[T]he report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
Does anyone know about the technology that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers use? Why are they able to operate but we can’t use the same technology on land?
I was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Here are the actual reasons:
- The designs are classified US military assets
- They are not refuleable
- They only come in 2 “sizes”: aircraft carrier and submarine
- They are not scaleable. You can just make a reactor 2x as big
- They require as much down time as up time
- They are outdated
- The military won’t let you interrupt their supply chain to make civilian reactors
- New designs over promise and underdeliver
- They are optimized for erratic operations (combat) not steady state (normal power loads)
- They are engineered assuming they have infinite sea water available for everything
There’s more but that’s just off the top of my head
I’m pretty sure they essentially are “one time use” only.
Extremely simplified:
They run for 20-30 years without refueling, which means the reactors/system could be built more compact, a higher level of safety and require less maintenance / monitoring / fine-tuning.
All those parameters are connected in an equation which means if you want higher safety you have to make another parameter “worse”. By making the system “one time use” you set the “refuelability” and “repairability” parameters to the lowest and can therefore up the other parameters.
Also, military requirements are very different from civilian.
They used pressurised water reactors with enriched uranium. Dunno how the costs run but there is no strategic alternative anyway. They also wouldn’t want such highly enriched uranium to be commonplace.
Because military engineers overengineer these things from the most expensive materials available, and they also perform frequent maintenance on them, which is also expensive.
To add to this: A certain type of Soviet submarine used a lead-bismuth alloy as coolant for their reactor. The coolant solidifies at ambient temperature so it had to be heated indefinitely by some way or another or else it solidified and trashed the reactor. I don’t think any of them exist anymore since Russia wasn’t able to afford sustaining the giant navy after the Soviet collapse.
Just goes to show how insane nuclear submarine engineering is, or was at some point.
Because if the military wants something, budgets are big. And they do not need to make money.
Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.
