Revolutionary Small Reactors Are On Their Way
Miniaturized fission plants are smaller, safer, cheaper, and now far closer to being a reality.
This September the design for a Small Modular Reactor (SMR), designed by NuScale Power, gained approval from the federal government. It’s the first such reactor to be approved, ever. Small reactors like NuScale’s offer the possibility of fundamentally changing the economics of nuclear power.
While fission plants pay off in the long run, they have immense upfront costs that other energy sources just don’t experience on the same scale. Today, starting a commercial fission plant is something of an Odyssean task requiring decades of paperwork, miles of land, and billions in investment. These smaller reactors could change all of that.
“They can be factory-built and assembled on site much faster than these larger gigawatt-scale reactors. And so part of what we have seen with the cost overrun and the schedule delays… will not be experienced with SMR or microreactor deployment,” Baranwal said.
The mass-produced nature of these small reactors creates a wallet of benefits. The plants can be built far more cheaply while retaining the same safety guardrails of a larger plant. Once installed, each 100-megawatt plant would cost around $500 million to construct but generate $1.3 billion in sales and create 7,000 permanent jobs, according to a study on the design.
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