The European Commission should make a “clear commitment” to nuclear, the president of French energy giant EDF’s small nuclear reactor project, Renaud Crassous, told EURACTIV France in an interview, describing the EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act proposal as a failure.

Small modular nuclear reactor projects (SMRs) have proliferated across Europe in recent years. While they are similar in technology to conventional reactors, they operate at a much smaller scale.

Their power can vary “from a few MW to a few hundred MW”, Crassous told EURACTIV, while a conventional reactor easily reaches 900 MW.

The sliding scale of output defines the plant’s usage – those with just a few MW would be used for “niche needs”, he said, such as serving small isolated communities or military operations, whereas those that produce a few dozen MW would be earmarked for industrial uses.

Crassous is the president of EDF subsidiary NUWARD, which is currently developing two 170 MW reactors in France, to cater for industry and replace coal- and gas-fired power stations.

While the excitement around these SMR projects is “changing the approach” of traditionally nuclear-reluctant countries such as Belgium and Italy, “in general, the nuclear-phobic countries are not coming forward,” Crassous said.

“[For example], we have almost no German interlocutors,” with whom we can talk about our projects, he explained. Some member states, meanwhile, are less explicitly positioned: Sweden and Finland are yet to take a stand while the Czech Republic is identifying potential sites, Crassous added.

Explicit EU support for nuclear needed

In this context, the EU institutions, particularly the European Commission, must do more to support SMRs, Crassous said.

“For the moment, the European Commission is not doing much. Until recently, it was only interested in keeping its market competitive, rolling out the red carpet for US projects,” he said.

However, he added, the recent signing of a joint declaration by the Commission and EU nuclear stakeholders recognising an interest in research and development around SMRs “is a landmark development”.

Nevertheless, the “energy wall” the bloc faces cannot be overcome without the EU reviewing its “model of liberalisation”, inherited from a period of energy stability in the 1990s-2000s, Crassous said.

As such, NUWARD’s president called on EU member states to accept the harmonisation of certain safety rules and for the European Commission to demonstrate a “clear commitment” to SMRs.

“It is time to stop pitting decarbonised energies against each other: The compromise has become obsolete, as has the distinction between large and small electrical installations”.

Furthermore, he warned, the Commission’s Net-Zero Industry Act, unveiled in March, proves that Brussels has “failed” on that front for the time being.

“It’s funny that a European directive introduces a technological distortion rather than promoting fair rules.”

In his decade-long work for the French delegation on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which spanned a decade, Crassous said he “learned that technology-neutral instruments, such as the carbon market or taxonomy, are the best way to fight global warming”.

SMR projects, in Europe and the US

Under the US Inflation Reduction Act, €30 billion is to be invested in nuclear power, with €7 billion directly going towards researching and developing “advanced reactors”, such as SMRs.

The Biden administration is “investing massively in the European market”, with “proactive diplomacy” and “very strong financing” creating a US advantage in a market that is just in its infancy.

The US is financing a number of projects in Poland and Romania through loans. For example, US SMR developer NuScale signed a contract with Romanian company RoPower Nuclear S.A. in early January for the engineering and design work to roll out a plant in Doicești, Romania, north of Bucharest.

Regarding EU SMR developers, NUWARD’s projects are among the most advanced for their scope in Europe, Crassous said, with building works for the first project expected by 2030 and the launch expected for 2035.