Letters | For a carbon-neutral Northern Metropolis, look to small nuclear reactors

Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at [email protected] or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words, and must include your full name and address, plus a phone number for verification.

The Northern Metropolis, with HK$100 billion (US$12.8 billion) allocated from the 2022-23 budget, spread over 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres), situated at the northern end of the “Eastern Knowledge and Technology Corridor”, provides an exciting opportunity to design a carbon-neutral transport system, built and powered by a domestically generated carbon-neutral electricity supply.

The solution is to install next-generation mini nuclear reactors, called small modular reactors (SMRs), small because they generally produce no more than 300 megawatts of electricity each. SMRs can be contained inside a regular factory-sized building in the middle of a small safety area, using much less space and concrete than conventional nuclear plants, and therefore considerably cheaper to build. The nuclear reactor itself is within a containment vessel sunk into a pool, and designed to shut down passively and safely when electricity is cut or turned off.

SMRs are considered significantly safer than conventional nuclear plants – such as the Daya Bay nuclear plant in Shenzhen that Hong Kong imports energy from – and therefore require a much smaller safety radius: they can be set within grounds of 16 hectares (40 acres). If we place an SMR in a cavern, for example, as will happen with the huge Sha Tin sewage works, the safety requirements will be easily met and even exceeded.