Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
I think you mean it will be record construction time for a western company in the last few decades.
It would be miraculous, in the biblical sense of the word. Not only because it would be a technical and regulatory triumph for RR and the UK, but because it would mean this is something other than what it appears to be to me.
None of this will get built. It's all fake, and after the benefits are taken, and the subsidy budgets are drained, and the various political and academic and regulatory folks have populated the requisite non-profit no-show jobs, and the professional opposition leaders have collected all the anti-nook bucks, and RR et al. have wiggled out of whatever obligations they're pretending to pursue via the holes they've already carefully arranged for themselves, these papers and headlines will be forgotten.
Closer to a third for recent models (the French P4 reactors from the 80s were 1300, the later N4 1450~1500, the EPR is 1650). 500-ish is a relatively typical density for reactors from the mid to late 60s.
Agree that it’s hardly small or modular tho.
Step 1: Find and reserve site of nuclear plant
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Power!
The gist of it is, the reactor is a 500MW pressurized water reactor, Gen3/3+. Not any fancy new Gen4 thing that you usually hear about when talking about small modular reactors. No molten salt, no high temperature gas cooling, no weird moderators, no heap of crumbling carbon/uranium spheres, no liquid lead/bismuth/natrium, no thorium.
So I guess it could actually be possible to keep that timetable, because it is actually old, boring and proven technology, just a little smaller and maybe more prefabricated than the usual 1GW to 1.5GW PWRs that were built in the last 4 decades.
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
Not usually, no; that wouldn't be cost-effective.
The reason being that the nuclear sub reactors run on very enriched uranium which is very expensive and not fun if some got away.
That technology is so expensive, so far from economically viable, that only two countries (US & France) are even using it for aircraft carriers, despite its potential huge advantages over oil (stay at sea for years at a time without refuelling, no need for vulnerable supply ships etc.)