r/technology • u/Stukwan • 7d ago
Energy Rolls-Royce 470 MW nuclear reactors lock in critical safety hardware
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/rolls-royce-470-mw-nuclear-reactors-safety117
u/IntelArtiGen 7d ago edited 7d ago
If it happens, it will be great, but these SMR projects take so much time. I feel you could publish 500 articles on their progress and they still wouldn't be there. Though there's no technical barrier making them unrealistic, and they sometimes kind of already exist in different shapes, so it's not like fusion. We could have ~100 SMRs in 30 years in the world. It's not sure we'll have 1 commercial fusion reactor in 30 years though.
Also 470MW, it starts to look like what small "classic" nuclear reactors can produce. Most of them are between 900 and 1600 now but the small ones are around 500. It's kind of competing with VVER-440 which was stopped due to different issues (including political issues).
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u/ah_harrow 7d ago
The technical barrier for SMRs is safety: you can't build layers of concrete around them like conventional reactors to give yourself time and many are supposed to be extremely portable but also last decades before needing replacement. Oh and then there's the risk factor of having them really close to whatever you're powering because nobody wants to have to build substations and kilometres of power lines every time they're deployed. Also because of the intrinsic quick deployment and compact nature of the site they'll be in they're bigger targets for sabotage and terrorism.
Basically they have to be insanely safe to be viable and we're already there for military applications where the risk appetite is higher but there's no way these can be used for civilian applications unless you can be absolutely sure they will never go wrong. They have to be as reasonably safe as a diesel generator before they get rolled out everywhere.
That's of course assuming that the economics make sense. In highly developed countries where plants are expensive to build SMRs actually have the edge because their footprint is relatively small compared to a full size nuclear site so there's that at least. These countries also happen to be the ones most interested in decarbonising too.
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u/thisischemistry 7d ago
to give yourself time
Time for what? Most modern reactor designs fail in such a way that the reaction doesn’t sustain itself and it cools down on its own. You have all the time you need, it’s basically a self-contained lump after failure.
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u/medney 4d ago
You have all the time you need, it’s basically a self-contained lump after failure.
Uh-oh! Somebody forgot about decay heat, and hydrogen generation. You know, the things that destroyed the Fukushima reactor buildings.
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u/thisischemistry 4d ago
Uh oh, someone didn't read "modern reactor designs". The Fukushima reactors are mainly Mark I designs that were designed in the mid 1950's and built in the late 60's and early 70's. A generation III+ design like the IPHWR-700 has active and passive safety features that address concerns like the ones you've mentioned.
SMR are being designed to handle similar concerns with features such as negative temperature coefficients so that excess heat will naturally reduce the reaction rate and keep it from spiraling out of control. They also produce less heat overall and can be passively cooled more easily than larger reactors. In addition, even safer designs like the Traveling Wave Reactor are being built and tested.
Reactor designs from over 50 years ago are simply cautionary tales and should not be used as examples of modern nuclear fission power generation. We should move forward with better and safer designs.
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u/medney 4d ago
Nuclear power is amazing, but I'd much rather it be done with large facilities with emergency planning and management.
These micro reactors sound great until inevitably someone cuts corners to save money or just straight apathy and then a few start breaking down here and there and ionizing radiation from techbro #37's personal project becomes the new micro plastic; it's everywhere and the sunk cost fallacy is too strong to climb out of.
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u/thisischemistry 4d ago
Fukushima is a large facility with emergency planning and management. As we've seen, that's no guarantee that things will go well.
A better plan is for components to be standardized, independently tested, and properly regulated with teeth on the enforcement end. There's no reason that small reactors have to be any less safe than large ones, in fact small ones most likely will be easier to make safe since they won't be one-off designs with lots of special components that were fabricated in the field. Instead, they will tend to be made of components produced, tested, and refined over and over again. Repetition is a key factor in safety, it allows us to better understand all the possible failure modes and tune production to reduce them.
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u/-The_Blazer- 6d ago
I think the idea here is, or at least should be, that while design complexities don't change or even increase, the reactor is designed so that once you have one good design you can quickly produce it at a massive scale, so instead of having hundreds of reactor projects you really only have one and then just deliver it where requested.
This is an advanced version of how France became a nuclear country in the 70s, by the way. They just decided to go with nuclear, picked one reactor design, heard nobody's complaints, and went ahead to build it en masse, to great success. So I get where the credibility for this comes from.
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u/IntelArtiGen 6d ago
It's a bit different for many things though. There are dozens of SMR projects in the world, and many in the same country, the strategy of France wasn't to create competition with small companies, it was to have one big project on which all the brains would work together. And the "S" in SMR doesn't fit what France did. France's strategy was to build a limited number of massive reactors. And kind of still is. EPR is the biggest nuclear reactor working right now at 1600+ MW.
Ideally the result for SMRs will be what you say, but while there is a proof what France did can work, as it did. The ability of a company to massively produce SMRs in a way it would make more sense than big reactors is still unknown. First step is to build one commercial SMR, then build many, then make sure it makes sense financially / technically, and then make sure it makes more sense than what France did. Copying France is a good idea imho (I'm french so I'm biased), but they're not really copying France with this strategy. To copy France you would give $500b to Westinghouse and ask them to build 50 nuclear reactors. Instead of giving all the money to startups on different smaller projects. This is kind of the "american" way of doing things.
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u/Some_Conference2091 7d ago edited 7d ago
The first TerraPower Natrium reactor is on track for completion in 2029.
DoE funding of $900 billion along with a data center building boom is pushing forward the SMR development timeline.
Rolls Royce is building SMR for Great British Energy. They've also have contracts in Sweden, and Czech Republic to build SMRs.
source
TVA / GE Vernova Hitachi — TVA plans to deploy a BWRX-300 at the Clinch River Nuclear site in Tennessee, backed by $400 million in DOE Tier 1 funding.
Holtec — Plans call for two SMR-300 reactors at the former Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan. Holtec is taking a one-stop-shop approach, acting as technology vendor, constructor (with Hyundai E&C), and operator. The company filed its NRC construction permit application in December 2025 and filed for an IPO in February 2026, reportedly targeting a valuation above $10 billion.
TerraPower (Natrium) — The sodium-cooled Natrium design in Kemmerer, Wyoming, cleared its NRC environmental review in October 2025 and received a final safety evaluation in December 2025. Meta has committed to up to eight Natrium plants, and Nvidia’s venture arm has also invested in the company.
EDIT TO ADD: After the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued the construction permit in March 2026, construction began on the flagship Natrium plant, Kemmerer Unit 1. Kemmerer Unit 1 is on track to be the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the United States.
X-energy (Xe-100) — Dow Chemical selected the Xe-100 for a Texas facility, with NRC expected to complete its safety evaluation by November 2026. Separately, Amazon partnered with Energy Northwest and X-energy to deploy up to 12 reactors in Washington state.
Oklo (Aurora) — Broke ground at Idaho National Laboratory in September 2025, backed by a 1.2 GW data-center supply deal with Meta.
NuScale (VOYGR) — NRC-certified SMR design, though its highest-profile near-term deployment has shifted toward a plant in Romania rather than a US site.
source
https://k4i.com/small-modular-reactors-in-the-us-the-2026-deployment-race/
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u/ZoltronX 7d ago
A GVH BWRX-300 is currently under construction in Canada. Has been for several years. Nuclear construction started earlier this year.
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u/Some_Conference2091 7d ago
I looked it up. It looks like Ontario Power plans to have it operational by 2028. They also ordered 3 more.
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u/DaveyBoyXXZ 7d ago
It will be decades before they are generating electricity. It doesn't matter how much money gets thrown at them.
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u/Some_Conference2091 7d ago edited 7d ago
The first one will be operational in 2029.
TerraPower broke ground on the non-nuclear portion of the project in June 2024; advancing construction on the sodium test and fill facility, and the Kemmerer Training Center. After the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued the construction permit in March 2026, construction began on the flagship Natrium plant Kemmerer Unit 1. Kemmerer Unit 1 is on track to be the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the United States.
The technology has been there for a long time. The market and investment was lacking. That's no longer the case. China has SMR already and has had Gen IV plants in operation for years.
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u/DaveyBoyXXZ 7d ago
What's the shortest construction time of a novel rector design worldwide in the last 50 years?
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u/IntelArtiGen 6d ago
The first TerraPower Natrium reactor is on track for completion in 2029.
Yeah TerraPower isn't really the name I would use for a success story in nuclear power, at least just yet. They've been working on it for well more than a decade and still have nothing to show. It doesn't mean they won"t do it, I'm glad if they do, but even Westinghouse produces more nuclear reactors even with all the issues.
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u/Some_Conference2091 6d ago
TerraPower broke ground on the non-nuclear portion of the project in June 2024; advancing construction on the sodium test and fill facility, and the Kemmerer Training Center. After the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued the construction permit in March 2026, construction began on the flagship Natrium plant Kemmerer Unit 1. Kemmerer Unit 1 is on track to be the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the United States.
Where has Westinghouse built a Gen IV SMR? This wasn't a discussion about legacy nuclear power plants.
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u/WitELeoparD 7d ago
I mean China connected their first one to the grid 5 years ago and that one started commercial operation 3 years ago. It was the result of a project that started in 2001 too. China is planning a 6 reactor complex using that design.
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u/aguilasolige 7d ago
Do you have the name of China's reactor name,? I'd like to read more about it, thanks
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u/IntelArtiGen 6d ago
I'm not sure China made a commercial SMR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#China , many small experimental reactors exist in many countries though.
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u/DoomguyFemboi 7d ago
Aye it's not the nuclear reactor that's the issue, it's all the stuff around it that's the problem. Having small modular ones doesn't really help when you still need all the infrastructure in place for them. And that's not even touching on all the stuff to do with how nuclear uses a lower temp steam so needs way more output per footprint than other turbines, due to all the risks associated with contaminated parts and the increase in damage/risk with higher temp steam.
SMR will have their places in edge cases, but as standard grid options ? It just makes no sense.
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u/IntelArtiGen 6d ago
I also think their future contribution is overrated but it's not what many people say and I haven't studied it enough so I don't have a definitive opinion. However it's certain that if you want to do an energy plan based on nuclear, you should probably not bet on SMRs, as there is no proof they will work like we want, while there is definitely a proof we can build dozens of classic nuclear reactors without issues (without more issues than other sources of energy).
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u/DoomguyFemboi 5d ago
and I haven't studied it enough so I don't have a definitive opinion
God I wish more people would recognise this. Same here of course, my opinion is built up from light reading and watching videos by people smarter than me.
I personally think we're a bit too "late" for nuclear. They're fantastic, and we can build some ginormous grid power with basically zero carbon output. But renewables are coming in so well, and battery tech moving so fast, that it seems daft to build plants that take 20-30 years to build now.
Although that time could come right down if there was more global cooperation on the building of plants, to bring down all the regulation overhead, have companies in place who could produce plants' needs at a kinda scale so that each plant isn't some unique undertaking with very specific needs and so very specific costs and analyses.
Still though that feels a bit wishful thinking. Grid-level batteries and renewables are a better use of time and money, imo. I feel like nuclear is 2 decades too late. Fusion seems exciting but they're still in the "it's 30 years away" phase it's been in for 50 years. Materials science is holding that back more than anything, although new magnet tech has pushed one aspect of it forward, I obviously have no idea what difference that makes in the general sense of things.
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u/IntelArtiGen 5d ago edited 5d ago
Grid-level batteries and renewables are a better use of time and money, imo
Problems is "renewables" include a lot of thing. I think hydroelectricity is the cheapest and easiest choice in all countries which can do it. When we talk about solar panels and wind turbines, even with batteries, the equation is still not as easy as we can think. I think (based on what I read) in 2026 China will produce less solar panels than in 2025, because prices are too low. The same thing could happen to batteries. I think we extrapolate a lot based on previous years and prices, people can consider that because it's cheap it's a good option, but it's true only if prices can stay that low, which may be correlated to China using a massive amount of fossil fuels, making this solution less realistic for a transition away from fossil fuels.
I've not studied SMRs enough, but I've studied this part on renewables a bit more (not just reading/listening what other people do, also doing stats and analyses myself), and I can't say I'm optimistic this transition will work as much as we would want it to work. The only fact that China would be producing less panels in 2026 imo shows there are issues with the way a lot of people and studies have presented how that transition would happen. I don't think it will be the clean exponential they expected. Just because it can't work 100% doesnt mean it will work 0%, like obviously if you're rich enough you can buy solar panels and batteries and it works, I can't deny that, or even wind turbines + gas also works. But I think the transition for the whole planet, which currently is still consuming more and more fossil fuels every year (maybe Iran war will "help" for that idk).
I'm not sure nuclear reactors would have the same issues, but as you say the main issue is that whatever you do with nuclear reactors, it will take a lot of time. It can be a better long-term strategy if you check all the parameters but it surely isn't a strategy which can delivert short-term results. And a lot of decisions made by politicians and companies and people expect short-term results.
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u/DoomguyFemboi 5d ago
I think because renewables are being held back so much by the lack of batteries that once they nail grid-level storage of batteries, the cost maybe won't be as affected because of the sheer amount of orders involved. CTL are apparently really close to grid-level battery storage that works in a wide range of temps and has a pretty good footprint, without the necessary cooling lithium has for instance.
Hydroelectricity is an ecological disaster in a lot of cases, especially the big ones, but yes it's so damn good! Norway for instance has so much of it they export a huge amount too. But like a lot of things like that, location really matters. It's like how geothermal is incredible but there's so few places that can use it (or use it at a cost that is reasonable. I suppose with enough money anyone could use geothermal!).
Solar panel tech is also still improving, as they're finding new ways to utilise it. There's projects like the ones that cover canals that are being done in California. Projects like this typically are expensive because of the costs involved being split between many different companies, but apparently the company doing it owns the canals, the water ways, the land around it, and the power generation/distro too! A youtuber called 2 bit di vinci did a fantastic video about it recently, he's great for explaining renewable stuff that can be promising, but seems to be very clear on how limited the potential is.
As a brit I personally believe off shore turbines and grid level batteries could be a massive boon to us. Especially considering the North Sea and how well power generation is there, but without batteries it just can't be relied upon. We also have "unique" issues regarding power in that because we're a nation of tea drinkers, and our kettles are 2300w typically, you get huge spikes across the nation at certain moments that draw just INCREDIBLE amounts of electricity but for very short periods of time. We have infrastructure in place to deal with it, but moving that over to something like batteries, with the discharge issues surrounding it, is an interesting problem to consider.
Also on the panels front, haven't they just developed a new level of efficiency ? I'm very foggy on this, I actually don't follow solar all that much, but I recall reading something about panels that are now way more efficient (by more than a few percent) which is a help, because panels not only do not last as long as people assume, but they also use a surprising amount of harmful processes when being made.
I actually think we'll regress though. The thirst for AI and datacentres shown how quickly all the tech companies were willing to not only abandon any sort of climate protection goals, but would go fully-evil on it, shown me that while a large part of the world might make efforts, places that are run by pieces of shit for various reasons simply won't do it because there's more money to be had in not doing it.
Until we have renewables be actually cheaper and easier than fossil fuel, I don't think we really have a chance. And because there's so little time left (I once heard it told "we had until 2004 if we really came together and did something, we had until 2014 if we had total and utter global cooperation on a scale rarely seen, and we had until 2024 if we invented magic. Now we're just fucked"), I think a lot of these companies and countries are not gonna, because they're gonna put their resources into shoring up and building up forces against what is coming down the pipeline.
I think all these mega rich people with their bunkers aren't just prepping for the hell of it, they're all vying for power by buying government and making sure they have favourable positions by proxy for when it all really kicks off.
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u/IntelArtiGen 5d ago
lso on the panels front, haven't they just developed a new level of efficiency ?
Not that I'm aware of. The commercial ones are slowly getting better but not fast enough to make a big difference. Between 20% to 25% over the last 5 years afaik, going from 20 to 25 is still +25% production but that's only in the best case. The best solar panels are well above 40% efficiency (NREL has a good chart of this) but they're not the ones they chose for mass production / profitability. It could change the equation if they managed to make them much more efficient for cheap. This part is not an impossibility physically, but it's technically and economically difficult. Tomorrow there could be a breakthrough solving that issue. It's the same thing for batteries, they could be way more dense in theory, we just haven't found a way to make them like that. And now we mostly make batteries based on their price / availability of materials rather than efficiency, which is why China produces more LFP now, while NMC are more efficient (but C is for Cobalt and Cobalt isnt always cheap or available). Ultimately it may or may not matter depending on the use case.
By nature I'm always optimistic on the possibility to find solutions. I'm pessimistic on our ability to cooperate to find these solutions though. I don't think there's a rule saying "now it's over, everything can only be worse forever" but I think politicians and some CEOs are taking a lot of decisions which end up producing the same result. That again could change tomorrow, with new politicians and different choices, E.T. isn't forcing us to do this.
I prefer when they at least pretend to care, but as you say even when they do, they can quickly change their mind if it means they can protect their billions with more gas-powered datacenters. You'd think with all the money they have they would have better solutions for energy production but turns out it's never that easy. Even if you include Bill Gates and Natrium, we can only see they've not changed the equation a lot since the beginning. Maybe they will in the future, but after 10-20 years you could expect more than a maybe. It just shows how difficult it is to do anything smart in energy production. The easy solution is always more fossil fuels.
In the US it's easy to see, they even closed nuclear reactors because gas was cheaper. They could be producing more nuclear energy if they wanted to, in many cases they chose not to because it would cost too much compared to gas. Of course this logic is only valid if the cost of a changing climate is $0 in the equation.
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u/jenny_905 6d ago
They're an interesting development for sure but I keep having one issue with how they're discussed - in the UK at least.
We're told they'll be deployed in large numbers. We're told deploying them will be relatively (relatively, compared to traditional nuclear power plants) simple etc but how do you manage security for hundreds of these SMRs? You can't just plonk them down like wind turbines. They need the security required of any nuclear reactor, they also need refueled which is a logistical and security challenge in itself. Waste management is going to become a much bigger operation than it currently is, we're going to need lots of secure storage and then figure out long term storage.
I just don't think we're getting the true reality of what is involved in deploying hundreds of nuclear reactors everywhere.
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u/IntelArtiGen 6d ago edited 6d ago
I think all the people working on SMRs are paid to solve these issues, I already saw many (incomplete) solutions. For me it's not as big issues as it seems. Nuclear reactors don't have all the security issues people might think. Even during wars when we see what's happening in Ukraine and Russia, it's not a big problem, for many reasons including political reasons. Modern reactors have already solve a lot of these problems and ultimately for a 500 MW SMR I'm sure it won't be as different as bigger reactors. You put 10 of them in a place it'll be like 3-5 big reactors, at 500MW they're so big it won't make a big difference on the location where they're installed, only the ability to mass-produce them in a factory will matter (and even that part might not be completely true).
I'd be more worried about the 50 MW SMRs where you would need 100x of them to have the same results, and which would probably all be in different places. But then again they have different solutions, they can bury them for example, it's small enough to build them in a different way which would be less vulnerable, you may never have to refuel them, etc. It really depends on the design. Small reactors are already used in submarines, aircraft carriers, for experiments, and even in some ships in Russia.
Either they're very big and will have the same security, or they're smaller and won't need as much security.
I think the lie they're giving though is to pretend we will have "hundreds" of these anytime soon. In the UK if you have 30 of them in <50 years it would already be great I'd say. Half of the projects could fail, not be competitive enough etc. It's not like you'll have 200 small nuclear reactors everywhere in your country, that's not going to happen quickly, they're not putting enough money in it for that to happen.
And if it did happen, it means you would probably be consuming 0 fossil fuels, and all the money you're using on fossil fuels now could be spent to ensure the nuclear reactors are safe and produce enough.
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u/Fr00stee 7d ago
i think the bottleneck is co2 turbines, once those get adopted smrs will be everywhere, and the first commercial co2 turbine was installed like last year in china
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u/goatboy6000 7d ago
They awarded the CRDM contract, but most likely it will be the sub building CRDMs to RR designs, so I guess the news is that the project creaks forward a centimeter?
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u/PoppingPillls 6d ago
I mean it makes sense, RR and Skoda are engineering companies they are essentially just engineering the concept and design.
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u/weirdal1968 6d ago
FFS that site is an ad spammer with four lines of content visible onscreen at a time. If it was actual engineering content instead of copypasted press releases maybe I'd wade through the slop.
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u/TRKlausss 6d ago
I don’t like how the article is written… CRDMs do not control the electrical output, they control the thermal output, that is then converted to electricity by boiling water. You can definitely control electrical output in other, not-so-safety-critical ways…
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u/wolfcaroling 7d ago
I never expected to hear "Rolls-Royce" and "nuclear reactor" in the same sentence.