Small, modular?
I randomly came across a story about a “small modular reactor” startup that was having its first pre-operational test, not ready to generate electricity or anything, just heating up. This made me think about the recent suggestion that NZ should buy a couple of small modular reactors, as if they were standard off-the-shelf equipment like windmills or ferries. In fact, China has one SMR, Russia has one pair, and lots of people are doing R&D trying to develop them for sale in the future.
RNZ had a story this week, where most of the content was attributed to a spokesperson from “the international organization that promotes nuclear power and supports the companies that comprise the global nuclear industry” (per Wikipedia). I’m not going to check the whole thing, but I was struck by one statistic
Finland reportedly saw its electricity prices fall 75 percent when its latest nuclear power came online.
This obviously wasn’t a small modular reactor, but also there is no way that could possibly be an honest summary (I suppose the ‘reportedly’ might also have signalled that)
If you follow the link (as RNZ perhaps should have) the headline is Electricity prices in Finland flipped negative — a huge oversupply of clean, hydroelectric power meant suppliers were almost giving it away. As with similar stories, this is a transient phenomenon. There is no mention at that link of nuclear power.
We can also check with Stats Finland. Here’s the price of electricity from the start of 2023
That does show an apparently important drop in early 2023, which is when the most recent nuclear station went online, but a relatively short-term one. Looking back before 2023 we see
with a big run-up in prices suggesting there might have been other forces affecting Finnish power costs in 2022 that would complicate the pro-nuclear interpretation.
I don’t have a firm opposition to small modular nuclear reactors (I’m not a proper Kiwi), but if they were a good idea you’d think the links would be to documents that actually support the case.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
These sort of stories are fact free hype most of the time. The SMR are more expensive per MW to build than the standard large reactors and the Finnish one mentioned is 1600MW. It seems some of older coal and or gas stations have shut with the new reactor coming into service. There is only a relatively tiny amount of hydro
The part about the prices doesn’t make sense as Finland isnt a isolated Grid, it has major power interconnections with Norway, Sweden and Estonia. The prices are related to what that area will pay in peak demand or not when its very low.
Their peak winter demand is 15GW where as NZ is a bit above 6GW- but with roughly similar populations , but not climate.
Hence the need for a number of large nuclear reactors while we do not.
1 month ago