
Bill Gates Just Published a Letter Urging US Leaders to Embrace Nuclear Energy - ThomPete
https://www.sciencealert.com/bill-gates-says-us-leaders-should-embrace-nuclear-energy
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PaulHoule
He is not talking specifics in his letter.

It is not just a political problem but a technical one.

Back in the 1970s coal was the "least cost" power source and it had the
advantage over nuclear that the steam turbine operated at higher temperatures
and was much more cost effective.

Nuclear tried to deal with that by "making it up in volume" which led to
giantism, unconstructability, and failure.

Today the "least cost" competitor is a Brayton cycle turbine fired with
natural gas. A gas turbine is at least an order of magnitude smaller than a
nuclear steam turbine; a gas turbine could be about the same size as the
crane, employee break rooms, bathrooms and such of a nuclear steam turbine.

Nuclear can only be competitive if we can raise the outlet temperature and
couple it to a gas turbine. Otherwise you're looking at something that would
be uneconomical if everything went right -- and things don't go right,
particularly when you try to cover up bad economics with false promises.

~~~
arrosenberg
If you can't change the physics, you can change the economics by passing a
carbon tax (although I don't know if the carbon cost of building a nuclear
plant would make it cost-savings positive).

~~~
bilbo0s
Yeah. It really is complicated.

That's the thing with nuclear, if we really want it, at some point, the
government is going to have to kick in some money to do it. With all of the
competing generation technologies looking so good as investments right now, it
really would almost be financial malfeasance for an investment group to put
money into nuclear instead. You have to give those guys _something_ if you
want to make it happen. Right now, even with no subsidies, it's just hard to
compete with a lot of these other investment opportunities in power
generation.

And even government subsidies are going to be complicated, because I'm sure
the tax payers would get up in arms about having to finance private reactors.
Especially when more and more of them could be getting their energy from wind,
natural gas, and hydro or pumped hydro. At that point you'd have people in,
say, Iowa, where wind is abundant, paying for reactors for people in New York,
or Florida.

I suspect that would likely go over about as well as a fart in church.

~~~
philipkglass
There has been a federal production tax credit available for new nuclear power
in the US since 2005:

[https://www.nei.org/advocacy/build-new-reactors/nuclear-
prod...](https://www.nei.org/advocacy/build-new-reactors/nuclear-production-
tax-credit)

It's structured similarly to the wind power production tax credit but isn't as
generous. Presumably this is because in 2005 lawmakers believed that nuclear
power was a more mature, more affordable electricity source than wind and
needed less subsidy to attract new investment.

I'd be fine with nuclear incentives matching PTC terms for wind power
(available for 10 years after construction instead of 8, same per-unit rate,
no cap on nationwide capacity). But I don't think even that would be enough to
spur new investment. Both wind and nuclear power projects have costs
concentrated up-front in construction, but wind projects can go much smaller
in terms of capacity and dollar investment. $75 million wind projects are
common. Any modern power reactor is a multi-billion dollar commitment at
minimum, and there's a longer time lag between pouring first concrete and
selling the first watt of power. These long timelines and "chunky" capital
requirements made investors wary, even before South Carolina and Georgia
demonstrated that the newest reactor projects still have major problems
sticking to planned cost and schedule.

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melling
Can the US, China, and India agree on a design then create an economy of scale
to build a few hundred reactors?

The AP1000 was supposed to be such a next generation plant?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000)

~~~
ryanmercer
>Can the US, China, and India agree on a design then create an economy of
scale to build a few hundred reactors?

Depends on the reactor. If you did something like naval reactors you could
probably manufacture at scale up to probably 700MW.

If we get something like Oklo Inc is trying to do, 1 MW-decade reactors could
be churned out at scale and used to augment large cities, provide for smaller
cities, provide for individual customers that use large amounts (think
factories), distributed around a section of a grid with large distances
between power plant and customers to reduce transmission loss, etc. I also
imagine if they, or a similar company, gets something like they are trying to
build operational then it would be relatively easy to scale it for a larger
output (the point though here is to make something that is easily portable for
remote locations, disaster relief, dedicated power for a specific subscriber
etc). Even if you couldn't scale these to larger outputs, you could place as
many of them as you want on a piece of property and move them if ever needed
as well as move them offsite at their end of life for refill/refurb/recycle
and swap them out with a new unit if needed.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I think you meant Oklo[1]? There are quite a few organizations working in this
space[2].

1: [http://oklo.com/](http://oklo.com/)

2: [https://www.thirdway.org/infographic/the-advanced-nuclear-
in...](https://www.thirdway.org/infographic/the-advanced-nuclear-
industry-2016-update)

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Gravityloss
Since the in situ construction seems to take ages and has made everyone
extremely skeptical of the economics side of nuclear power (compared to 20
years ago), small modular reactors could be a better avenue. There the whole
reactor vessel can be built in a factory and transported to the plant site as
a whole.

Improvements to the design and operational procedures etc could also be made
faster if a lot more were made and operated.

At least over here, the problem is that the extremely long winded permit
process (the parliament has to vote) has to be passed for each reactor core.
This drives up the core size.

But laws can be changed, one could instead have a thermal megawatt limit per
permit etc.

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a-fried-egg
Why bother when nuclear fusion will be the next greatest thing?

~~~
klohto
Which is exactly what is Gates pushing, investments into nuclear.

