Decarbonising our energy supply is vital to achieving net-zero and while we have made great strides in deploying renewables, satiating our growing energy needs requires radical thinking. In this response to a prior article published here 'The End of Oppenheimer's Dream' by Allison Macfarlane, Jan Emblemsvåg argues far from resigning nuclear to the past, the new technology of small modular reactors finally allows nuclear to exploit Fordist capitalism, and with it, potentially save our energy crisis.

Professor Allison Macfarlane discusses in these pages the state of Small Modular Reactors (SMR), and overall she draws a pessimistic picture even arguing that SMRs are ‘supported by ideology alone’. She has many valid points in her article, but to cut across all the roughly 100 different SMR concepts with a single, broad stroke is too simple. Also, what about all the small nuclear power plants operating around today? Sure, many of these concepts will have licensing problems. Sure, many will have serious waste issues. Sure, many will not be competitive due to costs, and so on. But some of them will succeed, and industrialization will define the industry, just as industrialization changed the world.

Let us remind ourselves that in 1908 there were more than 250 car manufacturers in the US alone. 40 years later, it was five. Similarly, a similar shakeout will also take place in the SMR domain. In 1908, it was at best a niche industry until Henry Ford took it the next step through industrialization. Ford Model T cost initially 850 USD in 1908 but through industrialization it fell to 350 USD in 1916! It was said that Ford extracted the iron ore on Monday and delivered the car on Friday! This is the power of industrialization, and it illustrates that we must move the nuclear industry from handcraft today to the first Model T nuclear power plant design over the next decade.

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Many venture capitalists are satisfied if 1 out of 10 investments pay handsomely off.

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However, the most serious shortcoming of the argument of Professor Macfarlane is that she overvalues renewables as a credible alternative and underestimates the impact of industrialization on nuclear. To illustrate that, just keep in mind that after 20 years of investments in renewables where about 3 trillion USD have been spent, renewables still only constitute merely about 4% of primary energy. This largely negligible result has been achieved despite focusing on the most easy-to-abate sector – the production of electricity. Production of non-fossil electricity constitutes about 15% of final energy consumed, which means we have still not touched the hard-to-abate sectors of fuels and high-temperature industrial thermal energy (heat) and they constitute 80% of final energy.

Consider shipping as an example of the challenge. Shipping constitutes only 3% of global emissions as it consumes about 300 million tonnes of heavy fuel oil (HFO) per year. To abate this sector using green ammonia, which is often suggested, will require 2.7 times the entire EU power production in 2022. The reason is that HFO has an intrinsic thermal energy of 11 MWh/tonne, while ammonia has only 5 MWh/tonne and it requires about 12 MWh/tonne to be produced. Then add aviation, trucking and all the high temperature processes in industry. Decarbonizing the world economy as mandated by the Paris Accord, will never take place with the current energy policies.