
Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer - pseudolus
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/08/720728055/this-company-says-the-future-of-nuclear-energy-is-smaller-cheaper-and-safer
======
aurelwu
Their webpage [0] has the construction cost at $3 billion for a ~700 MW
reactor. This is about the same as the originally projected cost for the
Flamanville EPR with 1600 MW, which now is expected to end up costing ~$10
Billion. Now even if we assume - and thats a big assumption - they really can
build the reactor for $3 Billion, that still equals ~$7 Billion in
construction costs for a Flamanville sized reactor.

They do not put any number on their operating costs which makes it impossible
to calculate the electricity price they need to break even. If there is any
information out there it would be appreciated.

[0] [https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/cost-
competitive](https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/cost-competitive)

~~~
rwcarlsen
That $3 billion cost estimate is for first-of-kind of a reactor/plant that is
intended to be replicated many times. The cost per plant is expected to drop
significantly with total number of deployments. Also the plant is designed to
have significantly lower operating costs, shorter construction time (which
means shorter loan duration, lest capital wasted on interest). The Olkiluoto 3
(EPR) power station in Finland has been under construction for nearly 15
years! 15 years before you can even start paying off even 1 penny of the
capital cost is a huge barrier overcome here with Nuscale.

~~~
aurelwu
I know, but they said the same about the EPRs, so I remain sceptical that it
will work that way. Solar,Wind,Batteries,Hydrogen Production,Synthetic Fuel
Production is becoming cheaper year by year so Nuscale need not only to meet
their initial targets and then decrease the cost for future reactors but they
also need to end up beating the other technologies costwise & safety & safety
perception wise. Their Design might be faster than requiring 15 years, but I
doubt it is as fast to build as solar or wind.

------
vidanay
I have a hard time accepting their premise that they are designing for
"cheaper" based on that artists rendering (which I assume is based on some
real design elements). Curvy roofed buildings and arced cooling ponds are not
at all the most cost effective construction methods.

I want truly cheap nuclear that sits in unobtrusive cheap concrete boxes like
the old Bell telephone exchange buildings.

~~~
j9461701
The issue right now is every plant is a unique one-off. Meaning the inspectors
need to pour over the plans, construction crews need to learn how to build
each design specifically, fabricators providing parts need to make each
plant's run of stuff special. If we could have just one standard nuclear plant
design, even if it was silly curved roofs or whatever, it would _massively_
decrease plant construction costs by taking advantage of standardization.

France did this in the 1970s. They hired engineers to design them 1 single
kind of plant that was cheap, safe and would last a long time and then they
pumped them out by the dozens. Every plant was the same as every other plant,
so construction crews got good at it, part manufacturers could tool up for big
production runs and lower per-part cost, and government inspection was
drastically simplified because everything on the project was as stock as
possible and the original design had already been approved. Now France's
problem is it has _too much_ electricity, as it over-estimated how much energy
demands would ramp up going into the 21st century, and so now sells excess
wattage to Germany.

~~~
Retric
To much energy is the central problem with nuclear. It’s capital intensive so
if they don’t operate 24/7 their cost per watt increases. This puts Nuclear in
a bind as wind and solar are both significantly cheaper and Nuclear is
terrible as a peaking power plant.

In the end it needs to either beat Wind or Natural Gas. Meanwhile grid storage
prices keep dropping which may soon start undercutting Natural Gas.

~~~
AstralStorm
No, it is meant to beat base load plants, that is oil, coal, natural gas,
biomass, geothermal and hydroelectric.

Wind is somewhat bad as base load plant as there are serious lulls when wind
is relatively globally low.

~~~
Retric
Base load power is inherently less useful than peaking power plants as the
demand curve while predictable is extremely variable. Power companies build as
many of them as they can get away with because they are cheap, not because
there is some inherent advantage to steady state power.

Wind competes in exactly the same niche as the price is low though with some
additional downsides. As you build more of them there is less utility in base
load power as you end up producing wasted electricity production ever more
frequently.

PS: Hydroelectric is generally the ideal peaking power plant as it’s cheap,
the downside is you can’t build many if them.

~~~
kbenson
> Hydroelectric is generally the ideal peaking power plant as it’s cheap, the
> downside is you can’t build many if them.

What ever happened to the offshore hydroelectric turbines we were supposed to
get? I think is was 15-20 years ago they were being touted as one of the next
big power systems.

~~~
Retric
The ocean is a really difficult place to leave equipment. Short term small
scale tests looked promising, but scaling up never really worked out.

------
NotPaidToPost
> "My concern about NuScale is that they believe so deeply that their reactor
> is safe and doesn't need to meet the same criteria as the larger reactors,
> that it's pushing for lots of exemptions and exceptions," says Edwin Lyman,
> acting director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned
> Scientists

Bit of a red flag there...

Edit:

The article further states: > "Licensing this design is challenging. It's so
different from existing plants that regulations must be changed to accommodate
it. That worries some watchdogs and critics."

Let's not shoot the messenger here.

If they are regulatory requirements that clearly do not apply to this
technology because, e.g. it does not use the regulated parts or technology
then fine. But that should be very thoroughly scrutinised and no exception
should be granted on the basis that it is safe on paper.

Many requirements are very expensive to meet so I would understand that a
private startup tries to minimise the burden. But I think nuclear safety comes
first.

~~~
nickik
Union of Concerned Scientists are an anti-nuclear lobbyist group. Anything
they say should be dismissed out of hand. They have 0 credibility and have
spent the last 50 years spreading lies and fear about nuclear energy.

The problem here is actually that the people at 'Union' are deeply convinced
that nuclear is bad and no nuclear project no matter how much time was spent
on safety has ever been endorsed by them. This is simply how they operate.

The reason there are 'exceptions' is because partly with the help of
themselves the nuclear regulatory system was changed in a way to hardcore
specific technological solution into the regulatory process that only work for
traditional PWR, practically excluding every other form of nuclear energy.

NuScale uses PWR technology in a slightly different form but because that's
what they believed to be able to regulated, but even that requires lots of
extra cost to get regulated.

The regulatory changes after the nuclear accidents essentially killed all
research and all progress. This can be seen both in the rates of new reactor
designs and reactor building rates.

Union of Concerned Scientiests and Greenpeace have been at the forefront of
this issue for a long time now, and their deliberate strategy since literally
50 years (and this is a fact that has been shown based on their internal
documents) is to always focus on nuclear safety because that's how they can
make it uneconomical. And to their credit, this strategy has worked perfectly.
It might be the single most successful political campaign of the
'environmental movement'.

If they had been this effective against coal we would live in a better world
now.

~~~
neuronic
> Union of Concerned Scientists are an anti-nuclear lobbyist group.

Or maybe they are just concerned about a power source which has proved
catastrophic multiple times in the past.

~~~
magduf
Compare the number of deaths due to nuclear accidents to the health effects of
us all breathing in coal pollution.

~~~
mcguire
Deaths / trillion kWhr
([https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-
deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#34a80aa0709b))

Coal – global average 100,000 (41% global electricity)

Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity)

Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)

Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity)

Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity)

Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy)

Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)

Wind 150 (2% global electricity)

Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% global electricity)

Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity)

Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)

Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)

I've never been quite enthusiastic about these kinds of numbers, because I'm
not sure what deaths are included. I believe this article includes indirect,
pollution-related deaths for fossil fuels, but what about deaths in uranium
mining and processing?

Forbes separates out the US numbers because of the strong regulatory regime
here---which strikes me as odd; doesn't Forbes usually consider environmental
and health-and-safety regulations bad?

One confounding factor in this data is the low numbers of large-scale
accidents for nuclear power. The reason the hydro power number is so high is a
number of very large dam failures; would nuclear numbers be similar if
Chernobyl happened in a much higher population area or if Fukushima happened
faster?

~~~
nickik
> but what about deaths in uranium mining and processing

Modern Uranium mining is basically pin-point mining mostly done by machines.
And even without that, Uranium is so energy dense that you don't actually have
to mine much. Every other energy source also has lots of mining simply because
you need lots more of normal metals.

Think about the absurd amount of mining required for wind miles.

The same for processing, those are very highly advanced modern processes that
are pretty strictly on safety.

There are very few deaths from either.

> One confounding factor in this data is the low numbers of large-scale
> accidents for nuclear power.

The only ever large-scale accident (in terms of people) for nuclear power is
Chernobyl and if you look at the long term death we are talking around 4000
who die earlier and maybe 50 who died faster and that is one event 40 years
ago.

Other then that there have been basically 0 deaths from radiation from
civilian power nuclear accidents. In reality Chernobyl was a military reactor
and shouln't even be included in the first place.

> or if Fukushima happened faster

I'm not sure what you are talking about here. It seems that you assume that
evacuation saved people? That is totally wrong. Actually a far larger number
of people died during the evacuation that were actually endangered by the
radiation.

------
loganwedwards
Although NuScale is not the first to focus on this type of implementation
(Westinghouse, Areva, B&W, etc..), namely small modular reactors (SMR), I am
glad to see more hands in the mix. As a South Carolina resident (and supporter
of nuclear power) and witnessing the shit-show with SCANA and the cancelled VC
Summer plants, I am hopeful that economies of scale can take effect in the
SMR-based designs.

~~~
benj111
Is this economies of scale in the right place though?

I'm doubtful we'll ever get to the point where you can just plop a reactor
down and go. You're still going to have the years of political wrangling, all
the bulky containment and supporting infrastructure.

~~~
jabl
Most likely multiple units will be deployed on each site, allowing them all to
take advantage of shared infrastructure like grid connections, spent fuel
storage, security etc.

~~~
benj111
Yes I was going to add that their best chance is being put on the sites of old
reactors.

~~~
nine_k
I also wonder if converting old coal-fired plants is possible. If the
turbines, generators, and the power distribution stuff is in place and in a
good shape, maybe setting up an alternative source of steam could be more
economical than building the whole thing from scratch.

~~~
jabl
Typical coal plants use superheated steam at around 540C and turbines designed
for that, whereas LWRs produce wet steam at 300C, so no.

High-temperature reactors can produce superheated steam, but then it's not a
LWR and you give up on all the knowhow how to run those. The Chinese are
planning to deploy gas cooled pebble bed reactors which could replace the coal
furnace at existing plants (HTR-PM).

~~~
i_am_proteus
Alt. take: one could not reuse the turbines, at least not efficiently. One
might be able to reuse other parts of the steam/condensate/feed systems. The
electrical systems could largely be reused.

I doubt that reusing anything other than the power distribution and cooling
loops would be economical.

~~~
AstralStorm
Don't forget maintenance stations and other office housing required to run the
plant.

------
holografix
“NuScale's design doesn't depend on pumps or generators that could fail in an
emergency because it uses passive cooling. The reactors would be in a
containment vessel, underground and in a huge pool of water that can absorb
heat.

That means that even a reactor that fails would still be safe. "It doesn't
require any additional water," says Feldman. "It doesn't require AC or DC
power. It doesn't require any operator action. And it can stay in that safe
configuration for as long as is needed."”

What if there’s a leak? What if for some reason the temperature inside the
reactor is slight enough to vaporise the water?

~~~
acidburnNSA
Leaks are designed out because the entire reactor vessels are surrounded by a
giant swimming pool. The temperature stays low enough because this swimming
pool is passively cooled.

Lack of relible decay heat[1] cooling caused both Fukushima and three mile
island accidents. Having passive decay heat removal usually decreases the
probability of core damage by about 100x.

1 [https://whatisnuclear.com/decay-heat.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/decay-
heat.html)

~~~
C1sc0cat
What happens if the swimming pool leaks ?

~~~
antris
What happens if a windmill explodes?

~~~
Teever
I'm not too sure but I can say for certain that it doesn't spew radioactive
material into the environment.

~~~
i_am_proteus
There would be some trace amounts of radioactivity in the materials used.
Probably not enough to harm the public.

Similarly, most fission reactor failure modes don't release harmful amounts of
contamination to the public.

------
thrower123
Per gigawatt-hour, nuclear power as it stands may very well be the safest
power source that we have got already.

The biggest hurdle is irrational fear and the regulatory barriers consequent.

~~~
pfdietz
No, the biggest hurdle is that it's grossly uneconomic.

~~~
thrower123
Because it costs billions of dollars to check everything over in octuplet and
build everything special because everyone is so damned afraid of The Bomb that
we gave up on building them fifty years ago at scale.

It's the safest thing going.

[https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/11255616735556935...](https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1125561673555693569)

~~~
pfdietz
The nuclear industry isn't very good at making reactors, but they're really
good at making excuses.

------
goatgate
Complexity is the enemy of any reliable system. No energy source is simpler
than solar arrays. They don't require any moving parts, thermal management,
waste containment, or strong security. The only maintenance required is
dusting. Why otherwise intelligent people cannot appreciate the cost of
complexity for nuclear energy is beyond me, especially when viewed in contrast
to something as simple as solar.

~~~
fromthestart
There are costs other than complexity which must be considered before
selecting a power source. For example, energy density per unit area. Nuclear
has a much smaller footprint. Also the cost, maintnence, lifetime, and
environmental impact of batteries required during night time/occluded
operation is also not trivial, as is accommodating for unpredictable outputs
due to weather.

~~~
v_lisivka
Nuclear is slow to operate, so it needs batteries to handle peaks during day.
Nuclear can provide baseline power only.

Solar panel can be installed at roofs, so it can double as shelter, and power
loss due to transmission can be lowered. Backup gravitational battery can
provide backup power on site for short (hours) periods of time, to cheaply
offset energy from peak of production at noun to peak of consuming at evening.
Efficiency of solar panels can be improved up to 80%, so they can reduce need
for air cooling.

------
Animats
_" My concern about NuScale is that they believe so deeply that their reactor
is safe and doesn't need to meet the same criteria as the larger reactors,
that it's pushing for lots of exemptions and exceptions," says Edwin Lyman,
acting director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned
Scientists._

Here's a picture of the setup.[1] The reactors all share the same pool. The
pool is big enough to absorb the heat in an emergency, and passive heat
transfer from reactor to pool is high due to a smaller reactor size, and all
this passively prevents a meltdown.

So they have one class of failure covered. But that's not the only possible
failure. Leaks into the pool become a big problem, because one reactor can
contaminate the pool and all the other reactors. Three Mile Island had a valve
failure and contaminated the containment vessel. That was expensive to clean
up, and made the reactor useless, but didn't cause trouble outside the plant.
A plumbing leak with NuScale could take down all the reactors.

[1] [https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/NuScale-SMR-
ente...](https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/NuScale-SMR-enters-first-
manufacturing-phase)

~~~
mcguire
" _The pool is big enough to absorb the heat in an emergency, and passive heat
transfer from reactor to pool is high due to a smaller reactor size, and all
this passively prevents a meltdown._ "

Out of curiosity, how is heated water circulated through the pool? I have this
sudden vision of the reactor boiling the water around it and being surrounded
by a pocket of steam. Or, the repeated formation and collapse of a steam
bubble, which can't be good.

------
mcguire
" _" My concern about NuScale is that they believe so deeply that their
reactor is safe and doesn't need to meet the same criteria as the larger
reactors, that it's pushing for lots of exemptions and exceptions," says Edwin
Lyman, acting director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned
Scientists._"

If it's safe, it should easily meet the criteria and so shouldn't need
exemptions and exceptions, right?

~~~
AstralStorm
The idea is to save on some costs of monitoring equipment and recertification
per each module.

Good luck...

------
beat
Although I'm not a big nuclear power fan for various reasons, I'm really happy
to see someone approaching it with an eye to realistic safety, modern
economics, and compatibility with a renewable-based grid. It'll be interesting
to see if this can compete financially with batteries.

~~~
sharcerer
May I ask why you aren't a fan?

~~~
beat
A number of reasons, but for starters, consider inequality. Are we going to
give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia afford one?

They are expensive, require tremendous infrastructure, _and_ mean deploying
fissionable materials to countries that maybe shouldn't have them. So it's
solving a First World problem, and exacerbating the divide between rich and
poor.

~~~
smileysteve
> Are we going to give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia
> afford one?

This is an excellent case for these lighter reactors, but perhaps more so for
molten salt / Thorium reactors.

Where this reactor has smaller amounts of radioactive material and Thorium has
little use in weapons.

~~~
beat
I have a market argument against thorium reactors - basically, if they were as
awesome as their proponents argue, then _someone_ would have built one by now,
for commercial purposes. But there hasn't ever been a commercial thorium
reactor, and there hasn't been a serious build since the 1960s. Fifty years,
and a lot of countries that aren't full of namby-pamby treehuggers to blame
for it. Even India, which is sitting on like a third of the world's thorium
reserves, doesn't build them.

This makes me rather suspect that thorium isn't nearly as awesome as its
proponents think it is.

------
nickik
SMR based on old school water PWR is just not the best idea. The only reason
to do it, is basically because everything else is impossible to get regulated.
Putting whole PWR systems in one module seams pretty crazy compared to the
alternative reactors we could be building. The PWR SMR are still massively
bigger other SMRs.

We built and tested better smarter designs for reactors that would be way
smaller and cheaper but those are essentially impossible to license in the US
and no other country has a market big enough to finance development it.

Nuclear is so energy dense the market for it is so divided that the economics
of scale are just not there in the same way unless you do it stat driven as in
France or you have a large unified market like the US was when nuclear was
cheap and expanding fast.

------
Simulacra
Why not thorium?

~~~
nickik
Thorium only has advantages if you use a breeder. Uranium is actually better
for most applications.

And the development of any type of reactor is already expensive, adding the
additional challenge of regulatory burden to change fuels is totally
pointless.

The real debate is about reactor design, not fuel type.

I also started to get interested in Thorium, but I learn that its not about
Thorium but rather your reactor type.

~~~
jabl
> Thorium only has advantages if you use a breeder.

A _thermal_ breeder, that is. In the fast spectrum the U-Pu cycle is superior.

And even so, a thermal Th breeder has a very low breeding ratio, and in the
thermal spectrum poisons are worse, meaning that the reprocessing volume to
produce a unit of fuel will be frickin huge. Good luck making that economical.

~~~
nickik
Yes. A thermal breeder. Correct.

There are ways to reduce the poisons depending on your reactor design.

