Engaging Energy

They’re a proliferation risk.
They’re a cost-effective, low-carbon, utility-scale alternative to coal.
They’re unproven and dangerous.
They are old technology and a known risk.
They produce radioactive waste that is just as bad as any big nuclear plant.
They have the potential to bring fresh water to arid parts of the world.

As far as I can tell these are the main rhetorical positions for and against the development of the nuclear mini-reactor. If I’m missing anything let me know.

Lets take a look at each in turn.

They are a proliferation risk – the argument is that by multiplying the number of nuclear installations, the number of nuclear-savvy engineers and scientists, and the amount of nuclear material transported around the world you are multiplying the risks associated with that material or its derivatives becoming accessible to ‘the bad guys’.
That makes absolute sense from a numerical, risk-based approach. No system is 100% reliable (that includes security and accounting systems), so doubling the volume should increase the risk by a commensurate amount.
But there is the counter argument that by making these reactors one-shot, non-refuellable sealed units the degree of risk drops when compared to the current macro-reactors. We should also consider whether building 50-year life-span installations is inherently more or less secure than building multiple 10-20 year installations that employ a restricted set of technologies.
There appear to be two main, credible proliferation risk points; fuel enrichment and waste handling/reprocessing. By centralising both to the mini-nuke manufacturers surely you are bringing together those risk vectors and making them more manageable.
There are some benefits to building strong communities around our critical infrastructure rather than commoditizing it. After all its got to be better to have thousand families worth of eyes looking out for security risks rather than a thousand pairs of eyes, who frankly should be concentrating on the work itself. Whether that is best done by centralisation of reactor manufacture or centralisation of power production I couldn’t say, but what I do know is that community support is necessary for either and it carries benefits past simply providing the workforce.
I’m afraid that the argument that some bad guys will come along and rip a mini-reactor out of the ground and whisk it away to play with is simply not credible for the majority of designs that are around right now. Most of the installations are still 50 tonnes plus for the body of the reactor and they tend to be surrounded by thick concrete walls.

They’re a cost-effective, low-carbon, utility-scale alternative to coal.
Well that’s just wishful thinking right now. Until someone gets their design through the nuclear regulators and actually builds one we simply can’t know that for sure. Certainly the 10-50MW size is a really convenient bracket to sell within, but local conditions and regulations will have a massive say in whether they are cost-effective or not.
For example a 30MW reactor in the Australian outback might be just what the mining industry needs in order to get away from using diesel to extract nickel, so reducing the full-cycle emissions profile of electric vehicle using nickel-hydride batteries, but Australia doesn’t currently permit civil nuclear power generation so to be the first company to take that challenge on will probably not result in black ink on the bottom line.
Alternately if we look at somewhere like Japan, where the civil nuclear industry is very advanced, why would they bother with tiny reactors ? Their electricity grid is advanced and ubiquitous. They have decades of experience in all steps in the civil nuclear cycle. They might want to develop mini-nukes as an export route but I doubt that they will be using many themselves.
So we need to be careful about blanket statements regarding costs, but that’s the same for all power generation.
Low carbon ? Well, that depends on who’s life cycle assessment you believe, but I think that it is credible that our current 50-year lifespan reactors are low carbon when compared to most power generation technologies, including renewables.
An alternative to coal ? It depends on your application. If you are a blast furnace that can site next to a remote iron ore mine, yes that’s almost certainly true. Reduced transport emissions alone will make a big dent in the total emissions pattern. But for an urban centre where demand is cyclical a nuclear reactor is not a good fit on its own, irrespective of the size. Nuclear reactors work best to provide a steady base-load because they can’t be switched on and off and back on again in the same way as coal or gas. They’re not alone here. Renewables have a similar issue with intermittency and both would need some form of back-up or storage to provide electricity with a domestic demand profile.

They’re unproven and dangerous.
It depends which design you are talking about here. Certainly some of the new modular mini-nukes are unproven. Bill Gate’s travelling wave reactor certainly is, but you can’t simply equate unproven with dangerous. You can equate degree of proof with degree of risk and I’d back you on that, but a rhetorical position that lack of proof of safety is proof of lack of safety is just nonsense.

They are old technology and a known risk.
Again it depends on which technology we are talking about. But simply saying its old stuff isn’t actually that reassuring. For example the Russians are proposing a simple re-use of nuclear submarine reactor technologies with a lead-bismuth cooling system. Apart from the number of boats they lost, that’s a really toxic mix to be using as coolant and it doesn’t inspire confidence. Its old and known, but unacceptably high risk to many people. Of course just using the word nuclear implies an unacceptably high risk to some.

They produce radioactive waste that is just as bad as any big nuclear plant.
No denying that.
Well, unless the newer technologies are used. The problem is that the fuel cycles used in most current commercial reactors are variants of the cold war fuel cycles designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Not all nuclear reactions that can be used to produce excess heat in a controllable manner from readily available fuels produce plutonium as an end-product and even those that do can be tweaked to produce more or less.
This is essential a question of perception. If you believe that all radioactive waste is equal then it doesn’t matter about the efficiency of the fuel cycle, or what fuel it uses, or what the waste products are and there is no argument that the size of the reactor is about as relevant as its colour. If however you apply a risk-based approach, then not all waste is equal (the current situation under most legal jurisdictions) and there is a valid argument that fuel cycles designed for purely civilian uses can be less harmful than in the past.
But you can’t have both. You can’t argue that some power-generating techniques are less risky than others (on the basis of emissions or pollutants, or economics or whatever) except nuclear which is just plain bad.

They have the potential to bring fresh water to arid parts of the world.
The water argument is an interesting one and one that makes a lot of people very nervous. Nuclear reactors use vast amount of cooling water in their current form and what is being proposed is that they are used for desalination in order to take advantage of this Hey presto ! You have a double-edged sword against poverty and hunger. Power and fresh water provided in areas currently without either. The big problem being that areas without power & water generally don’t have effective government either.
There is no doubt in my mind that the world needs more of both, but whether dropping a mini-reactor onto the coast of Somalia is the best way of achieving that compared with more conventional development mechanisms. I dunno. Historically its been big hydro that carried out this function, but the number of rivers large enough to make a difference is going down compared with the amount of disputes between upriver and down-river water users which seems to be going up.

So what have we learnt ? Not that much because until someone actually gets through licensing with one of these things we’re just not going to get a good look at the economics. Apparently the licensing will cost over $100m in the US. Separate for the EU and anywhere else that might want to buy one. If they are $25m a unit with a 10 year life whoever builds them is going to need a hell of an order book to build a self-sustaining business.

For what its worth I don’t think that mini-reactors will be cost effective in ‘normal’ urban or industrial environments, areas that have grid power already. What they could be really good at is driving down costs of things like mining or oil refineries so that we don’t have to transport dead weight three times around the world before we use it. We make the product or a semi near the primary resource and ship those instead.