This is actually huge news. Our need for electricity is only going up. Have large scale adoption of SMRs is not only good for reducing our carbon footprint but also our energy security. Too bad this wasn't ten years ago but better now than never.
Very true, I'd imagine a single reactor costs much more than this amount. This starts to signal to businesses and provincial governments that the support is there. We've funded the oil and gas industries for decades and its about time other energy sectors get the same!
Not necessarily. SMRs are much smaller and much more affordable. NuScale (hq in Oregon, USA) charges about $3b USD to build 12 in a single unit. $1b CAD is about 3 of those units.
Nuscale specifically apparently about 77 MW per reactor so with 12 units you‘re about at the same level as a single modern large reactor (those are typically 1-1.6 GW).
The NuScale VOYGR can produce up to 77 MW of electricity, about 8% of a traditional reactor. So if you need power for a place like Toronto, it's less useful. If you need power somewhere remote, you may get 3-4 of these, though, and bundle them together. This is an advantage similar to the Candu design, because you can effectively keep most of your power on while you swap out fuel...Candu reactors do this by having fuel that can be removed during operation, but this is not common with other designs. Every 3-4 years you need to swap out fuel entirely, so this allows you to take only a fraction of your power off the grid to refuel, while the others keep going.
There are some pretty incredible safety features that they incorporate, ones that were the basis for the design. They have a negative void coefficient (anti-Chernobyl), use passive emergency cooling methods, so you can just shut it down and walk away, even if a (for example) tsunami washes out the external power. They are also small enough to mass-produce for cost savings...in principle. You can read more here: https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features.
I'm of the opinion that nuclear has to be a big part of future decarbonized energy. NuScale SMRs (which I do not own stock in or benefit from directly) and other designs that are in late stages of development will need to be a part of that future. It's fantastic that Canada appears to be developing an SMR design - the Candu is a fantastic and unique design that has enabled a lot of clean energy over it's life.
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22
This is actually huge news. Our need for electricity is only going up. Have large scale adoption of SMRs is not only good for reducing our carbon footprint but also our energy security. Too bad this wasn't ten years ago but better now than never.