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Global Marketplace
www.read-tpt.com104
September 2013
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According to Siemens’s Mr Laske, one of the new electric
buses costs at least $519,000: as much as twice the price
of a comparable diesel bus. But he expects that to drop as
production rises. He also noted that some of the expense of
a new bus is offset by lower operating costs from savings on
fuel and maintenance.
Anna Reich of Wiener Linien, the municipal transport
company, pointed out the savings to the city from not having
to build new infrastructure for its bus fleet.
“Vienna has the fifth largest tram infrastructure in the world,”
Ms Reich told the
Herald Tribune
. “We wanted to use [what]
we already have.”
If licensing can be speeded up,
smaller reactors could hold
promise for a beleaguered
American nuclear power industry
Small modular reactors (SMRs) can be made in factories,
assembled on-site, and arrayed in multiple-reactor
configurations to incrementally scale up capacity.
As further described by Navigant Research in its report
“Small Modular Reactors,” released 4 June, SMRs have
lower upfront capital costs, enhanced safety features, flexible
deployment modes, innovative fuel cycles, and a broader
range of applications.
Countering the economies of scale offered by larger facilities
with economies of mass production and standardisation,
these upstarts would appear to offer a range of advantages
to producers of nuclear power. And Navigant (Boulder,
Colorado) expects them to seize their opportunity.
The specialised services firm forecasts global SMR capacity
to grow from a few dozen megawatts (MW) this year to at
least 4.6 gigawatts (GW) – and conceivably to surpass 18GW
– in 2030.
“The move toward smaller, more flexible reactors is returning
the nuclear power industry to its roots, in the US Navy’s
nuclear submarine program,” according to Richard Martin,
Navigant’s editorial director. “It’s clear that, for the so-called
renaissance of nuclear power to achieve its potential, SMRs
must become a significant part of the world’s nuclear fleet.”
The company found strong government support for
SMR research and development, with the barriers to
commercialisation for vendors of SMR technology falling
steadily. But there are hurdles. In the US, one of the largest
is gaining approval and licensing from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, which recently approved the first new large,
conventional reactors in the nation in more than 30 years.