The China Nuclear Energy Association recently announced the world’s first operating SMR, now that the China Huaneng Group Co.’s 200-megawatt Unit 1 reactor at Shidao Bay is feeding power to the grid in Shandong province, using helium instead of water to produce power.
While this news is very exciting, SMRs are not likely to contribute meaningful amounts of carbon-free power for another decade.
Less newsworthy technological advances are making a critical immediate difference and have been doing so over the last two decades: namely, nuclear power plant life extensions and power uprates.
As shown in Figure 1, since 2001 global net capacity has increased from 352.72 GWe1 to 392.61 GWe, an 11% increase, while the number of operational nuclear power plants has not increased significantly .
173 MWe represents enough electricity to power an estimated 80,000 households in New England for one year.3 Located outside the city of Oswego, NY, on the shores of Lake Ontario, the Nine Mile Point Unit 2 reactor began operations in 1988, while Unit 1 began operations in 1969 and is the oldest operating reactor in the U.S.
The tidy acronym SMR makes it feel as if small modular reactors are a uniform category, but there’s an enormous range of designs in development for commercial applications — 70 different designs as of 2020.
The SMR solution is likely to prove revolutionary in efforts toward greener grids and universal energy access — but we need to be realistic and realize that it will take some time.
With sufficient investment, utilities can extend the safe working life of their installed reactors from the original 40 years up to at least 50 years and even 80 years in many cases, and potentially even longer.
The instrumentation and control systems in the plant will at some point be updated to digital versions since most were installed in analog form in the 1970s or 1980s.
Only the reactor pressure vessel, which houses the core itself, is not considered replaceable because it is such an enormous component forged out of a single piece of the highest quality steel.
Recall that the economics of nuclear power are about the depreciation of capital investments in the initial contraction because the fuel is such a small relative cost.
Upgrades and other life extensions also sidestep the political debates that plague new nuclear projects.
An uprate is any change that increases the power output of a machine or system.
The original generation of reactor designs turned out to have significant margin to work with — with advances in instrumentation and measuring equipment, many plants have been able to increase the reactor power output while staying well within conservative safety limits.
Most reactors need to replace these pieces of equipment towards the end of the 40-year operating license anyway, which paves the way for significant life extensions on top of the added electrical output.
The value is even higher when we factor in the political “investment” and licensing costs required to bring a new nuclear reactor to life — it’s far more efficient to boost capacity through uprates.
Extensions are just as valuable, though less quantifiable in apples-to-apples terms. The benefit of extended capacity multiplies every additional year of operation — especially in terms of the environmental impact.
This funding is earmarked for nuclear plants that are losing money and would otherwise retire, and it prioritizes those using domestically produced fuel, according to the Department of Energy .
A potential game changer is a national or global carbon credit system that overnight would make any operating nuclear power station into a potential gold mine.