Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

Obvious answer is to build them in the middle of big cities, where the demand is and where waste heat could be used for district heating rather than thrown away.

Tim

But not in the summer, when the river levels may also be low.

To some degree, the democracies investment in nuclear, is at present barely keeping pace with the retired equipment. Today at least, I would not say we are going crazy with the things. We could. But we aren't.

Say for example, I build a 300MW SMR for every 1GW regular reactor that just retired. I don't call that going crazy. I call that going backwards. But that seems to be one aspect of the plan, replacing a big thing, with one small thing, and not three small things.

I've seen no credible plan, or even a plan, to "do an SMR per year for the next 24 years". Nobody is showing that sort of commitment. We're doing one SMR, standing back and looking at it.

The closest we came to such a plan, was a Chinese five year plan to build 50 reactors, which was canceled and replaced with coal. There would be a skills shortage, to do that, and you'd have reactors going over the horizon, on rickety stilts. They did the maths and the plan came up short.

The Tech Bro are intent on building power stations, but they don't know what they're doing, and when the construction company says "we want real money and not payment in NVidia shares", the game is up. When the bubble bursts, there will be large piles of planning paper for sale, one-side-used. You cannot use a Tech Bro plan, as an attempt to plan for the whole society. The Tech Bro plans are filled with "fake money".

Grid systems, are surprisingly resistant to build-out on capacity. It's almost as if they've been holding a financing bag from a previous jerking-around. You can see if they'd actually planned for a BEV future, they would have been sorely disappointed. It's petrol for the win, forever.

"nuclear is a technology who's time has been"

To say this, means you mis-understand something. The job of the grid, is to make your lights work, 100% of the time. Not 75% of the time or 85% of the time. All the time.

They have a history of doing "whatever it takes" to meet that. They work within the confines of their cash flow. Politicians may interfere in a destructive way, with their plans, but as long as no one interferes, they will try to find a way forward. If they have to trade off building new grid structure to some obscure spot in the woods with windmills, if they have to foot the bill for battery banks to make wind and solar "dispatch-able", they will be trading that against the "awful" expense of nuclear.

One of our power companies here, is bankrolling a nuclear project, taking out a loan as they did forty or fifty years ago. They didn't go to government, with cap in hand. If the project goes well, we may yet see some government "interference", perhaps for a change in a positive direction. And that is how things get done, when politicians sit on their fat asses and do nothing. Someone recognizes a need and they fill it. And the power companies have been doing that, since they were invented by mill owners as a side business.

Paul

That is reasonable as SMR is a new technology, developmental. There are big question marks about the economy. The Rolls Royce SMR is a conservative design, with few apparent advantages. There are proposed SMRs that are much more innovative, but they are in development, experimental, not ready yet.

From my relatively ignorant perspective, it appears politicians are seizing on SMR tech because it gives the public perception of them implementing a sexy new solution without them having to really commit to anything.

I suspect a nationwide scheme of building many AP1000 type reactors would be economically better.

I worked in tech skill shortage industry. Big companies would pour money into starting up new departments. Initially it would be an absolute shower, but eventually it would get there.

Yep, but some people will do it right and get rich. It is a high risk business, hopefully high reward, but with a fear of political interference.

The problem is that it is hard to do small scale. The cost of reactors is too high. The economy only comes at the large scale. Traditionally, that has been the role of governments. The allure of SMR is that it is smaller scale allowing non government level innovation, it is just not ready yet.

I can just see the Urban Chatterati going for that one...

Problem is, the land is too expensive.

Now if they put it on the basement of a block of luxury flats...

Gosh That's a fair bit less efficient than I thought.

Still plenty to heat a small village though or run some nice greenhouses...

...or make for an all year round outdoor pool!

Its more a question of not oiverheating the river and making the fish all sweaty...

South East London Combined Heat and Power. Inner London, burns waste, generates electricity, and provides district heating. They have been extending the district heating bit over the last few months. You can see it from the railway as you go into London Bridge.

The Wylfa plan is to build 3 x SMR to replace the long shut down MAGNOX reactor. It will generate more than the old one did.

Once the government supports nuclear power, people will be rushing to build it.

Their have been issues with the regulators demanding unlimited third party insurance and premiums too high to pay with the govern,meant unwilling to underwrite some hypothetical disaster or even guarantee that they wont force a shutdown on running plant as Germany did planning authorities basically in the pocket of renewable interests opposing it, political dithering over waste disposal . Plus regulatory ratcheting that made a conventional power plant a 15 year box ticking excercise instead of a 5 year concrete and steel one

RR reckons that all other things being equal, they can spit out 6 reactors a year IIRC. That's 2.8GW of new plant every year.

My time in the private finance suggests that SMRs would be a hugely attractive investment to e.g. pension funds and other sources of large capital. But that is contingent on the government contracting not to f*ck things up for the investors and operators.

Dunno what that is, There isn't that much skill in building a reactor when the smart stuff is all getting delivered on a lorry with a crane. Think installing a central heating boiuler with an unsulally dilgent building inspector...

Again no idea what you are talking about

The problem is simply that the politicians and bureaucrats and all the NIMBY groups have been well paid to oppose nuclear in every possible way.

Under the promise that 'renewables can do the job' Which was a lie from the start.

Now people are realizing that renewables are f****ng expensive and cant do the job either, the wins of change are blowing in different directions

Ta. That's a lot! I was imagining that "small" meant they could be put almost anywhere.

Based on dT = P / (Ms) where dT is temp rise in K, P is power in W, M is mass flow in kg/s and s is specific heat of water (4200 J/kgK)

M = P / (dT * s) [1]

for P = 888,000,000 W and dT = say a 10K rise then M ~= 20,000 kg/s.

That's 20 m^3/s flow, which is larger than the average flow for any river around here (in the middle of the country, MK).

So I assume that, though these are "small", they still need to be sited near major rivers or coasts?

nib

They d9ont have to stump up money. That's the thing. No subsidies that actually cost anything anyway, just changes to planning guidelines to allow these to vbe built, and to sort out waste disposal. And a commitment not to pull the rug from out under them and limit liability to say £100bn

Not really. The problem boils down to on-site construction with every site having to be individually approved at every level, or factory made type approval where 90-% of the critical stuff is pre approved, Economise of scale.

If it were a simple matter of concrete and steel and labour, sure AP1000 cheaper.

But it isn't. It;s all about the paperwork. well over 80% of the cost is as a result of having to wait for paperwork to be signed off.

The UK regulator was all set to streamline the regulations after Brexit but gummint said 'no: we will stay in step with Euratom'

Reform would probably sort *that* one out.

RR says each SMR unit will fit within a site 'canopy' measuring 5.3 acres

RR are at the high end of SMR, very similar to Magnox and AGR, and planned to be coastal. 3 SMRs is closer to the size of Wales rather than Olympic swimming pool for heat use.

They did a lot of that in Copenhagen. The renewable people complained it would cut into their profits

Not necessarily. Many CCGT plants just have internal or small cooling towers. It is cheaper though to stick them (SMR etc) on the coast.

And there are less neighbours to complain :-)

Which is "just about anywhere".

A lot of Wylfa's power went to the aluminium works and the NW of England

- Chester and points North.

Cooling towers have been used extensively for nuclear power ion other countries. Sort of air cooled ultimately

But, so is the river Severn, and fish++ too.

what happens when all those Octopi that are stealing from the crab pots, or even an atlantic bluefin tuna (big as a car) gets sucked in ?.