Speaker
Description
Advanced nuclear reactors with rated electric power of less than 300 MW are commonly referred to as Small Modular Reactors (SMR); for power levels even below 20 MW, the term “Microreactors” has been established. The recently returning appeal of this class of reactors stems from the believe that the “economy-of-scale”, which had long been dominating the nuclear market and clearly favoured the construction of larger and larger nuclear power plants, will be in the near future increasingly replaced by “economy of production”, i.e. factory-built small modules yielding simpler construction sites, with costs per kWh in the same range as large power plants.
The presentation will shed a light on some of the recent developments and discuss some of the claimed advantages of SMR, i.e. the significantly lower initial capital costs due to the smaller size of the plant, shorter construction times because of the shift to factory production, the increased flexibility for load-following operation that makes SMRs easier to integrate with intermittent renewables sources, and the strongly enhanced passive safety concepts, yielding an unprecedented level of reactor core damage prevention. Some attention will also be attributed to Microreactors, as they have been identified quite recently by several US companies like Microsoft and Amazon as viable power sources for large data centers, operating practically non-stop for periods of several years at rated power of around 20 MW, and with a footprint of not more than the size of a few ISO containers.
