There’s been a lot of talk about SMR’s over the years, it’s nice to see one finally being built.
Even if it comes in over budget, getting the first one done will be a great learning experience and could lead to figuring out how to do future ones cheaper.
Assuming it’s on time, completion in 2029, connected to grid in 2030.
The small modular reactor (SMR) would provide 300 megawatts of power, enough electricity to supply about 300,000 homes, according to briefing documents from Ontario’s Ministry of Energy and Mines.
300MW isn’t small at all. That’s half a CANDU block! I thought they would be significantly smaller and therefore not too significant for the grid until we build more units. This is the equivalent of 20-30 of the largest wind turbines available. Not sure if we have that large units installed in Canada.
It’s small compared to typical nuclear reactors which are usually 1GW, and these new units use much less land space.
Edit: They’re also designed to be manufactured offsite at a manufacturing facility instead of the very large ones that are built on site.
Our reactors have lower output than the typical 1-1.5GW of foreign designs though. CANDU are in the the 500-800MW range. It’s why compared to CANDU, 300MW is significant.
Ah, I didn’t realize the CANDU’s were also manufactured at a factory unlike the bigger built in place ones.
I guess it’s just about getting them even smaller at that point, and the SMRs take up less land space as well.
A SMR-300 (maybe not this one specifically) can be as small as 3 hectares.
I don’t know if CANDUs have pre-made components, I was just talking about their output power. I don’t know exactly why it’s lower than other designs but I know there are some fundamental differences like CANDU burning unenriched uranium as opposed to almost all other designs. It also uses heavy water to make that possible compared to the rest. I assume the lower power output is related to these differences. Or it could be arbitrary. We need someone working on nukes at OPG or SNC-Lavalin to chime in. 😂
Oh sorry I googled CANDU to learn a bit more and saw that they were also made in a factory offsite.
I imagine that’s at least one of the reasons why its lower capacity per reactor. It can only be so big if built offsite.
So we had SMRs all along? I smell a grift. 😂
The CANDU still take a much larger space I guess due to the overall design. You can fit one of these SMRs in 10-15 acres.
These are considered ‘small’ because of their footprint, not just their output. They are absolutely safe, since if they malfunction they just solidify, they do not go into melt down. It is the same technology that is used in the reactors in submarines and aircraft carriers, and believe me, those are SMALL. China is making them small enough to fit in shipping containers, to be shipped and assembled in remote communities. The one Canada is building is, however, on the larger scale of these SMR’s. China is building them by the dozens.
It is actually the technology itself that makes them part of the SMR family - far removed from the technology used in conventional large scale nuclear reactors.
And the fact that they have been used in nuclear submarines for over 50 years does NOT make the technology ‘new’. It is not just ‘talk’, it is proven, built, and tested over decades of continuous use, albeit top secret use.
It was even rumored by engineering students that there was one under the greenhouse of a Canadian university, operated in complete highest-level secrecy, been there since the '80’s. Used in the development of the reactors used in the American submarines. But that was just an unfounded rumor.
Which is also why they might be snake oil. Similar problems to a full-size modern reactor, but without the savings of scale and not having to ship modules around.
But now it allows the same top-secret ultra-classified reactors that were once limited to military craft to be used on container ships and oil tankers. Pollution-free ocean shipping.
To be clear, the exact designs on military craft are secret for security reasons, but not the theory and general technology. Commercial nuclear boats have long existed, they’re just niche for all the cost, safety and complexity reasons you’d expect.
This technology was so highly classified that any mention of it by those developing it would lead to their lifetime incarceration, stated clearly in the non-disclosure agreements they had to sign They could not even mention the theory and general technology behind it. The background tech only came to the public attention when Russia and China started commercializing it, and this forced the Americans to acknowledge it. It was a Russian ice breaker that was the first commercial vessel to use nuclear power, and even at that it was wrapped in military secrecy. But America refused to allow any development on a Western equivalent for ‘military security’ reasons.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/commercial-nuclear-adoption-ship
But the most effective way for America to completely prevent any development of this nuclear technology was to make it essentially impossible for any commercial outfit to get insurance on these propulsion systems, making it impossible for them to enter any port.
Everything on the military is classified. Basic ass radios from the 80s are top secret, classified just means they don’t want enemies to know the exact specifications of their equipment.
There’s plenty of insurers not in America…
A nuclear reactor isn’t actually a very complicated machine, in a sense. Put enough nuclear fuel in one place and it gets hot. Then, drive a heat engine with it. Usually one based on steam, although closed-cycle gas turbines, sterling engines and airbreathing jet engines have all been experimented with.
It’s just that you have to keep track of neutron moderation and cross sections, half lives of thousands of isotopes, thermal changes, non-constant demand and the possibility of point failures, all under the condition that you can’t let anything escape. That makes it complicated, but then again each individual part on that list can be learned from open-source materials.
It’s even known what general kinds of reactors are on various military nuclear submarines. For example, the earlier Soviet designs used a liquid lead-bismuth cooled fast neutron design, which is why the Russians have so much polonium, while the modern designs use a pressurised water coolant.
It is not insuring the reactor for replacement, it is insuring the entire nuclear powered ship so it can enter a port. Ships collide. Ships crash. Ships hit bridges. An oil spill is one thing, nuclear contamination of the entire port is another.
Yes, I’m aware. It’s a sector pretty famously pioneered by the British, and Lloyd’s of London still operates.
You can’t use ship style because those use weapons-grade material. It’s more compact but not something you can use for civilian designs. The design isn’t complex, it just uses higher energy density material.
enough electricity to supply about 300,000 homes The estimated construction cost of the initial reactor is $7.7 billion
Interesting. That comes out to just over $25,000 per home, assuming it’s delivering power to 300,000 homes.
I wonder what it would cost to fit those 300,000 homes (or the roofs of large buildings) with solar, wind, and other green tech… interlinking communities to their wider municipality, and the rest of the province for redundancy.
Top end solar systems for the “average” home in Ontario would be around the same $25,000 price tag - one time - and would pay for itself in under 10 years, saving home owners from having to worry about rising energy costs.
Would it be most cost-effective? More sustainable? More eco-friendly?
You’re forgetting that the SMR provides a baseload, while solar would only provide during the daytime hours. You’d need to tack on a battery system capable of running the house overnight which would increase costs further by at a minimum another 10-15k with installation for a small single family dwelling, or build a more centralized MW level scale battery system elsewhere. Wind doesn’t really work too well for residential as the turbines aren’t as cost effective at smaller sizes. (edit: You’d also need to over provision each house in order to ensure there’s enough excess capacity to charge the batteries for the evening, increasing the cost further, and ensure it is over provisioned enough for winter)
The article mentions that IF it comes in on budget, it’d cost around the same as a centralized wind/solar project which would be cheaper than a home system, but home systems obviously provide better national security in terms of not a single point of failure.
Also the goal of these SMR projects is to just churn these things out of a factory which will make them cheaper in the long run. These things are brand new, and saying lets just forgo this new tech because solar, which has had decades to get to it’s current cost, are cheaper is a mistake. SMRs could very well be cheaper than solar in the long run if we put the effort into it.
Edit: And I’m not trying to say putting home solar/battery is a bad idea, it’s also a critical thing to do. It’s not one or the other, it’s both!
Edit: Also unless it’s on a standing seam metal roof or other similar snap on install roof, assume at least one likely removal/reinstall for the solar panels per lifetime of the roof which would add another few thousand dollars.
For comparison, the energy we get from Niagara Falls is 2400 MW, so this (300 MW) is very significant.
Cool, we’ll finally get to find out if it’s actually even more complicated and expensive than the traditional kind.
They plan to build 4 of them at this site… at the very least I hope each one is progressively cheaper to build as they learn.
If each one is more expensive that’ll be bad news bears heh.
I’ve heard it suggested that the mass production efficiencies wouldn’t kick in until they’re building hundreds or thousands. That’s pretty typical for manufacturing, and it’s not like we’ve never built a reactor before.
mass production efficiencies wouldn’t kick in until they’re building hundreds or thousands
Maybe if you are building laptops and dishwashers. These are small building crammed with plumbing and electrical work, making 4 or 5 of them in a dedicated factory will significantly reduce production costs. You can have one guy who is good at flanged stainless pipe, one guy who is a panel building wizard, and so on. The first project will take the normal amount of time, each subsequent one will go much faster because the team already has a process in place.
Source: I worked industrial construction for 6 years, jobs where more than one copy of the same machine was being built always came in under budget because each copy was built quicker than the last.
There’s at least as many parts in a modern reactor as in a dishwasher, but leaving that aside the modular building thing also failed to take off the n times it’s been tried, and for similar reasons. I fully believe there’s a speedup if you do the same project multiple times, although you’d find it would plateau after a while. There’s also a speedup associated with building something large and in place.
The big savings happen when you reach a production run where you can build or configure specialised tooling and run it until after it’s earned itself back.
