Last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada’s investment to construct and operate four small modular nuclear reactors in Ontario to create safe, clean, reliable and affordable energy, making it the first G7 country to bring SMR technology online. Many other countries are close behind.

The year before that announcement, Jamaica signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Canada, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories to advance Jamaica’s adoption of nuclear energy and possible deployment of SMRs.

At the signing ceremony, Jamaica’s prime minister said: “ … with proper regulation of the technology … nuclear can be a game-changer. In fact, today’s nuclear technology, especially small modular reactors, is far safer and more adaptable than it was in the past.”

SMRs are highly advanced nuclear fission reactors that can generate up to 300 megawatts of electricity, which can be cost-effectively manufactured on an assembly line. They are much smaller than conventional power plants, and they typically rely on passive safety systems, like gravity and water cooling.

By comparison, it is estimated that Belco routinely generates up to 60MW of electricity for Bermuda, although it may have a generative capacity of 160MW to meet the periods of peak electricity demand in Bermuda of between 112 and 123MW of electricity.

The idea of a more simply built nuclear reactor for a limited “geography” is not new. SMRs have, in one form or other, been in safe use for over 60 years. For example, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers all use SMRs that can generate in the range of 45MW of electricity.

The US navy pioneered SMR use on submarines with the launch of the USS Nautilus in 1954, and today the US, Russia, China, UK, France and India all operate, in the aggregate, approximately 200 SMR-powered naval vessels.

As well, many universities around the world safely use scaled-down nuclear power plants on their campuses. The University of Toronto installed its Slowpoke (Safe Low Power Kritical Experimental) nuclear reactor on its campus in 1971, and Jamaica's The University of the West Indies followed with its Slowpoke reactor in 1984.

SMRs also have many other possible uses, such as the use by militaries to reduce fuel supply-chain vulnerabilities via their deployment for forward operating bases.

With respect to Bermuda’s power requirements, SMRs sound ideal on paper. The idea of safely generating abundant clean energy from a single modular power plant, which takes up comparatively little land, sounds too good to be true.

However, constructing an SMR plant, as they are designed and manufactured, is an expensive proposition.

Although SMR vendors, like GE Hitachi and Rolls-Royce SMR, manufacture and assemble SMR stations to dramatically reduce the cost of acquisition, the accumulative costs of procurement, site evaluation and preparation, engineering, financing, and construction costs for a 200MW SMR have been estimated at between $1.6 billion and $2.5 billion.

For a small nation that might be considering such an investment, that price tag could be overwhelmingly unaffordable. In addition, the aggregate cost for such projects must also include expenditures such as: the marine transport of some very heavy components; bespoke grid integration (and stability); retaining highly skilled foreign labour for both construction and operation; a decommissioning fund; and the cost of highly specialised ongoing regulatory capabilities.

As well, jurisdictions that routinely find themselves in the path of strong hurricanes must also add the expense of hurricane-proofing designs and the commensurate costs of overbuilt construction.

However, in the near future, SMRs may not have to engender such pricetag pessimism. Much less expensive SMR options are now being developed by numerous corporations.

Of particular interest to island nations, several firms are now designing floating, state-of-the-art SMRs that will be able to generate up to 160MW of electricity at a small fraction of the cost of land-based SMRs and with no real estate consumption.

For example, the highly collaborative Flexblue project in France proposes to manufacture a civil version of a nuclear submarine’s power plant that would either be submerged or float within a weather-protected enclosure thus “utilising the ocean as a virtually infinite heat sink for passive safety”.

Although those nautical variations are far from being off-the-shelf purchases, floating SMRs are also not science fiction.

In fact, many floating SMRs have been deployed to float on small platforms or on vessels to generate electricity for decades. The first floating SMR was used from 1968 to 1977 to generate 45MW of electricity for the Panama Canal Zone by using low-enriched uranium.

In May 2020, Russia deployed a fully commercial floating SMR (comprised of two pressurised reactors) to provide its Artic port of Pevek with up to 70 KW of electricity. Corporations around the world, including in Norway, South Korea, Poland, the US, the UK, and China are all moving quickly to develop commercially affordable floating SMRs.

It is widely anticipated that floating SMRs will be much less expensive than their land counterparts, with estimates running from $600 million to $1 billion, with some commercial prototypes currently in development for mass-production, targeting an entry price of around $360 million.

Floating SMRs are also being touted as having the benefits of: safety and efficiency due to their direct-to-ocean cooling systems; safety in regions of seismic stability; pre-fab construction requiring only “assembly”; and, its ability to be decommissioned by simply “towing away” encased radioactive waste from the local environment.

Despite these emerging developments, it is important to note that environmentalists are deeply divided about the risks and benefits of SMR energy solutions.

While welcoming the abandonment of carbon based power generation that readily available SMRs would likely usher, many environmentalists have legitimate concerns about water-submerged SMR deployments, weather related risks, nuclear waste management and any diversion from renewable energy solutions.

Given Bermuda’s continuing energy challenges and dilemmas, it is worth keeping a close eye on all developing energy innovations, including the refinement of clean energy solutions that have been around for many decades.

• Duncan Card is the CEO of the Advisory Group in Bermuda (www.advisory.bm), which provides technology and privacy compliance advice. He has worked on numerous atomic energy projects, including PPP projects to design, build, finance and operate small nuclear power plants. This article is not intended to provide any advice