Will the irresistible global warming support a revival of nuclear energy, which emits very little greenhouse gas? And in the form of small units as well as powerful reactors from 1000 to 1700 megawatts (MW)?
On Monday, August 9, the day the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its alarming report, the Russian company Rosatom announced that the Russian Federal Service for Environmental and Nuclear Monitoring had authorized the construction of a 50 MW reactor, confirming its lead in “small modular reactors” (“Small modular reactors” or SMR), “prefabricated” plants that can be installed in areas without an electrical network.
Rosatom plans to launch its construction in 2024 in north-eastern Siberia, and to put it into service in 2028. It will notably allow the exploitation of a gold deposit. This pressurized water reactor is already being used to propel the three Russian icebreakers of the latest generation, and they will also equip floating power stations in the Arctic. The construction will be the first on dry land, after the commissioning of an SMR installed on a barge in the Russian Far East in 2020.
France is looking for its place
If Russia has been working in this segment for a long time, China has caught up with its delay: in mid-July, the China national nuclear corporation announced the start of construction on the island of Hainan, in the south of the country, of the SMR “Linglong One ”of 125 MW, which will supply 526,000 homes with electricity. “It will be the first in the world to enter commercial service”, affirms the new China agency, but without specifying the date.
In their desire to remain the leading technological power, the United States has also subsidized the sector for ten years. The American NuScale Power plans to put a prototype into service in 2029. Since 2008, TerraPower, a firm created by the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has been financing two SMR sectors. Together with GE Hitachi, it plans to commission a 350 MW reactor on the site of a coal-fired power station in Wyoming in the next few years.
As for France, long interested in only large reactors like the EPR (the most powerful in the world), it is looking for its place. In 2019, EDF, the French Atomic Energy Commission, Naval Group and TechnicAtome (specialist in nuclear submarine boiler rooms) unveiled the 300 to 400 MW reactor project called Nuward. They want to market it at the start of the next decade to expand the French sector’s too limited supply.
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