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The Indian government is planning to team up with the private sector to study and test small modular reactors (SMRs). Nuclear energy is an important power source in the world’s energy mix as it waits for the development and maturation of (other) renewable energy technologies while fossil-fuel-based sources, especially coal, continue to remain relevant and more affordable. Nuclear power offers a sufficiently high and sustainable power output, even if externalised costs like those of building safe and reliable reactors and handling spent nuclear fuel complicate this calculus. Indeed, cost and time estimates that expand to nearly twice as much as at the point of a project’s commissioning are not unheard of. The nuclear power tariff is thus higher from ‘younger’ facilities, even if they also fill gaps that haunt power from renewable sources. SMRs, of 10 MWe-300 MWe each, are smaller versions of their conventional counterparts. They aspire to be safer without compromising commercial feasibility by leveraging the higher energy content of nuclear fuel, a modular design, a smaller operational surface area, and lower capital costs. But the challenge is to have this aspiration survive SMRs’ external costs.
The government’s privatisation of nuclear power generation will also increase the demand for regulatory safeguards against radioactive material being diverted for military use. The first-generation SMRs are expected to use low-enriched uranium in facilities assembled on-site with factory-made parts, to produce waste that can be handled using existing technologies and power that can be sold at economical rates. But the reactor will need frequent refuelling and will yield a consequential amount of plutonium; both outcomes will stress proliferation resistance. The IAEA has touted the use of ‘safeguardable’ reactor designs but such solutions will increase capital costs. Subsequent SMR generations may also require more enriched uranium, especially if their feasibility is pegged on longer periods of continuous generation, or more sophisticated systems to increase fuel-use efficiency, which would increase the operational surface area and the generation cost. In fact, nuclear reactors have a fixed baseline cost and safety expectations that do not change with energy output, which means SMR-based tariffs need not automatically be lower. This is why the Department of Atomic Energy increased its reactors’ capacity from 220 MW to 700 MW. SMRs’ ability to bolster the prospects of nuclear power in India will thus depend on their commercial viability — and in turn on the availability of less uncertain market conditions, stable grids, and opportunities to mass-produce parts — and the price of proliferation resistance.
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Problem power: On small modular reactor plan
