India’s SMR push
Source: By Anil Sasi: The Indian Express
On trade and economy, the points of convergence between India’s business interests and Trumponomics are beginning to get comprehensible. The one potential area of mutual interest could be Small Modular Reactors, something New Delhi is increasingly viewing as an area of strategic interest, and president-elect Donald Trump appears keen to push.
During his pre-election podcast with Joe Rogan, Trump said he thought projects to build more of the large nuclear reactors currently on the grid, while “very clean,” have a tendency to be complex and go over budget. “They build these massive things (nuclear projects). Then the environmentalists get in,” Trump said, and then pointed to modular reactors as a potential answer.
Trump said he believes that reactors, which can be built in a factory, could avoid the complexities associated with large nuclear reactors.
This comes at a time when India is working to get into the manufacturing value chain of small reactors, both as a way of fulfilling its commitment to clean energy transition, and bundling SMRs as a technology-led foreign policy pitch.
Small modular reactors
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an international body that advises governments on the transition to clean energy, says nuclear energy has to more than double by 2050 if the world has any chance of reaching net zero. The problem with nuclear power currently is that it is big and expensive, takes too long to build and could cause civilisation-ending disasters if something were to go wrong.
SMRs — small reactors with a capacity of 30MWe to 300 MWe per unit — promise a workaround on most of those concerns. This is especially relevant in the wake of surging power demand from technology companies, given the massive incremental electricity requirement coming in from AI machine learning applications and data centres.
While lots of different types of SMRs are being developed, there are currently four main types, each using a different coolant to manage the extreme heat of a nuclear fission reaction — light water, high temperature gas, liquid metal, and molten salt.
The most common type, though, are light water reactors, which are very similar to traditional nuclear power plants being built in Russia, France and the US that are all water-cooled. That makes light water SMRs much easier to design and get approved, as today’s nuclear regulations are mostly based on water-cooled reactors. So with these light water reactors, the idea is to take a big traditional nuclear power plant, shrink it down, and mass-produce it in a factory — like Trump described it on Rogan’s podcast.
India’s Department of Atomic Energy is already in exploratory talks with Holtec International, based in Camden, New Jersey — a smaller, privately held company that is now billed as one of the world’s largest exporters of capital nuclear components — for possible collaborations.
Holtec’s pitch is for fostering a public-private initiative centred on the American company’s flagship small modular reactor, the SMR-300, to potentially help break the stasis in the nuclear engagement between the two countries nearly two decades after the India-US nuclear deal. The idea is to explore the possibility of using existing coal plant sites in India to deploy Holtec’s proposed SMR-based projects and the possibility of joint manufacturing in the future.
As of now, two SMR projects have reached the operational stage globally. One is an SMR named Akademik Lomonosov, a floating power unit in Russia that has two-modules of 35 MWe (megawatt electric). This started commercial operation in May 2020. The other is a demonstration SMR project called HTR-PM in China that was grid-connected in December 2021 and is reported to have started commercial operations in December 2023.
Apart from Holtec’s SMR-300, other emerging Western contenders in the segment include the Rolls-Royce SMR, NuScale’s VOYGR SMR, Westinghouse Electric’s AP300 SMR, and GE-Hitachi’s BWRX-300.
Holtec’s SMR-300 is one of the seven advanced reactor designs supported by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Programme. In 2020, the company’s SMR project received a $116-million award to help accelerate design, engineering and licensing activities and is currently in the early design review stages in the United Kingdom and Canada to deploy its small reactor.
Two legal hurdles
There are some niggling issues. On the Indian side, the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010 — that sought to create a mechanism to compensate victims from damage caused by a nuclear accident, allocate liability, and specify procedures for compensation — has been cited as an impediment by foreign players such as GE-Hitachi, Westinghouse and French nuclear company Areva (now called Orano). This is primarily on the grounds that the legislation channelises operators’ liability to equipment suppliers. Foreign vendors have cited this as a reason for worries about investing in India.
On the American side, the ‘10CFR810’ authorisation (Part 810 of Title 10, Code of Federal Regulations (Part 810) of the US Atomic Energy Act of 1954) gives American companies such as Holtec the ability to export to India under some strict safeguards, but does not permit them to manufacture any nuclear equipment or perform nuclear design work in India. This is essentially a non-starter from New Delhi’s perspective, which wants to participate in manufacturing the SMRs and co-produce the nuclear components for its domestic needs.
So, the US-India nuclear deal could need some additional leeway, for which New Delhi is trying for a workaround, even though it lacks the legislative mandate to make any changes to the 2010 legislation.
But New Delhi would want Washington to move the needle on the 810 authorisation. While there were some indications of progress under the outgoing administration of Joe Biden, the specific issue of getting around ‘10CFR810’ could run into hurdles, given Trump’s statecraft is centred on bringing manufacturing back into the US. But with Trump’s outlook also evidently transactional, New Delhi senses some leeway in getting a waiver of sorts on this legal impediment, provided there is some give from India’s side.
New Delhi is hoping to pitch itself as a credible alternative to the incumbents in this niche SMR field, riding on its strong track record of having operated small-sized reactors over an extended period of time and the ability to manufacture nuclear reactors cost-effectively and at scale.
This also comes at a time when Beijing is working on an ambitious plan to seize the opportunity of global leadership in the SMR space, unlike large reactors, where it has been a latecomer. Like India, Beijing is seeing SMRs as a tool of its diplomatic outreach in the Global South. It hopes to shake up the SMR industry, just as it has done in the electric vehicle sector.
Incentive for the US and India to collaborate
Though India’s civil nuclear programme has expertise in manufacturing smaller reactor types — 220MWe PHWRs (pressurised heavy water reactors) and above — the problem for India is its reactor technology. Based on heavy water and natural uranium, the PHWRs are increasingly out of sync with the light water reactors that are now the most dominant reactor type across the world.
The strategic pitch from Holtec’s end is that a collaborative approach could be a positive for both the US and India, given that both countries are ill-placed to compete with China on their own: India has technological constraints (outdated PHWR tech), while the US is being seen as impeded by a relatively high cost of labour and the growing protectionist mood in that country.
According to government officials, detailed technical discussions are underway in Delhi’s policy circles to plan a roadmap for studying the feasibility and effectiveness of the deployment of such reactors.
Russia is also learnt to be keen to expand its nuclear cooperation with India to include a partnership in SMRs, sources said. “The future course of action will be finalised on the basis of the decision of the Government within the overall remit of the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, and the possibility of allowing participation of private sector and start-ups in this sector (SMRs) is also being looked at,” an official said.
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