
Safer Nuclear Reactors Are on the Way - tshannon
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/safer-nuclear-reactors-are-on-the-way/
======
jabl
I'm slightly skeptical of accident tolerant fuels (ATF).

In terms of deaths per kWh generated, nuclear is already the safest form of
energy generation we have.

Where nuclear fails, and where improvement is desperately needed, is ability
to deliver on budget and within schedule.

What is NOT needed is minor incremental safety improvements at significant
cost (e.g. ATF's that the article discusses).

Now, more substantial improvements, e.g. non-LWR designs, passive walk-away
safety, modular design, etc., I'm all for those.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Hear hear! I think the nuclear industry struggles with finding a balance
between sunk costs (e.g. TRISO fuel development under NGNP, the TREAT reactor,
ATR, the BISON fuel performance code), and what advances the nuclear industry
really needs to survive and thrive. At a NRC meeting a while ago, one of the
members of the ACRS asked pointedly what regulatory relief they expect to get
from ATF. No one knew. Is the NRC going to relax a bunch of regs when we have
ATF and somehow allow nuclear to be cheaper without compromising safety? No
way.

We need ways to minimize financing costs during construction, and get the
number of staff required at operating plants way down to decrease O&M. My
favorite solution? Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to
locations for power and tugged back to port for maintenance. Solves almost all
problems assuming you can get them to operate largely autonomously. In attacks
or ship collisions, design it to sink safely and cool itself with seawater.
Build in a recovery operation to the design.

Also, the nuclear industry really needs to find ways to consolidate effort.
There are literally 50+ SMR designs in work right now, and dozens more larger
reactors. The industry is wayyy to small to be fighting over limited investor
and government money to develop that many reactors in isolation.

~~~
erentz
> Shipyard-constructed nukes on floating platforms, tugged to locations for
> power and tugged back to port for maintenance.

What’s your opinion on Thorcon?

Also I’m wondering if you have some thoughts on this: I’ve been wondering what
holds us back from taking a scale out approach rather than a scale up approach
we have now (e.g. with EPR design now producing 1.6GW). Instead couldn’t we
pump out naval sized nuclear plants in mass production style since we can
apparently still build those and my limited understanding is their smaller
size and output makes them safer (less decay heat etc). Ship those around as
needed for refueling. And just have a couple dozen on each site to produce the
equivalent power. It would combine a national strategic need that we have to
do anyway (naval nuclear power), with another need that we seem to be failing
to do (getting back on the horse with producing reliable clean power).

~~~
acidburnNSA
Thorcon is awesome. I love their style and logic. They're pretty open-door,
they have the boldest low-ball cost estimate I've ever seen, and they have a
solid set of reasoning for why it's going to be that cheap (e.g. The Tale of
Two Ships [1]).

I don't really like that it's fluid fuel though. As I said in another comment,
the unknown remote maintenance implications of that are very far from hashed
out, and will very likely be terribly expensive for a fairly long
shakedown/learning period. Fluid fuel is a good end goal. But don't get me
talking about fluid fuel in a near-term first-of-a-kind plant with a low-ball
operation/maintenance cost estimate. I also don't like that if they succeed,
they have a very large waste stream of super radioactive large-scale
components (that get swapped out ever ~5 years and put... where? That's gonna
be a problem). Also, working primarily with a country with inexperienced/non-
existant nuclear institutions for a very advanced reactor (Indoensia) is
probably not going to work. I get the logic though, bootstrap a new nuclear
regime without the old regulations. Problem is, fluid fuel reactors have a
variety of postulated novel ways to increase source term. That will take work
to license. A lot of work. Experimental work, in neutron irradiation.

I just wish they'd try a small light-water reactor with their shipyard
construction experience first and take it from there.

I also freaking love that they use LaTeX.

[1]
[http://thorconpower.com/docs/two_ships.pdf](http://thorconpower.com/docs/two_ships.pdf)

~~~
jabl
> e.g. The Tale of Two Ships [1]

Thanks, that's quite a story!

> I don't really like that it's fluid fuel though.

I have some misgivings about this as well. A water-soluble fuel salt in a
thin-skinned (compared to a high pressure LWR) vessel on a ship, what could
possibly go wrong?

(I'm a fan of MSR's and I'd love to see them deployed, but I'd prefer them on
dry land thank-you-very-much)

> As I said in another comment, the unknown remote maintenance implications of
> that are very far from hashed out, and will very likely be terribly
> expensive for a fairly long shakedown/learning period. Fluid fuel is a good
> end goal. But don't get me talking about fluid fuel in a near-term first-of-
> a-kind plant with a low-ball operation/maintenance cost estimate.

Agreed, but IIUC Thorcon, similarly to Terrestrial, are planning to replace
the entire reactor vessel with the primary circuit every few years (5/7/?). So
AFAIK the plan is not to do any maintenance of the reactor vessel. Guess you
have to hope one of the primary pumps doesn't need a new bearing 1 month after
commissioning, then, eh?

> I just wish they'd try a small light-water reactor with their shipyard
> construction experience first and take it from there.

Yes, though it seems passively safe LWR's are quite massive. Nuscale reactor
vessel is a frickin' 700 tons for a paltry 60 MWe. Thorcon reactor is 250 MWe
(or is it 500, their materials are somewhat confusing?). Would a passively
safe 250 MWe LWR fit on a ship, along with a pressure dome to handle a LOCA?

------
neilk
Is it possible to design a nuclear reactor that’s resistant to widespread
corruption and incompetence?

In 2019, we have to consider that even advanced democracies with great
scientists and technologists might descend into some form of illiberal rule.
Imagine if you could not depend on leaders to shut down a plant if problems
are discovered, or if contracts were awarded based on cronyism, or if it was
impossible to guarantee the quality of materials, or if whistleblowers were
not protected.

I'm not sure anyone can guarantee that any country will definitely remain
stable over the lifetime of a nuclear reactor. Black Swans are out there.

~~~
goda90
There are reactor designs that can't be used to make weapons, and when they
fail, passive systems prevent meltdown.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Not that I'm aware of. All reactors, bar none, require safeguards to prevent
the owner from making weapons-usable material on the sly. Civilian nuclear is
a fairly impractical and round-about way to get weapons material (just use
centrifuges... way easier), but if you think it's easier to get a nuke than a
centrifuge, or if you are a corrupt leader who takes over a country that has
nukes, you can generally make some pretty good U-233 or Pu-239 with any
nuclear reactor. Yes, even Thorium reactors (they're the ones that make
U-233).

China, India, USA, Russia, France, UK, Pakistan, and Israel already have
nuclear weapons. If you look at the fraction of world energy that that set of
countries and their collective military allies uses (nevermind Israel), you
can feel pretty good about transitioning more to nuclear even given a non-zero
risk of proliferation.

~~~
garmaine
Thorium reactors can’t make weapons grade material. It’s just not part of the
process.

Thorium is also more abundant and easier to work with. The only reason why we
have an uranium/plutonium nuclear industry is because those fuels permit dual-
purpose (weapons generating) designs. Now it is just industrial* inertia.

Edit: *industrial and regulatory.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Incorrect. Thorium reactors work by putting Th-232 into a neutron field, where
it doesn't fission, but rather it absorbs neutrons to become unstable Th-233,
which beta-decays into Pa-233 with a half-life of 21 minutes. Then Pa-233 in
turn beta-decays to Uranium-233 with a half-life of 26.8 days. U-233 is
fissile nuclear fuel, so when a neutron hits it, it will fission and release
nuclear energy. All thorium-fueled reactors use this chain of events.

But there's a problem. Pa-233 is a strong parasitic neutron absorber. So when
it's sitting there for 26.8 days, if it were still in the nuclear core it
would poison the chain reaction. So what people plan to do is to pull it out
of the core chemically and put it into a holding cell outside the neutron flux
where it can decay to U-233 in peace. Then the U-233 is added back to the core
as it arrives.

The U-233 is a potent nuclear weapons material and can be extracted from the
decay tank in what are called in the non-proliferation industry "Significant
Quantities". Faced with this issue, the ORNL folks created the Denatured MSR
project in the death throes of the MSBR program (~1960s) which had U-238 mixed
in to denature the WG U-233. Of course, then they were producing plutonium...

The general claim is that U-232 is also produced in trace quantities, which
has Tl-208 way down its decay chain, which emits a massive 2.6 MeV gamma ray
that's hard to shield. Since it's way down the decay chain and U-232 has a 69
year half-life, every time you chemically purify your uranium you have pretty
small amounts of gamma emitters. So you can purify, assemble a weapon, and
drop it in a few weeks without worrying too much about Tl-208.

The thorium-cant-make-bombs thing is a total myth. All nuclear reactors need
safeguards, even thorium-fueled ones. This is doable and should not prevent us
from making more carbon-free energy with any kind of nuclear reactor.

More abundant: meh, not really. There's uranium dissolved in seawater in vast,
practically infinite quantities.

Easier to work with: definitely not. Higher melting temperatures for ceramics
make solid-fuel thorium harder to fab, and the fluid fuel stuff is int he R&D
stage. It also leads to lower-density fuels, which are crappier neutronically.

~~~
garmaine
I’m not aware of any practical nuclear weapon design using U-233. Can you cite
one? The tests I’m aware of appear to be inconclusive as to whether U-233
works as weapons material. They seem to have resulted in a fissle or very low
yield device, have significant purification problems, and were dropped as a
research pathway by all nuclear powers that worked with it.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Yes: The classic uranium gun-type weapon design works beautifully with U-233.
Very low spontaneous fission, very excellent neutronics.

U-233 is unequivocally excellent weapons material. That's undebated
fundamental nuclear physics. A Significant Quantity of U-233 is defined as 8
kg, better than U-235! [1] The folks down at Los Alamos aren't messing around.

[1] [https://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-
repo/lar...](https://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-
repo/lareport/LA-UR-11-03368)

Just read this:
[http://fissilematerials.org/library/sgs09kang.pdf](http://fissilematerials.org/library/sgs09kang.pdf)

------
kurlberg
A long time ago, as part of a "Industry Study Visits"-course at university, we
went to visit Asea-Atom and were told about the "PIUS" reactor ("Process
Inherent Ultimate Safety"). Supposedly the construction was "passively safe"
(i.e., breakdown of cooling pumps etc would not matter.) The idea was to have
the reactor encased in an _open_ pipe contained in a larger (closed) tank with
borated water. Using stable stratification, the non-borated water was more or
less kept contained in the inner pipe using density locks; if something would
go wrong the borated water would get sucked in and and shut the reactor down.

The engineers were very optimistic about selling this even as small municipal
thermal power plants (for heating water) very close to city centers. The idea
of passive safety is quite beatiful, but it seems no PIUS reactors were
produced. Rosatom seems to have had some success.

More info about PIUS can be found at

[https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...](https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull31-3/31302392529.pdf)

[https://www.euronuclear.org/e-news/e-news-17/nps-
kth.htm](https://www.euronuclear.org/e-news/e-news-17/nps-kth.htm)

~~~
ethbro
I think the issue with safe reactor designs is economic and regulatory /
political, instead of intentional.

Nuclear power was invented. A few nuclear accidents happen. The solution was
to put more regulation in place. Regulation increases costs and limits reactor
designs (large plants, conservative / pre-existing design).

End result? It's impossible to build "safer" reactors, because they're
economically uncompetitive under the regulatory burden designed for older
reactors. And the regulations never change because no one builds anything but
old-style reactors.

I understand the DoE and other similar organizations have prototype programs,
but from results evaluation they seem to have gaps in the path to production.

Essentially, we're letting 1960s nuclear fear of 1960s reactor designs write
our regulations instead of science.

~~~
barrkel
The tail risk on nuclear is so bad that innovation which merely reduces the
cost of energy isn't nearly compelling enough. Energy costs (either direct, or
indirect via carbon taxes or other pricing in of externalities of burning
stuff) need to rise significantly before there will be a real driver in the
system.

If you want nuclear, you want punitive carbon taxes, or carbon trading with
low caps.

~~~
ekimekim
> If you want nuclear, you want punitive carbon taxes

I think this is the crux of the issue. Carbon-emitting plants get a free pass
on safety and long-term environmental costs, while for nuclear all those
things are examined with a fine-tooth comb, then compared to the cost of
alternatives without those things.

In any regulatory regime that punished carbon emission the same way it did
nuclear waste, nuclear contamination, etc, then coal plants would be
unthinkable.

I was going to say "then nuclear would be obvious", but I'll hold judgement
there because I don't know how that would compare to other non-carbon-emitting
sources (hydro, solar, etc).

~~~
anoncake
Carbon-emitting plants are safe. They cause a predictable number of deaths
every year. That's a cost, similar to the environmental costs.

That doesn't mean they are less bad than nuclear plants but the claim that
they are unsafe is just wrong.

------
kediz
If Nuclear power becomes a viable safe and clean energy, how are we going to
deal with countries that don't have nuclear technology?

[https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-
powe...](https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-
world-wide.htm)

There are only 31 nations in the world that has nuclear power.

If, in the unlikely case, we successfully distribute the nuclear technology to
the rest of the world. How do we prevent/contain states go rogue and start
enriching fuels for nuclear bomb?

This might be a harder problem to solve than technology break through.

~~~
redbeard0x0a
> How do we prevent/contain states go rogue ...

By using different fuels. The fuel we currently use (enriched uranium) was
chosen because we could also use it to build weapons. A different fuel (i.e.
thorium, etc) could be used that couldn't be used in making weapons.

~~~
kediz
I didn't know that! Thanks for sharing! I am not familiar with nuclear
technology and I do have a question: Is the technology used to make Thorium
power plant very similar to that of making Uranium rode?

This question aside, I feel states can not resist the temptation to get
nuclear bomb technology: It's a great equalizer for power. Looking at how
North Korea was able to repeatedly get U.S to the bargaining table, I think
none of the nuclear powered country would want any other country on Earth to
gain such technology.

------
kjar
"Safer Nuclear Reactors Are on the Way" this kind of headline pops up every
few years. Too bad it takes a decade to build these things, they cost
billions, they produce harmful waste that persists for thousands of years, and
in failure cases produce exclusion zones for thousands of years. Effort and
investment would be better spent on solar and wind power projects.

~~~
gdubs
Fossil fuels already kill millions. According to Stewart Brand, the nuclear
waste for one’s entire life would fit into a can of soda. And despite
nimbyism, there’s already a solution for the waste in the US: Yucca Mountain.

Oh, and it doesn’t produce the greenhouse gases that are currently threatening
global stability in a timeframe of decades.

We shouldn’t minimize a technology’s shortcomings, but we should at least
frame it fairly and soberly among our set of options.

~~~
garmaine
Yucca Mountain was never built and the project defunded in 2011.

------
throw0101a
* Safer Nuclear Reactor _Designs_ Are on the Way

Whether _actual_ reactors get built is another matter.

~~~
420codebro
Yup. One of those few areas where the capital required is so massive it can
bankrupt even big dogs if they fuck up. See Westinghouse. Need some more gov
joint investment or it will be the same state in 20 years as it is now.

~~~
winter_blue
I've always wondered: why isn't it possible to make _tiny_ , safe, low-cost
reactors? Do reactors really always have to be so big and expensive?

~~~
philpem
Human factors.

It's easier to secure a massive plant than a thousand small ones.

Imagine the outcome of some underpaid and overworked cable runner digging into
a buried mini-reactor with a JCB digger. Or a trucker falls asleep at the
wheel and drives their Mack truck through an above-ground reactor.

The difference is between the media coverage being "Idiot drives truck into
nuclear facility, is arrested, no damage" and "Idiot digs into mini-reactor,
irradiates neighbourhood".

And that's before people start yelling "Not in my back yard!"

~~~
wahern
There are already thousands of medical and industrial sites which contain
material arguably scarier and more susceptible to accidents than what would be
in a small reactor. The most recent was several months ago at UW Harborview:
[https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/hazmat-response-for-
radioac...](https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/hazmat-response-for-radioactive-
breach-in-seattles-first-hill-neighborhood/945941940)

I think your last reasons are probably more influential. Nobody knows or seems
to care much about sites like where the above incident occurred. And so far
such incidents have been fairly contained, at least in the U.S. In some other
parts of the world neighborhoods do become contaminated on rare occasion.

------
donarb
PBS/NOVA ran a documentary a couple of years ago talking about safer nuclear
reactor designs. This included lessons learned from Fukushima.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDCEjWNGv6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDCEjWNGv6Y)

~~~
e40
Just finished this. The end gives me more hope in nuclear reactors. Thanks!

------
chr1
There is also ongoing work on LFTR reactors
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reac...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor)
which are much simpler and safer than reactors using solid uranium, because
they have only fraction of fuel of solid reactors, do not have any pressurised
containers, and have stable rate of reaction.

Two experimental reactors of this type have worked in 60s, but technology was
abandoned because it didn't produce the isotope of plutonium used in nuclear
weapons.

~~~
acidburnNSA
The "doesn't make bombs" story of the molten salt reactor program's
cancellation is largely a myth, albeit one that's extremely common on the
internet [1].

Fluid fueled reactors, mostly in the form of Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs), of
which the LFTR is one brand name of, do have lots of potentially huge benefits
in terms of simplicity, online refueling, and straightforward reactivity
effects. We do only have about 5 reactor-years of experience with them, and so
we don't fully understand the costs of building, operating, and maintaining
such systems in today's regulator regimes.

There is some reason to be concerned. When the fuel is dissolved in fluid, the
radioactive fission products are dispersed everywhere. Literally half the
periodic table of the elements is in there, and lots of it is volatile and
mobile. It gets on your pumps, your valves, your heat exchangers, etc. Doing
routine maintenance becomes very challenging and will need to be done
remotely.

A line I heard recently regarding MSR maintenance is: "You'll need robots to
do the maintenance of your maintenance robots." Another memorable gem is "If
you can make robots that can do that, you should just sell the robots"

We should absolutely work on progressing this technology, but in the face of a
climate disaster, we should just build more of what we know is already safer
than almost every kind of energy system we can deploy, which is regular Gen
III LWRs. We need to solve problems on the construction yard so we can build
them much more cheaply.

[1] [https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-
myths.html#myth1](https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html#myth1)

~~~
philpem
Good points.

How do some of the other alternatives like Pebble Bed fit into this?

I imagine PBRs would be more challenging to recycle fuel as it's combined with
the moderator(?), but are there other issues which make it unrealistic
compared to traditional PWR/BWR/LWR/Magnox reactors?

~~~
acidburnNSA
I'm starting to really like gas-cooled reactors like pebble-bed. They have two
fundamental technical challenges. First is that gas coolant (typically helium)
isn't a great heat-transfer mechanism so you need to spread your heat
generation out in a large volume. This low power density results in pretty
large structures (which can get pricey to build) for relatively low power,
compared to other coolant configurations like water and especially liquid
metal. Related, if there's a coolant leak, all the pressurized gas shoots out
and you need backup cooling systems or particularly low power density that
supports heat removal via conduction and thermal radiation. This can ding your
economics pretty bad too.

Second, the fuel particles you mention are very expensive to fabricate,
$10k/kg. Estimates of future costs go "as low as" $3k/kg, but some say it
could even go up to $30k/kg. In all cases, that's really expensive fuel
fabrication. There's a plant in China that can fabricate them in moderate bulk
right now, so perhaps with time and experience we can figure out how to bring
this process down in cost.

Aimed at solving power density and decay-heat cooling issues, there's also the
salt-cooled version of the pebble bed reactor which gets the high-temperature
fuel benefits and trades high-pressure gas for low-pressure salt. A research
group from MIT and UC Berkeley has worked on this for years under Prof Charles
Forsberg, and a company in the Bay Area called Kairos is now working on
commercializing it. Unfortunately you get a lot of tritium production from the
best known salt, which is a FLiBe salt, where the Lithium + neutrons results
in crap-tons of supermobile tritium. You can cold-trap most of it but it's
still a pain. And the fuel is still $10k/kg to fabricate as far as anyone
knows, and the graphite cracks, and high temperature corrosion under
irradiation is hard.

~~~
pfdietz
FLiBe also needs Be. World annual production of Be is 230 tonnes. And new Li
isotope separation facilities would be needed, as only very small amounts of
6Li could be tolerated. The existing technology for that is not workable now
due to mercury leakage.

------
heisenbit
A big part of the Fukushima disaster were not the reactors but the spent fuel
tanks. Their existence there and close to many reactors is testament to the
still unsolved challenges of storing the waste.

------
nerdponx
Until we can find a safe and permanent way to store spent fuel (or otherwise
render harmless fission products with long half-lives), nuclear power is
always going to fail the "Facebook mom test". And, in my opinion, rightly so.

~~~
pdonis
You don't store spent fuel. You reprocess it, getting out new fuel and a much
smaller amount of waste that is much less hazardous and only needs to be
stored for a much shorter time.

~~~
ffghhh
Except:

1\. No one does that, or has the ability to do that except the Russians [0]
2\. Much less hazardous is still tons of extremely dangerous stuff that will
last 100 k years. [1]

[0] fast breeders. I know you can re-process fuel for normal nuclear reactors.
But that doesn’t give you: “less hazardous and only needs to be stored for a
much shorter time” waste

[1] to a first approximation linger lived isotopes are less dangerous. But the
conclusion that they’re not a problem is not correct:

\- An isotope that lives 100k years is incredibly radioactive! \- these
isotopes can produce children that are very short lived, and therefore nasty
(think short lived radon, produced from geologically decaying isotopes)

Edit: spelling of “extremely”

~~~
throw0101a
> _fast breeders_

How many would actually be needed to burn up the unused fuel of "regular"
reactors? Is there some ration of regular:breeder that would be needed (5:1,
8:1, 13:1)?

> _to a first approximation longer lived isotopes are less dangerous._

But isn't the shielding required for the longer lived stuff simpler?
Presumably the short-lived stuff is hotter gamma radiation, which needs more
shielding.

~~~
nerdponx
Cesium-137 for example has a 30-year half-life. So after e.g. 60 years you
still have 1/4 of the radioactive cesium-137 remaining. For context, that's
less than the length of time since the Three Mile Island accident.

Edit: according to Wikipedia, cesium-137 decays to barium-137m, which decays
to barium-137 by gamma ray emission
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137)).
So even though cesium-137 decays through beta radiation it needs shielding
against gamma radiation.

------
beders
Who is going to pay for all this?

And wouldn't it be more efficient to spend the money on energy technology that
has none of the problems and is carbon-neutral?

The potential for renewables in the US is fantastic. For solar alone a recent
report states:

The total estimated annual technical potential in the United States for urban
utility-scale PV is 2,232 terawatt-hours (TWh).

Full report at
[https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51946.pdf](https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51946.pdf)

~~~
ethbro
Minor note: nuclear is carbon neutral too.

~~~
philpem
Secondary minor note: carbon neutral power sources (e.g. wind or solar) also
have a carbon cost. It comes from building the damn thing and continuing to
maintain it (e.g. new parts, setting up crane access...)

~~~
notabee
And building massive, complex nuclear reactors somehow doesn't incur tons of
fossil fuel usage? How much carbon is associated with the years' worth of
human activity and material supply chain to build a reactor? How about the
ongoing maintenance and the carbon footprint of all of the specialized staff
to maintain the safety of the reactor? How many scarce nuclear trained
specialists must be flown around in fossil fueled planes to inspect reactors?
How long does it take to break even, carbon debt wise? How does the carbon
usage of the real world dependencies of nuclear measure up to the building and
maintenance of solar panels and wind turbines? If you're going to make a minor
note about renewables, it's only fair to make the same about nuclear.

~~~
thomastjeffery
> And building massive, complex nuclear reactors somehow doesn't incur tons of
> fossil fuel usage?

It involves significantly less.

Nuclear power generates _significantly_ more energy for the amount of
resources used.

------
xbmcuser
Nuclear is not an option as the major energy consumption growth in the next
20-30 years will be in countries/regions where the current nuclear powers will
not be willing to trust with nuclear power.

~~~
pojzon
Nuclear power is the ONLY option, because no renewable energy source allows
for all:

\- easy storage

\- constant availability

\- cheap construction per MW/h

And we cannot afford to pollute our environment even more burning fossil
fuels.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Energy storage cost is dropping rapidly and given enough storage, you have
constant availability. Unlike what you claim, there's a lot of innovation on
this front and solar/wind bids usually include it these days. These combined
bids routinely underbid nuclear/coal/gas: it's already cheaper now; even when
you don't consider subsidies.

So, you bring up an interesting point with cost per mwh. Nuclear is not nearly
cheap enough to be competitive right now and would have to come down by
magnitudes to out-compete solar/wind + storage in a few decades. I'd say a
good price to shoot for with new nuclear designs that might still be too high
would be around 0.1-0.5 cents per kwh in a few decades. That's only 10x less
than current bids; you'd probably want to stay below that even. But anything
over that would be dead on arrival in terms of profitability.

~~~
pojzon
You dont take to account how much energy newer reactors produce. And to my
knowledge its indeed "orders of magnitude" more than the old ones. This is
simply because they burn whole fuel and not 1.64% of uranium old reactors do.

And I think we are way past the point where thinking about profitability
should be our first concern.

ps. I find it hilarious when people talk about renewable energy sources but
dont take into consideration energy storage. Batteries production may go down
in price, but that doesnt change the fact how toxic that production is to
environment and how big of a footprint it leaves for the future.

~~~
pfdietz
It remains the case that we should be thinking about how to maximize the CO2
reduction per $ spent.

Building new nuclear powerplants is not the way to do that.

~~~
pojzon
It is in comparison to alternatives.

~~~
pfdietz
No, not at all. Many alternatives are much cheaper than building new nuclear
reactors, per unit of CO2 avoided. New reactors are sadly very expensive.

~~~
ryacko
New reactors are expensive because of current regulations. Tolerances in
various areas can be reduced for reactor designs that can gracefully shut down
with a loss of power.

~~~
pfdietz
If only the nuclear industry, or its remnant, were as good at making reactors
as it is at making excuses.

------
dghughes
Isn't the Canadian CANDU design already safe? Or at least safer than many
reactor types which usie plutonium and highly pressurized vessels.

CANDU use natural uranium, can be refueled at full power plus many other
advantages most being passive safety features.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor)

~~~
pfdietz
Canada gave up on CANDU, and sold AECL for just $15M. They decided there was
simply no market for the reactor technology.

~~~
dghughes
AECL is a Canadian government agency I believe the US equivalent would be the
DOE.

But I do see now AECL licensed the CANDU technology to SNC-Lavalin in 2011.

Another PM Harper stab in the back of Canadians.

~~~
pfdietz
Thank you for correcting my error.

------
tehabe
I wonder what the trade-offs of this technology are. Usually with nuclear
power you can make it better in one area and it gets worse in another area.
That is why nuclear power couldn't really keep the promisses it gave us in the
1950s.

As for me, I think nuclear power is a dying technology. This year two new
reactor might go online, after construction time of over 10 years and costs
around 10 billion euros each.

I wonder how much renewable energy you could set up 2 billion euros per year.
And how much closer we would be in storing electricity if we had spent this
money in research.

I think nuclear fission or fusion is interesting and has its applications but
commercial electricity production is in my humble opinion not one of them.

------
kragen
Talking about safety is kind of missing the point.

Existing nuclear reactors are quite safe (aside from nuclear proliferation
risk), and new designs using things like accident-tolerant fuels and molten-
salt thorium reactors could improve this further, but safety isn't the main
problem with nuclear power, and in fact even public opinion isn't; the main
problem is _the price of the generated energy_. And there are no designs in
the works that attempt to solve this problem.

With the exception of betavoltaic batteries, nuclear reactors provide energy
by driving some kind of heat engine, and the cheapest large heat engines are
steam engines. (Specifically, supercritical steam turbines, using Charles
Parsons's 1884 turbine design, but with better metals, better bearings, and
hotter steam.) These are _the same engines_ that convert heat into power in
coal power station; a coal power station is basically a nuclear power station
without the nuclear reactor and with a lot more global warming. So, no matter
what design improvements come along for nuclear power, we can't expect nuclear
power stations to be _cheaper_ to build than coal power plants.

[https://www.solarserver.de/service-tools/photovoltaik-
preisi...](https://www.solarserver.de/service-tools/photovoltaik-
preisindex.html) says that low-cost photovoltaic panels are now €0.19 per peak
watt, unchanged since January. Last year they fell by 30%, but apparently the
PV panel industry has formed some kind of cartel to keep prices high, like the
DRAM price-fixing racket in the early 1990s — they announced last year that
module prices would stop falling, and so far, that's holding true:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002696).
(Chuck's skepticism in that comment that the cartel would actually be able to
_raise_ prices seems to have been borne out thus far.) So we're stuck with
€0.19 per peak watt until the cartel breaks down and pricing reverts to the
long-term learning curve in a year or three.

But, in much of the world, that makes installing photovoltaic capacity
_already_ far cheaper than building new coal power plants, _not counting the
cost of the coal_. And that means it's _also_ cheaper than the cost of
building new nuclear power plants.

Whether solar power is cheaper or not in a particular place depends on the
"capacity factor", the ratio between a power station's _average_ output and
its _peak_ output or capacity. For example, solar panels don't produce power
at night, and they produce a lot less when it's cloudy. In the US, this
averages about 25% for utility-scale PV, with 27% in Arizona and only 15.5% in
Maine. That means that an _average_ watt of solar power costs €0.70 (US$0.79)
in Arizona but €1.23 (US$1.37) in Maine. More equatorial and less cloudy
places like the Sahara and the Atacama have even higher capacity factors, so
solar energy is even cheaper there:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-
power...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power-the-
entire-world-by-harnessing-solar-energy-from-1-of-the-sahara/) (Note that the
pricing in that article is from 2016, when panels cost €0.53 per peak watt,
two and a half times what they cost today.)

(Those prices are per watt, not per watt-hour. How much it adds up to per
watt-hour depends on the discount rate you use and what lifetime you use.
Crystalline silicon solar panels, which are the kind we use, last basically
forever, although they lose about 20% of their initial power output after a
decade or three. If you just divide the above numbers by 15 years, US$0.79/W
comes out to US$1.67 per GJ, or in folk units, 0.6¢ per kilowatt hour. That
doesn't include an inverter, batteries, or the rooftop panel installer's
worker's-comp insurance, much less long-distance power transmission.)

And that's why, in April, Solarpack signed a contract with Chile to build a
120-megawatt PV plant in the Atacama, selling the energy at US$29.10 per
megawatt-hour: [https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/cheapest-solar-
po...](https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/cheapest-solar-power/) This
will lower the cost of electrical energy to businesses by 25% starting in
2021, and this price does not include any subsidies. 2.9¢/kWh (US$8.08 per
gigajoule, to use SI units) is cheap enough that no coal or nuclear power
station has ever reached that average price — and, unless we find a cheaper
way to build steam engines or other heat engines, none ever will.

The intermittency of solar power — much bruited by nuclear-energy promoters —
will _eventually_ start to become a problem as more and more coal and nuclear
baseload plants are decommissioned, but at least for several years, batteries
are cheap enough to solve that problem, and they're getting cheaper, too. Gas
peaker plants are inefficient, but they're also quick to build pretty cheap,
and they still emit less greenhouse gases and carcinogens than coal. Through
the 2020s, we'll see more combined-cycle gas peakers, more utility-scale
storage projects, and more long-distance transmission projects, including
HVDC. We'll also see more demand response, and in the end I think that will
play a bigger role in solving the problem than utility-scale storage — ice-
reservoir chiller systems, phase-change reservoir space heating and process
heating, daytime EV charging, and simply shutting down energy-intensive
production lines at night. If solar panels get sufficiently cheap, even long-
distance transmission infrastructure and rural distribution will cease to be
profitable except in extreme cases.

------
naruciakk
Well, it's nice to have safer nuclear reactors, but the current ones are
already very safe and clean

------
magnamerc
IMO, safety with regards to nuclear reactors is a moot point. The problem with
nuclear reactors is that they are centralized and costly. You can't deploy a
nuclear reactor in undeveloped countries because you still need to deploy the
infrastructure. That's why solar and wind are the only viable solutions. Solar
is decentralized, cheap, and mass produced and can be deployed in a matter of
days. Storage is following a variation of Moore's Law, so we can expect
storage cost to continue to drop over the next decades.

~~~
gdubs
That renewables have certain advantages doesn’t make nuclear a moot point. The
developing world will indeed be an area with enormous carbon emission
potential, but where things stand now it’s the _developed_ world that is
emitting at a rate far greater than anyone else; and in these countries, the
infrastructure exists.

~~~
magnamerc
The issue is still design/construction and political red tape. It sometimes
takes decades to fund and build a nuclear plant, and we don't have decades. We
should be focusing on easily deployable solar and wind, even in developed
countries. I'm not against existing nuclear power plants (I get my energy from
a CANDU reactor), I just think we need to ramp up solar because it kills two
birds with stone by tackling the issue in all parts of the world
simultaneously.

------
liveoneggs
safer ones are always on the way but they need to be built for upgrade
cheaply. Vogtle is building additional capacity from new reactors but the old
ones are still expected to keep working, afaik. Also they're years over plan
and billions (with a B) over budget.

------
PeterStuer
Just let candidates that want to build/operate these things pay the costs for
a cleanup upfront.

------
ngcc_hk
Safer or safe ?

------
stewbrew
So, the problem of nuclear waste is solved now?

------
spsrich2
They have decided to build the containment chamber out of something other than
meringue at last!

------
RocketSyntax
Not if Professor Legasov can help it.

~~~
Gudin
Not great, not terrible.

------
sprash
More important would be _cheaper_ nuclear reactors. If you factor in all the
cost involved nuclear energy doesn't make sense.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
The story mentions that the new designs would be cheaper. They don't go into
detail as to why.

I suspect that a lot of the cost is process and regulatory overhead.

If that can be made more efficient, things are likely to get cheaper.

However, the story only mentions running efficiency, which may not have as
much impact.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I am a lifelong proponent of advanced nuclear, and I study it daily and
professionally. I can tell you that advanced reactors will not be cheaper, at
least at first. Nuclear technology development is challenging and takes time,
and is very heavily regulated and NIMBY'd. Proving out new reactors requires
in-reactor experimentation, which itself is very expensive and time consuming.
Building a new First of a kind reactor is always expensive, and is followed by
long test/shakedown periods where heat/electricity will not be getting sold
for a large fraction of the time. Delayed revenue causes financing costs to
skyrocket.

The small/micro reactors are less expensive from a total investment point of
view, but you still are paying at least tens of millions for your core and
probably hundreds of millions for your license, regardless of how small you
are. The payback on a $100M license for a 1 MWe reactor is infinite.

Furthermore, we've had small/micro reactors in the past, like the one that
powered McMurdo Station in Antarctica for 10 years. It was shut down because
it was expensive to operate. How do we make sure this doesn't happen with the
new gen of SMRs?

We need to be developing reactors that approach full autonomy, somehow design
out the need of having 4 shifts of security, somehow design out expensive
site-specific licenses, have a clear story for their final waste disposition,
are clearly and demonstrably safe, and so on. I'd like to see the advanced
nuclear industry focus less on hype and more on practical solutions to these
particular problems. Some are working on it, but there's still a lot of
seemingly vapid hype in the advanced nuclear circles. I worry that it will
lose credibility someday.

Meanwhile if we could figure out how to build Gen III light-water reactors
more cheaply, like the Koreans largely have, then we'd have a great low-carbon
stopgap that we could deploy significantly, today, with no technology
development, and help avoid climate change.

Regardless, we the nuclear industry have to work super hard to get both
capital and O&M costs down dramatically if we want to contribute to the energy
future.

~~~
potiuper
> figure out how to build Gen III light-water reactors more cheaply, like the
> Koreans largely have

You are suggesting to fake all the expensive paperwork and playing rock-paper-
scissors to decide who would take certain contracts?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal)

Along with keeping "Only about 10% to 20% of the [post Chernobyl] safety
additions" and abandoning an extra wall in the reactor containment building:
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-
corr...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-corruption-
blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/)

I apologize if this comment may seem sarcastic, but after reading the TR
article I would not want to live anywhere near one of those reactors.

~~~
acidburnNSA
No, that's not what I'm suggesting. That scandal's contribution to the overall
success of Korea to be able to build a standardized reactor is small.

> ... eight cases out of 2,075 samples of foreign manufactured reactor
> components that were supplied with fake documents.

S. Korea learned how to build nukes from the failing American company,
Combustion Engineering. They then tweaked the design a bit and totally
serialized its production. They have total alignment because there's one big
utility doing all the work (no contract wars, suing each other, etc.). They
optimized the hell out of the construction management for those projects. Many
of the pioneers of Korea's nuclear industry now want to help bring the
technology back to the US, they feel it's repaying a debt to the Americans
from the early days of their partnership with CE. For example, this long
podcast is an incredible and rare view into this stuff. [1]

[1]
[https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung#](https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung#)!

------
Krasnol
Safe journey than.

Hope to never see you again.

------
systemBuilder
When I last did a calculation ( 3 accidents of the once every thousand years
type in 25 years ) I concluded that Nuclear accidents would render the entire
land mass of Earth uninhabitable within 250,000 years. This BS oxymoron
"nuclear reliability" is just that, BS.

------
superkuh
Until the Dept. of Energy approved of the NASA Kilopower fission reactor
(~1kW, a couple years ago) they had not ever (ever!) approved of a new nuclear
reactor design. All currently operating US nuclear reactor designs were
approved by the Atomic Energy Comission, an agency that hasn't existed for 45
years.

The Dept. of Energy simply isn't interested in doing it's job. They will not
approve new nuclear reactor designs or create new regulations to make building
safer nuclear reactor designs feasible economically or legally.

