UK policy on SMRs and nuclear generally has been utterly bizarre. Rolls Royce started development of their SMR design back in 2015 when they saw that the French EPR for Hinkley Point was going to be beset with problems and massive cost overruns and delays, even if it could be made to work. By 2018 they were ready to build a FOAK prototype with the essential design complete and costed. 6 years later the ONR are still prevaricating over type approval of a design that was simplified precisely to reduce risks.
Meantime the UK has succeeded in deterring Hitachi and Kepco and Westinghouse from being able to proceed with existing proven designs to help replace our ageing nuclear fleet. It insists on holding a competition on SMR designs as if it was the only place where nuclear design could be developed and evaluated.
It should be obvious that our future world is going to turn to nuclear power on a large scale to help eek out its fossil fuel resources - the market will be a global one. Already the Russians and Chinese are offering and building nuclear power stations outside their own countries.
It's worth remembering that the building of the French nuclear fleet was so successful precisely because they ended up ditching their own design in favour of the proven design from Westinghouse, which they built again and again, reaping learning curve cost benefits and shorter build timescales. The UK has been mesmerised by that experience but not learned the right lessons.
There is no harm in having competing designs developed in different countries, but that takes investment in prototypes not in poring over blueprints. Look at how the internal combustion engine evolved. Some designs may fall by the wayside, eclipsed by lower cost designs with good safety. The ability to access winning designs is the real key to low cost nuclear. That implies an ability to fast track build approval for a foreign design if necessary.
We should have aimed for an international agreement designed to share the risks and benefits and to speed type approvals and prototypes across nations, much as we did with military equipment in WW II. If your design fails, license a better one and learn how to build it, just as has happened with the Pechiney design for aluminium smelters. If your design is the winner, then you will need to gear up to license it elsewhere and teach them how to build it as well as building for your domestic market.
Dumb for Ontario building those 4 American BWRX-300 reactors @ Darlington. Ontario has an electricity shortage and needs more of the large CANDU EC6 700MWe reactors. Lots of places in Canada to build the smaller BWRX-300's like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Northern Ontario and Saskatchewan, where the EC6's would supply too much power.
CANDU EC6's running on the new ANEEL Thorium/HALEU fuel are 7X more fuel efficient, produce very little plutonium, 7X less waste, refueled online, existing and fully operating supply chain, 96% Canadian produced. And the Indian version of CANDU are the lowest cost reactors being built on Earth, cheaper than coal, at $1.7B/GWe. No need for a giant custom built pressure vessel. And CANDU's have run continuously for over 3yrs - 100% CF.
Canada's CANDU's produced 87.2 TWh in 2022 vs the giant James Bay hydro project which produces 83TWh/yr avg. With the total land area (including mining & fuel processing) of CANDU nuclear @ 20 sq. km vs James Bay hydro of 17,000 sq.km.
Thorium + HALEU = Clean Core Thorium Energy: Mark Nelson @ TEAC11:
Nice graphs @ 32m08s in the video showing the CO2 output of Germany's electricity generation, hourly total over a whole year vs the same for France. Pretty shocking. This is for 2015, it's much worse than that now, since Germany greatly expanded its wind & solar capacity. As Mark Nelson says the gyrations in output are insane with their current 140GW of solar+wind capacity and the lowest hour was 1.2GW avg output.
covering the extended periods of high winds and negative prices, including that the costliest generation continues even while the cheapest self curtails. However, the idea that limited capacity batteries can make money by charging up and then threatening to discharge into an oversupplied market unless their palms are crossed with silver I admit had not occurred to me.
What a twisted market. Why invest in longer duration when you can get paid for your battery doing nothing?
I was curious what the thermal efficiencies in the table work out to so I did a line of CoSy.com , evolved from APL in Forth , a major purpose of which is such ` off-the-cuff computations :
Did you see this Telegraph article about Babcock? I wondered if this was a late entry into the UK race or whether it is aimed at overseas markets.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/04/mini-nuclear-reactor-built-hartlepool/
UK policy on SMRs and nuclear generally has been utterly bizarre. Rolls Royce started development of their SMR design back in 2015 when they saw that the French EPR for Hinkley Point was going to be beset with problems and massive cost overruns and delays, even if it could be made to work. By 2018 they were ready to build a FOAK prototype with the essential design complete and costed. 6 years later the ONR are still prevaricating over type approval of a design that was simplified precisely to reduce risks.
Meantime the UK has succeeded in deterring Hitachi and Kepco and Westinghouse from being able to proceed with existing proven designs to help replace our ageing nuclear fleet. It insists on holding a competition on SMR designs as if it was the only place where nuclear design could be developed and evaluated.
It should be obvious that our future world is going to turn to nuclear power on a large scale to help eek out its fossil fuel resources - the market will be a global one. Already the Russians and Chinese are offering and building nuclear power stations outside their own countries.
It's worth remembering that the building of the French nuclear fleet was so successful precisely because they ended up ditching their own design in favour of the proven design from Westinghouse, which they built again and again, reaping learning curve cost benefits and shorter build timescales. The UK has been mesmerised by that experience but not learned the right lessons.
There is no harm in having competing designs developed in different countries, but that takes investment in prototypes not in poring over blueprints. Look at how the internal combustion engine evolved. Some designs may fall by the wayside, eclipsed by lower cost designs with good safety. The ability to access winning designs is the real key to low cost nuclear. That implies an ability to fast track build approval for a foreign design if necessary.
We should have aimed for an international agreement designed to share the risks and benefits and to speed type approvals and prototypes across nations, much as we did with military equipment in WW II. If your design fails, license a better one and learn how to build it, just as has happened with the Pechiney design for aluminium smelters. If your design is the winner, then you will need to gear up to license it elsewhere and teach them how to build it as well as building for your domestic market.
Good video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeCotEJj1M&t=440s
Three years from first spade in the ground to on-line...
Dumb for Ontario building those 4 American BWRX-300 reactors @ Darlington. Ontario has an electricity shortage and needs more of the large CANDU EC6 700MWe reactors. Lots of places in Canada to build the smaller BWRX-300's like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Northern Ontario and Saskatchewan, where the EC6's would supply too much power.
CANDU EC6's running on the new ANEEL Thorium/HALEU fuel are 7X more fuel efficient, produce very little plutonium, 7X less waste, refueled online, existing and fully operating supply chain, 96% Canadian produced. And the Indian version of CANDU are the lowest cost reactors being built on Earth, cheaper than coal, at $1.7B/GWe. No need for a giant custom built pressure vessel. And CANDU's have run continuously for over 3yrs - 100% CF.
Canada's CANDU's produced 87.2 TWh in 2022 vs the giant James Bay hydro project which produces 83TWh/yr avg. With the total land area (including mining & fuel processing) of CANDU nuclear @ 20 sq. km vs James Bay hydro of 17,000 sq.km.
Thorium + HALEU = Clean Core Thorium Energy: Mark Nelson @ TEAC11:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAUDuaqpVW8
Nice graphs @ 32m08s in the video showing the CO2 output of Germany's electricity generation, hourly total over a whole year vs the same for France. Pretty shocking. This is for 2015, it's much worse than that now, since Germany greatly expanded its wind & solar capacity. As Mark Nelson says the gyrations in output are insane with their current 140GW of solar+wind capacity and the lowest hour was 1.2GW avg output.
Off topic.
I had worked out most of the perversions of sensible markets reported by Timera here
https://timera-energy.com/blog/negative-prices-and-high-bm-acceptance-drive-bess-revenues-across-the-weekend/
covering the extended periods of high winds and negative prices, including that the costliest generation continues even while the cheapest self curtails. However, the idea that limited capacity batteries can make money by charging up and then threatening to discharge into an oversupplied market unless their palms are crossed with silver I admit had not occurred to me.
What a twisted market. Why invest in longer duration when you can get paid for your battery doing nothing?
I was curious what the thermal efficiencies in the table work out to so I did a line of CoSy.com , evolved from APL in Forth , a major purpose of which is such ` off-the-cuff computations :
f( 340 1080 280 870 160 525 77 250 470 1358 225 800 )f i( 6 2 )i take flip .+ ' %f ./ cL ' ,/ 'm fmttbl|
(
340.0000 | 1080.0000 | 0.3148
280.0000 | 870.0000 | 0.3218
160.0000 | 525.0000 | 0.3048
77.0000 | 250.0000 | 0.3080
470.0000 | 1358.0000 | 0.3461
225.0000 | 800.0000 | 0.2812
)
Will annotate if anyone interested .