At a Sydney Mining Club luncheon, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s (ANSTO) chief executive officer, Dr Adrian (Adi) Paterson, said the use of small modular reactors (SMRs) had the potential to breathe energy into remote locations globally and drive other industries such as agriculture.

Countries that have projects underway with SMRs include the United States and Argentina, both using mature technology. In the Asia-Pacific region, South Korea has a project underway called the “smart reactor”. It is an integral pressurised water reactor that would be fuelled for 36 months before requiring replenishment and is designed to be transportable by rail.

“We are right on the cusp of SMRs, starting from about 10 megawatts and going all the way up to 180-200 megawatts, that will be highly modularised and able to be built, transported and installed in sites that become available,” Paterson said.

“The basic business proposition for an SMR is that you pack into the functionality of the reactor a highly safe, highly economic, highly reproducable and standardised reactor that you can roll out in a very efficient way in remote and other sites.”

This global phenomenon, according to Paterson, was being followed very intensely by China and India. He said it was easy to imagine in the generations to come that many small island states and developing countries without complex grids would not build large-scale nuclear pants. Instead, we would see literally hundreds of these SMRs going into these countries as they choose to decarbonise their electricity supplies.

“So there is a real opportunity for us to consider, in the Australian context, what sort of ideas might be valuable for the parts of Australia that look a little bit like the developing world.”

In terms of the regulatory environment, Paterson said it was ANSTO’s understanding that in the first generation of SMRs they would be completely and rigorously regulated, as all other nuclear reactors are.

He said that was completely appropriate, but pointed out that they would also be the first generation of nuclear reactors that would be standardised on a global scale.

At the moment, most large reactors must be customised for the relevant site, throwing up any number of individual regulatory issues on a case-by-case basis.

However, with the standardised design of SMRs, all of the parameters will be pre-defined and sorted through from a regulatory point of view, resulting in the regulatory framework also becoming standardised.

In terms of where Paterson saw the SMR debate moving globally in the near-term, he said there were a large number of companies with credible design and allocated funding that were building the first generation of the new sort of SMRs that would become available to developing, emerging and developed economies in the future.

“There is no fatal flaw from a regulatory or establishment-of-site point of view, which we believe will slow down the early advancement of these type of reactors by creative companies and entrepreneurial suppliers of services to all sorts of industries.

“We think they will be particularly suited to environments where there is low support infrastructure, with the business case predicated on having long fuel cycles, highly safe reactors – with integral operations and safety – being highly transportable and, the holy grail of SMR environment, when you have used it somebody picks it up, puts it on a rail car and ships it back to where it came from.”