Red-Hot Mapping

In something of a coincidence with the event described in the previous post, I have created a new map which covers nuclear power reactors in North America.  Most of these are in the US, of course, as America is the global leader in nuclear power generation.  But Canada has its own independent nuclear industry centered in Ontario, which lacks Quebec's massive hydropower potential, and I've included those plants.  Mexico also has one lone plant, which it imported from America.

In the period after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the subsequent Fukushima Daiichi incident, I published an number of posts on nuclear power.  I've largely lost interest since then because the industry seemed destined to become moridbund, which largely happened.  But in the past few years there has been an increasing amount of hype around "small modular reactors," which promise to solve the problem of the massive up-front costs required to build large reactors such as the AP1000 units in Georgia or the EPR units at Flamanville and Olkiluoto.  On the map I have noted 8 different SMR projects from 7 different vendors as being reasonably firm, given the amount of subsidies flowing to them at this point.  The currently authorized subsidies won't be enough to get the projects to completion, but for now I am assuming the subsidies will continue to flow.  But past history indicates that costs will escalate rapidly, and politicians will balk at some point, most likely after considerable concrete has been poured.

Time will tell, of course, but until then enjoy the new map.

First of a Kind or Dying Gasp?

On July 31, 2023, Unit 3 of the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant entered commercial service.  It is the first new reactor to be brought online in the United States since 2016, and only the second since 1996.  It is a Westinghouse AP1000, which is a two-loop (of primary coolant) design derived from the Combustion Engineering System 80.  It is classified as a Generation III+ reactor, which is a somewhat arbitrary marketing designation used by the nuclear industry to indicate the design has some passive elements in its safety systems.  An additional reactor of the same design is under construction at the Vogtle plant, and should become operational within a year.

The probability of Vogtle 3 and 4 being safe reactors is quite high.  The fundamental design is not new, and China has operated four AP1000 reactors since 2019 without incident.*  The Georgia plant is located inland, so there is no risk of tsunamis flooding the site.  Georgia Power and the American nuclear industry as a whole have a lot of operational experience at this point - far more than when Three Mile Island Unit 2 was operated incorrectly, causing a major accident in 1979.  The first large power reactor in America went online in 1968; the industry has an additional 44 years of experience since the TMI meltdown.

What the nuclear industry has not improved since 1979 is the cost of constructing reactors.  I am not going go down the rabbit hole of attempting to compare costs between different sources of electricity in this post, but it is very safe to say that Vogtle 3 was not cheap to build, and neither Unit 3 or 4 were as cheap as was promised by Westinghouse back in 2013 when construction started.  Why costs escalated so much is hotly debated, but Westinghouse and its subcontractors are responsible for a good portion of the blame.  The nuclear industry also has to compete with other power generation technologies, and the shale gas "revolution" made the economic case for nuclear power difficult even before the cost overruns at Vogtle and Summer were known.

The cost of large plants is why the nuclear industry has shifted to promoting "small modular reactors" - some of which aren't all that small, and none of which will be any cheaper than large reactors if the companies developing them don't get enough orders to justify building the factories that would enable serial construction using transportable modules.  However, the SMR vendors have yet to prove themselves to be failures, so the hype surrounding them continues.  This contrasts sharply with the prospects for new large reactors.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission website indicates there are active combined licenses for six more large reactors, but none of those are under construction, and six previous licenses have been withdrawn by the license holders.  Two of those licenses were for AP1000 reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina, which were so far over budget that the power company building them canceled them in 2017.  So Vogtle Unit 4 is likely to be the last large reactor to go critical in American in the next 15 years, at the very least.

Below is a chart showing all of the commercial power reactors built in America sorted by date of commercial operation.  It does not include the 43 reactors that were canceled after construction was started, nor a number of small reactors that were not intended for commercial operations despite being connected to the local grid.  Despite a number of announcements, there are no SMRs under construction as of today (2023-08-02).

* That we know of, of course.  But there has certainly been no major accidents, as those are subject to detection by remote monitoring.