The small reactor industry meets its first real deadline
Three modular designs are due for regulatory sign-off this year. Only one has filed a complete submission.
Small modular reactors have been eighteen months away for about a decade. This year the claim gets tested against a calendar that does not move.
The appeal is straightforward: build the reactor in a factory, truck it to the site, and replace the bespoke megaproject with something closer to manufacturing. The difficulty is equally straightforward. Factories need orders, orders need licences, and licences need designs that are finished rather than promising.
One developer has filed a complete submission and is working through a second round of regulator questions, largely concerning the behaviour of passive cooling systems during extended loss of power. A second has filed in part. A third has asked for an extension.
Utilities watching the process say the decisive number is not the licence date but the price of the second unit. The first of anything is expensive. The entire modular argument rests on the tenth being cheap.
Critics point out that the money committed so far would have bought a meaningful amount of wind and storage today rather than firm power in the 2030s. Supporters answer that a grid running mostly on weather eventually wants something that does not care what the weather is doing.
