CEO of NuScale Power Corp. defended its small modular nuclear reactor business on Tuesday, saying work continued in the US and two other countries, including Romania, after the company canceled its first such facility at a US government laboratory amid rising costs. Reuters reports.

NuScale announced last week that it had agreed with the Utah Municipal Energy System Coalition to cancel a six-reactor, 462-megawatt project that was slated to be built at the US National Laboratory in Idaho by 2030. NuScale and the associated Utah Municipal Energy System said the cancellation was due to concerns about low demand for the plant’s electricity, News.ro cited.

John Hopkins, CEO of NuScale, is optimistic despite the cancellation of the Utah project. “I know that financially we have $200 million in the bank. It’s cash, no debt. So we have a healthy balance,” Hopkins said at the American Nuclear Society conference in Washington.

NuScale projects in Romania and South Korea continue to grow, Hopkins said.

• Read also: Burduja believes that the failure of the American SMR project helps us: “We can bring equipment from there, let us be the first country in the world with small reactors” / He recommends the movie “Nuclear” to those who are afraid of this topic

The shutdown of a publicly funded power plant in Utah is a blow to US ambitions for a new era of nuclear power to help fight climate change. The NuScale project derives from traditional power plants that operate from one or more large reactors.

In 2020, the Department of Energy approved $1.35 billion over 10 years for the plant, known as the Zero Carbon Energy Project, subject to congressional appropriations. The department has given NuScale and other companies about $600 million since 2014 to help commercialize small reactor technologies.

Johns Hopkins also said a plan with utility provider Standard Power to develop two gigawatts of nuclear power for data centers in Pennsylvania and Ohio is on track. The contract for this project will be completed “if not this week, then next,” Hopkins announced.

NuScale was the first US company to receive regulatory approval for its Small Modular Reactor project. Proponents say such projects could be built in remote locations and provide heavy industry with emissions that have traditionally been difficult to reduce.

In January, NuScale said its target price for the plant’s power rose 53 percent to $89 per megawatt-hour, raising concerns about customers’ willingness to pay that amount. Critics say small modular reactors (SMRs) and other advanced reactor designs are too expensive to succeed. (News.ro)

Energy Minister Sebastián Burduia sees a bright side in Romania moving forward with a project that failed in the US. He says that in this way Romania can become the first country in the world with small size reactors (SMR) and we can transfer some of the technology developed there. For those who are intimidated by this topic, he recommends the film “Nuclear” by Oliver Stone.

What Burduzh says:

• We have the ambition to be the first in the world to have small modular reactors. Indeed, this NuScale technology, as you’ve probably read in the news, had a – let’s call it – hesitation in its progress. It’s a commercial fluke, the project in the United States is co-financed by dozens of utility companies, but the technology itself remains the only one in the world certified by the NRC, the world’s strictest regulator.
• And there is every chance that we will even benefit from the fact that the project in Idaho will not be carried out. Because we can negotiate with the United States Department of Energy to take some of the technology and elements developed there and even accelerate it to 2029 – why not? – the first country in the world that had a small reactor.
• There is also a fear in society, why should we be the first, but I think we should be proud of it and explain to Romanians that this technology is safe and as long as it receives all the certificates from the NRC, from CNCAN, from all those involved, we should not be afraid.
• By the way, I recommend a movie that is coming to the big screen, the movie “Nuclear” by Oliver Stone, a movie that explains in a way that everyone can understand what the advantages of nuclear technology mean and why humanity was scared when it could have adopted this technology .

HotNews.ro wrote a lot about this topic and about the reasons for the failure of the American project.