Small Modular Reactors

Question 1

How could the deployment of SMR’s help during events like the “Cascadia event” or other natural disasters?

Answer 1

• Rapid deployment: SMR’s are modular and can be thrown onto a bed of a truck, have hot-swappable backups on standby
  
  • Large scale microgrids, redundancy or isolation. Klamath Falls could be powered by one of these if we lost connection to the hydroplants. Hospitals, first responders, etc

Question 2

In what ways would the deployment of SMR’s be better and worse than other distributed energy resources like wind, solar, coal plants, and large-scale nuclear power plants?

Answer 2

• Virtually carbon-free
  
  • High-energy density upwards of 100’s of megawatts
  • Lower initial capital investment, greater scalability
  • Siting flexibility, much less land needed than compared to large reactors
  • SMR designs have the distinct advantage of factoring in current safeguards and security requirements. Facility protection systems, including barriers that can withstand design basis aircraft crash scenarios and other specific threats, are part of the engineering process being applied to new SMR design.
  • LCOE - represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle In 2018, NuScale was predicting its SMRs would have a levelized cost of energyof$65 per megawatt-hour. For comparison, the U.S. Energy Information Administrationcalculatesthat by 2025 solar PV will have an LCOE of $32.80 per megawatt-hour and onshore wind will be at $34.10.
  • Untested, bound to be issues

Question 3

Other than safety, what concerns would you have if your community was considering integrating an SMR into your local-electric grid?

Answer 3

• Project cost: construction costs have increased from 3 to 6 billion from 2015 to 2020
  
  • Delays: first SMR delivery was supposed to be in 2015, and now its forecasting 2029-2030
  • Cost of Electricity as stated earlier
  • Regulatory Uncertainty: The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and it Advisory Committee on Reactor Safegaurds have flagged unresolved issues with the Nuscale design that will have to be resolved at a future stage

Question 4

What are some of the factors that cause nuclear energy resources like SMR’s to not be pursued as heavily as solar or wind?

Answer 4

• New technology, many hurdles still need to be overcome
  
  • Cost drives everything, SMR’s are still expensive and will have a higher price per unit of energy than solar or wind even when they are operational
  • Public perception and safety concerns

Question 5

Where do you see SMR’s being most beneficial/applicable in the electric and why? (in the future)

Answer 5

• Obviously this is opinion based and there is no one right answer, but I like the thought of SMR’s being used as back-up power, being able to supply energy for an entire city or town and thus reducing the entire location’s need to purchase additional storage mediums like the Tesla Powerwall. Just the amount of Lithium that could be saved would be huge. Lower income families that cannot afford to have backup systems could be supported in this was as well.