There’s been a lot of talk about SMR’s over the years, it’s nice to see one finally being built.
Even if it comes in over budget, getting the first one done will be a great learning experience and could lead to figuring out how to do future ones cheaper.
Assuming it’s on time, completion in 2029, connected to grid in 2030.
The small modular reactor (SMR) would provide 300 megawatts of power, enough electricity to supply about 300,000 homes, according to briefing documents from Ontario’s Ministry of Energy and Mines.
300MW isn’t small at all. That’s half a CANDU block! I thought they would be significantly smaller and therefore not too significant for the grid until we build more units. This is the equivalent of 20-30 of the largest wind turbines available. Not sure if we have that large units installed in Canada.
It’s small compared to typical nuclear reactors which are usually 1GW, and these new units use much less land space.
Edit: They’re also designed to be manufactured offsite at a manufacturing facility instead of the very large ones that are built on site.
Our reactors have lower output than the typical 1-1.5GW of foreign designs though. CANDU are in the the 500-800MW range. It’s why compared to CANDU, 300MW is significant.
Ah, I didn’t realize the CANDU’s were also manufactured at a factory unlike the bigger built in place ones.
I guess it’s just about getting them even smaller at that point, and the SMRs take up less land space as well.
A SMR-300 (maybe not this one specifically) can be as small as 3 hectares.
I don’t know if CANDUs have pre-made components, I was just talking about their output power. I don’t know exactly why it’s lower than other designs but I know there are some fundamental differences like CANDU burning unenriched uranium as opposed to almost all other designs. It also uses heavy water to make that possible compared to the rest. I assume the lower power output is related to these differences. Or it could be arbitrary. We need someone working on nukes at OPG or SNC-Lavalin to chime in. 😂
Oh sorry I googled CANDU to learn a bit more and saw that they were also made in a factory offsite.
I imagine that’s at least one of the reasons why its lower capacity per reactor. It can only be so big if built offsite.
So we had SMRs all along? I smell a grift. 😂
The CANDU still take a much larger space I guess due to the overall design. You can fit one of these SMRs in 10-15 acres.
These are considered ‘small’ because of their footprint, not just their output. They are absolutely safe, since if they malfunction they just solidify, they do not go into melt down. It is the same technology that is used in the reactors in submarines and aircraft carriers, and believe me, those are SMALL. China is making them small enough to fit in shipping containers, to be shipped and assembled in remote communities. The one Canada is building is, however, on the larger scale of these SMR’s. China is building them by the dozens.
It is actually the technology itself that makes them part of the SMR family - far removed from the technology used in conventional large scale nuclear reactors.
And the fact that they have been used in nuclear submarines for over 50 years does NOT make the technology ‘new’. It is not just ‘talk’, it is proven, built, and tested over decades of continuous use, albeit top secret use.
It was even rumored by engineering students that there was one under the greenhouse of a Canadian university, operated in complete highest-level secrecy, been there since the '80’s. Used in the development of the reactors used in the American submarines. But that was just an unfounded rumor.
As far as safety, deaths are laughably low from Nuclear. Hydro has had significantly more casualty, thousands of times more.
Counting long term emissions from coal or gas I’d assume you’d be higher as well.
Which is also why they might be snake oil. Similar problems to a full-size modern reactor, but without the savings of scale and not having to ship modules around.
But now it allows the same top-secret ultra-classified reactors that were once limited to military craft to be used on container ships and oil tankers. Pollution-free ocean shipping.
To be clear, the exact designs on military craft are secret for security reasons, but not the theory and general technology. Commercial nuclear boats have long existed, they’re just niche for all the cost, safety and complexity reasons you’d expect.
This technology was so highly classified that any mention of it by those developing it would lead to their lifetime incarceration, stated clearly in the non-disclosure agreements they had to sign They could not even mention the theory and general technology behind it. The background tech only came to the public attention when Russia and China started commercializing it, and this forced the Americans to acknowledge it. It was a Russian ice breaker that was the first commercial vessel to use nuclear power, and even at that it was wrapped in military secrecy. But America refused to allow any development on a Western equivalent for ‘military security’ reasons.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/commercial-nuclear-adoption-ship
But the most effective way for America to completely prevent any development of this nuclear technology was to make it essentially impossible for any commercial outfit to get insurance on these propulsion systems, making it impossible for them to enter any port.
Everything on the military is classified. Basic ass radios from the 80s are top secret, classified just means they don’t want enemies to know the exact specifications of their equipment.
There’s plenty of insurers not in America…
A nuclear reactor isn’t actually a very complicated machine, in a sense. Put enough nuclear fuel in one place and it gets hot. Then, drive a heat engine with it. Usually one based on steam, although closed-cycle gas turbines, sterling engines and airbreathing jet engines have all been experimented with.
It’s just that you have to keep track of neutron moderation and cross sections, half lives of thousands of isotopes, thermal changes, non-constant demand and the possibility of point failures, all under the condition that you can’t let anything escape. That makes it complicated, but then again each individual part on that list can be learned from open-source materials.
It’s even known what general kinds of reactors are on various military nuclear submarines. For example, the earlier Soviet designs used a liquid lead-bismuth cooled fast neutron design, which is why the Russians have so much polonium, while the modern designs use a pressurised water coolant.
It is not insuring the reactor for replacement, it is insuring the entire nuclear powered ship so it can enter a port. Ships collide. Ships crash. Ships hit bridges. An oil spill is one thing, nuclear contamination of the entire port is another.
Yes, I’m aware. It’s a sector pretty famously pioneered by the British, and Lloyd’s of London still operates.
You can’t use ship style because those use weapons-grade material. It’s more compact but not something you can use for civilian designs. The design isn’t complex, it just uses higher energy density material.
enough electricity to supply about 300,000 homes The estimated construction cost of the initial reactor is $7.7 billion
Interesting. That comes out to just over $25,000 per home, assuming it’s delivering power to 300,000 homes.
I wonder what it would cost to fit those 300,000 homes (or the roofs of large buildings) with solar, wind, and other green tech… interlinking communities to their wider municipality, and the rest of the province for redundancy.
Top end solar systems for the “average” home in Ontario would be around the same $25,000 price tag - one time - and would pay for itself in under 10 years, saving home owners from having to worry about rising energy costs.
Would it be most cost-effective? More sustainable? More eco-friendly?
You’re forgetting that the SMR provides a baseload, while solar would only provide during the daytime hours. You’d need to tack on a battery system capable of running the house overnight which would increase costs further by at a minimum another 10-15k with installation for a small single family dwelling, or build a more centralized MW level scale battery system elsewhere. Wind doesn’t really work too well for residential as the turbines aren’t as cost effective at smaller sizes. (edit: You’d also need to over provision each house in order to ensure there’s enough excess capacity to charge the batteries for the evening, increasing the cost further, and ensure it is over provisioned enough for winter)
The article mentions that IF it comes in on budget, it’d cost around the same as a centralized wind/solar project which would be cheaper than a home system, but home systems obviously provide better national security in terms of not a single point of failure.
Also the goal of these SMR projects is to just churn these things out of a factory which will make them cheaper in the long run. These things are brand new, and saying lets just forgo this new tech because solar, which has had decades to get to it’s current cost, are cheaper is a mistake. SMRs could very well be cheaper than solar in the long run if we put the effort into it.
Edit: And I’m not trying to say putting home solar/battery is a bad idea, it’s also a critical thing to do. It’s not one or the other, it’s both!
Edit: Also unless it’s on a standing seam metal roof or other similar snap on install roof, assume at least one likely removal/reinstall for the solar panels per lifetime of the roof which would add another few thousand dollars.
I’m not pro-nuclear, but the baseload argument is compelling. We clearly need both more renewables, but sprinkling a few SMRs throughout the system seems to be a pretty good idea - especially if we don’t want to integrate with the US grids.
The article mentions that IF it comes in on budget
That’s one of the big ifs. It’s new technology (kind of), so I’ll be surprised if there aren’t some overruns.
All you need to counter the baseload though is a shit ton of batteries.
It’s doable, but it greatly increases the cost vs just solar. Going that route would still be very competitive price wise when centralized.
Edit: And even the baseload of an SMR might want batteries if there isn’t enough usage overnight, so they can use it during the day rather than building another SMR. So we want batteries regardless.
It’s still kinda comparable:
According to that analysis, providing a similar level of base power as the SMRs by building wind and solar power with battery energy storage would cost in the range of 13.5 to 18.4 cents per kWh
At the lower end of the estimate, at least.
At the lower end of the estimate, at least.
That will probably change for batteries as well as we come up with cheaper options. Lithium Ion ones can be expensive, but don’t take up much space, but when you want grid scale, space isn’t as big an issue. I have a lot of hope for the new Sodium Ion batteries. They’re much cheaper, they just take up more space. Very new tech though.
All you need to counter the baseload though is a shit ton of batteries.
This is not presently a practical option. That’s why it’s almost never attempted. The best “batteries” we have right now are things like reservoirs with a pump and a dam.
Except it is happening now. It wasn’t happening before.
It happens now in rarefied cases, but in general, it is not a practical option. It doesn’t merely have to be physically possible, it has to be economically competitive.
But it is competitive now, we’ve reached that point. It’s not “rarefied” cases anymore.
Tesla just installed 37GWh of capacity in the past year and recently bumped their capacity to 80GWh, and they’re just one company.
We’re going to start seeing GWh scale batteries now from the likes of Tesla, CATL, BYD and others.
Edit: This is a 15.3 GWh contract - https://www.intersectpower.com/tesla-provides-intersect-power-with-15-3-gwh-of-megapacks-for-solar-storage-projects/
The problem with using nuclear as baseload is that people have the wrong idea of what is required from a baseload power source.
A baseload power source’s most important quality isn’t constant output, it’s rapidly adaptable output.
When it comes to cost, nothing beats solar. It’s cheap, it’s individually owned and especially with a battery the self-sufficiency basically means not paying for power anymore. So, people will adopt solar at greater numbers as the cost of solar panels is still dropping.
Solar and wind at peak times in several countries already exceed the demand. Nuclear, which is more expensive to run, now has a problem, because nobody wants to buy that energy. They’d rather get the cheaper abundant renewable power.
So, the nuclear reactor has to turn off or at least scale to a minimal power output during peak renewable hours. This historically is something nuclear reactors are just not good at. But even worse, it’s a terrible economic prospect: nuclear is barely profitable as-is, having to turn it off for half the day kills the economic viability completely. Ergo, government subsidies are required to keep it operational.
Flexibility is king in the power network of the future. That means batteries or natural gas plants at the moment. Nuclear can be useful for nations without those and with a lagging renewable adoption, but it will be more expensive in the long run. It will also become more important to do heavy industrial tasks during peak renewable hours, so that the demand better matches the output.
Just buy batteries for the nuclear power plant as well. If you have to turn it off, you’re making a mistake with our current tech.
Why would you use the batteries for nuclear when solar is so much cheaper?
If there’s any excess capacity (solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear/coal/natural gas), batteries extend it’s usefulness and help manage any peaks better and can help you avoid building another generation facility for peak times. It also takes much less land than solar and with SMRs can in theory be brought much closer to population centers reducing transmission losses.
Edit: 300mw of solar would be between 1,500 and 3,000 acres of land. 300mw SMR could be as low as 10-20 acres.
Rooftop solar takes basically no extra space and it’s hard to get even closer to population centers than that.
300mw of solar would be between 1,500 and 3,000 acres of land. 300mw SMR could be as low as 10-20 acres.
In that context, it may still be better to plan for solar panels on all roofs in new developments.
Just taking one example of Whitby, Ontario, which only has a population of around 140,000. Using a quick and dirty measurement of the developed area from the waterfont to Taunton Rd., there’s over 12,000 acres of area used up by mostly homes and other buildings (schools, retail, etc.).
You may not even need to have EVERY roof covered to meet the demands of a municipality like that. This makes it even more compelling because you have room to expand the capacity, if needed. And it still comes with the benefit of having multiple redundancies, being self-sustainable, offering residents free or extremely low-cost electricity (or even be paid to put energy back into the grid!), etc.
Anyway, this fantasy is unlikely to happen in Ontario. LOL
It might happens eventually for new builds at least… It just did in the UK!
In theory you can setup electricity intensive operations that can use extra energy and power down when supply is tight. Things like water desalination or hydrogen production. You have the problem of capital not being used but desal plants are often cycled off already.
Assuming you still need the nuclear power to fill those batteries that is. Given the rate of solar adoption, that might well become unnecessary.
Assuming all power was handled by a single entity and not various businesses, there’s no point in building new solar (or any new capacity) when you can just build batteries for the existing nuclear plant that you have to shut down in the evening.
You should only build new power generation once you are able to drain the nuclear plants battery each day (or have the logistical planning to know when that will be the case anyway)
edit: made up numbers example: If a 300mw plant can power 300,000 homes but has to shut down in the overnight, that same plant with batteries can maybe power 400,000 homes.
Except people will just purchase their own solar, because it’s cheaper than getting nuclear power from a battery. They won’t wait for demand to catch up, they’ll make sure their own demand is fulfilled so they won’t have to purchase power anymore.
It’s a simple economic rule, if there’s a cheaper option people wi shift towards it. You can’t force people to purchase your power. You can’t stop it unless you ban buying solar, which won’t be received well.
Nuclear fills a rapidly shrinking niche in the power mix of tomorrow, and it’s economics that’s squeezing it out. There’s no point in fighting that unless you want to pay more for power than is necessary (which nobody does).
A baseload power source’s most important quality isn’t constant output, it’s rapidly adaptable output.
A baseload supply shouldn’t need to throttle up and down, it’s the Base Load. The load that exists 24hrs a day.
Well that’s exactly the popular misconception. The constant part of the baseload is the demand, not the supply. The total supply should always match that of course, but given the variable makeup of the supply, where renewable power sources are simply cheapest and at peak moments will supply the full demand, any other source will have to be variable as well to economically compete. Otherwise it’s just making energy needlessly expensive.
Look at the demand and supply graphs for the 6 day period: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
The lowest demand is about 12K MW, that is the base load, the load never goes below that. Nuclear and hydro cover that 12K MW constantly, and even hydro is throttles up and down to cover the some of the load that varies throughout the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as some large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants.
I know that nuclear and hydro can constantly cover it, the point is that when it’s very sunny out countries with good solar adoption will already 100% cover it (if not more). The nuclear power at those times has to compete with cheaper solar power, which it loses on price. And because the grid can’t handle more supply than demand, it requires shutting something off. The cheapest power is solar so you’d prefer to keep that on for economic reasons, but since nuclear is bad at scaling up and down you have to pick the more expensive option. This increases energy prices beyond what is really necessary.
This also becomes even less tenable as battery adoption increases.
For comparison, the energy we get from Niagara Falls is 2400 MW, so this (300 MW) is very significant.
the energy we get from Niagara Falls is 2400 MW
Holy shit
Cool, we’ll finally get to find out if it’s actually even more complicated and expensive than the traditional kind.
They plan to build 4 of them at this site… at the very least I hope each one is progressively cheaper to build as they learn.
If each one is more expensive that’ll be bad news bears heh.
I’ve heard it suggested that the mass production efficiencies wouldn’t kick in until they’re building hundreds or thousands. That’s pretty typical for manufacturing, and it’s not like we’ve never built a reactor before.
mass production efficiencies wouldn’t kick in until they’re building hundreds or thousands
Maybe if you are building laptops and dishwashers. These are small building crammed with plumbing and electrical work, making 4 or 5 of them in a dedicated factory will significantly reduce production costs. You can have one guy who is good at flanged stainless pipe, one guy who is a panel building wizard, and so on. The first project will take the normal amount of time, each subsequent one will go much faster because the team already has a process in place.
Source: I worked industrial construction for 6 years, jobs where more than one copy of the same machine was being built always came in under budget because each copy was built quicker than the last.
There’s at least as many parts in a modern reactor as in a dishwasher, but leaving that aside the modular building thing also failed to take off the n times it’s been tried, and for similar reasons. I fully believe there’s a speedup if you do the same project multiple times, although you’d find it would plateau after a while. There’s also a speedup associated with building something large and in place.
The big savings happen when you reach a production run where you can build or configure specialised tooling and run it until after it’s earned itself back.
