The Nuclear Fallacy: Why Small Modular Reactors Can’t Compete With Renewable Energy

Small modular reactors are the nuclear industry’s next big hope, because no government can gain a mandate to build dozens of GW-scale reactors any more. They keep looking at examples like Hinkley, Flamanville, and other EPR sites, the close to a trillion USD impacts to Japan’s economy due to Fukushima, and the mounting price tags and durations of nuclear decommissioning, and then look at wind and solar’s proven reliability and low prices and having trouble, even in the most nuclear-committed countries, gaining sufficient political support for what works. And so the occasional reactor that gets green lit is inevitably a failed and troubled project, resulting in very high wholesale cost electricity.

The promise of SMRs is that they will be standardized, smaller reactors that can be manufactured in central locations, shipped to sites, and assembled on site. No bespoke engineering. This has some merit, but as noted, it was mostly the promise of the AP1000 as well. The only actually different idea is that they’ll be much smaller per reactor than the AP1000, from 50-300 MW instead of 1000 MW.

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