White Paper - 05. Identify national and international opportunities for cooperation, leading to serial production in reactor technology.

Page / - last modified by Ad Min on 2021/04/24 22:49

05. Identify national and international opportunities for cooperation, leading to serial production in reactor technology.

last modified by Ad Min

on 2021/04/24 22:49

Table of Contents

As with wind turbines and solar panels, nuclear reactors can be progressively cheaper through serial production. To stimulate this process, promising reactor designs must be identified. To this end, cooperation can be carried out with countries and energy companies. The willingness to use the same reactor designs can be a strong lever in the rapid decarbonisation of our economies.

The structural support that the government has given to solar and wind generation has significantly reduced the investment risk for these technologies. This long-term involvement also successfully reduced costs thanks to the accumulation of experience, process improvement, serial production and serial implementation of new models. The government can now opt to enact the same evolution in nuclear energy. Vendors already lay the foundation for this by betting on models that can be built serially. The Dutch government could start by enabling the licensing for serialized reactor construction. The existing Dutch laws and regulations are equipped for this: for example, it already enables 'risk informed' and 'graded' working methods – although new practical experience is a prerequisite. Both are applicable to reactor safety (e.g. adapted safety measures) and reactor protection (e.g. custom Design Base Threats). A contribution from Dutch nuclear agencies to internationally agreed (IAEA) codes and standards of reactor designs and the acceptance of licenses (Module Design Certifications) can promote international harmonization, analogous to industries such as aviation. This includes an Airbus-like approach, in which an entire power station is supplied as a product and assembled on-site from components that were manufactured in dedicated factories.

If the Netherlands were successful in implementing this strategy, many new standardized nuclear power stations could be built smoothly in the Netherlands and its neighbouring countries, making it easier to meet our obligations under the Paris Agreement—unlike a strategy in which nuclear energy remains excluded.

It is advisable to pay special attention to reactor types such as SMRs because they are smaller in size and fully standardized and therefore ideally suited to build in series. Some SMRs are available that cost less than one billion Euro and are competitive with the current gas plants (even without CO2 pricing).19,20,

There is sufficient existing transmission and cooling capacity in the Netherlands for many dozens of such SMRs (at least 15 Gigawatts).21 This is sufficient potential to initiate serial production of reactor and power plant components and the serial construction of nuclear power stations.

Experience shows that simply building more reactors does not guarantee enabling the benefits of serial production. In the United States, for example, successive reactors often became more expensive, not less. This was partly due to a lack of focus on standardization—even with plants of the same global design, changes in the design were made again and again during the execution. As a result, the technical complexity increased, as did the complexity of project management.22 By opting for a pre-standardized and simpler product, which can be replicated repeatedly, and by focusing strongly on standardization in project management, these pitfalls can be avoided.

Within Europe, the possible deployment of SMRs is proactively pursued in Great Britain, Poland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Finland, Sweden and Ireland.23 This multilateral cooperation led to, among other things, a large-scale exploration of the technological maturity of many SMR concepts.24 As a follow-up several companies and NGOs have signed the Tallinn Declaration.25

19 GE-Hitachi BWRx300: https://nuclear.gepower.com/build-a-plant/products/nuclear-power-plants-overview/bwrx-300
20 Open100 cost estimate: https://analytics.zoho.com/open-view/2302819000000010557/289737b7abeae16ee37e96f2ef455aa8
21 We have mapped out the existing fossil production capacity. Coal and gas plants need cooling, and already attached to the current grid infrastructure. Replacing "fossil" in those places with nuclear energy therefore does not escalate costs for the grid operators.
22 Quote: “Studies of cost escalation in mega-projects more broadly have found that nuclear power plant projects exhibit greater and more frequent cost overruns and delays compared to other electricity generation infrastructure, which has been linked to reduced modularity and more complex project governance compared to other technologies.”
23 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54703204
24 https://tractebel-engie.com/en/tractebel-s-vision-on-small-modular-reactors
25 https://www.e-lise.nl/post/stichting-e-lise-ondertekent-verklaring-van-tallinn