Small modular nuclear reactors: Not ready for prime time

I’m 100% pro nuclear power. There’s a massive nuclear fusion reactor online now, only minutes away if you move at light speed, that supplies the earth continuously with gargantuan amounts of safe, clean energy.

It’s called the Sun. What we should be skeptical about is the push in the West to install small modular nuclear reactors in rural areas as some sort of replacement for many of the large coal-burning power plants that have already shut down or soon will be. This seems to be another boondoggle in the making, and I’m hoping that the public will realize that this would not be wise.

Except for nuclear power — which except for solar sources has always been from nuclear fission — all other energy that humans utilize on this Earth actually comes from the sun.

Fossil fuels such as natural gas have stored energy from millennia ago that plants converted into carbon energy via photosynthesis. Other sources of energy such as hydropower, photovoltaic solar, and wind energy also are ultimately driven by the energy of the sun.

Nuclear fission, though — what we commonly call nuclear power — is a totally different animal. Now we are talking about harnessing forces that humans only recently discovered how to manipulate. It’s a rather promethean process that you may know started with the endeavor to develop a nuclear weapon to end World War II. Western Colorado and Grand Junction played a key role in this project by supplying uranium for the project. The effort succeeded and we used the knowledge from the nuclear genie to also develop commercial nuclear power. But from the very beginning the weapon part of nuclear was tied to the hip with the commercialization of the technology.

To this day, the U.S. Department of Energy not only promotes new nuclear reactors but also develops and maintains nuclear weapons. Although there are now clearer lines of division, there’s still an uncomfortable connection between nuclear weapons and commercial nuclear power. The world’s first production nuclear plant in Hanford, Washington, was created to generate a material necessary to make weapons, the metal plutonium-239. Although it’s unintentional, small modular reactors create this transuranic metal, as well.

Another problem with small modular reactors is that they are basically still fission reactors and produce hazardous nuclear waste that we as a country have not really figured out to properly dispose of. Years ago, Congress proposed to store it under a big mountain north of Las Vegas called Yucca Mountain, and there were so many problems with that project and so much local opposition that it was shut down. All reactors produce radioactive waste that is dangerous for thousands of years, and right now there is no approved repository for it, so it must be stored onsite.

Is nuclear energy from small modular reactors really renewable or low carbon energy? It depends on how the analysis is done. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to extract uranium from the ground and then convert it into an enriched form that can be used in a reactor. Historically, this process has relied on eye-popping amounts of electricity generated by burning fossil fuels such as coal. But once you have nuclear fuel and start processing it in a nuclear reactor, it is true that from that point forward you’re generating carbon-free electrical energy. Presently, the overall net process is not carbon neutral, but definitely better than burning coal.

If we are looking around as a state for something to replace the reliable coal-burning plants that are shutting down, I would suggest that nuclear reactors are not economically tenable. It would be much more cost effective to replace this lost capacity with natural gas-burning plants for utility base load and then supplement these with new photovoltaic or wind power sources. Photovoltaic and wind power have become the cheapest new forms of electricity. Even a modest-size modular reactor facility such as that proposed by NuScale for Utah customers, 462 megawatts in output, would have been prohibitively expensive. That project was canceled after construction estimates doubled to over $9 billion in 2023. Right now, if you have the land you can build a brand new solar generation plant that delivers 1 billion watts of power for about $1 billion in investment. It’s pretty clear that Colorado’s largest utility, Xcel, is quite aware of these costs.

I am hoping that practicality will win out in this battle over air pollution, new technologies, and attempts by states to limit the burning of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change. Solar and wind power can be delivered for a fraction of the cost of any form of nuclear power, and there are very promising storage technologies, such as battery or gravity banks, coming out to make renewable energy sources reliable even when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.

Jack Byrom holds an environmental science degree from Capital University and worked in the environmental field for six years. He has been the technical editor of numerous peer-reviewed chemical and physics publications.