in Ontario, Canada. 22 This is the first commercial contract for a grid-scale SMR in North America.
credit of up to 50 percent or a production tax credit up to approximately $30 per MWh for the first ten years of new-plant operation. 21 As of January 2023, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, Ontario Power Generation, SNC–Lavalin, and Aecon have signed a contract for the deployment of a BWRX–300 SMR
The United Kingdom recently announced an approximately $145 million fund to support new nuclear projects. 23 South Korea has also announced increased capacity. 24 In the United
21 Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, H.R. 5376, 117th Congress. 22 “Aecon partnership executes agreement to deliver North America’s first grid-scale Small Modular Reactor for Ontario Power Generation,” Aecon news release, January 27, 2023. 23 “Future Nuclear Enabling Fund,” Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, United Kingdom, May 2022. 24 “Nuclear Power in South Korea,” World Nuclear Association, updated November 2022.
Innovations in reactor technology
— Gen-IV reactor. This category includes new and emerging technologies, such as liquid sodium cooled reactors, high-temperature gas reactors, and microreactors (1 to 50 MW of electrical output). Gen-IV reactors might solve key technical challenges (waste- burning, for example) and could create new use cases (such as microgrids that leverage microreactors or process heat from high-temperature reactors; high-temperature power for low- carbon hydrogen production). However, Gen-IV reactors are further away from commercialization and could require new supply chains for different materials or fuels. While key factors such as cost and technical maturity might vary across these technologies, each could have a role going forward. Such factors influence each technology’s scale-up potential.
Nuclear reactor technology is complex and comes in various forms. New designs promise lower costs, increased passive safety, 1 faster build times, smaller absolute size, more flexible locations, the ability to use nuclear waste as fuel, and other advantages. However, these designs are less proven, and supply chains for many of their parts have not yet been developed. The nuclear industry uses a standard classification of “generations” of reactors to categorize the technology. Today’s large reactors are known as “Generation III+” (generations I
— Gen-III+ large LWR. LWRs are the most common reactors globally (“light water” refers to the use of ordinary water as a moderator in the reaction process). They can generate more than 1 GW of electricity (enough to power 400,000 homes), can cost $5 billion or more for new plant construction, and may require at least five years to build. The up-front investment is high, but LWR designs are commercially ready and are being deployed today. — Gen-III+ SMR. SMRs generate less power than the Gen-III+ large reactors, in the 100 to 300 MW electrical range (though smaller designs, down to about 20 MW, have been proposed). Their simplified designs and modularity can reduce construction time and up-front investment, compared with larger reactors. We believe that SMRs, which are in pilot development, could play the largest role in any near-term rapid scale-up of the industry.
to III are generally no longer built). For nuclear power to scale up, we
would expect the deployment of reactor technologies to progress, such that current Gen-III+ large light water reactors (LWRs) carry the load at first, Gen-III+ small modular reactors (SMRs) ramp up in the 2020s, and advanced Gen-IV reactors begin to play a role in the 2030s. Here is a brief overview of each generation of reactor technology:
1 Safety functions that don’t require active interventions from operators.
Accelerating the journey to net zero
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