Delbert reported in early 2021 that in American energy, bigger is no longer better. The future, experts say, looks like “multispeed” nuclear energy—a combination of traditional large plants and smaller, safer megawatt reactors (SMRs). “Until now, customers only had one choice for nuclear, and that was a gigawatt-sized power plant,” says Rita Baranwal, the assistant secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy. “Now, we’re talking about reactors at the megawatt scale that can flexibly meet a customer’s energy needs as demand grows.”
Baranwal says megawatt reactors (one megawatt powers about 650 homes) will be cheaper to build and operate, and could be sited anywhere in the world. A more context-sensitive, localized nuclear power industry—in which small towns, remote facilities, and big cities find nuclear solutions tailored to their needs—could replace a large swath of fossil fuel power stations, filling in the inert, resource-sucking downtimes left by renewables.
“If you look at current big reactors and where they’re being installed, they’re going into countries that have a need to decarbonize,” Westinghouse Electric Company CTO Ken Canavan says. Countries like China and Poland are “replacing multiple medium or large coal plants with single nuclear,” he says, and these countries have contexts where large nuclear plants are appropriate. “If you look at other countries that have smaller grids, they don’t have the capacity to put on a big nuclear plant.” That’s where reactors like the one at NuScale—just 65 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter—can be of service.
Canavan does hedge, however, to say traditional reactor concepts could make a comeback after tiny nuclear hits retail. He says tiny nuclear might disrupt nuclear energy beyond what we can project today, and in a future where more things will need electrical power (not the least of which will be your car) than ever, a “multispeed” or “multidimension” nuclear energy market is likely to emerge. Here, anyone wishing to replace a remote diesel microgrid can find a solution in nuclear, or a combination of nuclear and renewables.
For now, Oklo, USNC, and NuScale focus on small markets as their entry point because in the United States, large plants are either aging out or are too stigmatized to be replaced. Finding common but untapped use cases for tiny nuclear, like rural towns, will be key to reinvigorating interest in nuclear power technology, and finding ways to integrate nuclear alongside or into renewable-focused grids will be important to acclimating the world to nuclear. A 2020 University of Sussex study found that the development of large nuclear plants stanched wide portions of global renewable-energy development between 1990 and 2014, but another 2020 report on the near future of energy showed four separate scenarios that demonstrated runaway growth in renewables alongside modest growth of nuclear energy. We see these things as competitors; they could coexist.
By 2040, if these small reactor projects are successful, we could see a selection of plant sizes, technologies, and types of locations enter the American energy landscape. “If you look at the way everything is going, it’s about personalization,” Canavan says. “What’s that worth to us? The capacity [small reactors] offer, and the capability they provide, is just irreplaceable.”
[Also see: "Beyond Hydrocarbons ... The Rest of the Story": https://i2mconsultants.com/downloads/corp/BEYONDHYDROCARBONS-2020ExpandedIIRev.pdf
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