With a few SMR projects built and operational at this point, and more plants under development, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) concludes in a report that SMRs are “still too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels.”
Return on investment is still heavily in favor of solar or wind generation with battery or hydro storage for low generation periods.
Yes, and SMR tech is not mature enough to be considered useful, BUT if it can overcome that hurdle, it has the potential for applications that need exceptionally high availability, like data centers targeting five 9s availability.
Energy costs aren’t always the only consideration
We can’t scale battery storage or hydro storage to the capacity we need to go carbon free
Be that as it may, nuclear is not the answer either.
I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s fair to say that small nuclear is unproven, both in terms of operational reliability and safety, and also in terms of its economic viability. The economic viability of large nuclear generation plants is also questionable, once you remove all the explicit and implicit subsidies that have kept the industry alive since its start.
It’s a more competitive if you remove the fossil fuel subsidies.
So, we should choose an unproven and uneconomic technology (SMR) in favor of a technology that is growing rapidly, is becoming increasingly affordable, and is still improving? At very least, it seems like the tradeoff might be more complex than throwing all our eggs into the SMR basket.
WE CAN DO BOTH!
The future of our energy generation is not a zero sum game, we can simultaneously build out and continuing developing solar, wind, mass storage, and other already proving things while also continuing development on SMR and building large nuclear reactors too. Sure, the nuclear options will take longer to bear fruit but we will likely still be needing more clean energy by the time they do, even with pumping out other renewables as fast as we can.
Do thorough research into grid scale power storage. Then tell me that nuclear is more complex.
