⚛ Technological failure and the nuclear renaissance

The cancelation of a much-hyped small reactor project is a bummer — but hardly the end of the story

Quote of the Issue

“The most effective thing government can do to create an Up Wing culture is to inspire one through public policy that helps create a better ecology for scientific and technological progress, business innovation, and high-impact entrepreneurship.” - James Pethokoukis, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

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I have a new book out: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available pretty much everywhere. I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! ⏩🆙↗⤴📈

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The Essay

image via NuScale

⚛ Technological failure and the nuclear renaissance

The rapid rise and fall of last summer’s hysteria over a possible breakthrough in creating a room-temperature superconductor … well, that was a bummer. Had the discovery by South Korean researchers panned out, humanity could’ve fast-tracked itself to a future that today looks purely science fictional. (“Faster, please!,” indeed!) Yet only for a moment or two did LK-99 seem even a tiny bit more likely than not to be the real deal.

By contrast, a nuclear energy renaissance, while perhaps not as warp-speed transformative, has seemed more likely — that, thanks to concerns about both climate change and global energy security. To greatly expand a source of abundant clean energy throughout the global economy would certainly be a massively important shift. So … my disappointment at the news that NuScale is canceling plans to deploy six 77-megawatt reactors in Idaho by 2030 — the project would have been the nation’s first small nuclear plant — is a bit different. It seems like a significant long-term setback to something that had seemed on the right track. As Bloomberg reports:

NuScale Power, the first company with US approval for a small nuclear reactor design, is canceling plans to build a power plant for a Utah provider as costs surge. The move is a major setback to the burgeoning technology that has been heralded as the next era for atomic energy. … The decision to terminate the project underscores the hurdles the industry faces to place the first so-called small modular reactor into commercial service in the country. NuScale is part of a wave of companies developing smaller reactors that will be manufactured in factories and assembled on site, a strategy that’s expected to make them faster and cheaper than conventional nuclear plants.

New reactors, old problem: cost

The gut punch here is the bit about rising costs. The key promise of “small modular reactors” is that standardized manufacturing would eliminate the huge cost overruns that have plagued traditional reactors, which are bespoke megaprojects in the United States — when they are built at all.