I don't think that the footprint is the key factor. Likely the total construction cost is. A large reactor may have a better cost per kWh, averaged over decades of its lifetime, but a smaller reactor likely has a more affordable upfront cost.
The key point with small modular reactors vs. reactors like this is that construction happens in factories rather than on site. Theoretically, you might get some economies of scale from series production in a factory that is much harder to get doing bespoke construction projects. Which is why historically, nuclear projects tend to blow through their cost estimates and why having larger reactors makes that a bit more tolerable. Of course until somebody actually does this and scales to hundreds/thousands of reactors production, this is all theoretical.
This particular reactor is already estimated at over 5 billion $ I think. That's a lot of money for just 300MW and it probably could end up being a wildly optimistic estimate as well. I think effectively much of the construction is still on site and not in a factory. Hence the need for a construction permit. So, you get all of the downsides of complex on site construction such as including high cost, permitting overhead, lots of bureaucracy, associated delays & uncertainty, etc. without the upside of actually delivering a lot of power like you would with a larger reaction. Calling it "modular" might be overstating things a bit.
Probably cheaper, faster, and easier to just plonk down 5GW of solar, wind, or battery (or combinations of those). Especially if you calculate in the 200-300% time and dollar budget that many nuclear projects seem to end up having. Maybe this one will be different. A lot of people have a lot riding on Nuclear projects breaking this trend. But then that has been the case for decades.
Five billion is just not all that much money. One guy spent eight times that to change the moderation policies of one social media website. Microsoft spent 14 times that to buy a video game company that they've largely mismanaged. Those two purchases alone could've paid for 20 of these reactors, maybe more if economies of scale kick in. Don't even ask how much Facebook is flushing down the toilet on VR or how much we're spending every single day in Iran. We could choose to spend our money on things like clean energy, but we choose other things instead.
If the argument is, in part, about footprint then enough solar and battery capacity to output 300MW around the clock with the same uptime/reliability as a nuclear plant is surely going to cover a lot more ground.
I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.
There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).
Nuclear reactor uptime is gonna be 90% at most, which is rather easy (battery capacity for several days) to beat even with just solar + batteries (in equatorial and most mid-latitude regions, at least).
This assumes learning rates never seen by nuclear energy. Within generations we've seen small learnings, and between generations the nuclear energy has been all negative learning by doing.
But that is literally why they want to get to assembly line levels of throughput. Dozens of identical reactors instead of dozens of bespoke reactors that can't use learnings from the last one
Also not said is the fact that going into more standardized designs you lower the operational cost because operations can be standardized. Today every single facility has different training from the next. Even at the same facility, if it's got new + old reactors, operators can't move between them without training on both
This is the biggest anticipated benefit of SMR. The US has 30+ licensed reactor designs. France has 3. Korea has 3. The economics of French and Korean reactors, built repeatably, are drastically improved over US reactors. If the NRC does its job and actually says "we know more about nuclear power than the local state energy commission and operator" then we the US can achieve those levels of repeatability and cost. We want safe reactors, we dont want infinitely customized reactors that are tailored to every state and operator's preference for how they want to polish fittings and lay out the pipes etc etc.
In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized. Thus, pivoting to SMR is unnecessary, since they produce significantly less energy.
One issue here is that the structures containing the "nuclear island" are just as expensive as that island. Containment buildings are civil construction and are not cheap.
This suggests one should move to reactor concepts that don't need such large structures. The containment building size is dictated by the need to contain a certain volume of pressurized steam in an accident (and the requirement to contain the pressure of that steam dictates the mass of the building's structure). This is perhaps the strongest motivation for reactors cooled with molten salt.
Alternately, allow steam to escape in an accident, after filtering. Most of the radioactivity could be captured. But this violates current rules that require no release of radioactivity for 24 hours in an accident.
The expensive part is not assembly, it is validation and documentation of that design and the lack of ability to spread those costs over multiple units. Site built units are fine so long as the design is sufficiently decoupled from site conditions that it can be exactly reproduced.
> A large reactor may have a better cost per kWh, averaged over decades of its lifetime, but a smaller reactor likely has a more affordable upfront cost.
What are the civil works costs for a small(er) reactor versus a large(r) reactor?
From thier website: "The BWRX-300 power block is small enough to fit within two international football pitches."
And after some digging, the core alone is 4.2m INNER diameter and over 27m tall. That is smaller than average but this is a far cry from the sales pitch of reactor modules being mass produced in a factory to be delivered to site by truck.
The label SMR applies to a wide range of reactors.
The BWRX-300 is at the upper end of that range and I don't think claims of factory-production of the whole unit were ever made for this reactor.
That said, even the much larger AP-1000 had fairly large modules made in a factory. In fact as far as I understand that was one of the problems with the Vogtle builds, because doing that only really makes sense for a larger number of units, not for just two unites.
Yes, exactly. But even the sub 5 MWe microreactors that are often shown in those truck demos require lots of shielding that has to be done on-site beforehand.
That discusses 'superloads', I hadn't heard it called that before but it's accurate in the sense that things like self-propelled modular transporters (or towed equivalents) can move just about anything just about anywhere IF the road infrastructure all along the route is amenable to it.
Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.
How certain are you of your prediction? What odds would you give me if I bet against you?
10:1?
100:1?
Background:
The BWRX predecessor, the ABWR, holds the record for the fastest construction time of a commercial nuclear power plant ever: just slightly over 3 years to first criticality, 4 years total to commercial operation.
Fun fact: it was the success of this first Gen III reactor that caused EDF to predict the EPRs would also only take 3 years to build. Which proved...optimistic. For the EPR. But proven for the ABWR.
I think that when people casually pronounce a bet like that, they generally mean even odds. If they meant something else they'd likely say so explicitly.
Sadly, the ABWR has also proven to be unreliable and uneconomic.
Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment) but eventually pulled out after 12 years with £2bn spent and nothing built.
Maybe the BWRX will have better luck - but I'd not want to stake any money on it myself.
The point of small modular reactors is not the cost of the first one, but that the cost goes down with each subsequent one. The cost of the first one is expected to be high. IMHO this is very well explained in "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg.
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Agree that if you run them for 40 or 60 years (1 renewal + 1 extension) it gets very affordable. Similar to data center, the economics are great if you take out construction costs. The problem is 40-60 years has proven to be a very long time in political and economic contexts, so on a practical basis many many plants are shut down prematurely and dont fulfill that useful life, increasing the cost of capital (bonds etc) to build the new plants and therefore LCOE.
Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.
> Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
It also says:
"The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
I'm not anti nuclear or anything like that. It's just the financial comparison one has to make. Currently competing with solar + batteries is hard since unlike SMRs which hypothetically will get cheaper, they are getting cheaper at a quick rate and don't have the history of cost overruns that nuclear does.
This is a 10th Generation Boiling Water Reactor. Here's some relevant links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWRX-300
https://www.gevernova.com/nuclear/carbon-free-power/bwrx-300...
Interesting point: no pumps; convection flow for 100% of the operational envelope.
No recirculation pumps. Feedwater is pumped as usual.
The BWRX-300 footprint is so large they might as well just build large nuclear power units again and get 3-4x the power
I don't think that the footprint is the key factor. Likely the total construction cost is. A large reactor may have a better cost per kWh, averaged over decades of its lifetime, but a smaller reactor likely has a more affordable upfront cost.
The key point with small modular reactors vs. reactors like this is that construction happens in factories rather than on site. Theoretically, you might get some economies of scale from series production in a factory that is much harder to get doing bespoke construction projects. Which is why historically, nuclear projects tend to blow through their cost estimates and why having larger reactors makes that a bit more tolerable. Of course until somebody actually does this and scales to hundreds/thousands of reactors production, this is all theoretical.
This particular reactor is already estimated at over 5 billion $ I think. That's a lot of money for just 300MW and it probably could end up being a wildly optimistic estimate as well. I think effectively much of the construction is still on site and not in a factory. Hence the need for a construction permit. So, you get all of the downsides of complex on site construction such as including high cost, permitting overhead, lots of bureaucracy, associated delays & uncertainty, etc. without the upside of actually delivering a lot of power like you would with a larger reaction. Calling it "modular" might be overstating things a bit.
Probably cheaper, faster, and easier to just plonk down 5GW of solar, wind, or battery (or combinations of those). Especially if you calculate in the 200-300% time and dollar budget that many nuclear projects seem to end up having. Maybe this one will be different. A lot of people have a lot riding on Nuclear projects breaking this trend. But then that has been the case for decades.
Five billion is just not all that much money. One guy spent eight times that to change the moderation policies of one social media website. Microsoft spent 14 times that to buy a video game company that they've largely mismanaged. Those two purchases alone could've paid for 20 of these reactors, maybe more if economies of scale kick in. Don't even ask how much Facebook is flushing down the toilet on VR or how much we're spending every single day in Iran. We could choose to spend our money on things like clean energy, but we choose other things instead.
It is for 300MW.
They're gonna throw in the factory that makes me for free tho.
If the argument is, in part, about footprint then enough solar and battery capacity to output 300MW around the clock with the same uptime/reliability as a nuclear plant is surely going to cover a lot more ground.
I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.
There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).
Nuclear reactor uptime is gonna be 90% at most, which is rather easy (battery capacity for several days) to beat even with just solar + batteries (in equatorial and most mid-latitude regions, at least).
This one may be $5 billion, but the next one will probably be (made up number) $3 billion, and the next one $1 billion
Part of the point of these projects in particular is to get the machine spinning. Once it's running you start getting some of the economies of scale
This assumes learning rates never seen by nuclear energy. Within generations we've seen small learnings, and between generations the nuclear energy has been all negative learning by doing.
But that is literally why they want to get to assembly line levels of throughput. Dozens of identical reactors instead of dozens of bespoke reactors that can't use learnings from the last one
Also not said is the fact that going into more standardized designs you lower the operational cost because operations can be standardized. Today every single facility has different training from the next. Even at the same facility, if it's got new + old reactors, operators can't move between them without training on both
This is the biggest anticipated benefit of SMR. The US has 30+ licensed reactor designs. France has 3. Korea has 3. The economics of French and Korean reactors, built repeatably, are drastically improved over US reactors. If the NRC does its job and actually says "we know more about nuclear power than the local state energy commission and operator" then we the US can achieve those levels of repeatability and cost. We want safe reactors, we dont want infinitely customized reactors that are tailored to every state and operator's preference for how they want to polish fittings and lay out the pipes etc etc.
In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized. Thus, pivoting to SMR is unnecessary, since they produce significantly less energy.
You cant make every part in the factory anyways. You need lots of on-site civil engineering, which accounts for a large chunk of the total cost.
And many parts of large (+1GWe) reactors have also been manufactured at off-site factories and then shipped on-site by barges in the past.
One issue here is that the structures containing the "nuclear island" are just as expensive as that island. Containment buildings are civil construction and are not cheap.
This suggests one should move to reactor concepts that don't need such large structures. The containment building size is dictated by the need to contain a certain volume of pressurized steam in an accident (and the requirement to contain the pressure of that steam dictates the mass of the building's structure). This is perhaps the strongest motivation for reactors cooled with molten salt.
Alternately, allow steam to escape in an accident, after filtering. Most of the radioactivity could be captured. But this violates current rules that require no release of radioactivity for 24 hours in an accident.
The expensive part is not assembly, it is validation and documentation of that design and the lack of ability to spread those costs over multiple units. Site built units are fine so long as the design is sufficiently decoupled from site conditions that it can be exactly reproduced.
> A large reactor may have a better cost per kWh, averaged over decades of its lifetime, but a smaller reactor likely has a more affordable upfront cost.
What are the civil works costs for a small(er) reactor versus a large(r) reactor?
Land is very cheap compared to how much normal reactors cost to build.
From thier website: "The BWRX-300 power block is small enough to fit within two international football pitches."
And after some digging, the core alone is 4.2m INNER diameter and over 27m tall. That is smaller than average but this is a far cry from the sales pitch of reactor modules being mass produced in a factory to be delivered to site by truck.
https://www.gevernova.com/content/dam/gevernova-nuclear/glob...
The label SMR applies to a wide range of reactors.
The BWRX-300 is at the upper end of that range and I don't think claims of factory-production of the whole unit were ever made for this reactor.
That said, even the much larger AP-1000 had fairly large modules made in a factory. In fact as far as I understand that was one of the problems with the Vogtle builds, because doing that only really makes sense for a larger number of units, not for just two unites.
Yes, exactly. But even the sub 5 MWe microreactors that are often shown in those truck demos require lots of shielding that has to be done on-site beforehand.
Going by the last table at
https://www.icetransport.com/blog/what-are-the-maximum-overs...
("Oversize/Overweight Permit Limits by State (Standard Freight Loads") that should be deliverable by truck with a permit.
That discusses 'superloads', I hadn't heard it called that before but it's accurate in the sense that things like self-propelled modular transporters (or towed equivalents) can move just about anything just about anywhere IF the road infrastructure all along the route is amenable to it.
Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.
Place your bets now.
Time until first power generated, and actual final total cost.
I’ll go 15 years and $10 Billion.
How certain are you of your prediction? What odds would you give me if I bet against you?
10:1?
100:1?
Background:
The BWRX predecessor, the ABWR, holds the record for the fastest construction time of a commercial nuclear power plant ever: just slightly over 3 years to first criticality, 4 years total to commercial operation.
Fun fact: it was the success of this first Gen III reactor that caused EDF to predict the EPRs would also only take 3 years to build. Which proved...optimistic. For the EPR. But proven for the ABWR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_boiling_water_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
The BWRX is also passively safe: cooling occurs via natural circulation, no pumps needed.
So if it takes 15 years I give you $100, if it takes less you give me $10000?
Deal?
I think that when people casually pronounce a bet like that, they generally mean even odds. If they meant something else they'd likely say so explicitly.
Sadly, the ABWR has also proven to be unreliable and uneconomic.
Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment) but eventually pulled out after 12 years with £2bn spent and nothing built.
Maybe the BWRX will have better luck - but I'd not want to stake any money on it myself.
The point of small modular reactors is not the cost of the first one, but that the cost goes down with each subsequent one. The cost of the first one is expected to be high. IMHO this is very well explained in "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg.
Smaller reactors = more reactors.
More reactors = riding the cost curve more quickly.
Profitable power or just power?
If the former: it might never happen.
Nuclear reactors are highly profitable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Agree that if you run them for 40 or 60 years (1 renewal + 1 extension) it gets very affordable. Similar to data center, the economics are great if you take out construction costs. The problem is 40-60 years has proven to be a very long time in political and economic contexts, so on a practical basis many many plants are shut down prematurely and dont fulfill that useful life, increasing the cost of capital (bonds etc) to build the new plants and therefore LCOE.
Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.
> Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
It also says: "The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
They are highly profitable when subsidized and you ignore decommissioning costs.
1 cent / kWh cost is fantasy land.
what is the timeline and cost for 300 MW of solar plus the battery back up to make it 24/7?
For fun, Gemini says between 1.1 and 3.8 billion, and 3-5 years.
That number will decrease every month too.
The gemini solar project in Nevada is 700 MW power + 4 hours of batteries at 380MW and cost 1.9 billion. Took 2 years and that was in 2022
Is 4 hours of battery an equivalent comparison to a nuclear plant?
I'm not anti nuclear or anything like that. It's just the financial comparison one has to make. Currently competing with solar + batteries is hard since unlike SMRs which hypothetically will get cheaper, they are getting cheaper at a quick rate and don't have the history of cost overruns that nuclear does.
I'll take that bet. Care to formalize?