Nuclear giant Holtec International is betting that its 300-megawatt small modular reactors are the future of atomic power.
On Friday, the Florida-based firm the documents presented with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to sell the company’s stock on NASDAQ.
In hundreds of pages, the revealing document outlines 40-year-old Holtec’s plans to transform itself from the entrepreneur of the industry — the manufacture of canisters for the safe storage of spent radioactive fuel and the dismantling of closed nuclear plants — to his midwifery, producing and operating new electrical stations.
The transition comes as nuclear power regains popularity in the US as a way to meet growing energy demand without creating more planet-warming pollution.
Developers have traditionally offset the high initial costs of nuclear by building ever larger reactors to capture economies of scale. However, since the early 2000s, a number of companies have proposed building small modular reactors that can be built identically and in groups.
SMRs can generate about a third of the electricity of conventional large-scale plants, but, proponents argue, would reduce costs through assembly-line repetition rather than physical scale.
This cost reduction has yet to be proven in the real world with actual plants. But in its S-1 filing Holtec said, ”SMRs will provide scalable, cost-effective solutions for new capacity with improved safety features, reduced construction timelines, and reduced land and transmission infrastructure needs compared to traditional, larger-scale reactors.”
He pointed out that a single unit SMR plant would need only 15 hectares of land and would take only three years to build. In contrast, large grid reactors today can occupy hundreds of acres, and construction typically drags on almost a decade.
Holtec’s SMR-300, as the pressurized water reactor is called, ”is expected to receive regulatory approval for deployment in 2029″ and reach its first deployment ”in the early 2030s,” according to the filing.
The company said it expects SMRs to play ”a significant role in expanding nuclear capacity,” noting that they can “complement large-scale nuclear production through lower upfront costs” and more flexible planning about how much power is needed.
For example, smaller reactors may be more suitable for converting some old coal-fired stations into nuclear power plants.
The US Department of Energy has been researching the idea for years, given that nuclear and coal are both thermal sources that operate at similar frequency rates and therefore use similar equipment to generate electricity from steam – which in nuclear plants is made from heat created by splitting atoms and in coal plants is made from heat created by burning black rock.
Converting a 400 MW coal plant to a similarly sized nuclear reactor makes more financial sense than using a larger reactor, which may require costly transmission upgrades and more space.
“We believe our SMR-300 plant could become a favored source of nuclear generation over large reactors due to several advantages,” the company said in its filing.
The future of the resume
The company will also operate at least one conventional reactor, the 800 MW unit it is currently restoring at its Palisades nuclear station in western Michigan. That project — the country’s first attempt to return a permanently shuttered nuclear reactor to service — it could be over within monthsalthough its contract to sell power to the local grid will not start until next year.
Holtec hopes to combine its factory restart strategy with its SMR vision. It is planning to deploy two SMRs at the Palisades site. If that works, the company has said it could build the SMR at New Jersey’s Oyster Creek nuclear plant, which it has been in the process of decommissioning for eight years.
Holtec owns three other defunct nuclear plants — Pilgrim in Massachusetts, Big Rock Point in Michigan and Indian Point in New York state — that it may also try to rebuild. The Trump administration has called for the rebuilding of Indian Point, but state government in Albany remains opposed to the controversial proposal.
However, local opposition is not Holtec’s biggest obstacle. That would be competition from nuclear giants in Russia and China. Almost every Western nuclear developer is facing an uphill battle to compete with the Kremlin’s state-run Rosatom, by far the world’s largest international seller of nuclear technology, and China’s two state nuclear companies, which are building more than three dozen reactors at home and are expected to enter the export game soon.
However, among its domestic rivals, Holtec may be best positioned to hold its own on a global playing field. It is an established company with profitable operations in a dozen countries on four continents, and has experience managing infrastructure so sensitive that it is overseen by a dedicated agency, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The company has electrical equipment in place that could potentially be used to deploy SMRs. It has also won significant support from the federal government, both in the form of a $1.52 billion loan that the Department of Energy provided to finance the restart of Palisades and 400 million dollars the agency gave the company to support the construction of its first SMR-300s.
“We began work in 2011 on a small modular reactor solution, and relying on our in-house capability to design, license, manufacture, build and commission nuclear systems, honed over decades of turnkey supply, we are now uniquely positioned to begin development of our small nuclear reactor,” said Krishna Singh, Holtec’s executive, founder and investors in the investor letter to chief.
Alexander C. Kaufman is a contributing journalist at Canary Mediawhich originally published this article. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license.
