The nuclear energy It seems to have its years numbered in Europe despite the fact that many leaders see it as a transitional, non-polluting energy, until renewables can take over all the necessary electricity generation.
Nuclear power suffers from the push of increasingly cheaper renewables, from the refusal of the majority of citizens to plant a reactor close to home, because of the price of its construction or renovation, because it generates electricity in a more expensive way than that generated by those same renewables and because the safety requirements after accidents Chernobyl and, above all, Fukushima, skyrocketed costs.
France, the European nuclear leader, shows how the renovation of the nuclear park can be a headache. Its new generation reactor, the one being built at the Flamanville plant, it was going to cost 3,400 million euros and it was going to be plugged into the power grid five years after construction began.
14 years have passed, more than 19,000 million have been spent and it still doesn’t work.
The abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Russia. Photo EFE
The solution
The leaders who defend nuclear, as well as the companies in the sector, now look at SMR as a solution (Small Modular Reactor). They are the new smaller reactors that can even be installed on ships. They are reactors of between 30 and 350 megawatts when the traditional ones ranged from 700 to 1,700 megawatts.
Russia’s Rosatom has been working on its development for decades and made Russia the most advanced country in its manufacture. Moscow already has an SMR reactor in operation aboard the ship ‘Academician Lomonosov’, anchored off the city of Pevek, on the Russian north coast, facing the Arctic. It has two reactors of 35 megawatts each.
Reactors like the one installed on the “Academician Lomonosov” would do, argues Rosatom, to give enough power to cities of up to 100,000 inhabitants or to industrial areas, especially in isolated regions. They would not serve to replace the most common large reactors but they would serve to maintain nuclear in areas of the world where the development of renewables was more complicated.
Its smaller size and less electricity generation capacity also suppose that they generate less radioactive waste and that they are cheaper and easier to build. The smallest can be made in a plant and moved when they are already built.
The Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. Photo EFE
Investments
Russia continues to offer foreign countries the construction of classic 1,200 megawatt reactors but the market for these reactors is getting smaller and smaller and hence the commitment to these SMRs. Russians develop them from 50 megawatts. Like the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans are also beginning to design their first SMRs.
This past August, as the United Nations published the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate, Rosatom announced that it would begin to build small 50-megawatt SMRs.
Its massive deployment, after Academician Lomonosov, serving as a pilot project, would start in 2024 and it would become general from 2028. Siberia and the Russian Arctic would be the areas where the first SMRs would be placed.
The 50-megawatt Russian SMRs are a development from the nuclear thrusters that power the three large nuclear icebreakers that Russia has been used in recent years to open the Northern Route, the sea passage along its north coast that reduces the route between Europe and China compared to the classic one through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
In addition to cities and industrial and mining areas of the Russian Arctic and Siberia, Rosatom envisages their use, as in the case of the ‘Academician Lomonosov’, as floating power plants that can be placed where their construction is technically complex or where they are needed for too short a period of time to justify the construction of an onshore reactor.
China is also taking its first steps with SMRs. Construction began on a 125 megawatt SMR in July to power more than 500,000 homes on Hainan Island. The Chinese see it as the first of many.
The United States subsidizes private companies (NuScale Power, TerraPower), which develop SMR in cooperation with Japan’s Hitachi. The first should go online, with 350 megawatts, in Wyoming.
PB
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