Pratique du Shadowing: How Solar Is Beating Nuclear's Best Idea - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo
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Three years ago, people were predicting the end of small modular reactors.
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The Utah utility canceled plans for Portland, Oregon's NuScale to build the first of these novel nuclear reactors in the state.
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The estimated cost started at $3 billion in 2015, it hit $4 .2 billion in 2018, $6 .1 billion in 2020,
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and $9 .3 billion in 2023.
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At which point, the customers walked.
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SMRs were sold as a faster, cheaper route to nuclear, nuclear, but NuScale showed they could be just as slow and just as expensive to build.
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I've covered these things three times.
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Each time I said the same thing.
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Promising, but unproven.
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So did 2026 finally change that?
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Just a few years after NuScale's collapse, it seems reports of SMR's death have been vastly overstated.
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In fact, 2026 is perhaps the best year for SMR's ever.
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Multiple projects are breaking ground after a decade without any new commercial nuclear projects.
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And the Trump administration wants to help with a pro -nuclear agenda and 900 million dollars available to support the SMR industry.
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94 million of that has already been awarded.
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So now we're back to rosy headlines and you'd be forgiven for having a case of small modular whiplash.
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So what's actually happening here?
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Are small modular reactors about to play a major role in our energy system?
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Or are they just a waste of time and enriched uranium?
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I'm Matt Farrell.
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Welcome to Undecided.
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This video is brought to you by Incogni.
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Big reactors put out 600 to 1500 megawatts.
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Small modular reactors, or SMRs, are built for 70 to 350 MW.
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SMRs are supposed to fix the problems associated with big, honking reactors.
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Although America has more nuclear power than any country in the world and nuclear supplies about 20 % of the U .S electricity, the reactor fleet is old.
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Most of it was built before 1990.
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Over decades, nuclear reactors have gotten more and more expensive and taken longer and longer to build.
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The most recent U .S nuclear reactors at the Vogel facility in Georgia took seven extra years to build
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and produce energy at more than seven times the cost that nuclear cost in the 1970s.
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New nuclear can't compete with renewable energy in terms of cost.
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The levelized cost of electricity from nuclear is between $175 and $255 per megawatt hour.
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That's much more expensive than utility -scale solar, which has an LCOE between $40 and $98, or onshore wind, which is between $37 and $99.
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If nuclear wants to compete in an era of increased electricity demand, that's just not going to cut it.
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SMRs are supposed to make nuclear competitive again.
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They're supposed to make it cheaper and quicker to build and have more places they can fit.
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As I've mentioned on the channel, whenever nuclear comes up, the prospect of a clean, firm source of power is incredibly appealing today.
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New nuclear capacity reduces dependence on fossil fuels and compensates for the intermittency of renewables.
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Also, I am aware that there are claims
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that SMRs will be safer from malfunction than traditional reactors and that produce less hazardous waste.
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We've gone into that in detail in other videos if you'd like to hear more about it, so I'm not going to rehash it here.
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When we say SMRs are small, that refers first and foremost to how much power they make.
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Modular means that most of the components can be built in a factory, shipped, and then assembled rather than built on site.
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In a recent Reuters column, Gavin McGuire describes it like this.
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The vision is straightforward.
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Turn nuclear power from a construction business into a manufacturing business.
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The idea is that over time it'll get cheaper and easier to build the pieces of these reactors.
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That's what happened with solar panels.
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We also know that finished working SMRs are possible.
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There are sample projects in China and Russia, which we'll get into later.
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Put this all together and you can start to understand the dream.
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Smaller, safer and cheaper nuclear developed in the U .S and exported for profit.
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You see the rosy picture painted across the U .S.
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Department of Energy's website, which reads, If a sufficient number of SMR units were ordered, it would provide the necessary incentive to develop the appropriate factory capacity to further grow domestic
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and international sales of SMR power plants.
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That's a big if.
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And it's a big problem.
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If there were a large number of specific SMR in the development pipeline, we could assess if mass production actually decreased cost, at what point, for which specific technology.
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The current levelized cost of electricity for SMRs, before any cost decrease from factory learning, is $214 per MWh.
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That's higher than every source of renewable energy.
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And without those orders, we can't fully assess its potential.
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It's like a middle schooler saying they're going to be an NBA all -star once they grow up to be 6 '10".
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Sure, we can't totally rule it out, but skepticism?
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It's appropriate.
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It's even harder to make an assessment
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because currently there are a huge number of different SMR designs taking off all over the world.
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Well over 100.
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With that many designs, it's possible that the market may become too diluted for any one design to be mass -produced cheaply.
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One whole category of these designs can't legally get built in the US right now, and it has nothing to do with money.
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It comes down to fuel and a piece of paper.
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More on that in a second.
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But speaking of paperwork, when my wife and I built our house, I filled out a mountain of it.
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Permits, applications, utility forms, inspection requests, and every one of those had my name, my address, and my phone number on it.
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I didn't think twice about it at the time, but years later I've got a pretty good idea where a lot of that information ended up.
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Ok, so back to those designs and the ones you can't get off the ground.
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On the one hand, the growing number of designs for small modular reactors shows a very real interest in the technology.
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But it's also a problem.
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All these designs compete for the same investment dollars.
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That makes it harder for any one of them to get built over and over.
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And without that repetition, the cost savings never shows up.
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The flurry of innovation in SMRs is creating a bottleneck to their adoption.
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It's like a factory where 50 teams are making 50 kinds of car.
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One team might be cooking up the Model T, but there's so much traffic to get out the door, it'll never have the chance to prove itself on the road.
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Also, remember that one of the key components needed to reduce the cost is the ability to mass produce them.
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If the same market for SMRs is divided between 100 teams versus 5 teams, mass production may not be possible, at least anytime soon.
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When I covered these three years ago, I figured the field would have thinned out by now.
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A couple of designs pulling ahead, everybody else quietly dropping off.
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The opposite has happened.
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There are more designs chasing the same pile of money than the last time I looked.
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There's a whole category of these reactors that can't get built right now and has nothing to do with money.
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There are some SMRs that we can probably count out from taking off, just from the kind of fuel they plan to use.
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You wouldn't buy a car
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if it ran out of gas from a special kind of gas station that hasn't been built yet.
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But that's effectively the plan for some SMRs.
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Many SMRs and advanced large nuclear reactors in the works plan to run on high -assay low -enriched uranium, or HALU.
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This is more enriched than the low -enriched uranium fuel that's used by most current reactors.
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HALU has a higher burn -up than low -enriched uranium, so you get more energy from the amount of uranium.
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This is key to claims of increased efficiency and less waste for many SMR designs.
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But there's a problem.
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The only commercial HALU right now is produced by Russia, which is a non -starter given a law called Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act of 2024,
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which does exactly what you think it does.
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What this means is that a serious chunk of SMR designs can't take off until a domestic supply chain can be built.
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The US is putting a lot of effort, and by effort I mean cash money, into meeting this potential demand.
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A company called Centris in Bethesda, Maryland proved it could produce 900 kilograms of HALU.
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They didn't want a separate $900 million contract, this one to commercialize its operations.
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According to the company, the initial buildout will include 12 metric tons of annual HALU production capacity, as well as LOO.
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The plan is for the facility to be built out by 2029.
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It's a step in the right direction, but it won't be nearly enough to meet the demand, which could reach 50 tons a year by by 2035, according to the Department of Energy.
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So there's a chunk of SMRs that have no chance of breaking out because of their fuel.
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But set the fuel problem aside for a second.
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What happens when you stop reading the pitch decks and go look at the reactors that are already running?
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Big Nuclear did try to standardize designs to make construction cheaper, the way SMRs are supposed to do it.
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It just didn't work.
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According to a 2020 study by Ish Gates and colleagues, the cost escalation comes down to lower labor productivity and soft costs.
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I guess modularity isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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So let's look at the actual SMRs.
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Two of these things are in commercial operation right now.
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Almost nobody talks about how they're actually performing though.
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The numbers here are bad.
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China's HTRPM ran 27 hours out of a possible 8 ,760 in 2020.
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Russia's KLT -40s unit percent, performed at 26 .4 % and 30 .5 % of capacity.
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And while they were being built, they had the same cost and time overruns of regular nuclear.
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According to Goldman Sachs, Russia and China's SMRs experienced cost overruns between 300 and 400 % over initial estimates,
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which aren't likely to go down until economies of scale develop.
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And just like boring large nuclear, these SMRs took forever to build.
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China's HTRPM took nearly a decade to complete.
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Russia's KLT -40s was projected to take four years to build, but required 13.
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Despite the troubled track record, the effort going to SMRs is very real.
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Like I said at the beginning, this is an incredible year for SMRs.
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Two US projects broke ground earlier this year.
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Bellevue Washington's TerraPower received the go -ahead for a 345 MW facility in Kemmer, Wyoming, with storage that can push output to 500 MW at peak demand.
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And the Alameda, California -based company Kairos broke ground on a demonstration project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
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Energy -hungry hyperscalers are linked up with SMR companies to power the data centers increasingly central to the U .S economy.
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Investment money is flowing into the space.
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According to Michael Johnson, managing director for JPMorgan Chase, this recent round of SMR enthusiasm started in 2024 when Amazon made a deal with Rockville,
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Maryland's X -Energy.
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He told the Wall Street Journal it was real support from Amazon
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that had people believe not just in the future of X -Energy, but in the future of small modular reactors.
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Look, if you'd want anyone on your side to build your SMR, it would have to be one of the most profitable companies on the planet.
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But how much should we weight that excitement from finance and big tech against everything else that we know? So here's my take.
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SMRs are a hard sell.
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For all the activity in this space, we're not seeing anything like what we've been promised every time we've covered them.
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This is now the fourth time I've looked at these.
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I keep waiting for my answer to change.
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Even people working to develop SMR companies don't expect the tech to break out.
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Ray Rothrock is an investor in several reactor companies.
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He expects very few SMR startups will survive.
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It's a single digit, he told the Wall Street Journal.
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It's not a double digit.
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The big problem is that a small nuclear reactor is more like a large nuclear reactor than a PV panel.
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It faces the same regulatory hurdles and process challenges.
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A reactor a tenth the size is just as complex to produce.
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It needs the same design work, build the tension and paperwork, and at first it makes less power for more money.
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Here's how the chief executive of TerraPower, Chris Levesque, put it to the Wall Street Journal.
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Because this is a smaller reactor doesn't mean smaller design effort, because it's still fission.
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A factory cranking out PV panels can produce millions of a specific design in a year.
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That That leads to lower costs. And comparatively, right now there are just a trickle of SMR projects without
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even a single design proving itself to iterate on into the future.
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In an era of ubiquitous solar backed up by batteries, the case for massive SMR investment is thin.
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But there's still a case for them.
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An IEA report last year predicts that globally, SMRs are poised for rapid growth.
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The IEA's baseline scenario has SMRs hitting 40 GW by 2050.
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And to be fair to nuclear, 40 gigawatts of reactors running around the clock outproduces a year of US solar installs by a good margin.
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The problem is the calendar.
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The US installed that much solar last year.
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SMRs get there in 2050.
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But it's still something.
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There are plenty of places they might be useful.
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Military installations, small outposts, way off the grid, and of course the data centers that keep coming online.
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I know how much we all love a good data center.
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Increased energy demand and climate change make any new source of clean energy worth pursuing.
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SMRs are being pursued, but their central mechanism to lower cost and speed adoption has yet to be proven.
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It likely won't anytime soon, or maybe even ever.
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But right now, solar and batteries are dunking on SMRs.
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It's not a fair comparison really, for a technology that is still some years away at best from reaching the rim.
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So are SMRs a waste of time?
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What do you make of the money that's still going into them? jump in the comments and let me know.
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You can also check out extended cuts of my videos over on Patreon.
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In this one I go into more detail on the different kinds of SMR designs that are out there.
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If human -written and researched videos matter to you, Patreon support helps a ton.
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And a big welcome to new Supporter Plus member Blue Falcon.
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The link's in the description if you'd like to join, but just watching, subscribing, and turning on notifications is awesome.
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And check out my follow -up podcasts still to be determined will keep this conversation going.
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Keep your mind open, stay curious, and I'll see you in the next one.
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Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon
Cette vidéo contient 195 phrases et 2687 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 14:02. Le locuteur parle vite, environ 191 mots par minute : attendez-vous à des liaisons et à des sons réduits. Seuls 81 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais, le vocabulaire est donc exigeant.
Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo
15 mots de la vidéo à retenir, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| reactor nom | /ɹiˈæktɚ/ | réacteur |
| modular adjectif | /ˈmɑd͡ʒəlɚ/ | modulaire |
| uranium nom | /ˌjuː.ˈɹeɪ.ni.əm/ | uranium |
| compete verbe | /kəmˈpiːt/ | rivaliser, concourir |
| utility nom | /juːˈtɪlɪti/ | utilité |
| renewable adjectif | /ɹɪˈnu.ə.bl̩/ | renouvelable |
| thin adjectif | /ˈθɪn/ | mince |
| assessment nom | /əˈsɛsmənt/ | évaluation |
| removal nom | /ɹɪˈmuː.vəl/ | enlèvement, élimination |
| component nom | /kəmˈpoʊ.nənt/ | composant |
| ton nom | /tʌn/ | tonne |
| pursue verbe | /pɚˈsu/ | poursuivre |
| anytime adverbe | n'importe quand, toujours | |
| adoption nom | /əˈdɑp.ʃən/ | adoption |
| decrease verbe | /dɪˈkɹiːs/ | diminuer |
Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez
| Mot | Sens |
|---|---|
| take off verbe | enlever, ôter |
| break out verbe | s'échapper, s’évader |
| check out verbe | mater, regarder |
| get off verbe | descendre, faire descendre |
| show up verbe | apparaître, se montrer se pointer |
| back up verbe | reculer |
| come up verbe | se montrer, sortir du bois |
| drop off verbe | s’endormir, tomber |
La grammaire de cette vidéo
Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :
| Structure | Dans la vidéo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenant | I've covered · have been · has already been awarded |
| Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le fait | were sold · been awarded · be forgiven |
| Propositions relatives who / which + proposition — une précision sur une personne ou une chose | solar, which has · Russia, which is |
Prononciation à surveiller
Le locuteur utilise 43 contractions et formes réduites, comme can't, you'd, I've. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.
- Les sons « th »: thin /ˈθɪn/, enthusiasm /ɪnˈθuziæzəm/, tenth /tɛnθ/
- Les sons « sh » et « zh »: adoption /əˈdɑp.ʃən/, exposure /ɪkˈspəʊ.ʒə(ɹ)/, efficiency /ɪˈfɪʃ.ən.si/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, sufficient /səˈfɪʃənt/
- Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: uranium /ˌjuː.ˈɹeɪ.ni.əm/, electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, utility /juːˈtɪlɪti/, efficiency /ɪˈfɪʃ.ən.si/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/
Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo
- Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
- Commencez à la vitesse 0,75×, répétez phrase par phrase, puis revenez à la vitesse normale quand cela devient facile.
- Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme reactor, modular, uranium.
Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?
Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.