In April 2014, I attended the ASME Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Symposium in Washington, DC. It was an excellent meeting with a very positive vision of the future of SMRs. However, there was little emphasis given to the urgency for the revival of nuclear energy in the United States. As an ASME Fellow Member, I am concerned that we are running out of time for building new nuclear power plants including inherently safe SMRs.
Figure 1 shows the past and potential future of the U.S. nuclear power generation [1]. In the 1970s to 1990s, we were building nuclear power plants and reached roughly 19% nuclear power of the entire electric power demand. If this trend had not been stopped, today we would have produced about 25% of the total power demand in nuclear power plants, and if this trend would have continued, we would have reached 39% in...
