Dr Kelvin Kemm
Over the past 25 years, the world electricity demand doubled. All indications are that it will double again over the next 25 years. In fact, the time span is likely to be much shorter. The emergence of more electricity-intensive consuming technologies such as data centres is causing electricity demand to rise more steeply. Then one must add the rising demand of developing countries in which. People are moving from cooking dinner over an open fire outdoors to acquiring an electrical stove and fridge.
The image of electricity demand is a large boulder rolling down a hill, it is not stopping or slowing. In fact it is rolling faster and faster.
Without doubt fossil fuels will continue to be the backbone of world electricity generation for decades to come. But equally certain is that nuclear power is making a rapid advance across the globe. That means not only for the traditional large, industrialised countries, but also for the less developed, or much smaller countries. Rapid development of Small Modular Reactor technology is also accelerating the options for the adoption of nuclear power on a large scale. South Africa was the first country in the world to start developing a commercial Small Modular Reactor, and has continued with the work for over 30 years.
Some years ago, South Africa announced its intention to add an additional 2500 MW of new nuclear to its existing nuclear base. Early in 2024, the energy minister confirmed the acceleration of this goal. The intention, from inception, was to build a new 2400 MW coastal nuclear plant, but also to dedicate 100 MW to the development of SMR’s for inland use. In September 2024, the energy minister gave a public address in which he stated that we must go ahead on the basis of science and facts, and not be ‘fighting in the mud’ with activists who rely more on emotion than reality.
South Africa is forging ahead with a new nuclear build. This is excellent news. The current initiative is for an additional 2500 MW of nuclear, composed of a 2400 MW new large nuclear power station on the coast, plus 100 MW dedicated to Small Modular Reactor (SMR) development.
The announcement of the continuation of the project was greeted with applause by many, but as always, the anti-nuclear lobby were frothing at the mouth about all the imagined problems associated with nuclear power.
But let us digress for a moment, to consider the macro-implications of this initiative.
Building a large nuclear plant is essentially following in the footsteps of the traditional route, that being; placing a large plant on the coastline at an ideal site. The resulting power is then transmitted over some distance to consumers.
But what of SMR’s? The crucial difference with a gas-cooled SMR, which does not need a large body of water for cooling purposes, is that you can take the reactor to the consumer. You can place the rector anywhere you like. This reality enables planners to embrace. Embark on a highly flexible. Nuclear solution across the entire country.
Think about it!
Let us now make a comparison with a cell phone system. Prior to the advent of cell phones, a telephone network consisted of major exchanges, interconnected by means of long-range connections. Then cell phones arrived. The cells are something like the honeycomb of a beehive, and each cell has its own main base station antenna. Each cell handles calls within the cell.
The emergence of Small Modular Reactor (SMR) systems onto the modern scene, essentially makes a nuclear cell system a reality. One can now place a gas-cooled SMR anywhere, and it can serve its own ‘cell.’ This ‘cell’ could be a mining complex, a municipality, a collection of factories, or an agricultural area encompassing the farm, proceeding to processing, packaging, and transport. Such a ‘cell’ does not even need to be connected to the National Grid, and can be owned by a Province, Municipality, or private company.
The SMR revolution effectively means that the fundamental planning options available for the distribution of electricity have changed significantly.
A gas-cooled SMR, such as the South African HTMR-100 is walk-away-safe. The fuel cannot suffer a meltdown under any circumstances. Such an SMR emits absolutely nothing during normal operations, no solids, no liquids, no gases. The fuel is in the form of balls, the size of a tennis ball, and each ball lasts between two and three years in the reactor. So, the amount of refuelling required is extremely small, in comparison to coal, gas, or oil plants. So no continuous refuelling structure is required, such as a conveyor belt, pipeline, or railway line.
What all this means is that small nuclear plants can be safely and effectively placed in industrial areas or agricultural areas, or near an idyllic town. One of the accusations of the extremist anti-nuclear lobby has always been that nuclear reactors are ugly industrial structures which spoil beautiful scenic coastlines
With modern SMR’s we can totally remove that accusation. Since then is a bomb, it’s nothing during operation. And what’s more? Is totally silent. It can be integrated into the Vista of any setting. With this in mind, the developers of the HTMR-100 range of reactors approached Johann Koch of Johann Koch Design Architects (JKDA) with a proposal to work together to develop SMRe complexes for a range of customers.
Stratek Global originally developed the HTMR-100 for a classic industrial setting in South Africa, such as a gold-mining complex, far inland, and far away from any large water body. However, Stratek Global has been approached by potential customers from around the world, including the Middle East, Australia, a number of African countries, and also island states.
Furthermore, site factors such as the altitude, have varied from sea level to high altitude. The prevailing weather conditions have varied from hot and dry, to cold and wet, including snow.
As a result, Stratek Global is in a position to offer any type of nuclear power complex which can be designed to fit, not only any site but which can also be skilfully designed to match the scenery or cultural nature of the people and area.
Since nuclear is completely clean and green, emitting no gasses, liquids, or anything else, during normal operations, there is no reason why nuclear power stations must be viewed as ugly industrial buildings. They can be made as attractive as a hotel complex or holiday resort.
Illustrated here or four of the designs developed as a result of customer requests. They are named; the Impala Design, Kudu Design, Oryx Design, and Sable Design.
The Kudu Design was developed for an African savanna setting. It is shown here with a single reactor of 100 MW thermal output, or 35 MW electrical output.
Kudu Design: For a temperate setting near a town or agricultural cluster
A most useful aspect of the. HTMR-100 is that an SMR complex can be designed to take up to ten reactors. All ten can be run from a single control room. Obviously, building more reactors per site reduces the unit cost, because you don’t have to duplicate the administration building, the workshops, or a variety of other facilities. Furthermore, if a site is designed for, say, ten reactors they do not all have to be constructed at the same time. An owner can add reactors, in later years, as the demand rises, or as finances become available, thereby allowing for immense planning flexibility.
The Oryx Design was developed as a result of a request from the Middle East. It also features a single reactor, but can easily be adapted for more reactors.
Oryx Design: A one reactor setup for a desert region
Computer graphic showing the interior arrangement of the reactor building. Approximately 60% of the reactor is underground. Ground-level is at the bottom of the ventilation stack.
The single reactor Impala Design is a workhorse design for an industrial setting such as a South African gold mining complex. This design was developed to fit into any existing industrial complex. It illustrates that other than the actual nuclear reactor itself, in the cylindrical concrete containment vessel, the rest of the power station consists of perfectly normal industrial buildings.
Impala Design: A basic one reactor design for an existing industrial setting
The Sable Design was developed as a result of a request from a country which experiences snow conditions. The request was for a ten-reactor complex. The reactors can be added, over a period of some years, as the customer sees fit.
Sable Design: Showing eight reactors, in a snow region
Dr Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist and is Past Chairman of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa). He is currently Chairman of Stratek Global, a nuclear project management company based in Pretoria, South Africa. The company carries out strategy development and project planning in a wide variety of fields for diverse clients. They are working towards building an HTMR-100 nuclear reactor in Pretoria. Kelvin.kemm@stratekglobal.com.
www.stratekglobal.com
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Might look good with a few Joshua trees.
Coincidentally, there is a place in California where you can legally uproot them right now … to save the planet!
I was wondering if Joshua trees could be transplanted.
????
In context that statement was about the esthetics.
The wording, however, is quite puzzling.
Diablo Canyon is a rather attractive building, and it is a conventional nuclear plant. Much better architecture than the FBI headquarters, which looks like a Flakturm on the Siegfried Line.
This site is now too political and not enough science.
Yes, you can’t win the politics without first destroying
the house of cards that climate science has built.
It’s about global warming/ climate change / power supply.
Which has been rendered nothing but politics by the left.
Maybe it’s science that has become too political and this site reflects that reality.
Or climate science has become an evangelical (in the sense of preaching, not fundamentalist Protestant) cult, not even straight politics.
Science perhaps but ALL the solutions are political and require subsidization
…and do nothing to change the GAT, yet do a great deal to enrich some, and extend political power over others.
“Climate science” is mostly politics, and ignoring the politics is like ignoring the cliche elephant in the room.
Yes, politics has overwhelmed a lot of real science.
This is NOT the fault of this site.
I can’t see how your comment is a response to someone’s opinion of architectural merit. 🙂
you just gave a good description of “climate science”
On point, I agree that there is a lot more of the political aspects than the science.
WEF: We own the science.
So, as many others point out, one cannot discuss the science in a vacuum.
Mr. dawson: And Mr. Halla’s comment drew that reply because……????
The polical controls the climate science. This site wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for politics.
More good news.
for the love of god, stop calling them ‘fossil fuels’, there is no such thing as ‘fossil fuels’!
they are hydrocarbons! call them what they are
Hmmm
Fossil plant based hydrocarbons?
Really really old plant material metamorphed into coal and oil and gas hydrocarbons?
I have this compulsion to define the origin of the hydrocarbons
“The second most prevalent liquid on Earth”
The universe is saturated in hydrocarbons that have no relation to plant material whatsoever. The methane on Titan did not come from prehistoric life. Coal is the only Earthly material that is almost exclusively plant based. Oil and natural gas are likely at least partly abiotic or left over from the primordial materials of planet formation. Some of it may be from dinosaur era plant and animal remains, but the science is not settled.
Science is never settled.
There are lots of terms that don’t make sense. For instance, heat capacity is a contradiction of terms. In thermodynamics, heat is a boundary phenomenon, and nothing contains heat. However, we are stuck with the term from historical precedence–heat capacity. Notice that heat capacity and entropy have the same units.
Specific heat capacity actually IS a scientific term describing the property of a given chemical compound to change its temperature due to thermal transfer into or out of that compound. It is expressed as units energy change per unit mass per unit temperature. “Specific” means that it is tied to a specified mass of the material.
fuels made by Mother Nature for our benefit?
Fossil fuels actually is a useful and factual term. It describes the origin of the fuel, as in, fossilized remains of biologic materials as it exists under the surface of the Earth. Not sure why that would bother you. There is nothing negative or pejoritive about the word “fossil”.
So what other kind of hydrocarbon fuels are there besides fossil fuels? Any fuel that is synthetically created by humans or by active plant processes, such as vegetable oils, synthetic oil, etc. It actually is useful to differentiate between non-fossil hydrocarbon fuels and fossil hydrocarbon fuels.
fossil:
the remains or impression of a prehistoric organism preserved in petrified form
Coal fits that definition. Oil and natural gas do not.
The hydrocarbons found on other planets did not come from biologics, at least that we know of. The universe has vast clouds of hydrocarbons, some of which were bound up in the crust of Earth when it formed. Asserting that all hydrocarbons on Earth are either biologic in origin or from human generated synthetics is presumptive and unproven.
Technically, coal is a fossil fuel and to my knowledge, coal is the only fossil fuel.
I prefer hydrocarbons. I prefer exact and concise language, too.
Using the same words and phrases employed by the Climate Syndicate only lends credibility to them at the expense of those pragmatics that are asking questions and pointing out fallacies and errors.
2500 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that the language was adequate to describe all things that needed to be considered to live life on earth.
He was not wrong.
It is the hallmark of scoundrels who conflate the meanings of definitions with other definitions.
And yet you call coal a “fossil fuel”, whereas in reality bituminous coal is something like 75-85% elemental carbon. Oh well.
Interesting post – and well done South Africa! Beautifully designed landscaping might help sell nuclear, but with the kind of security needed these days, I wonder if any should be seen. I had to go to the internet:
94 nuclear reactors still at work in the U.S. 22 of them are in “varying stages of decommissioning.” Colorado lost its Saint Vrain (named for the river) nuclear power plant – our one and only nuclear reactor – in 2009. A a slurry of vague reasons were given: corrosion affecting safety, “electrical issues”, fears of safety, and costs.
There’s talk of re-activating some of the decommissioned sites across the States but it looks like it will be hugely expensive and time-consuming (on the order of decades).
St. Vrain decommissioning began in 1989.
i would have much preferred to have that nuclear plant on-line than to see CO landscape dotted with these wind turbines. These wind turbines are a blight on the landscape and have degraded the scenery not to mention killing birds of prey. Nuclear makes the most sense, but common sense and sound reason is devoid nowadays.
RE: the esthetics of the windy plains. Some people just see the plains from the windows of their cars, and an awful lot of of looks the same from there. A painfully long distance between Chicago and the ski slopes and dude ranches of the Rockies. The rolling hills of eastern Kansas, the remaining pockets of tall grass prairie in Nebraska and Colorado, even the vast stretches of farm country – these are beautiful landscapes and still lovely places to spend some time. Putting in windmills is a travesty. People would be better off letting their land go back to native grasses and raising buffalo herds for meat and tourism.
Sizewll B on the coast of England is not an ugly nuclear power station. It looks much better than the offshore wind turbines and is much more useful.
Compare those beauties to monuments of human stupidity in the form of thousands of acres of solar panels or thousands of wind turbines. Yes, gas cooling is great especially for desert environments. But in the scheme of things water for nuclear cooling isn’t a major consideration elsewhere:
My rule of thumb after reading this posting:
1000 acre feet cooling water per year x 4 for a typical 4 reactors rated 77MW each NuScale reactor array of 300 WM (4000 acre feet)
2000 acre-feet water per year for a 300 MW CCGT
A typical US city population one million consumes 100,000 acre feet of water
Question for Copilot:
Could a 600 MW nuclear reactor supply all the electrical power needs of a one million population US city?
The 600 MW nuclear power plant operating at a 93% capacity factor would indeed provide enough electrical power for a city with a population of one million, with some surplus capacity.(end Copilot).
Comment
8000-acre feet of cooling water per year for 600 MW of nuclear generated electrical power for 1,000,000 population US city/ 100,000 total acre feet water consumption:
8000/100000 = 8/100 = 8% of total water consumption per million population for all electrical power consumption at 2024 consumption rates.
Question for Copilot:
Circulating the cooling gas for a nuclear reactor will require a lot of electricity. My knee jerk is about 5 percent of reactor output. What say you?
Sent by Copilot:
Your estimate of around 5% of the reactor’s output for circulating the gas is quite reasonable. The actual power consumption for gas circulation in gas-cooled reactors can vary depending on the specific design and efficiency of the system. However, it’s generally in the range of 2-5% of the reactor’s electrical output.
You asked the wrong question on supplying power to one million population US city. You should have asked if it could supply the peak demand.
MJ. Peak demand is a non-issue with load following SMR. Unlike worthless wind and solar nuclear has ample excess heat to keep salt molten during several days of cloudy and calm and especially at night low demand storage provides heat for steam raising as required (W&S generation can never battery store summer excess electricity for winter use, so that too is a non-issue).
BTW the purpose of my posting was to show that yes, gas cooling reduces water consumption but for non-desert locations it doesn’t provide a significant advantage. The million population 600 MW generation example helps put in perspective that cooling a reactor is a small percentage of what a modern US city requires for water.
D Sandberg. My comment was not against SMRs. I’m all in favor of development and installation of SMRs. My comment was about using the annual electrical demand to base the rated output of any electrical source for the cyclical daily demand. If the peak daily demand is twice the average daily demand the you will have a power shortage every day, even with load following.
I worked at a wastewater treatment plant. The daily peak influent flow was typically about twice the average flow for the day. If our influent pumps had a rated capacity of even 150% of average flow then the sewage would have backed up in the influent sewers and potentially overflowed and backed up into homes and businesses every day. Using average flow/electricity demand to determine installed pumping/generating capacity is just asking for trouble.
You’re joking, right?
This article is biased pro-SMR cheerleading
A fair and balanced article on the subject from my blog’s reading list this morning is at the link below:
Why SMRs Are Taking Longer Than Expected to Deploy
Why SMRs Are Taking Longer Than Expected to Deploy | OilPrice.com
Richard, from my reading the article is more SMR “cheerleading” per this quote:
Eric Carr, the president of nuclear operations at Dominion Energy, explained, “Nobody exactly wants to be first, but somebody has to be.” Carr added, “Once it gets going, it’s going to be a great, reliable source of energy for the entire nation’s grid.”
There isn’t any cost advantage for SMR until an assembly line factory is up and running and annually producing dozens of the cookie cutter identical one NRC design approval fits all reactors.
The best way to get from here to there is for the federal government to create a sufficiently large market by committing to purchase a couple dozen reactors. Doing so may be politically possible once the first “expensive” reactor has successfully operated for at least a year. If that first set of 4 reactors is going to cost $10 billion the government may need to match a $5 billion private investment to start the process. Pocket change compared to what we’ve wasted on wind and solar these past 20 years.
No. It is not cheerleading.
It is pointing out that SMRs can be esthetically integrated unlike the industrial large scale reactors.
It is pointing that SMRs can be located where needed without the longline infrastructure other solutions require.
It is pointing out that SMRs can be modular, facilitating expansion as power demands increase.
It is doing this to counter some of the no nuke activism claims.
It did not address the speed with which SMRs can be deployed or any of the technical challenges that have to be solved. While your blog post does point out cost and fuel and regulatory issues delaying deployment, it also covers some of the points made in this article.
You could have posted your link with an upbeat notation rather than the negative post you made.
There are three operating SMRs in the world
That is a very important fact that must be discussed.
Google says:
“Three small modular reactors (SMRs) were operational in 2022, located in Russia, China, and India. Three more were under construction, while 65 SMRs were still in the design stage. Most of them had a capacity of between 100 and 300 megawatts”.
Jul 2, 2024
It is cheerleading to ignore reality.
Reality of the wests regulatory incompetence. The governments in the west have taken the most efficient economic systems in the world and paralyzed them and at the same time borrowed so much money to follow socialist pipe dreams that they have bankrupt every nations future gestations.
It is ignorance to not read and comprehend the article.
You can have a balanced discussion whenever and wherever you please, but to complain about an article that is addressing specific points is a major fallacy on your part.
The article did not ignore reality. It addressed specific aspects.
True, just look at Chernobyl. It’s a nature reserve now.
The Chernobyl accident was caused by scientists playing around to get brownie points from Stalin. It would not have happened if the operation was under control of professional engineers. Scientists should never be allowed near an operating process plant of any kind. Scientists have no idea of safety and control. Nuclear engineering is a specialist part of chemical engineering and they are the only ones who should operate nuclear plants.
Some scientists have comprehension of safety and control in their areas of expertise.
I would never attempt to work at a nuclear plant but I am just fine around rockets and associated ordnance. I am a rocket scientist who does launch and launch pad operations.
Nope. It is a radioactive wasteland.
“The crucial difference with a gas-cooled SMR, which does not need a large body of water for cooling purposes, is that you can take the reactor to the consumer.”
Utter nonsense. All nuclear power reactors are steam machines. The reactor core makes heat which is removed from the reactor core by the so-called “reactor coolant.” That heat is transformed into steam either in the reactor core itself (Boiling Water Reactors) or in steam generators, akin to immersing your car radiator in a barrel of water. The steam then drives turbines which in turn drives electricity generators. The exhaust from these turbines must then be cooled back to water. These requirements are all established by the Laws of Thermodynamics and are immutable. No more efficient way of making electricity from reactor heat has ever been discovered although some have tried. The main variation among the differing types of reactors is the choice of the fluid used to extract the reactor’s heat and the materials, mostly metals, used to build it.
Water is the most common choice. So called water-cooled reactors are for the most part highly reliable and durable. They are able to operate for many decades because the temperatures and materials of construction involved are well established and reliable. The downside of such reactors is their thermodynamic efficiency, i.e. the fraction of the energy created by the reactor that the machine converts to electricity, typically 30ish percent. That means that about 70 percent of the reactor’s energy must be discarded in order to cool exhaust steam back to water. If gas is chosen, the steam generated by the machine may be some degrees hotter than that generated by an equal sized water cooled reactor and if it is, the machine will operate with greater thermodynamic efficiency, perhaps 35ish percent of the reactor heat converted to electricity. This will of course decrease the energy discarded by the cooling process by 5 percent in this example.
However, all reactor types including those using liquid sodium or molten salt as reactor coolants, require a secondary cooling system sufficient to remove well over half of the reactor’s energy from the machine in order to function. This is the requirement that leads to the enormous vase-shaped natural draft cooling towers and in some systems, the physically much smaller forced-draft cooling machines one sees in photos of reactors and coal or gas fired plants as well. These cooling machines function by way of evaporative cooling of water as you experience by wiping your face with cool water. The plumes of steam one sees coming from them are the result of large amounts of water being evaporated. All reactors, regardless of the fluids used in their operation, require such cooling machines. All evaporate large amounts of water whether from groundwater, a river, a lake, or the sea. Surely, Dr. Kemm knows all of this. What is bewildering is that he would claim otherwise.
While true, it is a matter of scale.
The author did not say no water.
“which does not need a large body of water for cooling purposes,”
“In September 2024, the energy minister gave a public address in which he stated that we must go ahead on the basis of science and facts, and not be ‘fighting in the mud’ with activists who rely more on emotion than reality.”
Amen.
Amen, Amen
A gas cooled SMR still needs a steam circuit and a condenser, so access to some cooling water
The Nuclear Schemes illustrated look a lot more environmentally friendly than those pernicious Solar Arrays or Forests of Windmills.
From the above article:
OK, I did give some engineering thought to the subject and came away concluding the following:
1) The typical overall power efficiency of a large (~1000 MW) nuclear power plant that uses a stream turbine to drive electrical generators in a Rankine thermal cycle is about 30%. This means that about 2.3 times the power that is output as electricity has to dissipated into the local environment (be it water or air) as thermal energy, aka “waste heat”.
2) Almost all SMRs are based on using a similar Rankine-cycle steam turbine-generator loop to produce electrical power output.
3) SMR’s can be expected to have overall power efficiencies less than 30% due to efficiency scaling in proportion to overall size up to some asymptotic maximum.
4) There is no possible way that air cooling can be used practically for SMRs with rated power output above about 25 MW (optimistically based on a maximum achievable heat flux of about 5 kW/m2 for a forced convection, fan-driven HX area and 20 °C ambient air temperature . . . see https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/heat-flux-cooling-mode-d_1211.html ). To put that in perspective, dissipating 25*2.3 = 57.5 MW of waste heat would require (57,500/5) = 11,500 m^2 of fan cooling . . . that’s a little more than twice total area of a standard US football field including end zones but excluding sidelines.
5) According to https://www.power-technology.com/news/nuclear-company-in-south-africa-enters-partnership-to-develop-new-reactor/ , the South African HTMR-100 reactor, specifically mentioned as a SMR in the above article, produces 100MW of heat and 35MW of electricity (an overall power efficiency of 26%). There is just no practical way this much waste heat can be dissipated into a local atmosphere having ambient air temperature significantly above 20 °C, short of using continuous evaporative cooling that in turn would require the SMR being located near a plentiful source of water. Good luck finding that in desert areas!
As the saying goes, a wonderful dream destroyed by harsh reality.
“which does not need a large body of water for cooling purposes,”
No where was it stated no water.
I quoted directly from the ninth paragraph of the above article. That quote states “no large body of water for cooling purposes”.
By referencing “no water”, you appear to be attempting misdirection. In fact certain (rare?) areas of deserts do have accessible underground aquifers, but it would be quite a waste of a limited natural resource to use such for evaporative cooling of SMRs.
BTW, did you notice the distinct absence of any large (many football fields equivalent) areas of ambient air convective heat exchangers with cooling fans anywhere in any of the idealistic artist renderings of SMR power plants in the above article?
Author of the above article, Dr. Kelvin Kemm, appears to be more a salesman than engineer.
Additionally, from the above article:
“With modern SMR’s . . . And what’s more? Is totally silent.”
What a joke! As I indicated above, ambient air-cooled SMRs will require fan-driven forced air convection cooling (as a minimum!) distributed over a total equivalent area of about 30 football fields or more. My above calculations did not account for the spacing needed between individual fan-drive HX units so as to allow fresh ambient-temperature air to freely circulate into each and every (modular) cooling unit.
There is no such thing as a silent fan-driven, cooling unit using ambient air . . . just listen to any window-installed room air conditioner or, bettter, a central air conditioner from the outside, then multiple that sound by 10,000 to 25,000 times!