
First U.S. Small Nuclear Reactor Design Is Approved - lambdasquirrel
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-u-s-small-nuclear-reactor-design-is-approved/
======
dsimms
also: earlier recent discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24358850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24358850)

------
millstone
What is significant here is that the NRC has approved a design, rather than a
single plant.

Nuclear plants in the US have been traditionally built like airports, each one
bespoke to its site, each one separately assessed for safety. This pushes the
plants to be very large, to offset the high up-front costs.

We should build reactors like airplanes instead of airports. You get your
airplane design and factory approved, then you can churn out thousands. That's
the hope for microreactors.

I learned about these ideas from this podcast episode:
[https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21155995/jessica-lovering-
nucl...](https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21155995/jessica-lovering-nuclear-
energy)

~~~
Krasnol
> We should build reactors like airplanes instead of airports. You get your
> airplane design and factory approved, then you can churn out thousands.
> That's the hope for microreactors.

Good there are some people with a sense of safety and this is not the case. A
nuclear reactor is not a plane.

Maybe you should question the opinion of a lobbyist first before you start
repeating their ads.

~~~
kiddico
Of course, modern planes, known for their constant crashing and terrible
safety standards.

~~~
manicdee
Every safety standard that modern aircraft have to meet is written in blood.

Even then, Boeing thought they were better than they are, and we have lives
lost to 737 MAX because they tried to play the rules to get a completely new
aircraft certified as an existing one. The reason we don't have planes
constantly crashing is because if a serious problem is found we can stop the
planes flying, grounding the entire fleet of that model/variant around the
world because airlines know that they'll be taken to the cleaners by
governments if they keep flying a known-dangerous plane.

Companies everywhere are placing profits ahead of safety and reliability. You
order parts for a nuclear reactor that have to be made out of a specific alloy
due to radiation, the contractor ends up giving you a slightly different alloy
that is just as strong mechanically, but costs them 20% less, and it turns out
that the bit they removed is the trace material that makes the specified alloy
radiation resistant (they're casting contractors, not metallurgists).

But because we're all cutting costs you're certifying the factory not the
part, so you end up shipping a thousand small nuclear reactors with coolant
systems that perish due to radiation and end up leaking toxic radioactive
waste two or three years after being powered up.

How do you ground a fleet of nuclear reactors? It's not like having a fridge
or hot water is a luxury that we can just do without for a few months while
the problem is resolved.

~~~
belorn
> How do you ground a fleet of nuclear reactors? It's not like having a fridge
> or hot water is a luxury that we can just do without for a few months while
> the problem is resolved.

Is there a reason why backup solutions are not the answer to that problem?

~~~
manicdee
The aim of small nuclear reactors is to be "safe" and "reliable" so the
chances are the states that switch their electricity supply to small reactors
aren't going to have lots of backup power. We don't have significant backup
power as it is, because we're not expecting all our power plants to fail on
the same day.

On the other hand states that use nuclear to supplement a "hydrogen economy"
powered mostly by renewables (typical plan is 500% over-production with
surplus converted to ammonia for shipping) will already have heaps of backup
power and the nuclear plants would be redundant anyway.

So either you only have nuclear, and most of it will be the same thing because
that's how it got cheap enough to use, and when the fleet is grounded you're
screwed — or you have enough "backup" power that you never needed the nuclear
reactors anyway and the government of the day takes the opportunity to shut
down your white elephant project which was only ever intended to funnel public
funds into your colleague's pockets anyway.

I don't honestly believe there is a middle ground where nuclear is selected as
a supplement to renewables by a government that isn't corrupted.

------
jeffbee
There always seem to be so many assumptions in these safety claims. I'm not
really for or against fission power but I don't like to feel like I'm being
conned by sales literature masquerading as science. Questions that seem
unanswered by NuScale revolve around their subterranean cooling pool. The
ultimate safety claims require this thing to be full of water, so the obvious
question is: what if it springs a leak? What if the pool drains around the
containment structure in such a way that the hydrostatic pressure of its own
lost coolant forces it out of the ground, like an empty swimming pool in a
flood? Speaking of which, what about floods? Also their safety claims rely on
vacuums and anoxic environments, but this is Earth so what happens during
oxygen intrusion?

Fission people spent the entire 1990s hyping pebble bed reactors but
ultimately they had these problems. The safety of a PBR lies in having an
inert atmosphere. During an air or water intrusion event the whole this will
burn, explode, and melt. Again, Earth is absolutely filthy with oxygen so this
is a legitimate concern.

~~~
mchusma
Fusion already has the advantage of being the safest energy source by a lot.

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

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
worldw...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-
energy-source/)

The "problem" with nuclear is the misconception and economic cost.

~~~
mechEpleb
Nobody has a working fusion power plant.

------
detritus
It amuses me to wonder what an entity with the value of one of the current
market behemoths could accomplish if only they put a % or ten of their
capitalisation into 'nuclear' research, be it fission or fusion.

A sort of modern day swords to ploughshares in terms of the Apples and
whatnots.

~~~
Krasnol
We know what they could accomplished because billions has been sunk into
nuclear research in the last DECADES. Decades which we could have spend that
money on renewables and storage a technology already so cheap that it makes
nuclear utterly pointless. A technology which would have made the whole
discussion obsolete and in fact: it is obsolete today. The time scale in which
"nuclear" is researched, approved or build is being counted in decades. We
don't have decades so why waste a single $ on it?? It makes no sense at all.

~~~
epistasis
I think you're right, and that it's very clear that research funds have been
systematically misinvested for the past 40 years.

IMHO it's because there has been a false belief that energy consumption is
tied by a constant factor to GDP. We knew this was BS even back in the 1970s,
but perpetuating that economic falsehood was extremely beneficial to
entrenched energy interests and lobbyists.

If we were 15-25 years ahead of where we are now, because we provided the same
tax benefits to solar and wind investors in the 80s that we give to small-time
oil investors to this day... the entire world would be so much better
positioned.

------
ogre_codes
The anti-nuke environmentalists spend massive amounts of time and energy
building public distrust of nuclear. They managed to shut down existing
nuclear reactors with safe track records. This makes me pretty skeptical we'll
be able to get new ones on line regardless of how much safer they are.

Getting the NRC to approve them is one thing, getting a city to allow a
nuclear power plant of any kind in their back yard is a whole other ball-game.

~~~
arandolpha
Existing nuclear reactors may have safe track records in terms of their
operation, but we still have no long term solution for high-level nuclear
waste disposal. At all.

The decommissioned plant outside of San Onofre, for example, is now storing
nuclear waste in steel canisters on site. That site is on an earthquake fault
line, right next to the pacific ocean [0].

Unless we come up with a complete end-to-end model for safely handling the
waste, I don't consider nuclear to be a viable option. As it stands, it's a
massive liability to the health of our future environment.

[https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-chapple-san-
onof...](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-chapple-san-
onofre-20180815-story.html)

~~~
in3d
We could've if there was enough political will though.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository)

~~~
klmadfejno
Do you want trains full of other cities' nuclear waste passing through your
city?

~~~
vonmoltke
"Trains full"? The US only produces 2,000 tonnes of spent fuel a year, and has
only produced 83,000 tonnes in the entire history of its nuclear generation
program[1]. That entire annual production, even accounting for the weight of
shielding and other safety measures, would fit on a single train the size of a
typical coal or oil train.

[1] [https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-
spent-...](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-
nuclear-fuel)

------
jbob2000
What's the smallest nuclear reactor possible? Could I have one to power my
home, for example? Or is the energy released from even a single particle so
great that it needs a huge structure to capture it?

~~~
elcritch
NASA‘s RTG can be relatively small:
[https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/radioisotope-t...](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/radioisotope-
thermoelectric-generator/)

~~~
mechEpleb
RTGs are not reactors, they utilize natural decay heating.

------
stmw
This was covered before but it's very good news. More of these (with different
designs) are in the NRC approval pipeline.

------
geogra4
We need to build thousands of these immediately to provide baseload power and
decommission all fossil fuels

~~~
epistasis
Back in the mid-2000s there was a huge policy, PR, and financing push to have
a nuclear renaissance. Lots of plans were made. Economics were ignored (and
honestly should have been ignored because the worst case nuclear cost is still
cheaper than climate change).

After that huge push, we have nothing to show for it except for a tiny number
of half-finished, over-budget, behind schedule construction projects, and a
toooooon of abandoned projects. The UK can't even find somebody to build their
projects anymore.

Hope has turned towards these small reactors, after the failure to build big
reactors--despite immensely favorable regulatory, finance, and PR settings. I
don't know of local opposition to a single reactor! At least not enough to
cause a stir.

Thousands of small reactors won't be enough, and we won't be able to build
thousands for another 10-20 years. So we are instead stuck with renewables and
storage. And just like we were right to throw experimental money at nuclear in
the mid-2000s when we didn't really believe the numbers, I think we are far
better grounded to throw equal billions of dollars (at least $40B in the US)
at storage projects that the industry currently disregards.

We have far better pricing data for storage, it's deployable within a year,
and it has massive benefits. And investing now will decrease the cost more
quickly.

Throw several billion each at more speculative storage techs like flow
chemistries and cryogenic air storage, and then the rest at standard,
shipping, off the shelf lithium ion. We will see massive industries come into
formation whose economic productivity and value dwarfs the tiny $40B we spent
on kickstarting it. This will work, without a doubt. Nuclear may or may not
work, it remains to be seen.

~~~
ArkVark
The missing component is the need to integrate Electric Vehicles into the grid
on a fundamental basis including selling electricity.

We need a technical, regulatory and user regime to support this. For starters,
by transmitting power demand/price information to cars so they can decide when
to charge, and also allowing cars to deposit electricity back into the
network.

If we manage this smartly, we can have battery storage and EVs in one go.

~~~
epistasis
Yes, exactly! A Tesla-size battery is three days' of electricity use for many
people's homes.

So we will be building massive amounts of storage as we shift our car fleet to
electric (though personally I hope that we can massively cut down on car use
too, due to the amount of PM2.5 pollution even EVs cause. The biggest source
of microplastics in CA is tire road wear, not plastic bags or straws, yet the
idea of reducing car travel is faaaaaar outside the Overton window even as we
try to ban single use plastics.)

I think there's lots of room for demand response, both in terms of pre-cooling
houses or pre-charging batters. But I would _love_ to be able to power my
house with the 50amps that my car battery could provide. If you're only taking
a couple kWh at peak times, it has nearly an effect on battery longevity and
could provide great value to both the grid and user if price signals could be
used in an automated fashion.

For a model that won't scale to the general population, OhmConnect in CA will
pay residences to reduce usage at certain hours, averaging about 6 hours per
month for me. During the recent CA high load days, I made about $50 with
minimal action on my part (used all the normal lighting, etc. just didn't run
the dishwasher or clothes dryer during that period).

~~~
bananabreakfast
Wait what? Where exactly is that pollution from EVs coming from? Seems a
pretty big leap you took there.

~~~
epistasis
EVs still have tires, and though regenerative braking is far better than using
brake pads, at low speeds and frequent braking that occurs in congestion and
city driving forces EVs to use brake pads.

This is the source of fine particulate matter, reported as PM2.5 in air
quality, that results in ~50k premature US deaths per year [1] [2].

Tire particulates are the major source of oceanic microplastics off the CA
coast [3]. Tire manufacturers produce tires that produce fewer particulates
and last longer and are more expensive upfront, but which have a lower total
cost of ownership. [4]

Sorry for the big leap, I accumulate all these news bits by trawling deeply in
a few narrow topics, and forget that they are not common knowledge and often
obscure.

[1]
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231013004548)

[2] [https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/10/22/mit-study-vehicle-
emi...](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/10/22/mit-study-vehicle-emissions-
cause-58000-premature-deaths-yearly-in-u-s/)

[3]
[https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-02/califor...](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-02/california-
microplastics-ocean-study)

[4] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyres-plastic-
environment...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyres-plastic-environment-
insight-idUSKCN22413H)

------
vaccinator
When can I get a nuclear car?

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Here ya go:
[https://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html](https://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html)

~~~
vaccinator
thanks I ordered one from aliexpress

------
christiansakai
A little bit OT, but I watched a Youtube video that mentioned that
"hydrocarbon is inexhaustible". Is this true?

~~~
bserge
Hydrocarbons are fossil fuels, basically. They are not inexhaustible.

~~~
s1artibartfast
Biofuels are

~~~
bserge
Oh yeah, good point.

I haven't thought about it, but yeah if you do agriculture just for biofuel,
it could be considered inexhaustible (and even renewable?).

But that seems like a terrible waste of agricultural production (which is
better used for feeding people and animals).

~~~
cultus
Soil loss and salinification is always a danger. It's better to farm as little
and as un-intensively as reasonable, in my opinion.

~~~
s1artibartfast
That depends on the alternative, doesn’t it? I think there is a place for
biofuels, even if it is just replacing fossil jet fuel powering airliners

