The energy market is one of the most competitive industrial sectors today. Every company with R&D departments or laboratories seeks to find new ways to produce clean, cheap, and reliable energy. There are some exciting ideas in the market today. We will talk about small reactors currently developed in the United States called Small Modular Reactors (SMR).
These new reactors are a miniature of a big nuclear plant. Of course, the output will be different. There is just one company in the United States that has passed the final safety report evaluation. It's approved to be used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the 28th of August 2020. They started the qualification process in 2016 to deliver a 12,000-page security protocol subject to evaluation, and as we can see, they have been recently approved.
The idea seems very good, and if all safety measures are I place, I believe this could be one of the future solutions for reliable Energy. I will not say clean either cheap, but the project's promise will reveal itself on an undergoing development.
In my perspective, Small Modular Reactors are a wise for of producing energy, but I would prefer using other Isotopes instead of Uranium and Plutonium; we have Thorium and is available in the United States and many areas of the planet as well.
Looking into Isotopes, in this case, let us look into Thorium capable of delivering from 1 kg – 4.8 billion KWh Th 232. Not as efficient as Uranium or Plutonium but good enough to deliver an excellent output for a long period.
I also believe the Space age and Space exploration will find new elements to answer the energy crisis. Fossil fuels are not just in fashion and contamination by production, as CO2 goes directly into the atmosphere.
Fossil fuels and carbon are just in the end stages of their use. We can see policies in different countries that in five to six years all transportation must be electric. We are starting to see solutions that provide energy to cars ad buses wirelessly from the floor; there will be a system to provide enough wireless energy. Soon the Public Buses and private cars will be able to load meanwhile driving, this type of solutions are good for small countries but what about countries like the USA or Mexico or Canada, where distance is an issue.
Well, Thorium has to go through a chemical process to provide the Isotope best conditions to consider in any reactor. But it is possible to use it, and the cost of Small Modular Reactors making the production and safety protocols make it to the market. We will start seeing SMR´s very soon. The question remains on the type of Isotope chosen.