My father, soon to be 91 and now totally blind is addicted to the 'Just have a think' output. Unable to read, this kind of resource is invaluable in keeping him refreshed, bright, alert and mentally active. Hearing about where modern technology is heading and all the amazing things that are happening helps give us all hope for the future in these troubling times. Thank you for taking the time and effort to broadcast this extremely interesting and informative content and allowing people like my father to engage & carry on living their best lives 👏

You are so correct that the entire concept of SMR's was fatally flawed from the start just on the economics alone; and the mass production dreams were only ever a fantasy. I'm an experienced nuclear plant engineer who is very pro-nuclear and has researched the history of nuclear power plants... and the fact is that the answers were known decades ago. For starters the concept of "mass produced" SMR's with main components transported to local sites with minimal field assembly was 1st proposed in 1955 in the annual conference on the potential of nuclear power plants (held in Europe that year - not sure which country). The 1st ever demonstration SMR was a 22 MWe thorium fuel cycle based BWR in Elk River Minnesota (USA) which many people were talking about could be erected in many small communities in the USA. Online 1964, Shutdown 3.5 years later in 1968 due to major design issues. However, it had already been deemed uneconomical as a power plant just due to staffing cost alone. For the record the USA built 17 commercial nuclear power plants in the 1960's - 1970's which would be considered SMR sized today. All of them were shut down decades ago as they were not economical to operate against the large nuclear power plants built at the same time (I am unsure of the details for the rest of the world; but, understand that the same pattern followed in other countries unless there were unique locations where building larger plants did not make any sense). As an aside: did you note that Elk River was a thorium fuel cycle (there is nothing new about thorium and the current proponents are not talking about its historical issues identified from the USA's failed attempts to develop it as a fuel source). The USA went whole hog into developing thorium as a nuclear fuel source in the 1960's - 1970's to see if it would work. Along with all the test reactors it was run in around the world the USA built and operated 2 test molten salt reactors and the Shippingport demo/test power plant (PWR 60 MWe) which showed a successful breeding thorium core could be designed and put into most of the existing PWRs in the world -). The USA then built 4 commercial thorium fuel cycle power plants of BWR, PWR, and HTGR designs. In all cases thorium did not work out (there were both technical and economic issues with thorium fuel cycle reactors) - and at least 3 of the reactors were converted to U235 fuel which worked better and was cheaper. Note if thorium is such a good choice now why are we not putting it into PWRs at this time - as at least we know that the reactor designs work well and we now have passively safe PWRs? Anyway back to SMRs (regardless of fuel source): By the end of the 1970's it was known that the concept of SMRs were dead unless it was for some kind of geologically isolated area where they only needed a small power plant and transmission line construction was impractical. If you double the size of a nuclear power plant it only takes about 40% more materials and in many cases the plant staff size does not even change. At some point the staffing size does increase modestly. As for the failed NuScale Idoho plant. 6 SMR reactors of 77 MWe output was the claimed plans (462 MWe). What is interesting is that only the 50 MWe version was licensed by the NRC and there was an expectation that the NRC would quickly license the 77 MWe version which they thought could be done during the early site preparation period: Utah Utilities & NuScale was well into the "Pre-License review" of the 77 MWe design and had received good feedback. But the License application was never submitted after they received the construction quote and the pre-licnese review was terminated. The quote came in at about $9.5 Billion to construct, with an estimated $1 Billion+ inflation adjustment during the construction period. In reality this would have been about the same price to build a single Westinghouse AP-1000 (about 1150 MWe) and the staffing for the plant would have been about the same. As for the $55 raising to $89 per MWhr for electricity cost. That was after $4 Billion from the US government for SMR development grants - so the real cost rose to well over $100 per MWhr (where a single unit AP-1000 could be built for significantly less than half of that). Note on AP-1000 construction cost: Yes a lot more was spent at VC Summer and Voglte. But the USA (and Europe with the EPR) had not built nuclear power plants in so long that no contractors and very few workers understood how to build them - and also a number of suppliers shipped fake certified components and materials to site that could not be used - or had to be tore out and replaced. Massive cost and schedule delays, and lots of lessons learned. The Idaho NuScale project used the same contractors to quote that had learned their lessons with the Vogtle AP-1000s which is why they could quote so much better (and if those contractors are used before they forget - the next USA nuclear plant will be built much cheaper and much more closer to schedule than Vogtle 3 & 4). By the way China built 4 AP-1000's with an average construction time of about 6 years. They had a delay and cost overrun on their 1st one as they were not used to working with the Westinghouse design - but once they understood it - no noticeable delays or cost overruns (and Chinese construction standards and contractors for nuclear are just as good - if not better - than their western counterparts. No shortcuts, no fake materials, and the workers understand high quality nuclear construction standards and practices). I did a consulting job for one of the Chines AP-1000 plants; and was impressed. China is now building 6 more AP-1000s (they have a licensed copy) and at least 2 other countries are starting construction on AP-1000s- and at least 15 more AP-1000s are in the planning stage worldwide. The Westinghouse AP-300 benefits from the fact that the controls and many smaller components are exactly the same ones being produced for the AP-1000's which provides a cost savings both up front and for repair parts and service down the road. No other SMR proposal can claim the same advantage. As for mass production - it will never happen for a nuclear power plant. 1) At a minimum you need a proven plant design that is known to work economically for many decades - and in the history of nuclear power plants most initial designs did not work very well at all. There is not a single SMR plant that has a proven plant design - and it will be many decades after one goes on line before we know (we only have great PWR designs now based on the lessons learned of over 4 decades of operation of about 100 unique PWR power plant designs worldwide (76 different light water designs in the USA alone). A lot of design ideas that looked good in concept did not work out and there are many early shutdown plants as it was too costly to modify the plant to a different design. Now we can pick out which design idea worked for each component, structure, and system. 2) The design of the components and overall plant must be identical for each plant. Never going to happen as each nuclear power plant site must be designed for "worst case" LOCAL earthquakes, flooding, storms, etc. No one wants to pay for a plant that is designed to handle all the worst case conditions that exist somewhere in the world. It would be massively overbuilt and expensive. 3) As for mass production. I put the number at a minimum of 500 identical units a year - for at least 10 years to make it economical to even build an automated plant. We don't need that many nuclear power plants (even if only 50 MWe each). 4) Those sketches and concepts of building skids in a frame and assembling them onsite has been tried at least twice for fossil plants. Total cost and schedule disaster. One of those ideas that looks good as a concept, but requires a level of quality and dimensional control that so far has not been demonstrated to exist. It's cheaper to just build a normal seismically designed metal framework for the site, bring in the preassembled major components (Like has always been done) and field built connecting piping and wiring. By the way, we disagree about the cost of solar and wind. I will post separately on that.

Just love that you are updating all these techs. Thank you.

As someone who is small and modular himself, this technology has always appealed to me

Why is it that so many ' private ' companies seem to always want, or even demand, that the taxpayers need to underwrite their for profit business ? Subsidies and long-term tax abatement are the most popular of late and are often handed out like candy here in the USA. In the long term, when these businesses are making huge profits, they seem to forget that we even exist.

Looking at the images of the Chinese SME reactors, it strikes me that "small" and "modular" are relative terms... They still look like they need a lot of work and materials to build and implement. It's not really like you can build a bunch of these and have them on the shelf for use in various locations! So, I tend to agree that perhaps larger reactors might still be the way to go, where nuclear power is the only real option for a country or location...

Excuse my ignorance but werent SMR's were supposed to be truckable hence the name "Small". The "SMR's" illustrated today by yourself look huge, slightly smaller than a current large Nuclear power plants.

Always appreciate your carefully researched content presented in an eminently understandable manner. Fully Charged is fortunate to have your leading presentations in London.

Whenever anyone tells me that modular reactors are the future and the only problem is that nobody has invested enough in them, I point to the worlds major navies. SMR's have been used in nuclear subs for nearly 70 years now. All the major powers have spent countless billions on trying to make cost effective small reactors for subs, aircraft carriers and other military ships - the military advantages of these are enormous. And yet virtually no progress has been made by any of them - the latest subs from all the major powers are still using the same basic technology as the original nautilus (apart from some experimental designs like the Soviet reactor for the Alfa subs), and if anything, they are falling behind to the latest generation of hybrid and AIP propulsion systems. And this is in an area where cost isn't much of a consideration.

Thanks for your continuing supply of things to think about.

Good luck hosting the panel, Dave. As ever love your point of view

The NuScale SMR situation is disappointing however for many experienced power engineers the materials issues associated with molten salt amongst other technology issues looked rather challenging. I am not suprised about the status of NuScales' solution. Nuclear plants as you note work very well once operational.A key issue is the 8-10 increase in costs since the 1970's.One of the key drivers of the cost (up to 50% of it) is the financing costs resulting from highly protracted construction times. SMR's an embryonic technology in aspects attempting to not just reduce equipment costs but also dramatically reduce construction times.In principle that should be achievable but should be far easier if we can leverage proven nuclear technology. You didn't mention the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 which is a smaller version of their NRC-licensed ESBWR” . The BWRX-300 incorporates a range of cost-saving features, including natural circulation systems, smaller, dry containment, and more passive operational control systems. The estimated capital cost of a BWRX-300 is $2250/kWe for series production after initial units are built. The design aims to limit onsite operational staff numbers to 75 employees to achieve an estimated O&M cost of $16/MWh or ~1.6C/KwH. Westinghouse are following a similar track using a scaled down version of their AP1000 tech which is running well in China and I believe may be considered for UK sites in the 2030's. We're entitled to have some scepticism about the cost claims based on history however Ontario Power Group are installing four of the GE Hitachi units over the next few years at their Darlington site.OPG have a lot of experience in Nuclear power & have run a strong fleet of CANDU based reactors for many years.The current average cost of electricity in Ontario is C$0.141 per kWh which by global standards is highly competitive. I note your comment that Solar/Wind/Storage + Hydro are a complete energy solution however other proponents of this view such as Mark Jacobson have been thoroughly debunked by experienced engineers & scientists. I believe your comment about this being a low cost solution is questionable when full system (LSCOE costs vs LCOE) are considered as per this paper by Robert Idel. drive.google.com/file/d/1JB-x88wPQuKwWoFnxvkDAzbJ7hnM1-sj/view If the energy supply challenge is going to be solved its not going to be just one type of technology but its going to require everything we have today plus some emerging technologies including Enhanced Geothermal,Natural Hydrogen & even in some cases SMR's. I

I have similar views. It's hard to see how nuclear as a whole will make a dent in the electricity market before 2050. In fact, given the age of most of the fleet, it would be surprising if current output levels can be maintained till then. 30 years of non-investment can't just be ignored.

I think you're exactly right about small modular nukes arriving too late to the party to be part of the solution.

i'd like to see the complete "carbon footprint" of the total Nuclear Plant- mining, transport, construction, operation, maintenance and disposal!!!

It was clear from the beginning. Current reactors are behemoths exactly because they have to spread out the huge overhead costs. Making reactors 10 times smaller wouldn't cut it, a calculation any honest bookkeeper coud come up with. Adding exotic technology (molten salt, thorium, you name it) can only increase the financial risks. SMR work well only were cost is not a problem, e.g. US Navy.

At the end of the day we need something that works and can be deployed now. Like it or not, the pipeline for nuclear is strewn with bureaucracy and overwhelming cost and simply stating that nuclear is safe doesn’t change either that or the fact it’s safe precisely because of so much of that cost. As Dave said, solar and wind work and they’re ridiculously cheap; in Australia we have issues during the day because so much solar floods the grid. Keep working on nuclear research - sure - but we don’t have years to sit on our hands waiting for a pipe dream.

Just giving this a boost for the algorithm. Thanks for the video as always.

Most Nations that have existing Nuclear are still promoting/ maintaining this technology as a way of safeguarding their own aging arsenal.

The reason MSR's were not implemented and Light Water Reactors (LWR's) were was a result of the Navy's need for Nuclear Submarines. It was a matter of national defense so cost was a secondary factor. Further, since the reactors were submerged, a ready heat sink was always available for free. That is not the case for terrestrial reactors with multiple trains of High Head injection, Accumulators, and Low head injection required to protect the core. Also because of economics, the fuel design for commercial reactors is very different than that of naval reactors which makes the naval reactor fuel much more accident tolerant. When Dr Weinberg made the statement that the public would become aware of the level of radioactive release that would result from a fuel failure event, they would require ever more stringent safety measures, and the reactors would become cost prohibited. He obviously saw 50 years into the future. Because of this and other statements, he was fired as Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and funding for MSR's was halted. It is also important to note that the focus of the US at the time was the production of Plutonium, also for national defense. This required Heavy Water Reactors of which 6 were built a SRS. This was to be followed by Fast Breeder Reactors which were also capable of Plutonium production and would make LWR's sustainable. When Carter shut down reprocessing, Fast Breeder technology and the ultimate future of LWR's were put into doubt! It is not commonly known, but a commercial LWR can not operate with more than 1% fuel failure. If more than 10% of the fuel fails, the LWR is done! No one will likely enter containment for the next 10 years with the plant eventually decommissioned. At Three Mile Island around 1/3 to 1/2 of the fuel was damaged.

There was a US General defending the high cost for nuclear power plants in Aircraftcarrier and Submarines to the congress. He explained scientist said it will be small, cheap and simple but in fact it was bigger, very complicated and far more expensive than expected so we should knew since the 60‘s 👍

You may have noticed in 2023 China installed 216GW of solar PV power which is more than the US installed in its entire US history.

Also...thank you so much for the video! I love your presentations!!

Can you do an episode about infrastructure capacity problems in the energy transition? Here in NL there is trouble and companies and new projects can't get new power connections because the grid is full and it takes forever to expand it (because of environment, staff shortage everywhere etc).

Fascinating as always

Small? Interesting how all these SMRs have grown big. It seems that we are just seeing 1950s and 60s sized projects being rebadged as 'small'.

From an ex Koeberg Nuclear Engineer and Shift Chemist I couldn't agree more that the economic model the SMR represents is still born especially so for the financial model assumed to its project implementation involving, as a matter of inevitability, to 'cost overrun' and almost predictable failure for indeterminable 'market pricing' to be borne by the end user for the profit modelling to be proven burdensome both in comparison to wind & solar and for the economic irrationality of private commercial electrical supply in general.

Thanks for all your hard work and putting the info across in an easy to understand format. Im not surprised you’ve been invited to the everything electric show at London, did that invite stretch to the Harrogate show. 😊

Thanks for the update Dave. It did look like a promising technology when it was first touted but it seems like it's chance to really shine has passed already. Perhaps it still makes sense in places where solar, wind etc is in short supply and the premium price is worth paying. It may not be the great saviour but perhaps we don't want to stop the research entirely just yet?

The best fusion power is the one you can see with your own eyes whenever the sun is out.

Was in nuclear power for 18 years. When they were first being talked about I was asking questions about cost that no one was answering. SMRs totally go against the mantra of 'economies of scale'. Sure, make the reactor in a 'factory' but (as your graphics and video show quite nicely) the reactor vessel is only a vary small portion of the total size and cost. The cost per megawatt hour must be substantially higher than a 1100 megawatt unit. So, IMO, SMRs are being WILDLY oversold. But this does not mean there is no place for them. Bilibino and the Akademik Lomonosov have shown there is a place for them - when you need consistent power in the middle of nowhere. But you build them for reasons other than saving money. BTW, nice presentation and great references!

Thanks Dave! Great work.

When you asked to guess which country built an SMR I guessed wrong. As far as nuclear reactors go, I figured an SMR would be rather kawaii.

Who woulda thought that easily-replaced, mass-produced, horizontally-scaled, solid-state panels collecting free energy from the sun could be more economical than a hulking, precision-engineered thermal reactor employing a dangerous and highly-refined fuel...

You might be interested to know that down here in Australia our Conservitive Political Parties have adopted SMR as the corner stone of their climate action policy. While they were in government they spent years denying climate change, then delaying doing anything about it. Now that they are in opposition they have finally got on board and recognised that the public wants something done. So their new policy will be focused on the role out of SMR's, "good reliable base load energy not unreliable renewables". This is where SMR's big advantages over renewables comes through. This technology is not available yet, it is over the horizon, years away. So they can have a policy that looks like they are doing something about converting the grid away from coal and gas while all the time using more coal and gas and slowing down the roll out of renewables. SMR's rescue coal and gas by delaying their replacement.

One thing very infrequently mentioned is that solar has now dropped below the cost of transmission, which will indentivize local production. Yes, batteries will add cost, but it can be even cheaper if that energy doesn't travel 1000+ km in the first place. Even if competitors got their energy for free, they would still be uncompetitive as long as they are operating on the national grid.

The thing about NuScale's $89/MWh estimate is that without subsidies it's actually $119/MWh. The thing was the head of the Idaho member of UAMPS, an industry veteran, had calculated the cost to be $130/MWh. Compared to $82/MWh for both wind & solar with lithium based storage currently according to independent analysis by Lazard. The difference also being solar, wind, and storage have a proven track record of declining costs, with newer technologies hitting the market with even lower costs. Nuclear, on the other hand, has a proven track record of rising costs even with reduced regulation and newer, simpler designs that were supposed to be quicker and cheaper to build (AP 1000 & EPR). And as France found out the hard way, having most of your reactors being the same design means that a defect found in one, a 24mm deep crack found in a pipe, which carried radioactive water, with a wall thickness of 27mm meant that they had to shut down over half their fleet for inspections and repairs IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ENERGY CRISIS. That on top of having to operate some of the rest of their fleet at reduced capacity due to inadequate cooling as the rivers they relied on were too warm. Honestly with a track record like that, how could an objective, rational person think nuclear is a good option?

I live 15 miles from a retired nuclear plant. It produced power for 30 years, but was unable to continue because of heavy deterioration. We are still paying for on site residual nuclear waste storage. While there may be special needs and developments for nuclear, the way that renewables are going, a paradigm shift is taking place. Rather than a centralize system of producer/consumers, local consumer generation will be the source of distributed energy.

This is the first video on the topic I've come across that talks about the issues with the scale factor. Using the factor I found in a recent AECL paper leads to the conclusion that a 300 MW SMR would produce 1/4 as much power as a modern large design, but only cost 1/2 as much. Given the cost of conventional designs is already too high for most customers, its difficult to imagine why they might want to consider an SMR.

Thank you for the commentary. I have been reading about the time and cost overruns for nuclear power projects for several years. The Vogtle 3 and 4 are many years overdue and billions over budget.

This sounded so promising.

This is a very astute analysis. Well done. Many thanks.

The most meaningful SMR are the most ambitious ones. Copenhagen Atomics aim to build an SMR that is: - High temperature low pressure (molten salt) - A waste burner that can reach close to 100% actinide burnup - A thermal breeder (thorium) - Made in 2 cm steel plating - President safe (cannot be operated to blow up) - Terrorist safe (even if blown up externally, the radioactive salt contain the radioactive elements and turn into stone for easy removal) - Automated operation (auto balance without control rods) - Can be build FAST, expect 1 reactor/day. - Double passive shutdown in case of power failure (boiling away of heavy water moderator + gravity drain of liquid fuel) - Serializable - possible to connect several reactors to one secondary molten salt loop heating steam for a single turbine. - Expected to beat coal on price, even with an initially short operation time of about 7 years. - Easy to test extensively without turning on the reactor (thermal properties, electronics etc.) - "Energy as a service" business model They will surely not be the first company to produce a commercial SMR, but they will be the company with the greatest SMR (if succesful of cause). Even if they don't manage to complete their own reactor, they will surely get work from other Molten Salt Reactor companies, as they have more technical experience with Molten Salt loops than any other company (more test hours, own production of ultra-pure salts to be specific).

keeping all of us informed, thanks

Thanks again Dave - good work. Small modular reactors were actually first conceived in the 1950s. Nuclear power was seen as the silver bullet and "soon we would get an SMR in each home, delivering energy too cheap to meter". Yes folks, a history lesson can be fun.

We’re very fortunate that the solution is relatively low tech and extremely low risk - solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and battery plus other storage methods.

Nuclear power plants are extremely expensive and complicated machines requiring constant maintenance. In contrast, solar/battery is cheap, widely available and deployable by most able bodied homeowners. Nuclear is also a very centralized (controlled) distribution of energy compared to solar's decentralized self sovereignty model.

Awesome informative video. THX

Michael Barnards has pointed out that Wrights Law only applies if a manufacturing process goes through 10s of 1000s of iterations, that's when 'learning' leads to savings at scale. Correct, and by the same token the entire "power block" of a plant where electricity is produced via steam can no longer expect any improvements as it is really mature tech. That reduces the percentage of possible innovation over the project volume considerably.

You're absolutely right - SMRs are already too expensive; meanwhile solar wind and battery costs continue to come down.

Probably much more important than fitting the category of Small Modular Reactor, are the numerous efforts to develop SMR's that are actually Gen IV designs, that get their cost reductions not from repacking Gen III fuel rods and control systems in smaller bundles, but from reexamining the way nuclear can be made to work and design walk away safe, cheaper more cost effective reactors. Three companies to follow are Terrestrial Energy, ThorCon, and Copenhagen Atomics.

Thank you for this video! I very much appreciate your honesty and your true perspective! Have wondered for many years why SMRs haven't taken off. Now I know!

I totally agree, we need more wind, solar, wave, tidal, hydro, geothermal power as well as more energy storage capacity.

While watching the video I thought solar, wind and battery are increasing so quickly and the prices dropping so fast that it looks like small scale reactors might not be able to compete based on cost alone. Your similar observation at the end of the video seems to bear that out.

I thought two issues with SMRs were that the grid would need upgrading in multiple locations to cope and using uranium as fuel, cooling water needs to be securely sourced. The latter was a problem for France with conventional NPPs during a dry summer when rivers were depleted. Coastal plants are too much at risk from rising sea levels, and alternatives to Uranium, that may require less cooling, are still in the experimental stage of development. Are these concerns incorrect or valid?

The good safety track record of nuclear is because of the huge effort made to make it safe. Inherently, what is being done is dangerous. And notice that wind and solar were even better on safety, with no worry about what would happen in a war or if society broke down to the point where the plant was not managed properly.

I think that last bit of rhetoric is actually spot on and is not emphasised enough!

As someone who’s developed wind and solar farms over the past 17 years, I hope SMR’s take off as we need clean, reliable, base load power to go with our solar and wind generation.

I was honestly surprised when I discovered that renewables are new growing faster year over year (measured by net energy produced) than nuclear power ever did. Even if you compensate for the increased world population since the 1980s, when nuclear grew at its fastest, renewables are still growing faster. And the growth is still accelerating. So how can nuclear ever hope to catch up now? It’d take a miracle breakthrough (Helion maybe?) Some people seem to assume renewables will hit a brick wall when the need for energy storage becomes critical. But it seriously feels like the world is totally on track to handle that challenge. There are dozens of really good solutions out there, some already operating at large commercial scale, and some with really promising pilot plants. And then there’s advanced/deep geothermal kind of looming in the background. Threatening to offer all the benefits of nuclear with none of the downsides if the cost comes down further. And you just know a big portion of the oil and gas industry will jump on that opportunity in order to exploit the expertise they have.

Just submitting this for a boost for the algorithm thingies. Thanks for the video as always.

SMRs are a bit like hydrogen and CCS: a solution to support the existing industry that knows its days are numbered. Nuclear is simply too expensive compared to wind and solar. At Darlington near Toronto, they are building a 300MW SMR (I think the "S" is disinformation at that size) which will produce electricity at 16 cents/kWh...that is double what wind and solar would cost and doesn't include what are sure to be cost overruns. Only 30 of the largest wind turbines are required for the same capacity and would take a fraction of the time to build.

One other thing. Once viable nuclear plants are developed buildout can be quite fast. France nuclearfied it's whole electrical grid in ten years. If the US continued it's reactor buildout at the same pace as in the seventies it's electric grid would have been over 90% nuclear in the nineties. So all these naysayers saying that nuclear can't possibly be a contributor to a climate solution simply are not paying attention to history of nuclear.

When I saw that offshore wind generates more power for less money than SMR it was over. I find it ironic that SMRs are being used to produce petrochemical products. That steam/heat production was a potential use for them but we'd save so much energy just not having to refine oil any more.

Hi Dave, many thx for your very meaningful week by week contributions. Bit one of the latest news worries me the most. This is the investigation from the belgean sientist about the very close stopping of the gulf stream? May be you can bring an update of your past 2020 contribution. many thx and best regards Robert

Imagine if all that money would have been spent on solar, wind and battery storage. 🤷‍♀️

Nuclear is one of those case examples of attractive horrible unworkable ideas that simply refuse to die.

Always glad to assist, Dave.

I work in the Nuclear power (US) and it was obvious to me over 10 years ago that a nuclear resurgence would never catch renewables like wind, solar, and hydro just by looking at the megawatts of these other technologies coming on line each year. 15 years ago there was talk of a nuclear renaissance in the US but most of this plants were scrapped with only the 2 unit Vogtle site in Georgia coming on line. Nevertheless, I would like to see nuclear move ahead to that it might aid in the retirement of fossil units which is sorely needed in the next 3 decades, and just in case there are other issues with renewables that emerge.

Perhaps it’s a bit off topic, but I fully expect that the development of fusion power plants is going to butt up against the same constraints of minimum economic scale as these SMRs, only on a scale that dwarfs even the largest, modern fission reactors now. My wild guess is that in a hundred years or more, there will be working fusion power plants, but they will be a scant few, mind bogglingly colossal constructs surrounded by the high energy demand industries that they will primarily feed. All the rest of us will be getting by just fine on renewables by then. That’s all assuming all the current negative trends get resolved without ending civilization as we know it. Wish I could be more confident of that.

Thanks. Beautiful video as always.

Yep. You lost me on renewables backed up by battery and hydro power. Given the variability of renewables and the immense power needed to stabilise the transmission frequency the scale of backup power and its durability makes this approach highly questionable particularly for Australia where transmission distances are much more profound than the UK. There are a multitude of issues involved around this proposed configuration making it a complex balancing act fraught with risks. The old saying is ... Keep it simple!!

At least in the U.S. your conclusion is spot on. Currently, long-term contracts for wind and solar with battery storage are in the $20 per Mwh range and dropping. A SMR at nearly $60 is a loser and when you bump that to $90 it's a massive loser.

Love your videos because you not only skeptical but dig deep and looking for some opportunities. Most of similar youtube channels just do hype and barely scratch the topic.

This quote fits nicely Dave Firefly Episode: War Stories Jayne Cobb: "Smellin' a lot of "if" comin' off this plan."

I once got into an argument with peculiar gentleman who was convinced CO2 doesn't affect climate, renewables are scam and environmentalist did more harm than good... But he was a big fan of developing Small Nuclear Reactor technology and argued that funds should be flowing there instead of renewables. This little belief of his helped me to sleep better at night knowing that he thankfully wasn't advocating for natural gas or something. But now, well....

Thank you for a good explanation about SMR's. Greetings from Uitgeest in the Netherlands.

i am sad about the failure of SMRs. i always knew something like this was coming, but its still sad :( if anyone could actually get cost-competitive SMRs done, they could do SO MUCH interesting stuff. it'd be an entirely new era of power generation but, like the skeptics had said from the start, it just isn't doable without fudging the numbers and hoping to be subsidized by VC. small will always be more expensive than big, no matter how you slice it, and nobody is going to accept a 'solution' that costs $100~ per mwh of electricity if we want nuclear (and i would argue we really do), we need the big traditional plants. and NIMBYism makes that nearly impossible

The description of the party is a bit short on storage for time smearing aka base load. Nuclear is at least reasonable for low level base load. Can you address the storage issue? Not beyond daytime/overnight, but for a week of low wind and also low solar as we get in swing seasons. Tidal - yes that will keep on going and if the moon disappears we have other issues. But we don't have much tidal.

Here's a strong reaction to this superb summary of the state of the art and sensible recommendations. THANK YOU!!!

Sometimes time makes the final Verdict. I'm in Western Australia and many years ago it was floated to "drought proof the State by pumping water from the Ord River Dam. it has a storage capacity of 204,719,140,000 cubic feet (5,797,000,000 cubic m). So plenty to do just that, and it sounded good on paper. But recent studies have established that it would consume considerably more power to pump the water the 3,000+Km's to the area of need than to desalinate the sea water readily available off the coast.

The need for SMR has passed. In the UK we just need 130% wind, supported by solar and battery. With the Morocco HVDC interconnector we will have stable, green abundance of cheap energy. Improving nuclear for big shipping is a valid spend of research money though.

Thanks - great analysis - you rock

The extra grid capacity expansion construction costs are ignored in all these nuclear posts. Nobody does the calculations. Yes, I know the existing grid is available, but grid electricity is only 15% to 18% of all energy used.

I'm curious about molten salt reactors. Moltex Energy's Stable Salt Reactor technology looks really promising.

While we continue to develop new ways to generate electrical power it seems odd that the push to develop less power hungry devices gets less attention when that seems to be the best area to achieve power savings. For instance, addressing the power needs of cold storage facilities that use freezers, refrigerators, lighting, etc, all seem like an easier way to achieving the goal of using less power and making what we do generate, go further. V = I x R is a pretty simple math equation when you get down to brass tacks.

There's just no getting over the geopolitical hard no to nuclear power in most countries, and the utterly unfeasible increase in nuclear technicians needed to operate everything. The cost of negotiations alone would sink any global project, and getting the staff in place is far more expensive than that.

SNRs only make sense in a few isolated cases. Aircraft Carriers and other large naval ships make sense for nuclear reactors. The other possible places for SNRs are relatively isolated communities in the Arctic where you do not have sunlight for half of the year. However, with large scale sodium based battery systems and a few backup generators, that will still be much cheaper than a reactor. Don't forget that EVs with bidirectional charging are also part of the grid.

The biggest threat I see is trying to provide security for all of these mini reactors. How much damage could be done by one person with a .50 caliber rifle or a propane truck?

Prodigal metaphorical ducks in a row. Perfect.❤

The discussion is not a fair one. - Using LCOE in these scenario's is wrong, we do not want power, we want power 24x7. If you deviate from that, these costs should also be included. If you don't than you should add the cost of failing to provide 24x7 power. Only then do you get a fair comparison. - For decomissioning of nuclear, that costs a lot. But its only a fair comparisson if you add those costs to solar and wind. In solar heavy metals are used (those are dangerous forever, thats much less than 30.000 years :-) ). - Nuclear cost so much because of the long build times. Well... thats our own fault because we put up all kind of hurdles. Japan can do it in much less time. - For the technology, at the moment we do not have grid scale battery. This channel shows a lot of options, but these are still under development and no where near gigawatt levels and will not be before 2030. Even solar took decades to drop down so much. But the discussion is not renewables OR nuclear. With the transition we are facing in can only be renewables AND nuclear. But only if we have a fair comparison on costs on ALL factors can we make good descisions (grid upgrades, resource availability, capital costs ect)

What everyone does not seem to notice is we have had working Small Nuclear Reactors for over 60 years. They are navel nuclear reactor that have been in service since 1955 when the USS Nautili's was commissioned. It would seem a simple task to adapt one for land use.

SMRs can hardly be considered a novelty. Churning out SMRs from assembly lines, though, is just a pipe dream. All reactors, big and small, can be modular if they're built alongside each other. However, due to economies of scale, it makes more sense to resort to bigger units because costs per unit of energy can be lower, all other things remaining the same.

ALGO! Cheers for the update on this. :)

A recent article in New Scientist#3477 noted that the 1.5C magical value was surpassed in 2010 when the world mean temperature was already 1.8C above the "preindustrial (1850-1900)" mean. I worked at K-25 enrichment plant in the 1970s, we all knew that the deaths related to nuclear power occurred in the coal mines that ultimately supplied the electricity for K-25 et al.

He's definitely not the first to say nuclear isn't an option because it takes too long. Maybe nuclear will fill a role we haven't thought of though. I'm not ready to ignore any option just yet.

Great video as usual 👌

Fusion has the same problems of economics plus their technical issues. Nuclear can't compete with the dropping cost of renewables, even if they could get their cost of fuel to zero (renewables are already at zero fuel cost).

Thanks for the video! I hope your words on renewable are true!

I do think that, if every other power generation technology had to comply with a similar set of costs and regulations as Nuclear, Nuclear would be more competitive. As is, Nuclear has to track every stay neutron, while Coal gets to just dump toxic waste that will be hazardous forever into the air and water and no-one cares. But...yeah, I have to agree that Wind and Solar do seem to be the best choice going forward.

Excellent analysis, lot of valuable information. Showing - if this was necessary - that the hype from "start-ups" promise a lot and deliver little. Just applying to France, this is absolutely true, wind and solar need to ramp-up responding to the huge electrification needs. However with a large share of nuclear, there is a need for replacement and new "standard" nuclear may not be sufficient, SMR could be added quicker than additional traditional plants, adding heat to power generation with interesting efficiency, contributing to fill the gap due to decommissionning of reactors from the 70's. But given the urgency and technological uncertainties, it is critical to be ready to do without SMRs in the 20 coming years (which does not prevent working on it).