Tuesday, 30 September 2025

small nuclear reactors will not help us solve anything, they are expensive, and too late

Members of the public, therefore, should be aware of the risks they are being asked to take on by funding the “advanced” technology of SMRs which remains largely untested. And they should know that to achieve an economy of scale would require the production of thousands of SMRs, which is not happening anywhere any time soon. According to JP Morgan’s annual energy 2025 report, there are only three operating SMRs in the world: two in Russia and one in China and another under construction in Argentina. None came in on budget. “The cost overruns on the China SMR was 300 per cent, on Russian SMRs 400 per cent and on the Argentina SMR (so far) 700 per cent.” All promised to be up and running in three to four years and all took 12 years or more to complete. Argentina’s SMR project began in 2014 and it’s still not finished. That may happen in 2027. Given these construction time frames, SMR certainly won’t put a dent in climate change in the near future or even decades from now. Certainly not in Russia, which uses its SMRs to mine arctic resources and produce more oil. And then there is the inconvenient issue of nuclear waste. You’d think something called a small reactor would pump out small volumes of waste. That’s not what researchers discovered in 2022. They concluded, “SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than Light Water Reactors.” Managing and disposing this waste will be problematic. In fact, they calculated, “water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of two to 30.” read the whole story here: https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/09/22/New-Nuclear-Fever-Debunked/

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