[credit: green lantern electric]
The small modular reactor contest looks to be getting underway. Whether the UK wants to be the ‘test bed’ as suggested remains to be seen, but something has to take the place of all the retired power stations. Part-time weather-dependent renewables can’t do that.
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A US energy developer linked to Elon Musk is in talks with the Government to build a fleet of small nuclear reactors across the UK.
Last Energy wants to build its first “mini-nuclear” power plant by 2025 and has identified its first site in Wales, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
The company intends to spend £1.4bn on 10 reactors by the end of the decade.
Last Energy’s end goal is to build “hundreds of plants” across the UK, sources close to the company said.
The proposals are a direct challenge to Rolls-Royce, which is racing to secure approval for its own British-made fleet of mini reactors.
Last Energy is one of 12 select investments by start-up backer Gigafund. Three of these – SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink – are founded by Mr Musk, 50, the world’s richest person and chief executive of electric car maker Tesla.
Last Energy met with Government aides last week to discuss plans. Its reactors are considerably smaller than those of competitors and are forecast to cost £50m and are prefabricated before being transported by 80 lorries, company insiders claimed.
Each plant is the size of a football pitch and the height of a double-decker bus – roughly half the size of rival reactors proposed by Rolls.
Representatives from Last Energy are believed to have told Whitehall officials that they want the UK to be the company’s “test bed” and insist that its plants will be up and running years before Rolls-Royce.
It is believed to have asked the Government for a commitment to pay £75 per MWh, considerably less than the £92.50 that the UK is locked in to paying the much larger Hinkley Point C nuclear plant once it is up and running.
Continued here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
[…] New Small Modular Reactor proposal for the UK […]
Whatever became of the research into thorium/molten salt (LFTR) based reactors?
It is believed that in a bid to reduce costs and vastly shorten the development and installation time, government ministers have recently visited Bournemouth Machine Mart Store and are negotiating a 5% discount for bulk supply of stand-alone petrol generators which will be made available to people owning large houses. When asked about their preferred source of supply, they chose far eastern manufacture as the cheapest source, as their private advisor Dmitri had informed them.
Roger – the story link seems to be hosted by “No2Nuclear” – a Luddite site. Could you not find a better source? Although the news is interesting of course.
[reply] Telegraph stories are usually paywalled – oldbrew
D.Mail version: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10680277/Next-blocks-Lego-style-nuclear-plant-module.html
Petroleum has other uses than burning it for energy. It is crucial to go nuclear while petroleum is still plentiful.
“Whatever became of the research into thorium/molten salt (LFTR) based reactors?”
They were determined to be technological dead ends. 60 years ago.
The topic comes up occasionally in popular science circles; it’s fun to talk about.
Briefly,
A. There is no reason to breed thorium.
B. The problems of 1. corrosion and 2. continuous separations seem unsolvable.
Thank you.
Doesn’t even say what the capacity is but $1,4B for 10 is a drop in the ocean size. Rolls Royce SMRs are 500MW plus, the size of a first generation Magnox or AGR reactor. Half a gigawatt. Not small at all.
I feel that the Thorium delusionals are like the moles in wackamole. Non, No, No.
Uranium has been developed over decades and works really well. There is no shortage of fuel., itis highly sustainable at scale as the oceans have a massive reserve , extractable at $200 per US pound, whatever a pound is. Fuel cost is sod all anyway.
Thorium cannot fission. Adding a neutron creates U233 which can, only odd Atomic weights fission.
The Fissioning of U233 produces similar fission products and long lived radioactive actinides. So why bother. Spent fuel is no use for making bombs, its far too unrefined, low enrichment, about 5%. The proliferation fear from commercial reactors is irrational/stupid. There are much easier ways to make a bomb, which is very difficult and involves far higher purity fissile material or you just get a “fizzion” in bomb terms.
We already figured out how to fission Uranium, because it helps with making bombs – BUT commercial reactors don’t have the necessary graphite cores or level of fuel enrichment, and the spent fuel is not a workable source of weapons grade enrichment and purity Uranium. No bomb produced by supposedly non-nuclear nations has been built using a civilian commercial reactor fuel, there are quicker, cheaper, better ways to do it. Ask Oakistan, India, North Korea, Israel, ANO?
FInally, as pointed out elsewhere, the well known problem of long term materials resilience to the higher temperatures and corrosive nature of the molten salts involved is an unknown and difficult problem. Superheated steam under pressure is a lot less aggressive, so relatively safer to contain, THis problem needs to be solved for long term fast fission and fusion processes. The Russians are probably closets with their commercial fast breeder which has been producing elctricity on the grid for several years now.
This is all well tested and reported in pilot . It is probably better to simply check these established realities on line before writing what you unknowingly believe to be the case? Save people having to explain what is already known over, and over, and over….
Thorium? Forgetaboutit.
If we start to get low on Uranium, perhaps. We still have a lot of fossil fuels to use on the way to majority Uranium fuelled nuclear….. in a few hundred years from now in the next and slightly colder Little Ice Age 2.0, c.2500AD, perhaps?
Gamecock, ilma630, the Chinese are now trying to build the second one after the US experiment was canned umpty decades ago. But they are interested in trying anything to see if it will work, I think. Their first design is a solid fuel powered, molten salt cooled reactor rather than a LFTR, and they may even yet have abandoned the idea. Need to scroll down the link a bit…
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-fuel-cycle.aspx#ECSArticleLink11
Once upon a time the US and the UK were at the forefront of nuclear design…
A. There is no reason to breed thorium.
Thorium is some four times more abundant in the Earth than uranium. You don’t “breed” it.
Stpaulchuck, thorium is not fissile. You do need to ‘breed’ thorium in the sense of putting it into a reactor with something that will provide sufficient neutrons to convert a portion to uranium. Thereafter it can carry on a fission reaction as more and more thorium is converted (bred) to fuel.
By itself thorium cannot produce a critical reaction.
‘Thorium is some four times more abundant in the Earth than uranium.’
Straight from pop science. WTF does it have to do with anything?
What is the cost per ton of thorium? Oh, wait, you can’t buy a ton . . . there is no thorium industry.
Breeding thorium was a grand idea in the 1950s, when uranium was rare and expensive. It’s not anymore. Thorium has no advantage, and real disadvantages. It’s presence in the earth’s crust has FA to do with it.
A report from some UK scientists (can’t remember the name) stated that the fuel cycle for Thorium is preventing any realistic implementation of a workable Thorium solution.
From mining, processing, feeding the stuff in and extracting used waste products from the reactor all need to be resolved. This means lots of research into materials that can handle temperatures, pressures, infeed materials and waste products.
All of this has been does for Uranium. There is a good body of knowledge on how to design safe reactors and safely handle the fuel at all stages of operation.
Thorium is decades away from commercial operations.
Yes, there are experimental designs that you can flash up, with lab developed materials but we are far away from being able to order a handful of complete Thorium power stations with the required material in and out.
“A report from some UK scientists (can’t remember the name) stated that the fuel cycle for Thorium is preventing any realistic implementation of a workable Thorium solution.”
Solution to what ?!?!
“Thorium is centuries away from commercial operations.”
Fixed it.
Using thorium is dependent on uranium markets, not technology. The U.S. successfully bred thorium at Savannah River and Shippingport. We know how to do it; we’ve done it. There is simply no reason to fool with it. Centuries out – perhaps millennia – should uranium scarcity become a problem, they might consider breeding thorium. Breeding at Shippingport produced near replacement amounts of U-233.
Thorium is the solution to a problem we haven’t had for 50 years, though it’s persistence in popular science has got to be some kind of record.
Roger
Thanks for the Mail link
so only precision strikes needed — is that what they’re thinking? i.e. a way for our (sarc) fabulous (/sarc) western “leaders” to facilitate further undermining of security — payload-free?
Re current draft of the UK energy security strategy, due out on Thursday…
The strategy is now expected to focus even more heavily on nuclear power, which Mr Johnson believes will be a major component of the UK’s energy security in the coming years.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, said the strategy would “reverse 30 years of drift and take the big decisions to generate more nuclear power”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/04/04/planning-hurdles-solar-panels-set-lifted-energy-strategy/
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Maybe someone in power finally worked out that something has to fill in the gaps left by exiting coal, and at some point, gas.
But Kafkaesque regulation of nuclear construction in Britain and U.S. insure it will never happen. There is no technical reason why nukes should cost billions.
Note that SMRs won’t be exempt from regulation. Government will prevent them, too.
Why is Germany anti-nuclear?
This mob is popping up all over the place:
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/us-startup-last-energy-plans-to-install-small-modular-nuclear-reactor-in-romania/
I wonder how this one is doing?
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsus-based-last-energy-invests-in-estonian-smr-project-7981162
Themselves:
https://www.lastenergy.com/
Is this credible?
COSTS: CAPEX: $3,000/Kw, OPEX: $20/Mwe