Viewpoint
The UK is currently paying a heavy price for a lack of long-term commitment and strategic insight into its nuclear programme, says Gregg Butler
Almost half of Engineer readers think that a UK-developed small modular reactor (SMR) would be a better option than the current deal to build and operate a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point, according to the conclusion of a recent poll on the website. Don’t we all! Had we but started this great programme around 1990, the world would indeed be our mollusc of choice. Only practicality and hard facts stand between this UK-centric wonderworld and reality.
Any nuclear reactor project takes a long time and continuity of purpose. UK nuclear policy has been the very inverse of this – in 2003 we announced a ‘no-nuclear’ energy policy, sold Westinghouse and its AP1000 in 2005, were thinking we might need some nuclear by 2006, and by 2008 were going hell-for-leather for 16GWe of new nuclear by 2025.
This timescale now meant existing, foreign-designed, reactors would be necessary but, even so, 12 or so reactors would surely give British industry the incentive to tool up and get involved. Strangely enough, 12 or so reactors of at least three different types doesn’t add up to the same opportunity.
So what haven’t we tried and messed up yet? How about SMRs rolling off the production line like washing machines? And there’s the rub. SMRs eschew the classic economies of scale that drive the size of light-water reactors (of which pressurised water reactors [PWRs] such as the AP1000 and Areva’s EPR are a subset) upwards – conjecturally until they are so big you can no longer build them – and replace this with economies of number: in other words, make a large number of small reactors in a factory setting and simply transport them to the desired site. This makes a lot of sense, but the key is in the words ‘a large number’.
Developing reactors is not cheap and tooling up a factory to make them is also expensive. Moreover, the factory has to be commissioned and worked up to speed, so by the time the first true production SMR comes rolling off the line a lot of money will have been spent. And this will need to be offset by sales before anyone starts making money. The process makes very good sense for Volkswagen Golfs, as you’ve got a pretty shrewd assessment before you start that the market is there – and it’s the requisite large number.
So for our UK SMR what sort of numbers would we need? Well, best estimates for getting even the most developed of the existing (foreign-designed) SMRs ‘on the bars’ in the UK are around 2030, and if you transferred the whole of the 16GWe programme to, say, 250MWe small modular PWRs, then you would need 60. That’s the right sort of amount for economies of number, but it would require a total strategic focus for a UK programme and the unequivocal backing of a single SMR horse. Everything from the last 70 years of the UK nuclear industry (Magnox – 10 stations, nine designs; AGR – seven stations, four designs; PWR – one station, one design, and very different from the standard model) tells you this isn’t likely to happen. Of course, if you want a British design, add at least five years to the timescale, and worry that this will miss the prime energy need by over a decade.
Advanced designs are what we need. Which is the point where we find out that an advanced system marches at the speed of its lowest technology readiness level. For example, molten salt fast reactors might indeed be as cheap as chips and safe as houses, but they tend to need things such as online reprocessing, and they need to pump hot salt reliably for years – an interesting materials challenge and one never demonstrated. Regulators want evidence, flowsheets and demonstrable evidence. And comments that it worked okay in the US in 1983 in a slightly different form will not cut the mustard.
So what are we to do? Get on with the current Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) competition, choose a single small modular pressurised water reactor design that can have a lot of UK manufacture, and announce a programme of, say, 20 of them after the current 16GWe of big ones. This would be enough of a home market to get the economies of number; getting the price low enough to access the world market. As a variant, you could also back one or two advanced systems at a low TRL level as a longer-term hedge. But do we have a clear idea why the programme is being supported, what future it is aimed at, what its success factors look like, and an unwavering long-term commitment? Unfortunately, this is called having a strategy and nothing in the last 70 years of UK nuclear power engenders a great deal of expectation that this will be the case.
Gregg Butler is head of strategic assessment at the Dalton Nuclear Institute, Manchester University
Why not just build an AP1000? Design is proven, licensed and a number are being built in China and the US . Would be a more prudent path than an SMR experiment.
Although my firm is developing an advanced gas reactor design, strikes us that the AP1000 is a good fit. Makes a lot more sense than relying on a French design that is clearly too expensive.
Try Crowd Funding?
Think you could crowd fund $25 Million? There are profitable reactors in all price ranges!
Most of us know that the French EPR reactors for Hinkley C are getting a bad press. Yes its the economics stupid. But few seem to really know about the engineering problems.
Is there anyone out there who can state what is ” wrong ” with Sizewell B or the fleet (6) of reactors at say Gravelines Northern France ( 100 miles SE of London for map readers)
A UK designed and manufactured plant of any description, SMR or otherwise, would be a very good thing. However, given the current capability within the UK – reality would suggest that this will be a difficult venture to successfully deliver – in which case I agree with Mark in that we should march on with the proven AP1000 design. SMRs are potentially a huge and costly distraction. There is one reason, probably among many, why the AP1000 design was favoured by Westinghouse – economies of scale – I believe that is one reason why they moved away from the AP600. I’d also suggest that ABWRs are another viable option in a proven design. A further thought to consider is that it would be interesting to know where we plan on getting the fuel from for ‘our’ SMR design – Westinghouse? Would they support this, or see ‘our’ design as competition?
A fundamental question needs to be answered, if we had a UK SMR design – who could manufacture it in the UK, and do they have the capacity to do so? Would we have to go further afield for various components and vessels? As well as the design work, I think the infrastructure required to support UK based SMR manufacture will need heavy investment. The level of suitably qualified and experienced personnel available in the UK to support such a design and manufacturing programme has shrunk to a point that I’m not convinced the UK can deliver this alone, we’re already on the back foot compared to non-UK SMR alternatives, for this reason it is perhaps is more feasible for the UK to partner up (with who I don’t know) in order to develop SMRs – or accept the AP1000/ABWR solution to keep the lights on. Oh, and our government has no money, so what is the lowest risk option – take a design that already exists and manufacture it thus reducing the non-recurring expenditure.
I agree that, all things being equal, SMRs will be more expensive due to dis-economy of scale. By all things being equal, I mean all the same hyper-strict regulations, requirements and component fab QA standards. That is, just happily taking the several order of magnitude increase in safety, and giving nothing in return. Nothing that would reduce costs. As though an even higher level of safety, as opposed to reduced costs, is what nuclear needs (nuclear already being the safest source).
The real truth is that, given the greatly reduced chance of meltdown/release due to fundamental factors like reduced size and/or differences in fundamental design, as well as the vastly smaller potential release even if a meltdown were to somehow occur, equally strict standards are not justified for SMRs. SMR designers should “demand credit” for the vastly improved fundamental safety of their designs (purchased at the cost of worse economy of scale). They should be allowed to reduce standards until the overall level of safety (accident frequency and potential release) is similar to that of today’s reactors. Such a policy, combined with sufficient scale of production (i.e., large “numbers”) would have a good chance of resulting in economically competitive nuclear.
Even with existing (large) reactors, the impeccably strict requirements (and the “way of doing things” in the nuclear industry) has always been completely out of proportion to the actual hazards involved. This is even more true (by orders of magnitude) for SMRs, most of which may not even result in any land area with radiation levels above the natural range, even under a worst-case accident event. SMRs could offer the rationale for “starting over”, with a completely different mind set. SMRs should be regulated like gas plants are. Standard industrial regulations and QA requirements.
Based on what I saw yesterday on just one LENR company’s website, those above designs of modular fission reactors will be obsolete long before they reach deployment, sorry, but that is my humble American opinion. No offense intended to my UK brothers.
Mike, Jeff, William, Andrew and James, You all have very good arguments and alternative ideas using existing Technology. Except we you have forgotten the very reliable and proven Nuclear submarine power plants which are built there in the UK by a sub of BAE. Yes they are not probably 200 Mw+ output, but are small and compact. And if run at 85% + do not need refueling for over 20 years. The British design has been upgraded and become one of the most reliable power generators.
So lets put what ever number are required to get to 200+ Mw and then you can mass produce them easily and transport them over the road to a site close to where the power is required – even think of placing the facility underground like the Military does!
Britain, Scotland, Wales and Ireland have the skills and capability to ramp up production even now using the current BAE facilities or even Areva’s.
Why do we have to keep reinventing the wheel and building bigger and more complex facilities like Brinkley C? The Sub/ship nuclear systems are still an SMR but smaller output! They can be assembled and run in multiples, so easily.
Think outside the box everyone, nothing is impossible if the UK Brexit is to really reinvigorate manufacturing and get folks back into industry….. there is even an export market as well?
You raise an interesting point Geoff, however, I suspect the requirements, specifically the safety requirements and operational needs for a naval reactor will be very different to any given civil reactor? My earlier point still stands, where would these be mass produced? Who has the capacity to build such things in the UK, you mention BAE and Areva but I’m not as convinced – we’d need a great deal of investment in factories, skills and the basic resources required. Finally, the UK submarine designs will be classified – and therefore I very much doubt the government would want UK defence technology or designs, or anything associated with them, leaking into the civil nuclear world for prying eyes to see. If this was the case we’d lose any military advantage we have, and worse still enable nations we explicitly don’t want to have this type of capability.
Just a thought but surely the safety requirements, by that I expect you mean; Not leaking Radioactive materials, exploding or melting down, must be significantly greater on a 300ft long moving Submarine in comparison with in a building in a 3 mile long town, or even a group set up in a single building 30 miles from the next town. That said, again the design is classified but again who says that it would need to be unclassified to be mas produced, I am sure the design of the Spitfire was classified but it was produced in huge numbers for many years in different factories by Supermarine and Jaguar and Morris. In reality though doesn’t only the assembly need to maintained as secret to ensure that the overall design remains classified, Sub contractors often build parts of machines that they have no knowledge of the final assembly and use of for both government and private industry?
I must admit to being one of the voters for a SMR reactor plan and when I did vote for that I was envisaging hundreds of (small ) reactors such as found in subs and ships each producing power of a few 10’s of MW rather than 10s of larger units producing 100’s of MW. Perhaps my view was distorted by the literally Dozens of 2-5MW installations we make each year for Diesel and Gas powered generator sets which are now being used for STORE and Load lopping and Mains support as well as standby power. This must be a way to go to give a large distributed base power that renewables can float above
Mike, you may be correct regarding the safety, but I suspect the amount of active and passive safety systems you could apply to a submarine reactor design will be severely limited by space, whereas a civil reactor is only really limited by funding (and that probably isn’t an argument to not implement a safety feature). I suspect the operational requirements are still fundamentally different. Your Spitfire example is interesting, but that was a very different world and I suspect all of those who worked on the design and manufacture of the Spitfire were UK nationals and it was a 100% UK supply chain. I’d bet we couldn’t even mass-manufacture Spitfires today, you’d need the facilities and the skills. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of SMRs, and as I said earlier I think it would be fantastic if the UK designed and manufactured a plant of any type – but we must face reality and understand what is the best value for money in a climate where we have none. Designing such a plant would cost a tremendous amount of money, ‘building to print’ theoretically costs a lot less. SMRs need to be mass produced to make them economically viable, so there needs to be a market/customer for them, globally, and we need the ability to manufacture them in the first place at the required rate. In other news, I think the Hinkley Point C news is a very respectable outcome.
Given the economy of large scale production, I think if an SMR assembly line were to be built, it would most likely happen in China. Not only do they have the domestic demand to justify the construction of such an assembly line, but other factors (cheap labor, etc.) make it likely that they could produce the reactors at much lower costs. After all, that’s what they’ve done for things like solar panels, and many other products. There is a reason they became “the world’s factory floor.”
SMRs finally allow nuclear the opportunity to partake of what is standard practice for most products (most notably consumer products). You find the place (on earth) with the lowest production cost, produce it there, and ship the product all over the world. (It must be a place with the wherewithal of produce the product in question, of course, and China is (of course) capable of doing so.) This is how competing technologies, like wind and solar, have reduced costs, and nuclear needs to be able to do that as well, for it to have a chance.
One annoying thing about nuclear, though, is that due to its lack of popularity and the undue fears about it, customer nations/regions are likely to demand a “bribe” (essentially) in order to accept the reactor. That “bribe” taking the form of a demand for local labor to be involved in much of the project (i.e., much of the construction, etc..). This will fly in the face of the standard consumer/industrial product model (i.e., fabrication elsewhere). It’s infuriating, but you can count on the “safety card” being played, against the idea of buying SMRs built on an assembly line in China. Not only by anti-nuclear “environmental” groups, but by interests such as local labor, etc.
“….suspect all of those who worked on the design and manufacture of the Spitfire were UK nationals and it was a 100% UK supply chain.”
I hope that few if any of the so-called ‘upper’ classes were involved: because as was pointed out to the grocer’s daughter when in 1980 she initiated a non-Union GCHQ et al… ‘the vast majority of those who betrayed our nation’s secrets were not from the lower orders, but at the very summit of the pyramid of power.
I can advise that there was one simple but critical part -the textile/rubber flexible coupling between the Merlin Engine and one part of its cooling sysyem- which was made by a small firm, based in Market Harboro (the subject of a congratulatory comment by no less than Mr Churchill in Parliament): but for which the Merlin’s efficiency and ability to be enhanced to several times its initial rating during the war could not have happened. Of course, this was staffed by textile technologists/workers: not Eton-educated toffs and consequently its secrets were safe.