Like the Chernobyl cloud, will the civilian nuclear renaissance come from the East? Long dependent on Russian technology, the countries of Eastern Europe are now turning to the American atom. Small modular reactors, in particular, are on the rise there.
Will Switzerland one day buy its electricity from Eastern Europe? In any case, from Estonia to Romania via Poland, projects for large power plants but also for small reactors have been accelerating in recent months. The Americans GE-Hitachi and NuScale have obtained contracts in Estonia, Poland and Romania in recent weeks. Late, the Europeans Rolls Royce and EDF are developing their projects for small reactors, better suited to these markets than the gigantic EPRs.
Why now is the time. The war in Ukraine revealed the dependence of Switzerland and its European neighbors on Russian gas. Between decarbonization of electricity production and exit from fossil fuels, nuclear power is once once more becoming an option.
In the West, Belgium has just postponed its exit from nuclear power scheduled for 2025. The Netherlands has announced the construction of two power plants. France is considering six new reactors. And Switzerland is reopening the debate via the Stop the Blackout initiative.
However, it is in Eastern Europe that the nuclear renaissance is most marked, with an explosion of projects for large and small reactors, generally of American origin.
Farewell to the EPR 1600. For fifty years, the development of nuclear power has been guided by a race for gigantism. The first-generation reactors of the 1960s, with a power of less than 500 MW, were succeeded by second-generation reactors approaching and then exceeding 1000 MW. The third generation, that of the EPRs under construction in Finland, the United Kingdom and France, must flirt with 1600 MW.
As explained to Heidi.news Czech nuclear engineering consultant Karel Samec:
“Basically a thermo-hydraulic machine like a nuclear reactor, the bigger it is the more efficient it is.”
Efficiency is here to be understood in the thermodynamic sense, of energy efficiency. But the size also has flaws:
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