Huge cooling towers, that's how we know nuclear power plants. On the advertising images with which the British company Rolls-Royce is presenting the future of nuclear energy, there is an idyllic green landscape instead, with a caterpillar-shaped building in the middle. It looks more like an opera house. This power plant will house so-called small modular reactors (SMR) in English. In a small form, nuclear power has been trying to make a big comeback for years, now under the flag of the energy transition, as a climate saver, so to speak. Proponents argue that nuclear power is low in emissions, like renewables, but delivers electricity regardless of the weather, time of day or location.
The British government is supporting Rolls-Royce with £ 210 million. And during the climate summit in Glasgow, the US company NuScale announced that it would build a nuclear power plant with six small reactors in Romania together with a local nuclear energy company, before 2030. The French President Emmanuel Macron also recently reaffirmed the role of nuclear power for the He promised subsidies for the low-emission energy industry in his country, the mini-reactors.
There is no doubt that nuclear power is initially approximately greenhouse gas neutral. However, critics have always referred to the danger of a nuclear accident, the misuse of nuclear weapons and the unsolved nuclear waste issue. As for the energy transition: nuclear power is expensive, prone to failure and therefore not economical and would stand in the way of the further expansion of cheaper renewables. The developers of the small reactors now claim to address the cost problem while making nuclear power safer. Can that be true?
The role of nuclear power is a point of contention not only among climate activists, but also in the EU.
The current debate is whether nuclear energy should be classified as a sustainable investment in the EU taxonomy.
The acting Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) is against it, with the future government nothing should change in Germany's position.
Mass production is supposed to make the reactors cheaper
Meanwhile, various SMR concepts are being developed around the world. These fall into two categories, which are summarized under the industry term Small Modular Reactor: One is alternative reactor concepts such as the molten salt reactor currently being tested in China. These differ significantly from the reactors in most of today's large power plants, some have been researched for decades, but have not yet been commercially established.
The small reactors that could most likely be used in Europe over the next few decades are a more compact version of the common pressurized water reactor. The Rolls-Royce reactor, the NuScale reactor and the French counterpart Nuward fall into this category. These reactors are “small” in terms of their output: 300 megawatts of electrical output are the upper limit, but that is not strict either, the Rolls-Royce reactor would be higher with its 470 megawatts.
Great Britain is currently building two large nuclear reactors, each with 1,600 megawatts of electrical output, at Hinkley Point - a project that will devour billions and will be delayed by years.
High costs, long construction times and high loan interest due to the investment risk are typical of modern nuclear power plants, says Juan Matthews.
He has been an advisor to the UK government on "advanced reactors" and works at the Dalton Nuclear Institute in Manchester.
The solution, according to Matthews: “You make the investment smaller.” So does the reactor.