Nuclear Energy Transition: Chronic Difficulties
Traditionally, the pursuit of economies of scale has led to growth in the power output of individual reactors and, simultaneously, in the complexity of designs. As size increases, not all cost items increase proportionally. In addition, variation in the weight of civil structures and auxiliary systems on the cost balance has always been considered favorable to expansion. However, large reactors have a surface area/volume ratio that makes decay heat removal more challenging, as well as demonstrating according to regulatory requirements that this occurs under every postulated condition without damaging the plant. This results in a complication in all phases of the project: from licensing, and project management to the actual construction and operation of the reactor with a significant time dilation between conception and actual energy production. Over such a long period, there are many risks-organizational and economic-that design companies face:
Changes in legislation
Sudden changes in policy lines
Changing projected needs of utilities or the power grid
Risk of premature shutdown of power plants due to political pressures
The occurrence of even one of these eventualities corresponds to an abrupt slowdown in the licensing process. But why is licensing so time-consuming and delicate? In a nutshell, the complexity and number of reviews, analyses, and documents to be submitted to regulatory bodies for evaluation of the design as well as the location of the facility requires a lot of skilled manpower, from both sides of the process. Asynchronous communication through static documents, whether paper or digital, requires a lot of material to be updated manually at each stage of the project. And this leaves even less room for potential changes that may be needed during construction. In addition, intuitively, the larger the reactor, the greater the risks in terms of time and economic resources involved. Based on these considerations, more and more companies are becoming interested in SMRs, both among designers and users. The benefits of this choice are self-evident:
Reduction in the time required for the licensing process due to simplification of facilities
Reduction in construction time
Reduction in investment size for the benefit of finance ability
New financing mechanisms (finished the first module you can start selling energy to finance subsequent modules)
Reduction of economic and time loss in case of failure to pass licensing procedures
Shortly, the reduction in reactor size will allow distribution to many more sites than large centralized plants. Thus, the importance and number of site licenses and environmental impact analysis will grow. Speed and efficiency in meeting bureaucratic requirements will be needed to effectively attack the market. Nonetheless, because few reactors have been deployed in recent years, the impacts of the resulting phenomenon of the reduction of the skilled workforce due to the retirement of the generation that built and fired the reactors still in operation today should not be underestimated.
