Modular Nuclear Reactors Sound Great, but Won't be Ready Any Time Soon

upstart writes:

Modular nuclear reactors sound great, but won't be ready any time soon:

The UK government has announced plans to build more than a dozen small nuclear reactors across the country, ushering in what it calls a new "golden age" for nuclear power. One of the ultimate goals is to help the country to finally divest from Russian energy within three years - but do tiny nuclear reactors make engineering and commercial sense, and can they even be built?

Ahead of a 16 September London visit by US President Trump, the US and UK announced a partnership between British firm Centrica and US start-up X-Energy to build 12 small modular nuclear reactors to power data centres, plus a "micro modular nuclear power plant" at DP World's London Gateway port built by US start-up Last Energy.

However, no dates were given for the beginning of any of the projects, and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero did not respond to New Scientist's request for more detail.

The announcement fits a trend of smaller nuclear reactors. Bruno Merk at the University of Liverpool in the UK says Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear energy organisation, recently finished building a batch of small reactors for a highly specific use in nuclear-powered icebreaker ships. Crucially, they then continued building more, showing either that there is demand from somewhere, or that Rosatom is taking a risk and building them as a commercial demonstration in the hope of selling more despite a raft of energy sanctions imposed after its invasion of Ukraine.

China, too, has built a Linglong One small nuclear reactor, but it is not clear whether it will yet be a commercially viable product. And giant technology firms like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are investing in these sorts of nuclear technologies,too.

David Dye at Imperial College London says tiny reactors make sense for remote military installations or Arctic sites, but is sceptical about using tiny nuclear reactors to power these tech giants' needs. He says it is far easier to build data centres near a ready supply of energy instead.

"If you're a tech visionary multibillionaire and you want to believe...and you've made your billion, what is it to chuck $50 million at this cool technology?" says Dye."This is very rich men, or clubs of very rich men, giving a few crumbs off the table to this technology they've always loved the idea of, without really looking too carefully."

One motivation could be oversight, says Michael Bluck at Imperial College London. "If you're a data centre, you need to be on 99.995 per cent of the time," says Bluck. "That means you really want to be in control of that electricity. You get first dibs on that electricity."

Bluck says there is no engineering or scientific reason we can't build tiny nuclear reactors, and build them fast. He points out the first experimental reactors were small, and many devices of a similar size operate in universities and military submarines around the world still.

"Size is not the issue. It's the modularity, it's the building it on a production line, it's the standardisation of components. It's really practical. It's standard engineering," says Bluck.

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