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State of the art overview on development of SMRs

Development of SMR (Small Modular nuclear Reactors) is currently high on the agenda. These SMRs are smaller than the conventional big nuclear power plants (about 1/3rd in terms of power output). There are over 50 designs currently being considered world-wide. On top of that, several spin-offs are being created to implement some of these designs. We consider that there will be a shake out in the coming years of all these initiatives. SCK CEN in cooperation with the Italian companies Ansaldo and ENEA and the Romanian RATEN has its own design, EAGLES 300 that it wants to build.

The challenge is to keep a good view on competition, where the main issue is the information overload. The amount of announcements in the specialized press is staggering but also international institutions such as IAEA, OECD provide very detailed reports.

The objective of the project is to make a 1 page graphic that provides a bird’s eye view on the state of the art and is easily maintainable after the project is finished by the SCK CEN team, preferably by a non-technical profile. At the same time it needs to capture a number of different parameters such a technical maturity, financials, change to succeed, institutional support, EU self reliance of the tech etc.. As example of such a graphic but in a completely other domain, we can provide the output of  a similar exercise done for Nuclear Medicine. It has the same challenge of information overload, a lot of startups being involved etc…

 

Primary source material is to be found on

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