2023-11-15 22:35:00
The CEO of NuScale Power Corp. defended its small modular nuclear reactor business on Tuesday, saying work was continuing in the U.S. and two other countries — including Romania — after the company canceled its first such facility in an American government laboratory, amid rising costs, reports Archyde.com.
NuScale small modular reactor prototypePhoto: Nuclearelectrica
NuScale announced last week that it had agreed with a coalition of Utah municipal power systems to cancel the six-reactor, 462-megawatt project that was to be built at the U.S. Idaho National Laboratory by 2030. NuScale and Utah Associated Municipal Power System said the cancellation was due to concerns about low demand for the plant’s electricity, it cites News.ro.
John Hopkins, CEO of NuScale, is optimistic despite the cancellation of the Utah project. “I know that financially, we have $200 million in the bank. That’s cash, no debt. So we have a healthy balance sheet,” Hopkins said at a conference of the American Nuclear Society in Washington.
Hopkins stated that the NuScale projects in Romania and South Korea continue to develop.
The end of the publicly funded Utah plant was a blow to US ambitions for a new era of nuclear power to help fight climate change. The NuScale project derives from traditional power plants that are powered by one or more large reactors.
In 2020, the Department of Energy approved $1.35 billion over 10 years for the plant, known as the Carbon Free Power Project, subject to appropriations from Congress. The department has given NuScale and other companies about $600 million since 2014 to help commercialize small reactor technologies.
John Hopkins also said a plan with service provider Standard Power to develop two gigawatts of nuclear power for data centers in Pennsylvania and Ohio is on track. A contract for this project will be finalized “if not this week, next week,” Hopkins announced.
NuScale was the first US company to receive regulatory approval for its small and modular reactor project. Proponents say such projects can be built in remote locations and feed heavy industry with emissions that have traditionally been difficult to reduce.
NuScale said in January that the target price for the plant’s power had risen 53 percent to $89 per megawatt hour, raising concerns about customers’ willingness to pay that amount. Critics say small modular reactors (SMRs) and other advanced reactor designs are too expensive to succeed. (News.ro)
The Minister of Energy, Sebastian Burduja, sees a good side in the fact that Romania is moving forward with a project that failed in the USA. He says that Romania can thus become the first country in the world with small size reactors (SMR) and we can bring some of the engineering developed there. He recommends the film “Nuclear” by Oliver Stone to those who are frightened by the subject.
What Burduja says:
- We have this ambition to be the first in the world to have small modular reactors. Indeed this NuScale technology, you’ve probably read the news, had a – let’s call it – hesitation in its course. It is a commercial hesitation, the project in the United States has been funded in a complex way by dozens of utility companies, but the technology itself remains the only one in the world certified by the NRC, the strictest regulator in the world.
- And there’s every chance we’ll even benefit from the fact that the Idaho project won’t be done. Because we can negotiate with the United States Department of Energy to take some of the engineering and the elements developed there and even accelerate, to be in 2029 – why not? – the first country in the world to have a small reactor.
- There is also a fear in society why we should be the first, but I think we must be proud of this and explain to Romanians that this technology is safe and as long as it receives all the certifications from the NRC, from CNCAN, from all those involved, we should not fear.
- By the way, I recommend a movie that is on the big screens, the movie Nuclear, by Oliver Stone, a movie that explains in a way that everyone can understand what the benefits of nuclear technology mean and why humanity was scared when it could have embraced this technology.
HotNews.ro wrote extensively about this topic and about the reasons why the US project failed.
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