'Advanced' nuclear power and small modular reactors

The Committee's report called for a partial repeal of legal bans to permit the development of "new and emerging nuclear technologies" including small modular reactors, but that was quickly ruled out by the Morrison government.

Nonetheless, the rhetoric about 'advanced' or 'next generation' nuclear power persists and the Australian Conservation Foundation has released a new briefing paper debunking that propaganda.

Conventional (or 'light water') reactors are fuelled by uranium and cooled by ordinary ('light') water, which also slows (or 'moderates') the neutrons that maintain the nuclear chain reaction. Advanced nuclear power generally refers to reactors -- large or small -- with different fuels, moderators and coolants.

Most of these concepts are far from advanced: previous R&D projects have been underwhelming or outright failures and have therefore been abandoned. In other words, most 'Generation IV' nuclear concepts could best be described as failed Generation I concepts.

David Elliot - author of the 2017 book Nuclear Power: Past, Present and Future - notes that many 'advanced' nuclear power concepts "are in fact old ideas that were looked at in the early days and mostly abandoned. There were certainly problems with some of these early experimental reactors, some of them quite dramatic."

Physicist Dr. Edwin Lyman has written an important report for the Union of Concerned Scientists debunking claims that 'advanced' nuclear power concepts offer significant advantages over conventional nuclear power. The report considers sodium-cooled fast reactors, high-temperature gas–cooled reactors, and molten salt reactors.

Dr. Lyman writes :

Based on the available evidence, we found that the designs we analyzed are not likely to be significantly safer than today's nuclear plants. In fact, certain alternative reactor designs pose even more safety, proliferation, and environmental risks than the current fleet. Developing new designs that are clearly superior to LWRs [light water reactors] overall is a formidable challenge, as improvements in one respect can create or exacerbate problems in others. For example, increasing the physical size of a reactor core while keeping its power generation rate constant could make the reactor easier to cool in an accident, but it could also increase cost.

Small modular reactors

If developed, 'small modular reactors' (SMRs) would have a capacity of under 300 megawatts (MW), whereas large reactors typically have a capacity of about 1,000 MW. Construction at reactor sites would be replaced with standardised factory production of reactor components (or 'modules') followed by installation at the reactor site. (The term 'modular' can also refer to the option of building clusters of small reactors at the same site.)

SMRs don't have any meaningful existence. Some small reactors exist, and there are hopes and dreams of mass factory production of SMRs. But currently there is no such SMR mass manufacturing capacity, and no company, consortium, utility or national government is seriously considering betting billions building an SMR mass manufacturing capacity.

Current and recent SMR construction projects