as well as their experiences dealing with a range of potential funders, regulators, suppliers, strategic partners and potential customers. 

Of course, we cannot be specific about those interactions, but we can express how confident and energized they make us feel for this next generation of reactor developers to broaden the zero-carbon toolset to help reverse the trend of ever increasing CO2 emissions. In the foreseeable future, those new designs will likely contribute to the gargantuan task of reducing the existing emitted inventory of over a trillion tons of greenhouse gases already afflicting our climate, by working in combination with a range of carbon capture and removal technologies.

Our investments do not give us a “conflict of interest.” Rather, we believe they give us a broadening window into the future of decarbonization. We will continue to work with the ventures in our portfolio to help them navigate in the ever-shifting policy, regulatory and investment environments. We will keep our eye on the progress towards commercialization goals and continue to drill down into technological and competitive progress being made, so we can better determine our future investment activity.

We are not policy makers nor government officials. We have “skin in the game.” We will be participating to the extent of working to make sure that the developing advanced nuclear energy industry focuses on meeting customer needs and wants and ensuring that there are cost-effective methods for delivering these over the longer term.

We are also enthused by the opportunity to expand the world of “clean energy” and “climate tech” investing to include nuclear energy. We know that a large portion of the clean, near zero-emission energy produced in the world today comes from long ago investments in nuclear power plants that have been operating reliably for decades. While some look at the hiatus in new builds and believe it indicates that nuclear power is on its way out, we look at the same hiatus as the impetus to improve upon and achieve major strides towards perfecting this extraordinary but still overlooked technology. We will be working our hardest to make sure that we and our investors are able to participate in the growth and success of those ventures which best meet the climate challenge with the right set of products and services.

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