Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.

Nuclear fission is the answer.

Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.

Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant.

This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse gas emissions.

Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514

In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The UAE, land of oil and sun, now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).

Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. You don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet, and many people (Europeans, I'm looking at you) still fear it.

Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.

RR also has some SMRs in Poland:

* https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/press/polish-government-issu...

in addition to Poland's GEH’s BWRX-300 in collaboration with AtkinsRealis (who also do the CANDU designs):

* https://www.atkinsrealis.com/en/media/press-releases/2024/20...

* https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2024/0...

AIUI, Poland has a bunch of generation sites that were small/medium in size that were around former coal mines, and so a lot of the transmission infrastructure is already present. It's just that they can't go 'too big' in those places as they'd have to spend a lot more on grid upgrades instead of 'just' a 1:1 replacement with SMRs.

SMR's make absolutely no sense to me.

Any engineer knows that one-offs are way easier & cheaper to design & build than production-ready designs & the factory to build them. Building a prototype car is an undergrad project. Taking it to production costs billions. You need significant volume before factories make sense, and it's not clear that SMR's will cross that threshold.

But let's say that SMR's do cross that threshold. Then what? A power plant incorporating one or more SMR's is still a mega-project with all the problems that mega-projects and especially nuclear mega-projects have. You still have all the planning & permitting costs, the large building with special design needs, the cooling infrastructure, the massive expensive turbines, et cetera. SMR's only target a very small fraction of the cost of a nuclear project. Halving 10% of the cost is not going to make nuclear competitive in a world where it has to compete with other power sources being at least an order of magnitude cheaper.

Coal plants and fission plants have a similar principle: they heat water to turn turbines. So you're highly unlikely to get their cost below that of a coal plant. A new build 600MW coal plant was estimated to cost $2B in 2008.[1]

1: https://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf

https://archive.md/pSNyY

I love the idea of SMR, not only the run-safe designs but the idea that clusters of them could be installed in metro areas and eliminate the transmission loss from generating electricity far away and transporting it to the load. And by having clusters of small reactors it enables both economies of scale and makes it feasible to have standby units per cluster allowing spent units to be replaced without the cluster having a diminished load service capacity.

I'm sure the greenies will find some reason to hate this concept (despite it being a great ZERO CARBON electricity solution) but in the city I live there are already two decommissioned coal-fired plants which could be leveled and re-purposed in this manner -- and they already have grid connection right of way and some of the equipment. This is such an obviously winning idea it's hard to imagine why people would oppose it.

For those interested in technical detail, here are the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) documents published by RR:

https://gda.rolls-royce-smr.com/documents

EDIT: huh, interesting, it's designed so that if the core melts, it's to be fully contained in the reactor pressure vessel. See Chapter 6, page 60

RR product page for their Small Modular Reactors:

https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...

I suspect some kind of political quid-pro-quo because recently:

- https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20240919050430

- https://www.intellinews.com/favourite-westinghouse-ejected-f... and https://czechdaily.cz/the-future-of-nuclear-energy-in-the-cz...

- https://www.intellinews.com/us-westinghouse-and-french-edf-f...

Of course such investments are always politics but...

Right now the wind would go from Temelin to Regensburg and Nuernberg. They will be surprised. But the typical wind direction is towards Brno and Wroclaw, to the north-east.