"SMRs are no longer an abstract concept," Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff, a leading nuclear advocate who has the ear of the Biden administration, insisted. "They are real and they are ready for deployment thanks to the hard work of NuScale, the university community, our national labs, industry partners, and the NRC. This is innovation at its finest and we are just getting started here in the U.S.!"
A Risky (and Expensive) Business
Even though Huff claims that SMRs are "ready for deployment," that's hardly the case. NuScale's initial SMR design, under development in Idaho, won't actually be operable until at least 2029 after clearing more NRC regulatory hurdles. The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are already calling for fossil-fuel use to be cut by two-thirds over the next 10 years to transition away from carbon-intensive energy, a schedule that, if kept, such small reactors won't be able to speed up.
And keep in mind that the seemingly prohibitive costs of the SMRs are a distinct problem. NuScale's original estimate of $55-$58 per megawatt-hour for a proposed project in Utah -- already higher than wind and solar which come in at around $50 per megawatt-hour -- has recently skyrocketed to $89 per megawatt-hour. And that's after a $4 billion investment in such energy by U.S. taxpayers, which will cover 43% of the cost of the construction of such plants. This is based on strikingly rosy, if not unrealistic, projections. After all, nuclear power in the U.S. currently averages around $373 per megawatt-hour.
And as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis put it:
"[N]o one should fool themselves into believing this will be the last cost increase for the NuScale/UAMPS SMR. The project still needs to go through additional design, licensing by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, construction, and pre-operational testing. The experience of other reactors has repeatedly shown that further significant cost increases and substantial schedule delays should be anticipated at any stages of project development."
Here in the Pacific Northwest, NuScale faces an additional obstacle that couldn't be more important: What will it do with all the noxious waste such SMRs are certain to produce? In 1980, Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 7, a landmark ballot initiative that halted the construction of new nuclear power plants until the federal government established a permanent site to store spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. Also included in Measure 7 was a provision that made all new Oregon nuclear plants subject to voter approval. Forty-three years later, no such repository for nuclear waste exists anywhere in the United States, which has prompted corporate lobbyists for the nuclear industry to push several bills that would essentially repeal that Oregon law.
NuScale, no fan of Measure 7, has decided to circumvent it by building its SMRs across the Columbia River in Washington, a state with fewer restrictions. There, Clark County is, in its own fashion, beckoning the industry by putting $200,000 into a feasibility study to see if SMRs could "benefit the region." There's another reason NuScale is eyeing the Columbia River corridor: its plants will need water. Like all commercial nuclear facilities, SMRs must be kept cool so they don't overheat and melt down, creating little Chernobyls. In fact, being "light-water" reactors, the company's SMRs will require a continuous water supply to operate correctly.
Like other nuclear reactors, SMRs will utilize fission to make heat, which in turn will be used to generate electricity. In the process, they will also produce a striking amount of waste, which may be even more challenging to deal with than the waste from traditional reactors. At the moment, NuScale hopes to store the nasty stuff alongside the gunk that the Trojan Nuclear Plant produces in big dry casks by the Columbia River in Oregon, near the Pacific Ocean.
As with all the waste housed at various nuclear sites nationwide, Trojan's casks are anything but a permanent solution to the problem of such waste. After all, plutonium garbage will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Typically enough, even though it's no longer operating, Trojan still remains a significant risk as it sits near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where a "megathrust" earthquake is expected someday to violently shake the region and drown it in a gigantic flood of seawater. If that were to happen, much of Oregon's coastline would be devastated, including the casks holding Trojan's deadly rubbish. The last big quake of this sort hit the area more than 300 years ago, but it's just a matter of time before another Big One strikes -- undoubtedly, while the radioactive waste in those dry casks is still life-threatening.
Nuclear expert M. V. Ramana, a soft-spoken but authoritative voice in Jan Haaken's Atomic Bamboozle documentary, put it this way to me:
"The industry's plans for SMR waste are no different from their plans for radioactive waste from older reactors, which is to say that they want to find some suitable location and a community that is willing to accept the risk of future contamination and bury the waste underground.
"But there is a catch [with SMR's waste]. Some of these proposed SMR designs use fuel with materials that are chemically difficult to deal with. The sodium-cooled reactor design proposed by Bill Gates would have to figure out how to manage the sodium. Because sodium does not behave well in the presence of water and all repositories face the possibility of water seeping into them, the radioactive waste generated by such designs would have to be processed to remove the sodium. This is unlike the fleet of reactors [currently in operation]."
Other troubles exist, too, explains Ramana. One, in particular, is deeply concerning: the waste from SMRs, like the waste produced in all nuclear plants, could lead to the proliferation of yet more atomic weaponry.
Nuclear Hot Links
As the pro-military Atlantic Council explained in a 2019 report on the deep ties between nuclear power and nuclear weapons in this country:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
