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Power United Kingdom

Rolls-Royce Expects UK Approval For Small Nuclear Reactors By Mid-2024 (theguardian.com) 261

Posted by BeauHD from the energy-of-the-future dept.
Rolls-Royce is to start building parts for its small modular nuclear reactors in anticipation of receiving regulatory approval from the British government by 2024, one of its directors has said. The Guardian reports: Paul Stein, the chairman of Rolls-Royce SMR, a subsidiary of the FTSE 100 engineering company, said he hoped to be providing power to the UK's national grid by 2029. Speaking to Reuters in an interview conducted virtually, Stein said the regulatory "process has been kicked off, and will likely be complete in the middle of 2024. We are trying to work with the UK government, and others to get going now placing orders, so we can get power on grid by 2029."

Small modular reactors (SMRs) are seen by their proponents as a way to build nuclear power plants in factories, a method that could be cheaper and quicker than traditional designs. The technology, based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, is seen by Rolls-Royce as a potential earner far beyond any previous business such as jet engines or diesel motors. The government under Boris Johnson put nuclear power at the centre of its energy strategy announced earlier this month, in response to climate concerns and a desire to ditch Russian gas. SMRs are expected to play an important role in an expansion of nuclear to supply a quarter of the UK's energy needs. Lower costs would be crucial in justifying the nuclear push, given that onshore wind is seen as much cheaper and quicker to install.
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Rolls-Royce Expects UK Approval For Small Nuclear Reactors By Mid-2024 More

Rolls-Royce Expects UK Approval For Small Nuclear Reactors By Mid-2024

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  • Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @09:59PM (#62460800)
    In the US, this would take ~25+ years for approval.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      SMRs have been significantly funded by the USA in the past fifteen years, so I see no reason why approvals for builds shouldn't come. However, SMRs are less efficient in terms of power:uranium usage, so that might be a factor in the USA which is for some reason not a concern in the UK.
    • It still seems like a long time, especially since RR has already been making these things for submarines. Why does it take two years to make sure they work on land as well as on/in water?

      • Because they are not the same as in submarines.
        Submarine and Carrier reactors run on very high enriched uranium. That is a huge difference.

  • Economics? (Score:3)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @10:46PM (#62460864)

    The article is little more than a powerpoint slide, and leaves me with the following questions:

    How much power does one of their mini reactors output?

    How much do they cost to purchase?

    How much do they cost to operate?

    Without any of that there is no way to judge if this is a worthwhile effort or not.

    • Re:Economics? (Score:5, Informative)

      by davide marney ( 231845 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @11:06PM (#62460890) Journal

      470MW, 1/10th the footprint of a traditional reactor site, factory-built components trucked to site, 60 years of continuous baseload power for 1 million homes.

    • Re:Economics? (Score:4, Informative)

      by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @11:15PM (#62460902)
      Rolls Royce SMR claims it can build these 470MWe reactors for 2-4B pounds. So, double that, and maybe double it again for the first couple plants. It is a MWR design, so should have similar operational costs as a traditional reactor, scaled down for size. Here's some technical specs: https://aris.iaea.org/PDF/UK-S... [iaea.org]

      • Re:Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by davide marney ( 231845 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @11:43PM (#62460926) Journal

        So assuming a cost over-run of 400% (the average in the US, at least) and an annual operational cost of 2% of the original capital cost, that's (gets out calculator) ...

        Cost: £16B capital cost + ((2% of £16B = £320M) * 60 years) = £35B lifetime cost
        Price: £35B total / 1M homes / 60 years = £583 per home, per year (roughly $720 in USD)

        And that's assuming no economics of scale or reductions due to automation which isn't really fair in this case, since the design is modular and the assembly is factory-built. So yeah, those are perfectly rational back-of-the-envelope numbers. You'd have to be a pretty bad business person to not be able to turn that for a profit.

        • A nice follow-on calculation is cost per kWh.

          Assuming a capacity factor of 0.9 over the 60 year plant lifetime, this is:

          £35bn / (60 years * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 470MW * 0.9) = £0.157/kWh

          In comparison, the strike price agreed for the new nuclear power station currently under construction in the UK (Hinkley C), was £89.50/MWh, or £0.0895/kWh.

          This makes the SMRs almost twice the price, assuming all the earlier assumptions about cost-overruns hold true. If Rolls Royce produce

          • Re: Economics? (Score:5, Informative)

            by q_e_t ( 5104099 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @05:13AM (#62461316)
            0.04/kWh is around the strike price of current offshore wind, roughly, IIRC. The costs for wind are falling, but there's also a value in 'always in' power. The 'powers X homes' isn't a useful measure, though. It would be better phrased as 'could power X homes when there is no wind' or 'provides power to Y hospitals' that reflects the nature of it as an underpinning source of power. In price terms, it might also be worth comparing it against wind with a level of storage. At that point, even with wind power cost reduction and some overrun in costs of the SMRs it might still be useful as part of an overall energy mix. There will end up being a limit to deployment from the quality and cost of uranium and the need to import it, but the latest government white paper seems to suggest twice the capacity from nuclear longer term, but in the context of greater demand for electricity, so probably no greater a proportion of the overall mix then now, and quite possibly a smaller proportion depending on the time window.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The problem is that the energy produced is more expensive than rival sources like wind. We have already had instances where the wholesale cost of electricity goes negative due to nuclear power not being able to ramp down during periods of high wind and low demand.

          I imagine these will come with the usual subsidies. Free insurance, and a guaranteed price for any electricity generated. For comparison, Hinkley Point C is getting £106/MWh guaranteed, with inflationary increases every year. Wind farms

    • Re:Economics? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by feedayeen ( 1322473 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @11:28PM (#62460912)
      They're trying to take advantage of the economics of scale. Larger plants are so expensive in no small part because nearly every component is a one-off build with very few opportunities reuse the prior manufacturing efforts in later builds. At least this aspect has a proven record but the gains here won't be visible for the first few reactors, the theory is that the 100th is a whole lot cheaper with this production method.
      • I'd rather see a modest diversity of manufacture, say three or so, as if there is a systematic fault in the design or manufacture, you don't want to have to mothball the entire fleet of reactors for repair. And that comes down to a diversity of components where possible - e. g., steel sourced from different foundries. That cuts against economies of scale but is useful in terms of hedging. If EDF, Siemens, ABB, etc., also for involved in SMRs then there is, or would have been, an opportunity for Pan-european

      • Re: Economics? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Renaissance Slacker ( 1767954 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @07:16AM (#62461416)
        FWIU until recently in the US every reactor was basically built to a unique design, to your point. All of Franceâ(TM)s units are basically identical, and they have a team of expert troubleshooters that can be quickly helicoptered to any unit experiencing problems. The uniformity of factory-built units could be a big advantage.

      • They're trying to take advantage of the economics of scale.

        The problem with that idea is that the economies of scale run the other direction in the case of nuclear reactors. Specifically, there are per-unit costs when it comes to inspection, security, and decommissioning in particular which make small reactors insensible. A lot of those costs are regulatory, which sounds onerous until you remember we're dealing with nuclear power and if you get it wrong you can ruin large areas for human use for long periods. And smaller reactors are more prone to be sited in locat

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by vivian ( 156520 )

      You left out another vital question. What do they cost to decommission?
      The UK is facing a a £7.5 billion bill to decommission 20 of it's defunct nuclear subs.

      https://www.chemistryworld.com... [chemistryworld.com]

      That would buy a hell of a lot of solar, batteries and wind turbines.

  • Rolls Royce is about to eat our lunch (Score:5, Insightful)

    by atomicalgebra ( 4566883 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @11:25PM (#62460910)
    We could have built fleets of SMR's already, but antinuclear regulations have slowed us. NuScale had to submit 2 million pages for their NRC review. They could have built the reactor already.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      They can have it. The economics in the US makes nuclear reactors non competitive. The industry has had 70 years to show it build at original estimates and supply energy at a reasonable cost. Instead in multiple jurisdictions rate payers are seeing higher bills for energy they never receive veto put in bluntly, in the US nuclear is a scam to funnel public funds to private pockets

      For some countries with limited resources, like Britain, nuclear is competitive. They literally have to ship trees from the ameri

      • The economics in the US makes nuclear reactors non competitive. The industry has had 70 years to show it build at original estimates and supply energy at a reasonable cost. Instead in multiple jurisdictions rate payers are seeing higher bills for energy they never receive veto put in bluntly, in the US nuclear is a scam to funnel public funds to private pockets

        By this same thinking, history has shown the economics in the US makes urban and inter-city mass transit non-competitive. It's not a matter of regulations, government planning and strategy, and competition (true or otherwise) from competing industries. So, the US should stop all efforts at continuing the failed mass transit experiment.

      • For some countries with limited resources, like Britain, nuclear is competitive [...] in the US we have tons of natural gas and lots of land for wind and solar.

        In England and also in Scotland they have some of the world's most ideal offshore wind conditions for power generation, and are also near enough to other nations that they could be supplying their excess to others. They don't need nukes, they need offshore wind.

  • Premium reactors (Score:3)

    by jargonburn ( 1950578 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @11:44PM (#62460930)
    Can't wait for the Chinese knockoffs ;-)

  • SMR is a dead end design (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jodka ( 520060 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @02:19AM (#62461102)

    Water-cooled SMRs like that are looking like a dead-end because molten salt reactors are going to take over. Not take over only from SMRs and conventional reactors, but from coal, gas, petroleum, wind and solar.

    By the end of the decade we will see at least four experimental molten salt reactors come online. China just finished construction of the first molten salt reactor since the Oakridge thorium reactor was shut down in 1969. Elysium Industries and TerraPower should have working prototypes. Then between the remaining groups such as Seaborg, Copenhagen, ThorCon, Flibe and Moltex we should see at least one more. By the end of he following decade, 2040, the molten salt reactor construction boom will be well underway, hundreds will be coming online per year all over he the world.

    Really nothing else will be able to compete. Molten salt reactors can not blow up or leak. They are not a proliferation risk. They fully consume their fuel. They burn thorium, a plentiful mining waste material, spent fuel waste from conventional reactors, uranium or plutonium. Overall very safe, incredibly versatile, very cheap to fuel and operate, anti-polluting and inexpensive to manufacture measured as $/kW.

    Molten salt reactors should remain the dominant source of power on earth for centuries if not millennia. Really the only foreseeable significant potential competitors could be deep geothermal wells and fusion.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      By the end of the decade we will see at least four experimental molten salt reactors come online.

      Yes, experimental. And then a decade to work out how to produce them efficiently. And then a decade to scale up production. So they'll be ready for use in 25 years. That's far too late. If SMRs can be ready in 2024 then even it it's 'old technology' it's the far better option.

      • Your main point is correct, but it's worth noting that RR expects regulatory approval in mid 2024. There won't be reactors putting power on the grid until 2029 (if all goes to plan, and we all know it rarely does for these sorts of complex projects).
        • It's still potentially 2029 versus 2050 for first builds. If you are aiming for 2050 net zero then going with current designs now, even if better tech might be available 'soon' is the right decision. You can work on molten salt as an alternative from 2050, but from a decent position both with respect to carbon emissions, but also experience of manufacturing and operating SMRs where skills and experience are transferable to molten salt versions are appropriate, and quite a bit will be, even if not everything

  • Rolls Royce? Well... (Score:4, Funny)

    by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @02:19AM (#62461104)

    if they slap 12 cylinders on it and call it Merlin, you can count me in :-)

    On a more serious note, we as a society need to learn to differentiate between designs and designers/builders who perform at different levels; Rather than being hostile to all things nuclear, we need to say "no" to letting soviets build reactors without containment buildings, "maybe not" when a Japanese outfit proposes building one on a fault line on the shore of the ocean which gets frequent typhoons and tsunamis, but not to panic when the US Navy builds one or when a company like Rolls Royce does it with proper design, construction, and siting.

    • Piston engines - birds of prey. Jet engines - rivers. I'd suggest mountains for the SMRs, but you'd have to stretch the definition to 'also big hills' to be able to have more than two series based on UK mountains :).

    • I'm well known to prefer that we build none, but how about we always require best practices no matter who's building one?

  • Nobody seems to read any contracts in the UK before signing them.

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