On Tuesday 10 March, the European Commission will present a strategy to promote EU production of small modular reactors (SMR), a new category of nuclear reactor that could boost the supply of clean, locally-produced energy and therefore contribute to the EU’s decarbonisation and industrial competitiveness objectives.
This strategy, a draft of which Agence Europe has seen, outlines a list of initiatives to encourage this production, calling, for example, for facilitating the mobilisation of private investment, particularly through risk reduction instruments.
The aim of public funding should be to mobilise available private capital through appropriate instruments, such as guarantees for first-generation SMR projects, the text states.
“Public support for de-risking SMR projects as they advance towards commercialisation is essential”, the document says.
To meet the financing challenges, “EU budgetary guarantees under the current InvestEU could contribute to the de-risking of investments in the most innovative SMRs”.
The Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) could also help to simplify authorisation procedures, speed up strategic projects and facilitate access to finance.
Under the NZIA, EU Member States and regions could “designate certain areas as Net-Zero Acceleration ‘SMR Valleys’, defined as geographical zones focused on activities related to the manufacturing or assembly of SMRs”.
Among other actions, the project calls for “prioritising industrial initiatives by identifying a limited number of projects supported by suppliers and other partners in EU countries”. Member States and the European Industrial Alliance on SMRs should “focus their support on a limited number of the most promising SMR designs”, explains the Commission.
The start of the 2030s. The strategy also calls for developing a competitive European supply chain that meets local content requirements. These actions “need to be launched rapidly in line with the goal to have SMRs operational in the early 2030s”.
These new types of nuclear reactor could become one of Europe’s next major industrial development projects, explains the Commission, with the potential to mobilise entire value chains in several EU countries and in different sectors of activity.
SMRs are expected to play a key role alongside conventional high-power nuclear reactors in increasing the share of clean electricity for households as well.
Initial estimates of expected SMR capacity in the European Union by 2050 range from 17 to 53 GW for electricity production and other uses (heat, hydrogen, synthetic fuels). Beyond electricity production, SMRs offer a wide variety of applications, the document adds, for example to support the decarbonisation of sectors that are difficult to decarbonise, including chemicals, iron and steel, refining, maritime transport, defence and district heating.
SMRs are also useful for data centres. These centres currently account for around 70 TWh of electricity consumption in Europe, a figure that could rise to 115 TWh by 2030.
The EU has already introduced a series of initiatives in recent years, such as the European Commission’s launch of the European Industrial Alliance on SMRs in early 2024.
SMR coalition. This strategy calls for going further by creating an ‘SMR coalition’ on the political, regulatory, authorisation and economic aspects of certain SMR models in order to facilitate their deployment by the early 2030s.
Interested Member States are invited to “establish an ‘SMR coalition’ to facilitate the introduction of the Alliance’s selected SMR designs, across their territories, through in-depth policy and regulatory cooperation and minimise – when impossible to avoid – locally customised solutions. Countries could align their licensing procedures or mutually recognise each other’s licensing decisions”.
Link to the document: https://aeur.eu/f/l32 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic with Anne Damiani)