Rolls-Royce wins pioneering deal to build mini nuclear plants in Czech Republic

SMR's make absolutely no sense to me.

Any engineer knows that one-offs are way easier & cheaper to design & build than production-ready designs & the factory to build them. Building a prototype car is an undergrad project. Taking it to production costs billions. You need significant volume before factories make sense, and it's not clear that SMR's will cross that threshold.

But let's say that SMR's do cross that threshold. Then what? A power plant incorporating one or more SMR's is still a mega-project with all the problems that mega-projects and especially nuclear mega-projects have. You still have all the planning & permitting costs, the large building with special design needs, the cooling infrastructure, the massive expensive turbines, et cetera. SMR's only target a very small fraction of the cost of a nuclear project. Halving 10% of the cost is not going to make nuclear competitive in a world where it has to compete with other power sources being at least an order of magnitude cheaper.

Coal plants and fission plants have a similar principle: they heat water to turn turbines. So you're highly unlikely to get their cost below that of a coal plant. A new build 600MW coal plant was estimated to cost $2B in 2008.[1]

1: https://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf

It doesn't need to make sense, you just need to have a market to sell it into. And that market is massive, it's basically any government worldwide that has bought the rhetoric that renewables don't work. Ontario, Saskatchewan and Poland are 3 examples off the top of my head, there are many others.

I suspect some kind of political quid-pro-quo because recently:

- https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20240919050430

- https://www.intellinews.com/favourite-westinghouse-ejected-f... and https://czechdaily.cz/the-future-of-nuclear-energy-in-the-cz...

- https://www.intellinews.com/us-westinghouse-and-french-edf-f...

Of course such investments are always politics but...

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.

Nuclear fission is the answer.

Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.

Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant.

This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse gas emissions.

Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514).

In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The United Arab Emirates, land of oil and sun, now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).

Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. But you don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet. And many people (Germany, Spain, I'm looking at you) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and well-secured in dry cask storage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.

Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.