The NuScale Corporation and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), a regional group of electric power utilities, canceled the nation’s first project to actually put small modular nuclear reactors online. The trigger for the cancellation was withdrawals from the project by enough UAMPS member companies to put the subscription level below 80% of the entire regional group; according to their plan made years ago, that level was required. The reason for the withdrawals depends on what account one reads.
NuScale has prospective project contracts or development partnerships in a number of other nations in Eastern Europe and Asia; now has producers for its 72 MW factory-built units; and has the possibility that one of those engineering companies—Nucor or Fluor—will acquire NuCor outright. So its Nuclear Regulatory Commission-approved technology is likely to come through the initial failure.
But its near-term future is probably in other nations. The United States continues to mark itself as an economy and regulatory/litigation environment in which nuclear power cannot be revived. The UAMPS member utilities which withdrew were spooked by long licensing delays (even after the years-long Nuclear Regulatory Commission design approval, it had to license the SMR model to be produced); and by reports of the power acquisition cost average over 40 years having risen from NuScale’s projected $55 per megawatt, to $89. But the latter figure was merely the new estimate of an outfit called Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, which opposes SMRs in general as well as gas-powered electricity, and supports only “renewables.”
