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Part 1 of 2 Parts
    There is a lot of excitement in the nuclear industry about what are called small modular reactors (SMRs). SMRs would produce three hundred megawatts or less of electricity. They would be produced as modules in a factory with tight quality control and economies of scale. SMR modules would be small enough to transport via truck, rail or cargo plane to the site of operations where they would be assembled.
    Bret Kugelmass is an entrepreneur who sold his drone company Airphrame in 2017 in order to focus his energy on fighting climate change. He has founded a non-profit research company named the Energy Impact Center (EIC) to find “accelerated pathways” to decarbonize the global economy by 2040. He believes that the best response to climate change is the use of nuclear power.
   Last week, EIC launched their OPEN100 project to serve as a foundation for new SMR nuclear power plant construction. It will offer developers a number of resources such as a web interface to help visualized plant and component design, cost studies and construction plans. The open-source format is intended to allow startups, engineering firms, global utilities and capital markets to align around a common framework.
     Kugelmass says the new project will make open-source blueprints for the design, construction and financing of a one hundred-megawatt SMR available. He says that his new SMR can be built for about three hundred million dollars in about two years. This would be a very substantial drop in both cost and time for the construction of a nuclear power reactor. 
     Kugelmass said “When we first got started we were under the assumption public perception might be an issue but as we continued to interview experts around the world we realized there were dozens of countries desperate for nuclear and the only thing holding them back was cost—cost driven by unnecessary complexity, borrowing risk of high capital outlay, and lengthy construction periods.”
     Kugelmass went on to say “Nuclear power isn’t just part of the solution to addressing climate; it is the solution. OPEN100 will radically change the way we deploy nuclear power plants going forward, offering a substantially less expensive and less complicated solution. The goal of the project is to accelerate the development of nuclear power, offering the world an affordable alternative to fossil fuels.”
     One of the major problems with the serious expansion of nuclear power generation to fight climate change is the cost of construction of nuclear power plants. Kugelmass attributes the high cost to a focus on large and very complicated reactors that take far too long to license and build. He has decided that the best way to overcome the cost problem is to start with the design of conventional pressurized water reactors and drive the cost down through standardization and factory construction to allow rapid construction.
    In order to begin the project, EIC conducted fifteen hundred interviews with experts in subjects such as technology, economics and policy and over one hundred site visits across fifteen countries The EIC team then used this analysis to create an open source template for designing and constructing a nuclear power plant.
Please read Part 2 next