Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
THE NEWS: The anticipated and feared nuclear renaissance suffered a major blow this week when Oregon-based NuScale and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems killed plans to construct a small modular nuclear reactor power plant in Idaho. Several years in the making, the project had become too expensive and there were too few subscribers to make it financially viable.
THE CONTEXT: As the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the electric power sector has grown more urgent over the last couple of decades, so-called climate hawks have increasingly looked to nuclear power as a decarbonization tool. That’s because the nuclear reaction — like solar or wind energy — emits zero carbon when generating power. And even when mining, processing, and enriching uranium as well as building the nuclear plant are taken into account, nuclear power still emits far less than fossil fuels.
These pro-nuclear climate hawks, or green nuclear evangelists, as I like to call them, tend to brush aside safety concerns and the problem of storing the spent reactor fuel, otherwise known as radioactive waste. And they often completely ignore the impacts of uranium mining, past and present. But it’s more difficult to get around the astronomical cost of building a new conventional nuclear reactor: The price tag for the Vogtle plant in Georgia, still under construction, is around $31 billion so far.
So, the green nuclear evangelists have focused on keeping existing plants, such as Diablo Canyon in California, open. And, to a lesser extent, on developing smaller, unconventional reactors that won’t cost so much.
The euphemistically named Carbon Free Power Project was supposed to fit the bill. It was pushed by a Portland startup called NuScale, which would include 12 60-megawatt reactors installed on the vast Idaho National Laboratory, and the Utah Association of Municipal Power Suppliers, or UAMPS. With 46 members scattered across the Interior West, UAMPS would own and operate the plant, while NuScale would build the reactors.
When I wrote about the project five years ago, NuScale claimed that its small modular reactors, or SMRs, would be safer and use less water than conventional reactors. But the big selling point was their relatively low buy-in cost. A utility could, theoretically, build a micro-nuke plant for less than $2 billion upfront, which ain’t exactly cheap but also isn’t $31 billion. The reactors would be manufactured in a facility, then trucked to the installation; what NuScale lost in economies of scale, it hoped to offset with the volume of reactors produced. NuScale’s main investor, the Fluor corporation, also benefited from oodles of federal subsidies.
NuScale managed to clear a number of regulatory hurdles, but the project would only come to fruition if UAMPS succeeded in selling the concept to its members. This wasn’t easy: It ran into early resistance in Price, Utah, where leaders feared it would help kill the local coal industry; in Truckee, California, because it would hamper the community’s efforts to go 100 percent renewable; and in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where residents were leery of investing in unproven technology, not to mention the high projected operating costs relative to other energy sources. Anti-nuclear activists in Utah and Idaho battled the project, too, mostly because it would use a lot of water and add to the growing stockpile of radioactive waste.
In the ensuing half-decade, projected costs continued to rise, scaring off more of the potential subscribers. And several major wind and solar and battery storage projects have also moved forward, making such a plant less desirable — even if it is “carbon free.”
The euphemistically named Carbon Free Power Project was supposed to fit the bill. It was pushed by a Portland startup called NuScale, which would include 12 60-megawatt reactors installed on the vast Idaho National Laboratory, and the Utah Association of Municipal Power Suppliers, or UAMPS. With 46 members scattered across the Interior West, UAMPS would own and operate the plant, while NuScale would build the reactors.
When I wrote about the project five years ago, NuScale claimed that its small modular reactors, or SMRs, would be safer and use less water than conventional reactors. But the big selling point was their relatively low buy-in cost. A utility could, theoretically, build a micro-nuke plant for less than $2 billion upfront, which ain’t exactly cheap but also isn’t $31 billion. The reactors would be manufactured in a facility, then trucked to the installation; what NuScale lost in economies of scale, it hoped to offset with the volume of reactors produced. NuScale’s main investor, the Fluor corporation, also benefited from oodles of federal subsidies.
NuScale managed to clear a number of regulatory hurdles, but the project would only come to fruition if UAMPS succeeded in selling the concept to its members. This wasn’t easy: It ran into early resistance in Price, Utah, where leaders feared it would help kill the local coal industry; in Truckee, California, because it would hamper the community’s efforts to go 100 percent renewable; and in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where residents were leery of investing in unproven technology, not to mention the high projected operating costs relative to other energy sources. Anti-nuclear activists in Utah and Idaho battled the project, too, mostly because it would use a lot of water and add to the growing stockpile of radioactive waste.
In the ensuing half-decade, projected costs continued to rise, scaring off more of the potential subscribers. And several major wind and solar and battery storage projects have also moved forward, making such a plant less desirable — even if it is “carbon free.”
