Nuclear power has never quite lived up to its promise, but governments committed to ambitious climate-change targets have been giving the technology a second glance
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskBut governments committed to ambitious climate-change targets have been giving the technology a second glance. In January the European Union added nuclear power to a list of projects eligible for green finance. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile, has sent fossil-fuel prices soaring, and put energy security at the top of the political agenda in Europe, which currently relies heavily on Russian natural gas.
NuScale’s design has a 23-metre-tall, lozenge-shaped reactor vessel that sits in a steel-lined subterranean pool of cooling water and is capped by a reinforced-concrete reactor building. Several plants can be combined into a large power station, or a few used to provide power to a single site. Such modularity implies redundancy, too, since individual reactors can be switched off for refuelling while the rest keep running.
NuScale, Rolls-Royce and the China National Nuclear Corporation, which is building the plant in Hainan, are sticking with tried-and-true designs. All their proposed plants are light-water reactors , which use ordinary water both to cool the core and to moderate the speed of the nuclear chain-reaction. Since most of the world’s existing reactors are alsoOther designs are more exotic, relying on molten lead or sodium, or gaseous helium, instead of water, to cool their cores.
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