Climb aboard the Nuclear Ship Savannah in Baltimore, built in 1959: The Past and the Future of Nuclear Power?

In 1959, at the time it was commissioned, most people may have seen The Savannah as a symbol of the future of nuclear power.

In a speech before the United Nations, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower acknowledged the peril facing the world, but he refused to accept that the atom's only purpose was to vaporize mankind.

"The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future," Eisenhower told the assembled diplomats. "The capability, already proved, is here today."

Sixty-four years later, we still don´t know if Eisenhower´s dream will be fully realized.  In some ways, it remains just that: A dream. For others it represents something of a tangent of history. Nuclear power remains a useful technology for some very specialized purposes such as for military sea and space ships, but nothing like what the Savannah represented 64 years ago. I don’t remember the Savannah, but I remember the promise of nuclear from the Sunday comics in «Our New Age». If you’re too young or your memory isn’t 100% you can read much the same hype about «small modluar reactors» today.  In order to be sure that no one can accuse me of cherrypicking skeptical or overly critical sources of SMR information, here is a very recent discussion of SMRs from the erstwhile champion of all things nuclear: The World Nuclear Association. As with descriptions of The Savannah technology, you’ll not find any answers to the obvious questions we might ask, among which are 1) When? 2) How much? 3) What about safe disposal of the high level radioactive waste material? We don´t even know today, in 2023,  what decommissioning of the Savannah will cost as “full decommissioning of the ship's nuclear components will take another two years or so.»

Fortunately, today’s readers are blessed/cursed with a touch of skepticism/cynicism when the obvious questions are not answered. Of course, no one in 2023 would be foolish enough to buy their pitch without reliable answers to those crucial questions. Really. We’re not that dumb. The WNA article is from last month and is replete with useful information, especially that SMRs will be SMALL, very SMALL, almost bite sized (Do you remember the line from the movie «Arthur» when Dudley Moore (Arthur) describes the size of the island nation of which his (hooker) friend is the Princess?). Still no info on when?, How much?  or waste disposal issues. None. So, yes. Many may be that gullible.  I suppose the reason that none of the questions are answered is either that  they know they will not be believed or because they have no idea. Both, in fact may be the case. People´s cynicism is appropriate. There are, however, estimates available from NuScale, the builder of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS). They are described by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

The present projected cost is now $89 per MWh and that includes “more than $4 billion in subsidies NuScale and UAMPS expect to get from U.S. taxpayers through a $1.4 billion contribution from the Department of Energy and the estimated $30/MWh subsidy in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).» Otherwise the cost would be $119. And that is far from final.  The project is at least seven years from coming on line. The IEEFA suggests:

“The higher costs announced last week make it even more imperative that UAMPS and the utilities and communities participating in the project issue requests for proposal (RFP) to learn if there are other resources that can provide the same power, energy and reliability as the SMR but at lower cost and lower financial risk. History shows that this won’t be the last cost increase for the SMR project.»

Surely, the industry knows it has no credibility with respect to cost, scheduling or the waste issue.

Even the Cato Institute (certainly no “lefty” organization) says:

«The economic promise of SMRs, however, is that their smaller, modular design and factory construction can bring down construction costs through standardization and replication that will allow firms to reduce costs as more reactors are built. Our analysis found the prospects for SMR cost reductions are largely reliant on a high rate of manufacturing (e.g., 5–10 reactors per year) and the factories and supply chains necessary for this mass production are not close to being in place.

The increase of the NuScale target price from 5.8 to 8.9 cents per kWh doesn’t actually change this calculus. It just means that the NuScale SMR has a higher starting point from which its costs need to be reduced for the benefits of mass production to pay off. But it does reaffirm our conclusion that high nuclear construction costs currently outweigh nuclear’s low‐​carbon benefit.»

 Or, as frequent EnergyCentral contributor, Dan Yurman, said today in this space:

"After a fashion for marketing purposes that’s probably not a stretch, but construction of SMRs isn’t going to be, metaphorically speaking, like fitting together a set of Legos."

How about EnergyPost? Does being a European organization make them "lefty" or "righty"?

• A February 2022 IEEFA report on NuScale showed that renewable resources and battery storage will provide reliable electricity at lower cost than the UAMPS CFPP—even if the price for the power from the project is just $58 per MWh.
• A target power price between $90 and $100 per MWh will make the CFPP even more uneconomic compared to renewable and battery storage resources costs that are expected to continue to decline over the next decade, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Annual Technology Baseline for 2022. 

It is hardly a sure thing that this will ever be built because:

Few new utilities have signed up to buy power from the CFPP

• When IEEFA released its report on the NuScale SMR in February 2022, communities had signed up to buy only 101 megawatts (MW) of the 462MW CFPP. According to the presentations to the Washington City and Hurricane power boards, the situation appears not to have changed. For example, the Washington City power department director told the city’s power board on November 1^st that the biggest challenge to the CFPP is the number of MWs subscribed. Parties seem interested in the CFPP but are wary about potential cost overruns.

As with the Savannah and every nuclear generator ever since, the cost and its problematic (to say the least) waste products stymie every effort at success.  I don´t believe that the technology cannot be developed. It is a question of when? and how much?  There are credible players in the high level nuclear waste disposal space, though all remain just possibilities and much remains to be seen. Rather, it is the industry in the US and much of the rest of the world that keeps coming up short.  Keep in mind that of the roughly 500 commerical power reactors built, 3 failed catastrophically.  At least the owners in France (the government)  recognized the faults and shut them down.  We need not go into the arguments about what caused the many hundreds of extra thyroid cancers from Fukushima and Chernobyl. (Don´t even mention Zaporizhzhia.)

One might well ask: What if we knew then what we know now about climate change and the other hazards of burning fossil fuels?  What if there were 99+% agreement that burning fossil fuels would eventually be the existential threat that we know it is today?
Interesting question, but hardly relevant.  It is what it is.

Today, there is something of a consensus around that existential threat, though far from overwhelming.  Tommy Tubberville, the Senator from Alabama has this to say about the recent global heat wave:

“There is a very scientific word for this: It’s called summer,” Tuberville told the Huffington Post on Thursday in an interview. “It’s no hotter right now than it’s ever been. I’ve been in this heat all my life in July and August as a football coach. This world’s not heating up, come on.”

I suggest that as long as a United States Senator can be that utterly ignorant, it cannot be said that there is any kind of consensus. 

The issues around nuclear have been confirmed and reconfirmed frequently over the last 60 years, most recently by the $35 billion (and still counting), 2 x 1.3 GW reactors in Georgia that, finally, at least 7 years late, is now half operating (3 cheers!)  The waste issue is a bit further ahead of where it was 60 years ago, but no solution has actually been put to the test. (Bronx cheer!). Some contributors would like to say otherwise with regard to performance of those still running.  Of those, many were shut down because they were too expensive to run.  But the dream lives on, at least for some industrialists and politicians (some crooked) and technologists. What we didn’t know about until only about 10 years ago, was the possibility of power generation with wind and sunlight and other renewables at a cost and scale that are actually being implemented, and the possibility of large scale storage of energy in a variety of ways that are just being realized and brought to market in increasing quantities and decreasing costs. Without doubt, serious problems remain: The materials required, though abundant enough, are not freely available in the marketplace. They’ve become strategic weapons of a sort  (as are the components of nuclear fuel).

But, if we had begun the transition to wind and solar, and maximizing hydro (including from Canada) earlier,  I doubt that it could have developed quickly enough to have prevented many of those nuclear plants from getting built.  But, we cannot look backward.  However, one gets the feeling that this might be our last “do-over”.  Are we going to squander it by betting on technology that does not yet exist?  SMRs may eventually fill some niche needs.  But the per kwh price for installing and running it will be far higher than for solar and wind for most purposes.  If there were any chance that SMRs will be cost effective, we would have some idea of that by now. 

As for the fossil fuel industry, they have decided on at least one more boom and bust cycle before they «really» get on board with the energy transition. Hands up please by those who think this is the last of their delays? I thought/hoped that at least BP and Shell were serious about renewables. Alas, the last vestige of credibility disappeared when Shell changed their CEO, Russia invaded Ukraine and war profiteering ensued. 

In June, Shell became the latest of the big oil companies to curb plans to cut oil output, announcing that it will no longer reduce annual oil and gas production through the end of the decade. The company also raised its dividend, diverting money that could be used to develop clean energy. BP’s share prices surged this year when the company walked back its plan to reduce oil and gas output.

Perhaps more discouraging is the UK decision to issue hundreds of new exploration licenses for the North Sea. That is troubling as it validates oil companies’ wishes for at least 10-15 more years of increased fossil fuel burning and delay in the transition to renewables. Amazingly, the announcement came during the worst European heat wave in history, while people were literally dropping dead in the street from the heat.

This podcast makes for interesting reading for those who hope that the better intentions of the oil industry will eventually prevail. This «ESG» (Environmental and Social Governance) consultant does not only say that the Oil&Gas Industry should be partners in decarbonization efforts but that they "should be at the helm". God help us.  Their role seems to be to whisper encouragement into the ears of Oil&Gas Industry CEOs and say that they are doing very, very well, and that they will not ever have to swallow the inevitable bitter pill that is coming their way. It´s all about "energy security" and taking full advantage of the war in Ukraine.

So, there is little joy for the time being, though the  renewables industry will continue to develop and grow and the nuclear industry continue to shrink until the writing on the wall is too bright and big for anyone to ignore. It is to be hoped that that happens, though it may have to be in spite of Gov. Abbott of Texas forbidding wind turbines in the "pristine" waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and Gov. DeSantis forbidding discussion of climate science in the classroom and, most of all, the possibility that the Orange guy gets back in office.