The United States and Romania will announce today plans to build a ‘first-of-a-kind’ small modular reactor (SMR) plant in Romania

8 comments

  1. Unfathomably based, GG lads

    Hoping we can get some SMRs built to complement the more conventional reactor building going on as well.

  2. I think the UK was talking about building mini reactors but that was a while back.

    Now we’re just gonna dig for fucking coal again!

    Considering we’re hosting COP26 it’s a bloody disgrace.

  5. Correction: A private U.S company and a Romanian company have signed a memorandum of understanding on building an SMR they have not built anywhere before. Factoring certification from the IAEA and the European Union on a new modular reactor that doesn’t exist, realising this project and managing it’s cost will be a significant challenge for an untested tech.

  6. I kind of wonder whether those particular SMRs — or the ones that anyone else is making — are capable of putting waste heat into district heating.

    If so, that’d permit for making more use of the energy produced than otherwise.

    [As far as I can tell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor), the countries that have the most businesses that have been moving quickly on SMRs are Japan, Russia, China, and the US. But of those, only Russia has heavy usage of district heating. If those companies were targeting a domestic market, I’d think that district heating wouldn’t have been high on their list of concerns.

    Europe, on the other hand, has more widespread use of district heating, and Eastern Europe in particular has a lot of use — the infrastructure’s already been built for it. The Soviet Union apparently drove district heating systems from heat from traditional nuclear power plants that would otherwise go to waste.

    [Nuclear district heating in CMEA countries](https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/31304794649.pdf)

    > It is important, and an economically attractive idea, that the fullest possible use be made of the existing capacity of district heating systems in nuclear power plants.

    –

    > Despite this important incentive, in the majority of nuclear power plants maximum use is not being made of this capacity to provide heat. The reason for this is that the location of the plant is not always ideal in relation to potential heat consumers. The “guaranteed” consumers (within the plant and plant living quarters) usually use only a small part of the total potential heat output from a district heating unit.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

    >The EU has actively incorporated cogeneration into its energy policy via the CHP Directive. In September 2008 at a hearing of the European Parliament’s Urban Lodgment Intergroup, Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs is quoted as saying, “security of supply really starts with energy efficiency.”[50] Energy efficiency and cogeneration are recognized in the opening paragraphs of the European Union’s Cogeneration Directive 2004/08/EC. This directive intends to support cogeneration and establish a method for calculating cogeneration abilities per country. The development of cogeneration has been very uneven over the years and has been dominated throughout the last decades by national circumstances.

    I’m guessing that power generation can be a lot further from where that power is used — IIRC you’re losing maybe a couple percent to transmit a thousand kilometers — than the heat generation for district heating can. So heat generation for heating use is probably more location sensitive, and I suspect that SMRs are easier to stick a precise amount of power generation at one location over another than with a traditional large-reactor plant, as each reactor is just a (relatively) small increment.

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    ***Oh, it could’ve been, should’ve been
    Worse than you would ever know
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    Oh, we talked about nothing which was more than
    I wanted you to know-oh-oh-oh-oh
    Now here we go***

    ***Oh, It would’ve been, could’ve been
    Worse than it had even gone
    Well, the car was on blocks, but I was already where I want
    (It was impossible, we ran it good, we ran it good)
    Why should we ever even, ever really even get to know
    (It was impossible, we ran it good, we ran it good)
    Oh, if the world don’t like us
    It’ll shake us just like we were a co-oh-oh-oh-old
    Now here we go***

    ***Well we scheme, and we scheme, but we always blow it
    We’ve yet to crash, but we still might as well enjoy it
    Standing at a light switch to each east and west horizon
    Every dawn you’re surprising
    And the evening was consoling saying
    “See it wasn’t quite as, bad as”***

    ***Well, it would’ve been, could’ve been
    Worse than you would ever know
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    (The dashboard melted, but we still have the radio)***

    ***Oh, we could’ve been, should’ve been
    Worse than you would ever know.
    (The dashboard melted but we still have the radio)
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    Well, it sounds like someplace I’d like to go-oh-oh-oh-oh
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    ***Well we scheme, and we scheme, but we always blow it
    We’ve yet to crash, but we still might as well enjoy it
    Standing at a light switch to each east and west horizon
    Every dawn you’re surprising
    And the evening was consoling saying
    “See it wasn’t quite as, bad as”
    Oh, it would’ve been, could’ve been
    Worse than you would ever know***

    – Dashboard, From the album “We were dead before the ship even sank”, by modest mouse (2008)

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