Behind the reopened debate in Europe on the future of nuclear energy hides a million-dollar race worldwide for the research and development of small modular reactors that provide cheap and stable energy with which to promote the decarbonization of the main economies. The United States,
Russia, Argentina, China, Canada, South Korea, France and the United Kingdom
- which announced last week a plan to make
Roll Royce
their atomic champion - are working on their own models of minis and microreactors with which to re-launch nuclear power. .
The Spanish engineering company
Idom
has entered this career
, investing through a British company in the development of one of these innovative projects in Canada. Its director of Nuclear Services,
Xabier Ruiz,
believes that these reactors will represent a resurrection of the atom worldwide by saving one of its great current obstacles: the millionaire investment required due to the delay in its installation and commissioning, which can exceed the 20 years after a long and complex bureaucratic process that ensures the safety of the plant.
A 'nuclear mini-reactor' is an electrical generation facility with a power close to 300 megawatts, which is approximately a third of the size of the large power plants currently existing in Spain. Its promoters point out that it is precisely in its small size that its great advantage lies, since the necessary investment is greatly reduced from the tens of unaffordable billions of euros that a large plant requires.
"The big difference is the installation time due to the simplification of the authorization process, which greatly lowers the investment. Being smaller, the license time will be less, between three and six years," explains Ruiz.
The last nuclear power plant to start operating in the US, in 2020, took a total of 250 months to start generating electricity, almost 21 years.
Another advantage of mininuclear power plants is their ability to adapt to environments not suitable for large reactors.
These facilities can be prefabricated and then transported, which gives them flexibility to supply energy to places where the grid is not able to reach.
There are currently more than forty research projects, as detailed by the
International Atomic Energy Agency
. The Spanish company is working on a model promoted by Canada that includes the recycling of nuclear waste as a major advance. This would alleviate another of the great current burdens of nuclear power: what to do with the thousands of liters of spent fuel and high radioactive content discarded each year by the plants. This is precisely one of the arguments of the detractors of the atom, including the Spanish Government itself, to argue that nuclear cannot be considered a 'clean' energy despite not emitting CO2 into the atmosphere.
In the same way, SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) reduce fuel consumption and therefore the need for recharging, which forces the power plants to temporarily stop.
The first studies speak that in this case the recharges would take place in a period of between three and seven years, compared to one or two at most for conventional plants.
Some mini-reactor projects speak of recharging every 30 years.
In Spain, this same week the technical shutdown of two plants, Cofrentes and Almaraz, to refuel.
Nuclear mini-reactor project of the Moltex Energy company in Canada.EM
Will we see this type of small power plants in Spain? "Here is a very contrary ideology that eludes the debate. The challenges are to extend the life of the current reactors, what to do with the resources and whether or not to create a Centralized Temporary Warehouse (ATC) for waste ...", laments the director of Idom.
While in Spain nuclear energy is heading towards its disappearance, with the closure agreed by electricity companies and the Government of the entire park before 2035, the
United Kingdom and France
have announced their reactivation in recent weeks. The first of these countries will grant
Roll Royce
grants of 240 million euros to develop its own nuclear mini-reactor. The second, as announced by its president Emmanuel Macron in a speech to the nation, will allocate
1,000 million euros to research
as one of the main legs in its recovery plan after the Covid crisis.
The entry of the great world powers with public funds is added to the private investments that are being carried out by tycoons such as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.
Both share participate in the North American company
Terra Power,
which is working with the objective of putting one of these reactors into operation in 2030 to provide coverage and stability to the great renewables plan promoted by the North American Administration.
Environmental organizations, for their part, believe that the mini-reactors still offer serious doubts about their competitiveness and their dangerousness, so they are betting on a decarbonization process based entirely on the energy generated by renewable sources supported by the new storage systems as well. Developing.
.
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