Friday, 25 April 2025
What is an SMR?
Small modular reactors – also known as SMRs – are smaller nuclear power plants and are intended to be designed so that their parts can be factory produced and assembled on site in a modular way allowing costs to fall as increasing numbers of the same SMR design are built.
The widely-accepted definition of an SMR is that it is a nuclear power reactor which has an output level of up to 300 MWe, which is about one-third of the power generated by a traditional-sized nuclear power plant unit. Each SMR could power about 600,000 homes, probably for 60-80 years.
There are more than 70 different SMR designs in development, with Russia, China and Argentina leading the way in terms of constructing them so far with many other countries having hopes and plans for fleets of SMRs during the 2030s.
The SMR-in-Minecraft contest
Here’s the video featuring the winning entry:
The winners of the secondary school Energocraft contest, organised by the Yvents agency with the support of Slovenské elektrárne, were Daniel Kypet from the Gymnasium in Velký Krtíš and Mikuláš Bodnár from the Secondary Vocational School of Forestry in Prešov.
Their SMR, which is the one featured in the video above, was named ERIK, from the Slovakian title Ekologický Reaktor Inovatívnej Konštrukcie (in English – Ecological Reactor of Innovative Design).
This was the second year of the competition, with 100 entries. The winning entres were chosen on both the look and design of the building itself and also the details of its interior.
