Part of the problem in building conventional nuclear reactors is that an $11Bn project like the conventional build mentioned in the article is of such a scale that it’s inevitable that something will go wrong that causes the budget to explode. The sales pitch for small reactors is they’re not $11Bn projects, so there’s a possibility they could actually be completed on time and somewhat near budget.
The author is also clearly anti-nuclear - that’s not to say they’re not right, but they’re motivated.
> is of such a scale that it’s inevitable that something will go wrong that causes the budget to explode.
It's not just the scale, it's also how few there are in planning in the west. You work out the kink (both building and operational) by building more of the things, and that's also how your builders skill up. At the height of its buildup, France had half a dozen nuclear reactors being built concurrently.
Because SMRs are smaller and you need more for the same total output, more would be built, and thus there are more opportunities to work out the kinks in manufacturing and setting up.
An other theoretical advantage of SMRs is they could be built in factories and craned in, and when the fuel is expended they get craned out, a new reactor is dropped in, and the old reactor is moved to a refueling facility (which can be nearby a reprocessing plant), the site doesn't need to be offline for refueling, and it gives higher opportunity for automation.
Indeed, if SMRs can serve as a way to get the industrial learning loop of nuclear working again, it may be worth it. The size of the current power plants were defined exactly due to the need of scaling the energy output to a level worth the auxiliary costs of lower output temperatures than coal, combined with increasingly expensive safeguards.
Why being anti-nuclear is even a legitimate stand is a good indicator that people still don’t take climate change (and general over consumption) seriously.
It’s like being anti-chemicals because some of them can be toxic to ingest.
Why people are still pro-nuclear is a good indicator they don't take climate change seriously. CO2 emissions are reduced more quickly and more cheaply by going with renewables instead of pouring the money down the nuclear rathole. This is especially the case when experience effects on renewables and storage are included. The faster we spend on them, the faster they get cheaper, and the more quickly even existing fossil fuel capacity becomes cash flow negative.
If robust, affordable storage technologies that can smooth out the volatility inherent to solar/wind energy become available for a variety of topographies and climate zones, then we’ll be in great shape to reduce GHG from power generation without adding nuclear. Whether this will happen in the next 5-10 years is not clear (at least to me).
Robust, affordable storage at very large scale will be developed for vehicles, even if nuclear were to win. A Tesla might have 70 kWh of storage; there are 283 million motor vehicles in the US. That's about 20 TWh of storage right there, or about 40 hours of average US grid output. (This is not to say the vehicles' batteries themselves will be used for grid storage, although they could be.)
At this point nuclear is effectively dead; this SMR stuff is just the corpse twitching. Anyone investing in nuclear is making a bet that renewable/storage technologies are going to immediately run into a brick wall, or even get more expensive, while nuclear gets considerably cheaper.
This is already happening; Ørsted cancelled its two US Eastern seaboard windfarms in the US, saying that the cost of WE power needs to rise considerably for WE to become feasible again.
As for "nuclear being effectively dead"; the story you yourself posted in this thread says this:
quote: "By contrast, Russia, which now dominates the international market for new reactors, has 53 under construction, planned, or proposed within its own borders and another 50 in 19 countries. China is constructing, planning, or proposing to build 220 new domestic reactors, and 20 of its models are being built or are under consideration in 12 other countries."
And thats not even considering the agreement on tripling nuclear capacity before 2050, adopted by 20 nations at the COP28.
Can we stop with the ultra partisan claims, please?
Offshore wind is at the extreme of renewables. It may or may not make sense, but it's not needed to kill nuclear.
I will add that with natural gas still facing no CO2 tax in the US the impressive thing is how much renewable energy is still being installed. The environment is oppressive for anything but gas; it's absolutely lethal for nuclear, to the extent nuclear can count it as a victory if existing plants can remain operating.
I reject the argument that being against nuclear energy is "partisan". I suggest instead that new construction nuclear is just bad when examined objectively. Nuclear partisans (and there the epithet is warranted) do not exert quality control on their "arguments".
I believe that offshore wind formed a key part of the vision for the United Kingdom's net zero transition. They wanted to use the learning curve to become the "Saudi Arabia of wind power", manufacture hydrogen etc.
>I reject the argument that being against nuclear energy is "partisan".
I'm specifically referring to your extreme rhetoric in this thread. Despite your continued claims, nuclear is experiencing a renaissance these years, and I see that it's purposeless to argue the point further with you, so I'll let you observe the developments yourself in the coming 10 years as they will speak for themselves. End.
1) Have we built enough reactors consistently enough over time to say for sure the experience effects don’t build? I know we effectively stopped in the 80s, but I’m curious if there’s evidence from elsewhere to say nuclear’s indeed different here.
2. Hypothetically, if SMRs lead to a 10-100x increase in volume building, would we see experience effects? At what volume would you expect to see genuine experience effects, or again is nuclear fundamentally different for some reason?
I’ll say my biases are: I’m not surprised we’ve seen limited learning over time for various reasons, I think the size of nuclear projects almost precludes repeat learning, and I do expect if we lower the project size and increase the volume we’d see efficiencies of scale, but I could be convinced that either nuclear is sufficiently different or that even with the SMRs we’re not going to see enough scale to actually recognize efficiencies or learning.
If I had to guess, it's because nuclear power plants take so long to build.
Experience effects occur when an individual or a cohesive group gains experience. But with NPPs taking a long time to build, any individual doesn't go through many iterations in their career. Experience also decays, so if the learning rate is low enough decay should cancel it out.
In contrast, the facilities for building renewable technologies iterate much faster, both on production of individual modules, and in design updates. Installation and planning also have similar high rates of activity.
SMRs might provide a solution, but if they're so fast we have to ask why none of the SMR companies have built any yet.
> The climate crisis is urgent. The world has neither the financial resources nor the luxury of time to expand nuclear power. As physicist and energy analyst Amory Lovins argued: “… to protect the climate, we must save the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time.”
> Expanding nuclear energy only makes the climate problem worse.
> The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables.
> And the reduction in emissions from investing in renewables would be far quicker.
These statements may wind up being correct, but they’re speculative, and they’re anti-nuclear.
To the point of the Wikipedia page, a couple selected publications - although in fairness I haven’t read the publications and am just judging from the titles:
> Nuclear power: Economic, safety, health, and environmental issues of near-term technologies, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34, 2009, 127-152
> Beyond our imagination: Fukushima and the problem of assessing risk, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2011, 19 April
> Nuclear Power in India: Failed Past, Dubious Future, 2007, Available at www. npec-web. org/Frameset. asp
Again, all of these could be entirely factual and well defended, but the author is clearly not a disinterested observer.
I’m more pro-nuclear than the author, and mostly I’m skeptical about good scalable solutions to the storage problem. I’d prefer renewables + storage to be the answer, but I think we made a mistake when we halted nuclear development and I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors by not pursuing the technology.
I’m not saying anti-nuclear as a slander, but that’s clearly their position. Given their resume, I believe they came by it honestly, via years of experience and study. I don’t think I’m besmirching them by saying they’re anti-nuclear, and I think given the tenor of the article, they’d agree with me.
It is, however, something to be aware of when reading an article they wrote: they are not a fully disinterested observer, they have a pre-existing belief about nuclear, and their arguments for this article agree with those beliefs. That’s a thing to be aware of when one evaluates the set of facts they’ve chosen to present.
It isn't, because I don't think it's possible. Because of that, I think it's relevant to know what an author's preexisting opinions and beliefs were when writing the article. If, for instance, the author had been strongly pro-nuclear, then their conclusion that SMRs are a dead end would carry more weight, as they would have had to overcome their own biases. Articles that confirm an author's beliefs, on the other hand, are much easier to write.
You made this claim before, I asked you to elaborate. To me it seems that the article describes a career doing research and applying it to public policy.
Yes, you are accurately describing the pro-nuclear side there. The nuclear skeptics, we can point to objective market evidence. The pro-nukes have to invent conspiracy theories to stave off cognitive dissonance.
Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors.
That's not what affordable means. People are building smaller reactors because it's more likely that a project will be completed, not because of unit costs.
And because if you build a lot of reactors, then you get a learning curve where they get cheaper over time, just like any other mass-produced item. Some of the SMR designs can even be built in factories.
The article ignores this, and in fact complains about the cost of the first six reactors proposed by NuScale (which, fwiw, is just a smaller LWR, not one of the more innovative designs).
Before anyone talks about the negative learning curve of large reactors in the US, bear in mind that we mostly build those as one-offs, so no learning curve exists. We don't build many, regulations change pretty frequently, and sometimes the NRC requires design changes after construction starts.
Economies of scale don't work for infrastructure. I mean if it would work for nuclear plants why have people not done it for coal plants? There have been many of them build, and a nuclear power plant is 70% the same as a coal power plant (which incidentally also explains much of the cost for nuclear power generation, it's essentially a thermal plant with added complexity, so can't really be significantly cheaper than a coal plant).
Economies of scale are working great for solar. I suspect economies of scale don't work specifically for coal, because people don't want a bunch of pollution machines scattered everywhere. It's better to centralize and regulate pollution capturing, etc.
The fact that something hasn't been done is not necessarily evidence that it won't work. A few years ago you could have asked why everybody was still using disposable rockets, if reusables would be so great.
And coal is not exactly fertile ground for innovation, given that we'd like to stop burning coal entirely.
Matching the price of coal, with clean dispatchable power, is not such a bad outcome. There's a bit of wiggle room for extra complexity since coal pays 2 cents/kWh for fuel, and has to handle large amounts of incoming fuel and outgoing ash.
For a reliable zero-carbon grid of only wind/solar/battery, we need about 2X overproduction and 4 days of battery storage[1]. Maybe that still ends up the cheapest option, but it's not so obvious that a backup plan isn't worth considering.
I did mention batteries above, but that's a lot of battery. Hydro is great but not available everywhere. Gas turbines have substantial carbon emissions. Curtailment is fine but doesn't help on windless nights; what we need is power on demand, not just power available sometimes that we have the option to switch off.
How dispatchable nuclear is depends on the specific design, which is important given our context of small reactors with new designs.
According to the DOE, "Certain designs, like DOE-supported NuScale Power, LLC, can vary their energy output over days, hours and even minutes."[1]
According to NuScale, "The NuScale Power Module is capable of a ramp rate of 40% per hour in reactor power change, which aligns with specifications set by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). For even quicker responses to electricity demand, the NuScale SMR can rapidly lower its electric power output up to 10% per minute and return to full output at the same rate utilizing turbine bypass. This is significantly faster than conventional nuclear power."[2]
There’s clearly some value to consistent power sources producing clean energy but if SMRs are in the $0.15/kwh wholesale range, they’re DOA.
Solar+battery gets you there today, is getting cheaper every day, and there’s almost zero project risk. If the install is small enough, you could likely beat the realistic costs for SMRs with solar + battery + diesel generators if you need a guarantee of 100% uptime.
That enormous solar price is obtained by a not very well described adjustment procedure for variance in supply. It is not the usually described levelized cost of energy (LCoE). The adjustment would depend on system design, and should be much lower than that in a cost optimized renewable system.
If I go to https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for a cost optimized renewable + storage system for Ontario, I get a cost out of 55 Euro/MWh for providing synthetic baseload (2030 cost assumptions). That solution doesn't include using hydro to deal with variance in supply and demand; Canada has large amounts of hydro.
The model at the site I linked uses real historical weather data, so it takes into account "supply going to zero". Renewables still win and come in much cheaper than $0.50/kWh.
And this very article is about how SMRs by their nature are going to be more expensive than traditional nuclear so seems pretty silly to make any comparison to the costs of production for reactors that were built 40 years ago. A better comparison would be how much are we expecting wholesale costs for Hinkley’s new reactor to be? Don’t want to ruin the surprise but people will be shocked if they look up what they’re charging in a sub-$0.10/kwh world.
Most of Europe is more northern than the inhabited places of Canada[1], so it's far from insignificant either.
[1] Yes, really: the populated places of Canada are comparable to northern Italy in terms of latitude. The Gulf Stream really does an unbelievable job hiding that fact.
> Canada plus all of Europe is only 1 in 10 people.
A bit less actually. But you cannot dismiss a technology that works for 10% of people. And we still weight more than this in terms of CO2.
> Global problems need global solutions
No, global problems need custom solutions suited to all the different situations. Thinking there exist one technology to rule them all that will solve the problem everywhere is not helpful to anyone.
> That's why every prediction has solar accelerating past nuclear deployment and heading for multiples of nuclear output.
This isn't a race! Stop thinking of technologies as if it was sport teams.
You are dismissing someone who (rightly) dismisses the tech for Ontario. I don't think anyone in this thread who dismisses solar (+ battery) for California or Texas, but dismissing nuclear because it's not helpful for California is just missing that not everyone live in a sunny places: Canadians and the majority of Europeans live farther north than Maine!
Please stop acting as if we don't exist.
SMR are a huge opportunity for 300+M people to dramatically reduce C02 emissions from electricity generation, for which there is no credible alternative.
And, in doing so, propelling both solar and batteries further down their well-demonstrated experience curves. Given this, it's very late in the day for nuclear. The competition is pulling away.
Ontario gives hope to the nuclear dreams. Being able to deliver projects on-budget gives decision-makers cause to believe project plans.
Lets hope that another 4-pack of CANDU reactors will be built, to further the soverign industry.
> Solar+battery gets you there today, is getting cheaper every day
Solar + battery cannot be sufficient for most Europe except Mediterranean countries, it's not a matter of cost, there's just not enough sun in Winter and you need months of electricity worth of storage which isn't happening in our lifetime.
In general, talking about energy price ($/kWh) only make sense when you have fossil fuel as a near majority of your mix (because you have practically unlimited power as long as you spend money on fuel), but cease to make sense without it, because nobody cares about energy (Wh), what you (and the grid) need is power (W). With either nuclear or renewable, energy is practically free, but power is what costs money, and as we move towards a decarbonized mix, we'll need to change how the economics work to adapt to the underlying changes (including how we price electricity to consumers and businesses), because when you don't align the economics with the how the supply works the system collapses (like it did in Texas as few winters ago).
Europe would use hydrogen for seasonal leveling, not batteries. Vastly superior, even with the much lower round trip efficiency. Europe has petawatt-hours of hydrogen storage capacity in salt formations.
In science fiction books, yes. But in the real world Germany has spent hundreds of billions over a decade in renewables while phasing out nuclear, and yet they are still very far from full renewable (they haven't even over the “easy” phase of the transition)
Ah, so "it hasn't been done yet, therefore it can't be done" is a valid argument? We might as well stop talking about SMRs then.
Germany has not tried to roll out hydrogen yet. CO2 charges are not yet at the point where natural gas must stop being used for long period leveling.
Also, a big part of Germany's large expenditure was in 2009-2012 when solar (in particular) was far more expensive. Funny how you didn't mention that, isn't it.
> CO2 charges are not yet at the point where natural gas must stop being used for long period leveling.
During that period, Germany has emitted more CO2 than hundreds of millions of peoole, and we're way past the moment where we should have stopped using coal and gas really.
> Also, a big part of Germany's large expenditure was in 2009-2012 when solar (in particular) was far more expensive. Funny how you didn't mention that, isn't it.
And why hasn't Germany completed the transition now that “solar is dirt cheap” for years now, then? Solar makes no sense in Europe, period. Wind, hydro and nuclear, yes, but every solar panel installed in non-mediteranean European country has been a tragic waste of taxpayer's money (giving the panels to Greece or Arab/African countries would have been a much better investment, by an order of magnitude)
Germany's problem is they are hopelessly tied to fossil fuels. Any replacement (nuclear or renewable) would crater their heavy industry. Northern Europe is not a place for heavy industry in a post-fossil fuel world economy; they are at a grave disadvantage compared to sunnier locations closer to the equator.
That's why nuclear is interesting there. Unless you're asking Europe to just accept being phased out of industrial economy without doing anything to avoid that…
The point I was making was that nuclear doesn't help. Germany is dependent on fossil fuels, and nuclear is not a drop-in, equal cost replacement for fossil fuels.
For Germany to be saved from this fate by nuclear, nuclear has to be as cheap as solar is in the best locations in the world, not just better than solar in Germany.
Germany (and Europe) should probably be putting more money into CO2 sequestration, so they can keep burning fossil fuels.
Large, utility-scale solar is much cheaper than California rooftop solar. That California has so much rooftop solar is problematic; it's a symptom of market distortion.
Solar + battery: will there be enough raw material available to make it a viable alternative at world scale? I am hearing that we won't be able to extract enough metals for a world transition based on renewables. Cost is secondary when physics gets in your way.
The batteries would not be Li-ion NMC cells, but more likely Li-ion LFP cells. The latter use iron and phosphate, both of which are available in very large amounts. Availability of other chemistries (like Na-ion) would only ease any constraints.
Batteries would best be used for diurnal leveling; don't overestimate demand by assuming they are used for (say) seasonal leveling.
The batteries used by electrified motor vehicles would exceed those needed for the grid.
In terms of cost per ton moved, trains and semi-trucks outperform taxis. And yet taxis still exist. Turns out cost per vehicle (or per reactor) is important in some situations.
Yes. Also, there really aren't any such niche areas save some military naval applications. Even there, most ships in the US navy are not nuclear, because burning liquid hydrocarbons is cheaper.
Indeed, the selling point is probably that a single entity can build an SMR without risk of going bankrupt.
Perhaps this speaks to the problem of building consortia of like-minded companies. Currently EDF are being stung for a large chunk of money now that CGN are refusing to put any more cash into Hinkley Point C construction.
A site that contained a single NuScale reactor would have unacceptable fixed costs per MW. The UAMPS/NuScale CFPP was planned to have six reactors to amortize those fixed costs (like personnel) over more output.
Note also that the cost figures NuScale gave for that was the cost after 40-50 reactors had been built (and with federal subsidy), not FOAK costs.
This needs to be recognized as an indictment of our society. An inability to accomplish anything in a collective and intentional manner is only one of the many disasterous outcomes of the wretched individualism promoted by the neoliberal agenda. And make no mistake; this is not a result of a so-called "free market". It is the result of top-down privatization. The US government, for example, has a much larger budget than ever before, accounting for inflation and so on. It's just being delivered to private firms for profit instead of on building big things or maintaining the big things we used to build. This lack of cooperation across society is also the primary source of cultural breakdown and the sense of "division" felt by all of us, both rich and poor.
There is no market in the regular sense when it comes to large-scale enterprises, especially one that is so government-entangled as the energy and infrastructure sectors.
There are plenty of markets in the electrical power sector. In addition to the market for energy sources, selling generating assets to utilities, there are markets in the power itself in many places, for example ERCOT in Texas.
No one has ever built a nuclear plant to sell into a competitive power market. One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the time when markets were opened to competition, with PURPA.
Nonsense. PURPA was just more regulation, regardless of how it was sold. It had nothing to do with "markets being opened to competition".
One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the end of the New Deal coalition and the divestment of public infrastructure, which meant short-term planning only. It has nothing to do with "markets". Markets in energy don't exist now and did not exist then.
> The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) triggered a restructuring of the previously monolithic utility sector, stipulating in particular that electricity produced by independent power producers must be purchased by utilities at "avoided cost." The new power from independent producers, combined with lack of demand for electricity, further eroded utilities' need for new nuclear plants. In large part owing to the provisions of PURPA, nonutility generation rose steadily from 71 billion kilowatt-hours per year in 1979 to almost 400 billion kilowatt-hours per year by 1995 -- this new, nonutility generation was the equivalent of adding more than 50 typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants (Energy Information Administration, 1996). As Peter Bradford (2011), a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, argued in the Wall Street Journal:
> "Nuclear-plant construction in this country came to a halt because a law passed in 1978 [PURPA] created competitive markets for power. These markets required investors rather than utility customers to assume the risk of cost overruns, plant cancellations, and poor operation. Today, private investors still shun the risks of building new reactors in all nations that employ power markets."
The so-called "market" isn't telling anybody anything here. The financiers are the only ones speaking and all they're saying is they can't turn as much profit in their own individual lifetimes. It is a total disregard for society as a whole, which is why we're in this mess.
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
What is your point? Cost is not a problem when near-term profit is high, and nuclear energy has an unbeatable track record with long-term ROI. Saying "it's expensive" is meaningless nonsense. There is absolutely no excuse besides the time to ROI.
Source? France's investments in nuclear energy are very well known as being incomparably successful, both in terms of return on capital investment and emissions. There is literally nothing to compare it to because nothing comes close. The only downside is literally upfront cost. Even the US has had great ROI in long term nuclear investments, especially if you discount the losses of all the prematurely decommissioned plants.
The idea that nuclear is struggling because people are "scared" is a form of denial from nuclear advocates. Nuclear is struggling because it's much too expensive, not because people are "scared".
That is simply not true and repeating it all the time does not make it more true. There have been several analysis posted here on HN which showed that compliance with regulations is not a major cost factor for nuclear power. In fact nuclear power operators have often lobbied to be exempt from regulations that apply to other power generation schemes. Solar and wind often have significantly higher compliance costs as percentage of their budget than nuclear.
I'm not sure that nuclear is that expensive per unit of energy delivered, compared to rooftop solar for instance.
In Europe (UK and Germany) one might get 1000 kWh/year from 1kW of panels. Last year I helped a family member install 6.4kW of solar for around £7000 (VAT free), so £1.2 per kWh/year = 1.4 USD/kWh/year.
Vogtle 3 & 4 cost around 30bn USD but has a 90% capacity factor on 2 x 1117MW = 17612856000 kWh/year = 1.7 USD/kWh/year. I believe the AP1000 reactors have a 60 year design life. In addition the reactor design (lacking at the start of the project, and cause of many delays) plus underlying skill-base now exists to construct more.
In addition nuclear power now attracts the Inflation Reduction Act Investment Tax Credits for up to a 50% rebate once a reactor comes online. Which puts nuclear at 0.85 USD/kWh/year before we account for reduced construction cost and time now that the AP1000 is Nth of a kind.
You need to include interest rates, not just divide the cost over 60 years.
One way to subsidize nuclear is to artificially reduce the interest rate on its financing, but market rates for nuclear financing would make a 60 year lifespan almost irrelevant. The NPV of the out year revenue would be very low.
Put another way: for nuclear to pay out over 60 years, it also has to compete with the cheaper energy sources that will be discovered and improved over those generations. This obsolescence risk cannot be ignored, and gets reflected in interest rates charged. Now that wind/solar are becoming dominant, their inherent rapid evolution has pulled in the time horizons for all other energy sources. I sometimes think this has kept natural gas going longer than it otherwise might have, since the uncertainty adds incentive for sources with more operating cost and lower investment cost, as these have less obsolescence risk.
Expecting AP1000 to show NOAK improvements is optimistic.
It’s expensive because environmentalists put in too many barriers to building nuclear power plants because they’re scared (in addition to being innumerate). If we had started building out nuclear power in the 1960s the same as the French, we would have much more runway today to address climate change.
It's failing pretty much everywhere (even in China it's struggling, falling far short of plans). Your explanation presents environmentalists as so globally omnipotent it would be senseless to fight them. Unfortunately, environmentalists are not this powerful.
It worked great in France, which had a majority renewable grid back in the early 1990s. If the rest of the developed world had invested in nuclear power during that same time frame we would have much more developed nuclear technology today. More importantly, we would’ve started emissions reductions decades ago instead of waiting for solar to become viable. We are still waiting for fundamental breakthroughs in grid-scale battery technology that will likely come too late to avoid 4C warming.
I’m not presenting environmentalists as powerful. I’m presenting them as innumerate feelers. Unfortunately that’s contagious.
Did it work great in France? The financing was so opaque it cannot be audited.
What we do know is that France can no longer do what they once maybe did. Their recent attempts to build nuclear plants have been disastrous. They've also given up on fast reactors, which is a clear tell they do not expect the world to go nuclear anytime soon (if the world did, it would quickly need breeders).
The "environmentalists did it" argument is not a good one. It falls apart when examined closely. If they were so powerful as to suppress nuclear worldwide, why can't they (for example) stop oil pipelines? Or coal combustion? The argument has all the signs of something cooked up to save a tenuous position, not because the evidence actually supports it.
Because the big coal & big oil lobbies are massively more powerful than the very meagre lobbying efforts of the nuclear industry. And yes, the greens are of course going for choking off the nuclear opponent, instead of Big Oily, not forgetting that part of the green movement does receive money from the hydrocarbon industry; the Sierra Club in the US has been funded by Cheasapeake Energy from which it receives 25 million bucks between 2007 and 2010.
For example, Greenpeace has recently successfully lobbied the Phillipne government to ban golden rice despite its obvious advantages:
That's false. The manufactured nulear scare is a leftover from the Cold War where communists in the West did everything to equate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons and/or ticking time bombs that they advocated the abolition of (at the same time as most East-bloc nations had operating nuclear power plants). The cold war ended but the seeds of angst had been sown and to this day is the bedrock of the "green" anti-nuclear policies in pretty much every "green" movement on the planet, with a notable exception of the Finnish Greens. The Green parties, fx. In Germany have actively used hyper-regulation of the nuclear power sector as tripwires to make nuclear energy operation in the West extremely expensive to do.
Only the massive onesare absurdly expensive, we build plenty of cheap small safe ones for the military to power aircraft carriers and submarines. why dont we build the same thing for power.
their cheap compared to the cost of a civilian nuclear power plant. A whole aircraft carrier which has two reactors costs $4.5 billion of which about 1 billion goes to each reactor, a civilian nuclear power station cost on the other hand cost on the low end around 5.4 billion minimum. civilian reactors are cost over 5x as much.
Naval reactors are so economical that it's cheaper to burn expensive liquid fuels instead. Most naval ships are not nuclear, you know. Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement. /s
The observation isn't that ships don't need nuclear reactors, it's that it's usually cheaper to use liquid hydrocarbons instead. Or do you think the USN is deliberately wasting money by constructing all these ships with conventional power plants?
In much of Western Canada, energy use is highest at night in deepest winter when there is no appreciable wind, meaning that the grid is completely reliant on gas-fired power. If we want to reduce gas-fired capacity, we need another source of on-demand power. Meaning either nuclear or a robust storage solution. There seems to be more enthusiasm for the latter, but there’s no buzz about any viable solutions on the horizon.
Nuclear isn’t great for ‘peaker’/infrequent usage. The large up front capital costs means they require running at 90%+ utilization to be economic, and the way the radioactive decay chains work means they tend to take awhile (hours) to stabilize at their high power outputs, and hours to days to ramp down in actual effective power. Even a scrammed ‘hot’ reactor takes half a day to a couple days for daughter products to burn down to the point it doesn’t produce significant thermal power (hundred of megawatts to even half a gigawatt thermal).
That’s what got Fukushima btw - when they shut the reactor down and then the backup generators got destroyed, they lost their ability to pump water to cool the reactor (which requires significant electrical power), which proceeded to start to melt down the core, and causing massive hydrogen buildup, eventually blowing up the reactor building.
Some new designs allow more effective emergency passive cooling, but the issue remains - nuclear plants are great for baseline power, but they aren’t good for sub-day, hourly, or finer grained peaks. Both economically and technically. Think ‘fully loaded container ship’ or ‘multi-mile long train’.
Pumped storage, battery, or fossil fueled turbines are great for those faster reactions - and often can provide useful sub-second grid stability too. Think ‘speed boat’ or ‘passenger car’.
Nuclear is terrible for peak loads of course but absolutely perfect for base loads. We should be producing something like 60% of the base load with stable and emission free nuclear, then all kinds of renewables can provide the rest. When there is excess power we charge batteries, pump hydro or make green hydrogen for use in peaks.
I totally believe that this is true on average. But there are a few weeks in the January/February when we're sitting under a high pressure system with clear skies, no wind, and -30C temperatures. Power generation needs to be able to handle annual extremes, not just averages.
According to https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=251000... January and February are among the most productive wind energy months in Canada, with the summer months being notably lower. I couldn't easily find stats about nr of low-wind days. I guess Canada also has the advantage that it's a big country so local weather variations doesn't necessarily matter as much.
I'm absolutely not an authority in these matters, and any corrections are welcome and appreciated.)
From what I've read, "green" hydrogen made from electrolysis with energy from non-carbon-emitting sources extremely energy intensive, as is compressing it for transport. Transport is also expensive. To my knowledge, there aren't any pipelines in Western Canada that could transport it, so I guess it's trucks and train cars. But maybe there's potential there because hydrogen wouldn't need to be the backbone of the grid, it would just need to pick up the (substantial?) slack when renewables weren't producing.
Seasonal leveling doesn't require transport -- make the hydrogen above the storage caverns.
Green hydrogen certainly is more expensive than hydrogen derived from fossil fuels, but if we are imagining a 100% RE grid, that hydrogen isn't available. It does make sense to burn natural gas directly instead of burning green hydrogen as long as the CO2 charge isn't high enough to rule out use of natural gas. This is why we're not yet seeing a large green hydrogen role out in Europe.
The interesting question is whether fossil hydrogen with CO2 sequestration is acceptable. It may be preferable to green hydrogen, depending on things like methane leakage.
An alternative solution to hydrogen could be methane synthesis from captured CO2 and green hydrogen. The infrastructure to transport, store and use methane (aka 'natural gas') is already there.
This is possible, although the problem is the cost of capturing the CO2. It might be better to synthesize a liquid fuel; methanol is probably the easiest. Capturing the CO2 of combustion is probably easier than capturing atmospheric CO2, so that should be included. Overall, the RTE will be lower than hydrogen, but maybe it's cheaper if the geology doesn't favor hydrogen storage.
Another possible alternative would be artificial geothermal, with very high temperature rock at fairly shallow depth. Obviously that's not transportable.
I can’t understand why, with winters known to be how they are, there is no district heating. If that infrastructure had been in place, a transition to carbon-less sources of heat could be well underway.
For Edmonton & Calgary at least, which house the majority of Alberta’s population, such infrastructure would’ve meant better planning for growth, reducing the low-density sprawl we see today.
Where I’m at (Saskatchewan) everything is very flat. We have some hydro but all of the “economically viable” hydro resources have been tapped. I worked out the math once on doing pumped hydro storage and the best siting I came up with involved building a massive reservoir in the middle of one of the most beautiful provincial parks we have and putting the downstream low point 80km away.
There’s a really interesting nomenclature thing in Canada with respect to electricity. Every province (except Alberta) has a government-owned power company. If you want to tell whether or not a given province has good water resources for generating electricity you just need to look at the name of their power company: BC Hydro, Manitoba Hydro, Ontario Hydro, Quebec Hydro… all good places for hydroelectricity. SaskPower? Not so much.
We have recently bought into the SMR idea and one of the questions I used to have was “why the hell didn’t we build nuclear 20 years ago here”. The problem, I understand now, is overall grid sizing. You don’t want to have a single power plant that provides more than about 10% of your grid capacity. In SK, our total generation capacity is around 3500MW; a conventional 1+GW reactor would have dramatically exceeded the 10% cutoff. Smaller 300MW reactors provide a much better fit for our grid.
Same is true here in Sweden, we just have deep enough reservoirs. We also have nuclear, but hydro is also a really big part and as Canada has even lower population density than we do it shouldn't be unreasonable. But perhaps terrain in many areas isn't helpful.
CANDUs are pretty flexible in that there's a lot of maintenance (including refuelling) that can be done while it is running, but there's still some stuff that needs to be done when the system is powered down, which means taking down a large source of power for the grid.
If there were 2-3x300MW reactors, when there could be rotating maintenance without much impact to the grid.
Some people present Alaska as a good place for SMRs. But the largest grid there, the Railbelt Grid, has an average power flow of just 600 MW. A 300 MW reactor would be too large to integrate into that system.
CANDU are a great design; the calandria is a nice adaptation to the capabilities of Canadian maufacturing, and it is impressive to see the lines of reactors at Bruce, Pickering and Darlington. It is also a widely exported design, with China constructing reactors on a 4 year timeline.
Granted a single large reactor would dominate the grid, but I presume there is grid connectivity to adjacent provinces. An alternative would be a large energy user (aluminium, heavy water production) to soak up the excess power and turn down when one unit comes offline.
One thing I was surprised to learn about nuclear costs is that there's a fixed component that is basically the same regardless of technology (SMR vs 'LMR'): the civil works.
There's a certain amount of concrete and such that needs to always be built, and if you go with a "cheaper" SMR, then the fixed cost becomes a large portion of the total project budget.
So unless there's a specific local need for ≤300MW, it might be better to go with a 600/900(+) MW design if you can tie into a large grid where all of those 'extra' MWs can be soaked up.
Does this prediction include the effect of cost and time overruns? These overruns are mentioned in the article, but then not dealt with at all -- but it is very important whether SMRs are more expensive according to made-up "planned" numbers or actual costs.
Flyvbjerg mentions SMRs as an example for modularity in his book, How Big Things Get Done, and predicts that they will be much less prone to overruns because experience can be accumulated along a series of reactors, whereas traditional reactors are one-off, bespoke projects which directly implies that they will be built with a lack of experience. Even if a nuclear power plant gets built that is "like" an existing one, it is never the same.
> traditional reactors are one-off, bespoke projects
TBF they don't have to be, obviously they don't number in the hundreds and site-specific concerns matter (especially as they have a large surface, they matter for SMRs too but the footprint means they matter a lot less). However you have to commit, hard.
If the overruns are due to salesmanship and lowballing, not unforeseeable problems, then one can expect SMRs to be subject to them just like traditional nuclear. This was the UAMPS/NuScale experience.
The cost over time generally tends to weigh heavily on the initial budget. Small reactors don't replace large ones for large needs, even if multiple are built (this hasn't even happened yet!).
What small ones can do is afford either government/public/private energy sources in localized areas. Infrastructure was built upon technology stacked on top of previous; dirt to stone, stone to asphalt, and on; etc.
The same is inherent with nuclear. It is easy to tie in to the existing grid, but the grids are extremely out of date for the growth of populations in general.
A large mix of SMR's could absolutely fuel energy needs in both the short and long term as technology continues to improve. The cost is a metric of current economics/interest. That's the problem right now - perspective states it's unaffordable because we've pivoted it that way.
It seems to me there's a lot more 'mass production' efficiency still to be found for small reactors. The whole article is just comparing historical costs.
Large reactors are highly bespoke, and therefore increasingly expensive, and the whole idea of small reactors is that they can be produced identically from an assembly line, and so you get the same kind of learning-curve price reductions as for solar panels or whatever.
I don't think that's the case, yet, though, so the argument might be compared to criticisms of solar in the 1980s and anyway this article seems to be a simple attack on nuclear in favor of 'renewables', which have already experience a learning curve.
You can produce significant fractions of a large modular reactor (e.g. AP1000) in a factory.
There are arguments that for a small modular reactor the civil works that happen onsite (e.g. foundations) could make up a larger proportion of the costs than for a large modular reactor!
Interestingly, if you said that “The Federal Government” should build and run small nuclear reactors, I bet you’d get a lot of pushback; I’m always fascinated by how “the military” is culturally considered very different from “the government” in the US. The military is perceived as able to do most anything while the government is considered lazy and wasteful.
I’m Canadian and don’t know all of the inner workings of the US Military, but an observation from the outside is that it seems that the US Military oddly captures a lot of the more left-leaning ideals:
- Health care provided by the VA
- Education, both before the job (officer school or trades training) and for post-military life (GI Bill)
There is a lot of empty practically free land in the world.
Also, it is estimated that it would take about ~7 million acres to power the US entirely with solar.
The US currently uses about 40 million (!!!!) acres for corn for ethanol.
Land is not a problem in land-rich nations like Russia or Canada, of the US for that matter. It is however a problem in Europe where distances are shorter, population density is higher and so are the land values and thus both direct & shadow costs associated with infrastructure development.
While "common knowledge" says small can't compete with big when it comes to price/unit due to economies of scale, this article reads as very partial and anti-nuclear so I would trust the things that were said and the facts that were left out.
From the outside, this SMR situation looks a bit like monolith vs micro-services where there is a great deal of non-technical reasons why SMRs are a route being taken and it appears it's mostly political and organizational ie. approve and build the damn thing.
The author is also clearly anti-nuclear - that’s not to say they’re not right, but they’re motivated.