Nuclear Energy Innovation Big and Small Important to Climate Change
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"In the last week, two news stories really captured the potential future for nuclear energy. The New York Times Matthew Wald reported from Georgia, where construction crews are slowly building the first two new nuclear reactors in thirty years. And National Geographic’s Will Ferguson reported from Tennessee that engineers and scientists are taking core samples and mapping regional geology as part of the early planning stages of building the first small modular nuclear reactor in the world. Both projects face unique challenges, yet they both represent the beginning of two potential nuclear paths for reducing climate-warming carbon emissions in the United States (and potentially the world)."
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SMR (Small Modular Reactor) innovations potentially solve a key problem with traditional nuclear technologies: up-front costs. While nuclear-generated electricity is relatively cheap once operation begins, it can cost $10 to $20 billion to successfully develop a new plant — something only a handful of energy companies are capable of doing even with federal loan guarantees. SMR companies believe they can construct a plant for roughly $2 billion, or one-fifth the cost. Of course, one SMR reactor won’t provide the same output as one big-box reactor, but this actually creates flexibility. SMRs can be stacked together to meet a particular region’s power need, so less populated regions can invest in less SMR reactors while more populous regions can add more, if necessary. Power generators can also begin operating SMRs even while installing additional modules, so energy companies can begin recouping up-front costs much earlier than if building a large traditional reactor, which can’t be turned on until construction is complete.
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Nuclear is currently the only carbon-free energy source that can provide base load electricity — a characteristic crucial to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, renewables at increasingly high penetration rates require either utility-scale energy storage (which isn’t cost or performance competitive yet) or peaking natural gas plants to balance spikes in demand. In fact, California’s carbon emissions are set to increase because it closed the San Onofre nuclear generating station, which produced one-tenth of California’s electricity, and is quickly working to replace it with a mix of natural gas and renewable technologies. The same situation has occurred in Germany and Japan."
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