8 ms·

> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Yeah, "mini" seems like it would be an order of magnitu

> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Yeah, "mini" seems like it would be an order of magnitude less than the existing nuclear reactors. But the 470 MW mini reactor is just on the low side of current operational reactors which are in the 400 - 1200 MW range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

moralestapia 5y ago
More specs: Land footprint: ~2 football pitches [1] Cost: ~2.4 billion USD [2] 1:https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor... 2:https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secures-funding-for-SMR-deployment#:~:text=The%20target%20cost%20for%20each,operated%20by%20power%20generation%20companies https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secu....
- philipkglass 5y ago
  The second article says "The target cost for each station is GBP1.8 billion (USD2.4 billion) by the time five have been built, with further savings possible." This indicates that cost per station could be significantly higher before 5 of them have been built. It's reasonable to believe that doggedly continuing to build more of them will bring costs down eventually, but if early units have high costs (or worse, if build progress falls behind schedule) then it could be difficult to maintain support for building more of them.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    I imagine given that the whole point of these small units is batch manufacturing that several would be ordered together.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      Also that building multiple facilities at once will streamline regulations and building codes. What killed the large nuclear reactors was the need for so many "one-off" design changes to accommodate safety regulations, which would vary by site. This means that economies of scale are lost when compared to gas power stations, because every nuclear reactor was essentially unique.
      - Manuel_D 5y ago
        There were plenty of repeated design that started during the 1960s and 70s. Accordingly, costs were considerably lower, often in the range 1 to 2 billion USD per GW.
        mywittyname 5y ago
        After this period, costs to build nuclear power plants skyrocketed. When the reasons behind these escalating costs were studied in depth, it was found to be due to the fact that plants lack standardization across the board, leading to ballooning engineering and labor costs as designs are reworked in site-specific ways: > Overall, a common theme emerging from this analysis is the lack of anticipation in engineering models of the cost-increasing contributions of soft technology external to standard reactor hardware, in response to changing regulations and other factors such as variable project-specific conditions. Prospective modeling shows the potentially transformative effect of rethinking engineering design to adapt to these factors, for example through reduced commodity usage and the automation of some construction processes. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS254243512030458X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r...
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    I could imagine they already have contracts in place, even at a higher price tag. It's Rolls-Royce after all, also, they mention they have some MoUs in place. (This is not based on any facts, it's just a moonshot) If they manage to drive cost down to 1/10th of that, while actually delivering and showing their design is safe (which I think it is), this could be a global energy game changer. The world's total energy consumption from "dirty" sources is ~140,000TWh, one of these SMRs could plausibly produce 3TWh/year, so about ~45k would be needed to match our current energy demands. The world is not going to switch to 100% of these, obviously, but nonetheless their market is HUGE (trillions!).
  - KaiserPro 5y ago
    at £120(current price is £240) per mwhr that's still £430 million a year income. With a 60 year lifespan, naively 5-8 years to profitability. The main risk to nuclear plant building is overuns of the reactor and problems with commissioning. If all your doing is hooking up pipes to heat exchangers then that simplifies significantly the building of a plant.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      > at £120(current price is £240) £120/MWh is a rather terrible price. That's basically Hinkley Point C level rate, which is something many grid operators would never accept. So much for "export potential"?
      - KaiserPro 5y ago
        You're damn right its shit. Hinkley was bollocks because the strike price was that high. If we don't agree to stupid strike prices (ie £60 per mwh) then its not a disaster. Even at £60 profitability is inside 12 years. Unless we start building generation capacity, then the wholesale price will go up as time goes on. Or as new renewable come on line, we'll get even more price fluctuations. it doesn't take many of these to even out pricing.
        pydry 5y ago
        If the strike price wasnt that high it never would have been financed.
        KaiserPro 5y ago
        Because of the way that the finance was structured. from my understanding it was because the government didn't want to shoulder any risk (or reward) from this.
        pydry 5y ago
        Someone has to subsidize nuclear or it never gets built. In the UK ended up being ratepayers. In a way it's better that the costs arent disguised.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    That actually seems reasonable for the cost of a power station. The problem recently is that privatized energy operators have a hard time securing financing in the orders of tens of billions. Wind, solar and gas may have higher per-unit costs but you can actually build one for under a billion dollars, and in the case of rooftop solar we are talking tens of thousands of dollars, and it is a lot easier to secure loans of that size. Tens of billions of dollars is basically reserved for the bond markets and state actors.
    - AdamN 5y ago
      There's also the lifecycle cost of the fuel and the power station itself to account for. This is higher for nuclear than for solar/wind.
      - rmbyrro 5y ago
        I would expect lifecycle costs to be largely underestimated for solar. Regulations are way more relaxed to dispose panels in comparison to nuclear waste, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, panel disposal is still expensive, we're just leaving the bill for future generations, just like with nuclear, unfortunately...
        pfdietz 5y ago
        A PV module has a weight of about 0.05 kg/W. If it costs $0.20/W, that's $4000/tonne. The disposal cost of waste in a landfill in the US is about $60/tonne. So, even with no recycling at all, the cost of landfilling old PV modules is not a significant part of the cost of PV here. And much of the cost of PV installations (the steel mountings and earth anchors, the aluminum frames of the modules, the glass covers) is highly recyclable.
        rmbyrro 5y ago
        Is this $60 disposal sustainable? I mean, if we're concerned about using a renewable energy source, shouldn't we be concerned that its materials are also renewable? How much does it cost to renew that $4000/kg solar panel so that it can continue to be used? I bet renewing will cost more than $4000/kg. If that's true, we're taking a 50-75% discount on the expense of future generations, as I said. Solar is more expensive than we are lead to think it is. This should be accounted in decision and policy making. Just my person opinion.
  - benlumen 5y ago
    They spent 100 billion pounds on lateral flow tests alone. I enjoyed the free test kits as much as everyone else, but think of the infrastructure that could have paid for.
    - tblt 5y ago
      I thought it was £50bn and was the total allocated budget of NHS Test & Trace to include PCR testing and contract tracing, as well as LFT distribution etc. It has not been spent yet and with the current rolling back of testing the final cost should (hopefully) be well under that figure. I still agree it's a gargantuan sum that could have been spent in many other important areas, but pandemic response is important too.
- adrianN 5y ago
  That seems to be an okayish price for the power generated. Wind power costs about $1.5 per W installed and has a capacity factor of around 1/3, this costs around $5/W. So this reactor costs about as much to build as wind power. For wind of course you ignore storage costs, and for nuclear you ignore fuel and waste disposal related costs. I'm not sure that costing around as much as wind power will be a sufficiently strong argument to sway public opinion on the construction of nuclear power plants.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  For comparison, the Hickley Point plant current being built in the UK spans approximately 380 football fields and will cost $30B. These are massive industrial complexes + giant cooling towers. This single-building reactor does look “mini” compared to that. It also seems to be more cost-effective, 12 of them would generate almost double the 3GW of that one plant.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
That’s not even midi in my book.
fortysixdegrees 5y ago
Really, they top out at 1200MW and not 1210MW?! Come on now
- willis936 5y ago
  EPRs are 1750 MWe (4950 MWth).
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Are these going to produce 470MW?! A 1MW wind turbine costs ~$4M and is competitive with oil/gas. At $2.4Bn - anything above 400+ megawatts sounds like a great deal - since you don't have to worry about the wind blowing or the sun shining. If these can produce 470MW at that price - what has been the hold up?!
- dijit 5y ago
  1) People are skittish on Nuclear because of the perceived danger. 2) We still can't solve the waste problem, the best we have is putting it underground in Finland. I disagree with these opinions, since the waste is minuscule for the amount of power generated. (1 cubic centimeter of uranium per million homes per day or so) and coal is killing more than nuclear ever will.. but, hey ho.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Coal is a bit of a red herring in the UK as we don’t burn much of it anymore.
    - infinityio 5y ago
      To be fair, even oil and gas are orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear per unit energy
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    The French seem to have solved the waste problem. And either way, at least it's less urgent than the climate one
    - Balero 5y ago
      Could you please elaborate or provide some further reading for the French solution?
      - diordiderot 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
Right. It's comparable in power to Fukushima Unit 1. Is there any good info about this? Why is it smaller? Do they claim it doesn't need a containment vessel? NuScale and some others have tried that. RR has a brochure, which is all about "creates jobs", not how it works.
- blitzar 5y ago
  > Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round That buys jobs not products. Its still vapourware - barely a drawing on a piece of paper. 5 years to approve gives plenty of time to turn an idea into an actual design.
wdb 5y ago
In the Netherlands they had plans for neighbourhood level nuclear-based power plant

moralestapia 5y ago

More specs: Land footprint: ~2 football pitches [1] Cost: ~2.4 billion USD [2] 1:https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor... 2:https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secures-funding-for-SMR-deployment#:~:text=The%20target%20cost%20for%20each,operated%20by%20power%20generation%20companies https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secu....

philipkglass 5y ago
The second article says "The target cost for each station is GBP1.8 billion (USD2.4 billion) by the time five have been built, with further savings possible." This indicates that cost per station could be significantly higher before 5 of them have been built. It's reasonable to believe that doggedly continuing to build more of them will bring costs down eventually, but if early units have high costs (or worse, if build progress falls behind schedule) then it could be difficult to maintain support for building more of them.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I imagine given that the whole point of these small units is batch manufacturing that several would be ordered together.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Also that building multiple facilities at once will streamline regulations and building codes. What killed the large nuclear reactors was the need for so many "one-off" design changes to accommodate safety regulations, which would vary by site. This means that economies of scale are lost when compared to gas power stations, because every nuclear reactor was essentially unique.
    - Manuel_D 5y ago
      There were plenty of repeated design that started during the 1960s and 70s. Accordingly, costs were considerably lower, often in the range 1 to 2 billion USD per GW.
      - mywittyname 5y ago
        After this period, costs to build nuclear power plants skyrocketed. When the reasons behind these escalating costs were studied in depth, it was found to be due to the fact that plants lack standardization across the board, leading to ballooning engineering and labor costs as designs are reworked in site-specific ways: > Overall, a common theme emerging from this analysis is the lack of anticipation in engineering models of the cost-increasing contributions of soft technology external to standard reactor hardware, in response to changing regulations and other factors such as variable project-specific conditions. Prospective modeling shows the potentially transformative effect of rethinking engineering design to adapt to these factors, for example through reduced commodity usage and the automation of some construction processes. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS254243512030458X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r...
- moralestapia 5y ago
  I could imagine they already have contracts in place, even at a higher price tag. It's Rolls-Royce after all, also, they mention they have some MoUs in place. (This is not based on any facts, it's just a moonshot) If they manage to drive cost down to 1/10th of that, while actually delivering and showing their design is safe (which I think it is), this could be a global energy game changer. The world's total energy consumption from "dirty" sources is ~140,000TWh, one of these SMRs could plausibly produce 3TWh/year, so about ~45k would be needed to match our current energy demands. The world is not going to switch to 100% of these, obviously, but nonetheless their market is HUGE (trillions!).
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  at £120(current price is £240) per mwhr that's still £430 million a year income. With a 60 year lifespan, naively 5-8 years to profitability. The main risk to nuclear plant building is overuns of the reactor and problems with commissioning. If all your doing is hooking up pipes to heat exchangers then that simplifies significantly the building of a plant.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    > at £120(current price is £240) £120/MWh is a rather terrible price. That's basically Hinkley Point C level rate, which is something many grid operators would never accept. So much for "export potential"?
    - KaiserPro 5y ago
      You're damn right its shit. Hinkley was bollocks because the strike price was that high. If we don't agree to stupid strike prices (ie £60 per mwh) then its not a disaster. Even at £60 profitability is inside 12 years. Unless we start building generation capacity, then the wholesale price will go up as time goes on. Or as new renewable come on line, we'll get even more price fluctuations. it doesn't take many of these to even out pricing.
      - pydry 5y ago
        If the strike price wasnt that high it never would have been financed.
        KaiserPro 5y ago
        Because of the way that the finance was structured. from my understanding it was because the government didn't want to shoulder any risk (or reward) from this.
        pydry 5y ago
        Someone has to subsidize nuclear or it never gets built. In the UK ended up being ratepayers. In a way it's better that the costs arent disguised.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  That actually seems reasonable for the cost of a power station. The problem recently is that privatized energy operators have a hard time securing financing in the orders of tens of billions. Wind, solar and gas may have higher per-unit costs but you can actually build one for under a billion dollars, and in the case of rooftop solar we are talking tens of thousands of dollars, and it is a lot easier to secure loans of that size. Tens of billions of dollars is basically reserved for the bond markets and state actors.
  - AdamN 5y ago
    There's also the lifecycle cost of the fuel and the power station itself to account for. This is higher for nuclear than for solar/wind.
    - rmbyrro 5y ago
      I would expect lifecycle costs to be largely underestimated for solar. Regulations are way more relaxed to dispose panels in comparison to nuclear waste, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, panel disposal is still expensive, we're just leaving the bill for future generations, just like with nuclear, unfortunately...
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        A PV module has a weight of about 0.05 kg/W. If it costs $0.20/W, that's $4000/tonne. The disposal cost of waste in a landfill in the US is about $60/tonne. So, even with no recycling at all, the cost of landfilling old PV modules is not a significant part of the cost of PV here. And much of the cost of PV installations (the steel mountings and earth anchors, the aluminum frames of the modules, the glass covers) is highly recyclable.
        rmbyrro 5y ago
        Is this $60 disposal sustainable? I mean, if we're concerned about using a renewable energy source, shouldn't we be concerned that its materials are also renewable? How much does it cost to renew that $4000/kg solar panel so that it can continue to be used? I bet renewing will cost more than $4000/kg. If that's true, we're taking a 50-75% discount on the expense of future generations, as I said. Solar is more expensive than we are lead to think it is. This should be accounted in decision and policy making. Just my person opinion.
- benlumen 5y ago
  They spent 100 billion pounds on lateral flow tests alone. I enjoyed the free test kits as much as everyone else, but think of the infrastructure that could have paid for.
  - tblt 5y ago
    I thought it was £50bn and was the total allocated budget of NHS Test & Trace to include PCR testing and contract tracing, as well as LFT distribution etc. It has not been spent yet and with the current rolling back of testing the final cost should (hopefully) be well under that figure. I still agree it's a gargantuan sum that could have been spent in many other important areas, but pandemic response is important too.
adrianN 5y ago
That seems to be an okayish price for the power generated. Wind power costs about $1.5 per W installed and has a capacity factor of around 1/3, this costs around $5/W. So this reactor costs about as much to build as wind power. For wind of course you ignore storage costs, and for nuclear you ignore fuel and waste disposal related costs. I'm not sure that costing around as much as wind power will be a sufficiently strong argument to sway public opinion on the construction of nuclear power plants.
ricardobeat 5y ago
For comparison, the Hickley Point plant current being built in the UK spans approximately 380 football fields and will cost $30B. These are massive industrial complexes + giant cooling towers. This single-building reactor does look “mini” compared to that. It also seems to be more cost-effective, 12 of them would generate almost double the 3GW of that one plant.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

That’s not even midi in my book.

fortysixdegrees 5y ago

Really, they top out at 1200MW and not 1210MW?! Come on now

willis936 5y ago
EPRs are 1750 MWe (4950 MWth).

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

Are these going to produce 470MW?! A 1MW wind turbine costs ~$4M and is competitive with oil/gas. At $2.4Bn - anything above 400+ megawatts sounds like a great deal - since you don't have to worry about the wind blowing or the sun shining. If these can produce 470MW at that price - what has been the hold up?!

dijit 5y ago
1) People are skittish on Nuclear because of the perceived danger. 2) We still can't solve the waste problem, the best we have is putting it underground in Finland. I disagree with these opinions, since the waste is minuscule for the amount of power generated. (1 cubic centimeter of uranium per million homes per day or so) and coal is killing more than nuclear ever will.. but, hey ho.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Coal is a bit of a red herring in the UK as we don’t burn much of it anymore.
  - infinityio 5y ago
    To be fair, even oil and gas are orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear per unit energy
- diordiderot 5y ago
  The French seem to have solved the waste problem. And either way, at least it's less urgent than the climate one
  - Balero 5y ago
    Could you please elaborate or provide some further reading for the French solution?
    - diordiderot 5y ago

Animats 5y ago

Right. It's comparable in power to Fukushima Unit 1. Is there any good info about this? Why is it smaller? Do they claim it doesn't need a containment vessel? NuScale and some others have tried that. RR has a brochure, which is all about "creates jobs", not how it works.

blitzar 5y ago
> Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round That buys jobs not products. Its still vapourware - barely a drawing on a piece of paper. 5 years to approve gives plenty of time to turn an idea into an actual design.

wdb 5y ago

In the Netherlands they had plans for neighbourhood level nuclear-based power plant