Everyone is piling on about better designs or mythical future tech.
This is a win for clean energy. End of story.
Smaller reactors have maintenance and footprint wins that are hard to appreciate. I think this is one of a few key turning points that are coming up that will help us transition to a better carbon future.
But if not, at least now we have more options which means more competition and more innovation.
The competition is for cost. I don't mind more competition, I think it's great that there are alternatives. However, I don't see nuclear as particularly competitive on that front as it is currently, by far, the most expensive option. The only thing that comes close is natural gas. Which has seen pretty high price hikes of course.
Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.
Nuclear, not so much. A few deployments here and there. Usually at prices that are way over budget and years late as well. Maybe smaller nuclear plants will change that. They have a lot to prove. I wouldn't bet the future on that. It's a wild card at best.
Meanwhile, the future is now. Lots of countries are going carbon neutral in the next decade or so and mostly without the help of nuclear power. No need to wait for small reactors to work or not. If they do somehow work at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive, great! But not a problem if this is just the next chapter in nuclear power's long history of being too costly and complicated to be practical.
Nuclear absolutely has to be part of that carbon neutral equation. Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not “dispatchable”. i.e. they turn off sometimes when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Without tons of batteries, natural gas and coal etc are always going to be used to fill the gaps. Nuclear is the perfect choice to replace those dispatchable sources.
Also, additional nuclear capacity can be used to do things like desalinate ocean water and help alleviate droughts in the future.
Traditionally, nuclear is not dispatchable either, it's baseload, and in particular these SMRs are not dispatchable. There are a few variable output reactors in France, but they are very expensive. Molten salt reactors could perhaps have a thermal storage component, but...
Nuclear is "firm" in that its always running. This is a good characteristic. I'm more optimistic about advanced geothermal that has been developed in recent years, using the advances in drilling developed for fracking.
If we can use the waste heat from nuclear for something productive, like desalination, then I think it has a much better chance. But coastal communities will also have access to offshore wind, which has really high capacity factors and will be far far cheaper than nuclear could be.
The design we are talking about here has the capability to load follow:
The unique features of a NuScale plant allow its modules to respond to meet the power generation demand in the evenings by increasing from 20% to 100% power in 96 minutes
Nuclear reactors aren't fundamentally incompatible with load following: you can stick some control rods in or out and get more or less heat energy distributed to your turbines.
Nuclear power plants are generally used for base load for economic reasons: they are really expensive to build and have close to fixed hourly costs to operate, compared to say natural gas plants which are cheap to build and have operating costs proportional to the amount of gas they burn. Consequently we only build nuclear where we expect it can be utilized pretty much all the time, and we don't optimize nuclear plants for quick scaling up and down.
Thank you! I'm surprised that I've not heard this before, and I never noticed it the many times I've been to NuScale's site.
I'm clearly in left field when it comes to concerns about nuclear, in that I mostly am worried about wasted effort and capital on a tech that I do not foresee being able to keep up, rather than concerns about "safety" or belief that it is in anyway necessary for decarbonization. So I appreciate seeing some new information that make me more hopeful that SMRs will succeed.
> Molten salt reactors could perhaps have a thermal storage component
If you can build one of those economically and deal with the caustic molten salt then you can build a concentrated solar thermal plant with molten salt for storage even more economically with no worries about a nuclear disaster.
While nuclear disasters are acutely catastrophic, they are also exceptionally rare. In the US, nuclear power has 1/100th the deaths per TWh compared to hydro electric, 1/500th oil, and 1/1000th coal.
I really hope the US can adopt a more aggressive approach to using more fuel, even if that means it may be closer to weapons grade at some point in its cycle. This would eliminate a significant amount of waste leaving catastrophic failure as the only real downside.
I would be very happy with a nuclear+solar future (which is currently my present as well).
The last nuclear meltdown was literally a trillion dollar disaster.
Wind and Solar don't have failure modes like that so you don't even have to think about it.
This is why Nuclear tends to get more expensive over time because nobody can accurately calculate the risk of any design decision, so engineers and managers tend to make them more complex over time.
Not sure 96 minutes will be sufficient in all load-following cases (bar a huge and therefore very expensive fleet of reactors). A gas turbine is way ahead here. Moreover in existing reactors the frequency of such adjustments is limited, for example "no more than twice a day, with a minimal 5-hours pause between modulations, and no more than 150 modulations per year". Approaching limits adds maintenance time (at shutdown state). I don't know if SMRs alleviate this, but given the causes I doubt so.
We will likely have sufficient battery storage where 1.5h would be acceptable though not quite ideal. It still requires quite a bit of storage, but its entirely doable for seasonal variations (the harder problem) and perhaps even daily cycles (the lesser problem).
You make it sound like nuclear is the only solution to this problem. It's not. It's merely a very expensive solution to this problem. There are all sorts of storage options being considered currently that each have their own cost profiles. Some of them are very cheap and simple too. And when solar is basically orders of magnitude cheaper in terms of GW/$, you can afford to have quite a lot more of it than you need to compensate for cheap but relatively inefficient storage options and still be cheaper overall.
As I said in my original post, cost is the key driver here and nuclear has a lot to prove.
You say "always", but the technological progress and price curves indicate that within the next 20 years wind and solar (with batteries) are going to outperform any other source of energy generation by such a large factor and become so cost efficient that it would be ridiculous not to use them exclusively.
> they turn off sometimes when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn’t shining.
Spreading production at continental scale has a major beneficial impact, and such a huge grid is highly beneficial to any type of source (even nuclear).
Are you including the cost of battery storage in solar & wind power generation for 24 / 7 power output? Otherwise Nuclear power is of higher quality since it can be sustained virtually at any time unlike solar & wind
My understanding with the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia is that you could buy solar and batteries for cheaper and deploy sooner. You could throw in a subsidy for electric cars too which can feed back to the grid in an emergency. That said the small reactors of this article will hopefully have lower costs and faster deployment times.
Another advantage of wind and battery is that they aren’t national security targets in the way nuclear is.
I'd hate to be relying on cars feeding back into the grid when a natural disaster happens which encourages people to evacuate, or prepare to evacuate such that they want to ensure their batteries are charged.
I would hate to weather another large and close wildfire where in addition to the normal grid instability and power issues it's exacerbated by lack of expected car feedback resources because people have evacuated or are standing by to.
On the other hand. Nuclear is not immune to natural conditions either. Look at France, currently turning off reactors because of lack of cooling water due to the drought.
Right now the European grid is operational and demand is being met. When winter arrive it is expected that multiple countries will have to start to shut down part of society in order to save the grid.
Thankfully the cooling issue won't hopefully exist during winter, and given how much political outcry will occur if the grid do collapse, France might actually step up and fix their reactors given enough political pressure.
I'm glad the issues in France won't have too bad of an impact. But that's somewhat besides the point. The cause of the electricity shortage is the enormous overreliance on Russian gas and oil. It's not about renewables vs. Nuclear.
The comment I responded to argued nuclear is superior in a situation of crisis, and selects as an example a natural disaster. Wanted to point out that this seems to depend rather sensitively on the kind of crisis.
No, I didn't argue nuclear anything. I merely noted that I would be worried about relying on a resource which we might expect to get scarce during a time when energy instability is already high.
Nuclear plants may or may not be reliable, but outages at multiple nuclear plants are usually not corellated.
Solar is corellated around time of day on a large scale and cloud cover on a more localized scale. Lack of wind sometimes happens to fairly large regions; interconnections to farther away wind farms helps though.
Weather extremes outside the design can result in outages for all kinds of plants though, so a relatively geographically small and isolated grid like Texas, that has many plants unprepared for cold will likely have outages at plants of all types during a bad cold snap; a particularly bad heat wave might cause issues as well.
On the other hand an advantage that solar and wind have is that they are predictable in the medium term. Weather forecasts are fairly reliable predictors of solar & wind output about a week or so out. They also ramp up and down smoothly.
So while grid operators have to be constantly adjusting for solar & wind output variations, they can do so without panic and without customers noticing.
Reactor shutdowns, while rare, are sometimes very unexpected and drop a lot of capacity from the grid very quickly.
This isn't really any more or less true of Nuclear than any other facility. A power outage which took out many of the railways in London a few years back was caused by one of the offshore wind fields tripping from the grid.
Every country. Lack of water in a river is usually correlated to lack of water in the other river close to it (a common cause could be very hot and dry season with no rain for instance)
Let's note that part of them are down now for planned maintenance that had to be delayed because of the pandemic. Hopefully, this is not going to be a recurring event.
Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point".
Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time.
I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing.
Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.
> Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it ...
The people could demand a resolution to the politician's issues which are holding five turbines in Montreal that could be installed in a pipeline which supplies gas to parts of Europe. It is almost like some political segments don't want a resolution before winter.
I'm ready to bet that when all the turbines are back (some already are), if the geopolitical situation is still as complicated, Russia will find another good reason to limit the amount of gas sent to western Europe.
I think the Kremlin is expecting the German electorate to push pressure on their government to ask for a return to the "normal" flow of gas, Ukraine be damned.
That seems like a reasonable bet, but I'm not going to rule surprises out any more.
No one is saying that the grid should be fully nuclear. What we are saying is that wind and solar require another technology to pick up the slack when they have low generation. Currently, that is gas or coal in most places. In the future, it may be large scale long term storage, but that doesn't generally exist.
The only green technology we know about that could replace coal and gas as slack for wind and solar today is nuclear.
Does nuclear cost more than wind and solar? Irrelevant, since wind and solar can't power the whole grid. Does it cost more than coal and gas? Irrelevant, since those need to be stopped or the effects of global warming will destroy our industrial life in 50 years.
Does nuclear cost more than large-scale long-term storage? This is an interesting question, and we don't yet have a good answer, as no one has really tried creating storage for hundreds of megawatts for something like half a year. There is one such storage location in Switzerland, and in fa t it took 14 years to build compared to South Korea's newest nuclear reactor taking 10 years (while also producing 1350MW compared to Switzerland storing 950MW). Is that representative of such costs? Probably not, but who knows.
Well, I should mention hydro as well, though that is very geographically dependent, so it's often not an option at all.
Maybe 6 months is too much, but for example in Europe, you do need more than a month to ensure that your grid actually works even if you have low wind and low sun for that long - at least until you can over-generate so much that you have enough production on a ~14h of sunlight on a cloudy day in winter with low wind you can ensure enough power for the whole day. The farther north you go, the bigger this problem gets - places like Norway or Finland have far less than 14h of sunlight in winter per day, for example, for months.
Why the heck would you rely on solar power in Northern Europe? The North Sea has some of the most reliable winds in the world, and Northern Europe is full of mountains. Use excess winds to pump water up the mountain and use the head to turn a generator on the rare windless days.
IDK what your definition of green is but I'm fine with using gas (methane) to pick up the slack for wind/solar/nuclear if it is made with electrical surpluses from wind/solar/nuclear in a carbon neutral way.
That still requires you to store that gas on bright windy days so you can use it weeks or months later on overcast still nights, so I am lumping it with "storage technologies".
Today, "coal and gas" means using fossil fuels, not renewable coal and gas produced out of CO2 in air, and I expect this to remain true for quite a while longer - the temptation will be too large, given the price difference.
> Nuclear has the opposite problem of wind/solar in that it needs to be run at 100% capacity as much as possible in order to amortize its absurd building costs over its low operating costs.
Can you not make the same argument for wind/solar? If any power generator isn't capable of dumping it's full output onto the grid when possible, it's not going to be profitable. This pdf seems to indicate that wind is allowed to just dump all of their output onto the grid and everyone else has to ramp up or down. Which doesn't give realistic comparisons of cost between the two. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/61721.pdf
Bad phrasing on my part. Wind/solar/nuclear are all basically pure capex with no marginal cost to producing max energy so they all need to be run at 100%.
To handle daily/seasonal energy demands though, you'll want to run any of those all the time and thus dump surplus energy into some type of storage to reduce capex costs and dynamically handle demand with some type of peaker.
So your options are nuclear surplus + storage or wind/solar surplus + storage but why light your money on fire with nuclear creating said storage when wind/solar are 1/3 the cost.
Sometimes wind is free, but some other times, you can’t get it for love or money. Same with solar. This is why they can never be a solution by themselves.
(Until battery technology improves, and please, let me know if that ever happens.)
The point, in this particular subthread, is that wind is so inexpensive so there's no problem if we have to "dump" a lot of unused power windy day. And we can have enough wind so even when it delivers say less than 50% of max, it will be enough. And windy days with a lot of extra capacity, we make hydrogen (or pump mass to higher elevation where practical), even though the efficiency isn't particularly good. When the energy we put in is for free, it doesn't matter that the efficiency is 30% or even 20% for the full cycle.
And this can't be said for nuclear power. It's so expensive to build and run, so it has to run most of the time to make a profit. And this will of course be problem when it sells it output on the same market as wind, where many days the cost of electricity is almost zero.
> The point, in this particular subthread, is that wind is so inexpensive so there's no problem if we have to "dump" a lot of unused power windy day.
Fair enough.
> And windy days with a lot of extra capacity, we make hydrogen (or pump mass to higher elevation where practical), even though the efficiency isn't particularly good.
From what I understand, those are not worth the cost. Is is even remotely feasible to even produce, let alone build, enough solar and/or wind electricity production plants which give enough hydrogen to be able to handle the world’s energy needs? Even in places with extended periods without sun and wind? Until that is true, nuclear seems to be the only alternative left which is not oil, coal, or natural gas.
(Left out is hydro, which, from what I understand, is already built everywhere it can be built.)
Yes, wind/solar require more peaker plants to handle their unreliability compared to nuclear but seeing as nuclear is 3x as expensive, I don't see it as the optimal solution to getting carbon neutral.
Predicting future cost is really, really hard. Future cannot really be extrapolated from the current state of things.
Until 2022, a lot of Europeans counted on cheap Russian gas.
If any kind of cold war breaks out with China, will solar panels be as available as they are today?
Ceteris paribus, I would always keep at least some energy generating capability "at home", without the need to rely on potentially hostile powers or unstable regions. Even if it looked uneconomical at the very moment.
“Will solar panels be as available as they are today”
Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China. In the steady state you need to replace around 3% per year to keep up with panel degradation, but a dependable solar grid has significant excess production so you have wiggle room to build up domestic manufacturing. And you can ramp up alternatives like wind.
Nuclear has more significant systemic risks, which are less obvious. Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance. If they where nearly as dependent on Nuclear as often reported they would be having real trouble right now.
> Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China
> Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance
There is more. Nuclear power requires continual availability of skilled technicians and engineers, replacement parts that need advanced manufacturing, water and other material, access to road and infrastructure.
And a stable socioeconomical and political and legal system. And military defense.
For some developed countries it can already difficult to provide all these things with 100% reliability. Today, before the bigger impact of climate change.
And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?
And they do, what about plutonium and nuclear proliferation?
> And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?
This is hard to read charitably. It seems like a racist remark, not least because there are nuclear power plants in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Maybe you aren't racist yourself, but you presume nuclear power proponents to be racist? The ends justify the means, so you can play into the racial biases of those you oppose?
Suggetsing countries like Afghanistan that have had difficulty maintaining basic infrastructure would have more difficulty safely maintaining more difficult infrastructure like nuclear power plants seems reasonable.
There is nothing racist about suggesting South Africa which is the only Africa country with nuclear power might have better odds than Sudan. Similarly Brazil has safely operated nuclear power plants for decades, but nuclear has faced real logistical issues in South America.
The sad part is that the power grid is exceptional vulnerable to military operations and the single most vulnerable source that caused the loss of more lives than any other energy source during war is hydro power. A single hydroelectric dam has the potential energy of multiple nuclear bombs just waiting for a single fuse to go off, and as demonstrated during the second world war, even a mostly failed attempt to set it off can cause a massive amount of death and destruction.
Attacking hydroelectric dams during war is a major war crime for a big and deadly reason.
If WWII is anything to go by, Dams are a surprisingly difficult target.
Operation Chastise cost 53 RAF killed, 3 captured, and the loss of 8 aircraft. Net result 2 hydroelectric dams destroyed, several damaged, and ~1,600 civilian casualties. And it was only that successful do to high water levels at the dams in question.
The difficulty back then was mostly caused by the technology of the day when targeting was done by hand and sight, and where the pilot flew the plane by looking out from a window and using eye sight and memory to figure out where they were.
Those technical issues of bomber planes are long gone, but the vulnerability of damns are just as they were 80 years ago. A bunker buster would go through the concrete as a knife through butter, and the targeting would be done with laser precision. The navigation and execution would today be done by computers.
A cruise missile and a lancaster has very little in shared technology, and depending on definition isn't even in the same category. The construction of a 1940 hydroelectric damn and a hydroelectric damn in 2022 is basically indistinguishable. Concrete holding up water is concrete holding up water.
The technical issues are still significant because you need to detonate underwater next to the dam making current smart bombs useless. Individual, Bunker busters fail because the hole is too small, it’s easy to patch and doesn't let enough water out to be destructive. Multiple bunker busters used together can work, but it’s still challenging.
If look at the actual dams from WWII you notice they all got damaged about half way up and only blew out a section of the dam. This is because thickness increases dramatically with depth and bombs only have so much energy. They needed the pressure of a dam at near maximum capacity to work, which is why several other dams services just fine.
While I agree there would be issues to solve, bombs like the massive ordnance penetrator seem like it could do some damage with its 30,000-pound load (the dam busters used 9,000-pound loads).
But even if we went with the same 80 year old designs of bombs as in world war 2, the biggest challenges with Operation Chastise has been solved today by the user of precision-guided munition, drones and cruise missiles. The pilots of Operation Chastise had a major challenge flying so low, with such a heavy payload, with a very narrow target window, using technology that was neither precise nor easy to use. They could also not avoid flak from anti-air, and the explosion from the bomb was a major threat to the plane forcing the pilot to balance their own and crewmen life with that of the mission. Misty weather also prevented one plane from even find their target. It was a very risky mission.
The issue with current penetrators is they aren't designed for the mission. Reusing old designs but now with better guidance systems is really designing a new weapon system based on older principles which means a full R&D cycle and hoping people haven't built defenses for such an old approach.
There are three basic angles of attack, from the front, top, and water. Anything that comes in from the front or top and then detonates has a large hole to let energy back out without damaging the structure. The same issue also applies to a water entry with current perpetrators as these things are designed for high speed impacts which creates a large void behind the bomb.
Ideally you want something that lands in exactly the right spot and then slowly sinks to the right depth. And of course no netting to be around the dam to make the mission that much more difficult. Which gets back to my previous point, it’s clearly possible, just technically difficult.
Sure, there have been these two incidents. But whats the real argument here? Do these indicents mean that Ukraine has an intolerably poor track record? I don’t see how it does—especially since one occurred when Ukraine was part of the USSR, which was actually the nation operating the plant, and the other was caused by a neighbor’s aggression.
And the actual point here was about Latin America. Ukraine was just an example. Is it really so implausible to think that, for example, Brazil and Argentina could not safely operate nuclear plants?
The point is if you want to consider how successful a major infrastructure project then you should base things on similar countries. Brazil has multiple nuclear reactors though South America has very few.
If the history of nuclear incidents should tell us anything it’s the importantance of understanding failure modes. To use a Brazil example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
Massive complex infrastructure projects in poor countries often fail to finish or suffer from substandard construction etc.
The Chernobyl explosion happened during Soviet times, 6 years before Ukrainian independence. So I wouldn't blame Ukraine as such for it.
The fact that an aggressor chose Ukrainian nuclear plant as a target and impromptu military dump isn't Ukrainian fault either. This could have happened to Finland or Sweden, too, in case of a Soviet/Russian attack. (Neither country was under NATO's protective umbrella.)
Actually attacking it is on Russia. However, placing troups inside the nuclear power station is on Ukraine. It’s for similar reasons that you don't station troups inside a school, which apparently Ruissa has been doing.
What do you think about the reliability of the global supply chain for uranium ore and fuel rod production? Canada has some high-grade ore but the United States and Europe don't seem to have much at all.
The strategic reserve of sunlight and wind isn't susceptible to disruption due to war or economic collapse. It does take some work to collect that energy, i.e. a domestic PV and turbine and battery manufacturing capacity, but these are not consumables like oil, gas, coal or uranium - they're durable goods that should last for years to decades, and which can be recycled.
Manufacturing of PVs and batteries on a large enough scale (and that means much larger, at least volume- and weight-wise, than a fleet of SMRs) needs enormous amounts of minerals that are produced in either unstable or potentially hostile regions. The sheer energy density of uranium cannot really be downplayed here.
PV’s require minimal rare materials because the part that makes power is only ~1/5000th of a meter thick. It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power.
The casing on the other hand can be made from an extremely wide range of materials. And of course long term you can recycle PV panels because they arn’t consuming the material.
> It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power.
Well, one cubic meter of uranium is ~19000 kg, so not sure what your point was.
And how much raw material needs to be mined and processed to manufacture those rare minerals that generate the power?
Have you accounted for the recycling of uranium? Only a minuscule amount of the energy in fission material goes to generate power and what is left can be recycled over and over again until it is fully "spent".
Exact numbers depend on panel technology, but if you really want to get into the recycling argument stuff that isn’t consumed to generate power is obviously a net win over nuclear fuel. Reprocessing doesn't let you create energy from nothing while solar does let you create energy from material inside the sun.
In term of mining, look at all the material needed to construct and maintain a nuclear powerplant. A significant portion of why nuclear is so expensive is all the stuff needed to build and maintain one.
For your renewable vs nuclear cost, is the cost advantage that obvious?
When price is comparison is done, does it account for lifespan difference, a nuclear reactor last 60 year vs 20 for wind and solar.
That can already triple price of the renewable.
Does it account, that you should build extra capacity of many time what you need because not all the same regions have the same wind and sun exposition at the same time?
You can look how oversize is the installed capacity of Germany [1] compared to France.
Also, I'm not sure for the US but the EU got its solar panel production wiped out by the heavily subsided Chinese industry.
So the rather lower apparent cost of solar by might be partially driven by the Chinese attempt to pump money in to gain market share.
Solar panels can last 50 years. The main reason they don't is that they improve so much every decade that the opportunity cost of doubling power output per square meter makes it worth replacing them.
So you're left with 2 theses:
1: solar panels will stop improving, so you should amortize over 50 years.
2: solar panels will keep improving, so cost / kWh will be less than a 50 year amortization.
> Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.
A lot of these calculations are based on straight line production cost against average power output. They often omit one of the most valuable aspects of nuclear: grid stability. Redundancy is expensive but EXTREMELY important. I see few papers accurately imputing this cost when they conclude that we should all switch to renewables immediately. Here in Europe we can have swings in wind power production in excess of 50% in the span of a day. This is ENORMOUS volatility, and requires some kind of stable power production to offset the slow wind days.
Grids need to be diversified. Solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydro, and definitely nuclear. If not nuclear, we are stuck with coal and LNG for the foreseeable future.
This will just mean that even more renewables will be built up the point where it is economically feasible to store such energy in batteries, heat, hydrogen, synfuels etc. Yes, many of these processes are inefficient, but if you consider wind already being the cheapest mode of electricity generation then after another 50% price decline due to progress in technology we might have electricity for lots of inefficient storage mechanisms.
Storage is of course the way to overcome grid volatility but so far there are few economical options. As I mentioned, few studies have been conducted on this volatility component and cost, but my understanding is that current storage options are uneconomical relative to nuclear, and especially relative to coal and LNG. Hydro storage is ~70% efficient but it's obviously only feasible in mountainous regions. It's actually cheaper to significantly overshoot renewable capacity to compensate for slow days, but if we're now building 2-3x peak capacity then the cost equation shifts considerably.
>At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.
If the costs are so settled, why are countries like China still installing more thermal plants than solar or wind?
You think they would favor the cheaper proven options?
The design might not not be hard but getting it approved is a real pain.
"NuScale completed the first NRC review of an advanced reactor application, and overall the NuScale DCA review was a success. Staff completed review of the first small modular reactor design in 41 months following docketing of the application. The review was thorough; it involved over a quarter million review
hours, about two million pages of documentation made available for review or audit, and about 100 gigabytes of test data." [1]
1/4 of a million review hours!
IIRC, NuScale said they spent about $500 million on getting it approved.
This was the first modular design ever approved. This is really good news and the fact that none of the climate change bills fund the quick ramping up of testing and building this design means that people don't really want quick action on reducing CO2.
How much of NRC regulations are based on 1980’s scaremongering and FUD, vs. real and material risks of Nuclear reactor designs?
I suspect there is some malaise and misallocation of resources where we could benefit from very strict regulations where it really matters.
Reminds me of the story of 3D printers where Stratasys had 80 patents expiring between 2005-2010 and as soon as that happened, 3D printers were all the rage. Sometimes, it’s not the fundamental physics, engineering or manufacturing issues; but purely artificial boundaries created by, in this case, IP regulation (patents).
The next paragraph after the one quoted above gives some hope for reducing unneeded parts of the NRC review process:
"While successful, the level of effort for reviewing the NuScale DCA may not be repeatable for future reviews. Significant resources were expended on issues with little bearing on the safety of the design, matters well beyond the purview of reasonable assurance of adequate protection. Several issues were left unresolved by Staff, which could have been avoided were the recommendations here in place. During the course of review, NuScale identified several overarching problems with the review process and review criteria that could yield significant efficiencies in the review of future applications, without impacting the effectiveness of NRC’s review."
Refering to you 3D printer history, most technologies don't take off till the first round of patents expire. I think one reason tech makes such great strides during war time is that all war related patents are ignored or cross licensed to everyone else.
Unfortunately in the US regulation is technology depended, so the specification might say 'how is your secondary steam loop secured', but of course a molten salt reactor doesn't have steam. You literally can't get approval for anything that is not a PWR. NuScale could kind of slip threw by still being a PWR.
NuScale still had some major challenges, one of the reason they had to pay so much is that they wanted 1 control room to control multiple nuclear reactors. That was partly paid for be the government as it will help others as well.
If you wanted to do anything other then PWR, you basically have to give them a huge amount of money and a design (couple 100M invested to get there) and then they will take a long time (on your cost) and then potentially develop a regulatory framework and then tell you what your design needs to add. So in practice you are gone be down billions and decades before you get something like a molten salt reactor threw approval.
That is why virtually all (at least non DoD) next generation reactors go to Canada to go threw initial deployment. Its hopped that once Canada approves an GenIV reactor other places might be easier to get threw. And thankfully the US is actually looking to Canada and they are considering cross licenses.
> How much of NRC regulations are based on 1980’s scaremongering and FUD, vs. real and material risks of Nuclear reactor designs?
Quite a lot, I think. My dad spent his career in the nuclear industry. I don't know exactly how much interaction he had with the NRC, but he did spend several years working in the relicensing group, so I assume it was a lot. The impression I got from my conversations with him was that there was very much an adversarial relationship -- not collaborative.
I did not work with the nuclear regulators, but I worked plenty with other regulators. Like lots, maybe thousands of hours of interaction. I noticed the tendency among the industry people who interact with regulators to grumble that "they don't even know what questions to ask", etc. I always found that unfair. Of course, as a worker you'd always rather do something else than produce documentation for regulators, but I personally appreciate that the regulators have a job to do, and in my experience they do it well. In many cases I was simply amazed of how thorough they can be.
I spent some time looking at the NRC safety approval of the NuScale design [1]. You look at all those documents published there and realize that they are all necessary. You pick one randomly and open it at a random page, and you don't find superfluous things.
Now, when you have a review that takes millions of man-hours of effort, you'll find cases of irrelevant inquiries. I suspect however that most of these inquires were irrelevant only in hindsight, not because the NRC supervisors were incompetent.
Right, but that's why we it won't be a win until it's generating. We don't know that this manufacturing method will work out better than prior attempts.
The AP1000, was supposed to address construction problems by being able to ship in large parts already constructed. But that failed so miserably that SMRs-long ignored because they weren't thought to be economically efficient-became the last ditch effort to build nuclear. And the AP1000 failed because of all the on-site mismanagement of things as simple as concrete pours.
SMRs are unproven in at least two regards: 1) ability to manufacture in a factory economically, and 2) ability to construct all the on-site infrastructure for the SMR to generate the electricity.
>We don't know that this manufacturing method will work out better than prior attempts.
There are never certainties in anything except in hindsight. Most people with expertise who have reviewed SMR designs (and there are many) believe there's a high probability of the central manufacturing concept being able to work. Factories are a very well known concept at this point.
Renewable builds typically come in within 10% of the contracted cost. You get certainty by installing things in very large quantities, with rapid cycle time.
> ability to construct all the on-site infrastructure for the SMR to generate the electricity.
I'm a little confused by this, as all existing reactor designs required both the reactor and their infrastructure to be built on-site. I'm not sure why you think it would be an open question to just do the infrastructure.
Isn't it a little disingenuous to call this clean energy? It might be carbon free energy, but doesn't clean imply that it's not stressing the environment altogether?
The term clean loses its meaning if you include the production phase. There is no way to produce any product of any form without impacting the environment in some form.
Especially because you can't really draw a line at that point, as you'll also have to include the production impact of tools and materials which you needed to produce your product. Suddenly, basically everything that happened since industrialization is part of the equation.
The world is warming rapidly, we don't have time to piddle around waiting on a 100x improvement in storage tech to make grid scale 100% reliable solar/wind/tidal. There is with nuclear, and we know we can do it. I know to which basket my eggs are going.
Each installed gigawatt of nuclear reactor power, regardless of whether this is twenty 50MW reactors or a single 1000MW reactor, requires on the order of 200 tons of uranium fuel rods per year to operate. By comparison, a 1GW bituminous coal plant burns on the order of 2,750,000 tons of coal per year to achieve the same kind of baseload power output.
However, coal requires no further processing once mined. To get those 200 tons of fuel rods, it can take a varying amount of uranium ore, and the majority of that ore is not high-grade, it's down around 0.1% U3O8 more often than not (there are a few high-grade deposits). So you might have to mine 200,000 tons of ore, extract the uranium in the form of yellowcake, convert that to uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment from ~0.7% to (apparently) 4.95% for the NuScale design, and then convert the gas to solid uranium oxide and package it in a fuel rod. This is a pretty intensive industrial process just to make the required fuel and is neither cheap nor all that clean.
If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity.
In terms of greenhouse gas emmissions, it's very clean. That's the whole point of bothering with green energy.
"If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity."
Unsurprising - things that exist are generally more expensive than things that don't. I'm not sure how you can even assess the cost of storing the power from those sources to compare them.
Until a realistic method of storing that energy is created (if it ever is), nuclear as well as waste-incineration and hydroelectric are superior by virtue of being viable.
For #2, I’m interested in an energy cost comparison, including the cost of ongoing maintenance, too. Solar and wind seem like an obvious investment in our future.
I don’t know about the quality of “nuclearasia.com,” but I found an interesting anecdote that more directly answered the question “how much raw ore converts to a how much fuel rod?” The answer is that
* 2.5 tons of uranium ore = 1kg fuel
* 1kg uranium fuel = same energy output as 100 tons of coal
* 2.5 tons of uranium ore = same energy output as 100 tons of coal
> Even if you take a relatively poor ore (with a uranium content of 0.2%), it turns out that to produce 1 kg of enriched uranium fuel you need approximately 2.5 tonnes of uranium ore. If we recall that one kilogram of enriched uranium contains the energy “equivalent" of 100 tonnes of coal, it turns out that to produce the same amount of energy you would need 40 times less ore compared to the same amount of coal. Another advantage is that coal has to be delivered to the station in “bulk”
but there is no need to ship uranium ore far from the place of extraction. Uranium and uranium fuel take much less space than coal, and this means a dramatic reduction in transportation costs.
What I’d like to know is the overall cost (mining, processing, transportation, handling/disposal, and maintenance) in terms of $/energy. I would think that individual energy plants could provide this information.
We can estimate this for nuclear pretty easily. From the UxC cost calculator[1], we can see the various components that go into getting mined ore, converting it, and enriching it. At today's prices, let's call it $2000/kgU. We need to add fabrication, transportation, and carrying costs to that. Let's call fabrication $250/kgU[2] and throw on another $50 for transport and misc costs, giving us $2500/kgU for finished fuel. Assuming we burn our fuel to a an average discharge burn of 50 GWd/MTU and the plant is operating at about 34% electrical efficiency, that works out to 0.6 cents/kWh for nuclear fuel.
On to disposal, in the US utilities were previously charged 0.1 cents/kWh for disposal; utilities haven't been charged this fee since 2014 due to a disposal route not being available[3], although DOE retains responsibility for disposing of civilian nuclear waste.
On top of that you have the plant's O&M costs, which are probably another 0.8-1.0 cents or so/kWh.
Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap.
If you have solid fuel rods, you have meltdown danger, you can't use up all the fissile material, there's no breeding, extraction of fission products. It's under a lot of pressure, so besides meltdown you have other dangers. Solid fuel rods can only use the very tiny percentage of uranium that is naturally fissile.
This is simply not a good design for a nuclear reactor. The LFTR design has meltdown proof operation, no pressurized water, near 100% use of fuel, can burn/breed old solid fuel waste, can breed more fuel from plentiful thorium, and can scale down to closet-sized reactors.
Pebble bed also shares some of these aspects, and I assume there are other new generation designs with advantages.
But this is just more of the same bad design reactors. Oh great, it got spitshined and scaled down and passed approvals.
What nuclear needs to be relevant is to tackle meltdown danger and nuclear waste. LFTR addresses both and any future reactor needs to address both. Perhaps LFTR could be a "waste processor" if LFTR isn't economical enough, while other meltdown proof designs do more economical generation in a sort of large scale web.
You know what killed nuclear power? The moving targets of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Was the NRC out to make life hard for new nuclear power plant construction? Some claim that, but I chose to believe that they were just doing their job. As more corner cases were discovered in the operation of the existing power plants, the regulations had to be upgraded to deal with them.
This process will continue, that's for sure. But fewer corner cases will be discovered for PWRs than for new technologies. For the reason that in the US the experience with PWR is at least two orders of magnitude higher than with any other nuclear technology.
Still, it took Nuscale 6 years to get their approval, 2 million man-hours and half a billion dollars. Whatever estimate they have for the time their first reactor goes online (2030 currently), it might be delayed because of new regulatory changes. But at least they have a proven design. If someone is trying a new design, the chance of delays increases one hundred times.
I love new technology. I am personally rooting for the gas cooled fast reactors (like Xe-100) or for the sodium cooled fast reactors (like Terrapower's Natrium).
> You know what killed nuclear power? The moving targets of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Uh, massive political pushback from environmentalists starting in the 70s leading to less nuclear and more fossil fuel plants, because somehow they were (and continue to be in parts of the world) much more strongly and rigidly opposed to NPPs than coal and gas power plants.
What killed nuclear in the 1970s was a combination of things. First, NPPs turned out to be more expensive to build than vendors had promised. Second, electricity demand suddenly stopped growing as it had been. Third, PURPA passed, allowing non-utility producers onto the grid (ostensibly for cogeneration, although many were cogeneration in name only.)
To the extent regulation bit nuclear, it was because of NEPA, which affects all industry not just nuclear. The AEC has tried pretend this didn't apply to nuclear but the Calvert Cliffs decision at SCOTUS said otherwise.
2+3 together meant utilities suddenly were in an environment where adding new GW capacity was a hard sell to state regulatory boards, and 1 made it even harder.
Sure, environmentalists complained about nuclear, but don't infer that just because they complained, they caused nuclear to fail. Correlation != causation.
The nuclear wind-down happened in many Western countries and can't be explained solely by US-specific legislation.
The Swedes decided after TMI to not pursue nuclear power. Austria built a reactor and a referendum prevented it from coming online in 1978, with Austria prohibiting nuclear power the same year outright. Spain stopped construction of new NPPs in the 80s because the Socialists were against it. German Konvoi (3rd gen series PWR) was killed for good after Chernobyl, though I grant you it also suffered higher-than-expected costs due to each state having different legal requirements. The only Konvoi plants that went online did so shortly after Chernobyl, because construction was essentially done at that point. Italy shut down their NPPs after Chernobyl and prohibited construction of new plants in '87. etc.
Same thing happened in Germany more recently and more rumblings in France as well although they've gone kind of quiet given the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine.
> Ok, sure maybe it's smaller than a PWR behemoth. It's still solid fuel rod crap.
Yes, "solid fuel rod crap" same as used in every other production nuclear power plant? This SMR sounds like it might actually get built.
One of the biggest issue that SMRs try to solve is the inability of (western) nations to build nuclear plants - which itself has myriad causes, but a big one is the difficulty in building any massive facility without cost and schedule overruns
~~Few plants built after the non-proliferation treaty, because many plants were subsidized by proliferation needs.~~ (not true, see comments for correction) Nuclear plants don't even really pay insurance, they have $15 billion liability cap on the entire industry, when there are possible $1 trillion+ single incident disaster scenarios.
Our first change should be that nuclear plants have to pay enough insurance to cover their full liability. Better to tax fossil than just hand out huge nuclear subsidies that risk safety. Let them both account for their risk and externalities individually.
The Price Anderson Nuclear Indemnities Act was supposed to be temporary while the insurance industry for things stabilized:
> The act was intended to be temporary, and to expire in August 1967 as it was assumed that once the companies had demonstrated a record of safe operation they would be able to obtain insurance in the private market.
There are some similar liability caps on oil spills and dam failures that should also be removed.
> Few plants built after the non-proliferation treaty, because many plants were subsidized by proliferation needs.
This is incorrect. Looking at the list[1], only 2 remaining reactors in Canada were built before the NPT was complete, and they're both scheduled to shut down in 2024. So essentially the entire Canadian nuke fleet was built after. Same thing for France. And Germany.
For the US, also same - only a few that started construction before the 1968 signing remain working. Most operational plants started construction in the 1969-1976 range.
There are a number of First-of-a-Kind SMR and Micro Reactors planned for the U.S., UK, and Canada. The advantage of the three leading lightwater SMRs (NuScale VOYGR, GE Hitachi BWRX-3000, and Rolls Royce SMR) are fast time to market due to the existing supply chain and continuous innovation on well understood technology. The problem is not so much the solid fuel, but the Zirconium clad fuel bundles that produce explosive hydrogen gas during Loss-of-Coolant-Accidents (LOCA). Accident Tolerant Fuels are being deployed now and may be another important innovation that reduces the likelihood of meltdowns but these systems also address the main sources of LOCAs: 1. isolation condenser system (ICS) replace pressure release valves that caused the Three Mile Island accident, and 2. passive coolant circulation systems that don't require external/backup power like the ones that failed during the Fukushima accident.
The problem with this class of lightwater SMR is that they are essentially base load power and the projected Nth-of-a-Kind costs will be competitive with fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) at best but are not cost competitive nor a good complement to intermittent renewables (wind and solar). They are a good slot-in replacement for existing coal fired plants.
There are also a number of Advanced SMRs and Micro Reactors (mobile and campus-size) that have announced First-of-a-Kind builds like the X-Energy Xe-100, TerraPower/GE Hitachi Natrium, ARC-100, Moltex SSR-W, USNC MMR, Xe-Mobile, and Westinghouse eVinci. These designs compete on a much larger landscape of theoretical trade-offs that may leapfrog the lightwater SMRs. I prefer this diverse mix of technologies and applications over a single anointed technology like Liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs). YMMV.
Same here, as far as I'm aware Thorium salt reactors are still solidly in the experimental stages. Demanding a switch to something that isn't ready yet strikes me as making perfection the enemy of better.
I'm definitely not saying LFTR has the materials solved. But liquid fuel leaks lead to immediate loss of neutron economy and the reaction stops.
Solid fuel rods are always at risk of meltdown because once the solid fuel starts chain reacting out of control, you can't separate the fuel apart and stop the chain reaction. You're basically praying the moderators will slow it down.
I believe pebble bed relies on small chunks of solid uranium, and if there is a meltdown risk, you separate the pebbles apart and like LFTR liquid safety pools and plugs, that kills the neutron economy and reactions stop.
If the MSR vessel leaked from corrosion, it would likely fall into the safety pool and simply lose criticality.
Anyway, I'm not advocating for LFTR to the exclusion of all other things. Just that solid fuel issues: lots of waste, meltdown danger, are just not palatable when there are designs and approaches that eliminate them.
I don't care if it's "the only way that currently works", that is the "old guard" of nuclear protecting their current economic interests, not producing a nuclear design that is ACTUALLY next generation that will have relevance in a power generation ecosystem that will be dominated by solar, wind, and storage.
Nuclear is already not price competitive. New nuclear projects will come online in 5-10 years in best case, and that's 5-10 years of wind/solar hitting economies of scale and research improvement (which are improving at 5-20% geometric improvements year on year), and battery storage is seeing high density LFP and sodium ion designs come into production.
I simply view this approval as a rehash of old crappy design from the entrenched nuclear economic interests. Even with this rehash, it won't be remotely price competitive.
Here's the thing with scalability and waste: If you scale it down, it's in a LOT more places, and then if you hae substantial waste generation, that is a LOT LOT LOT more transport issues and concerns with dirty bomb nuclear, crashes, accidents in transport.
So that's why near-100% fuel use of LFTR is so important with scalability. Nuclear dismisses the NIMBYism, but the concerns over waste transport are real.
Unfortunately true. The molten salt solar concentrators couldn’t make it economical with a free source of heat. Replacing the heat source with a fission reaction only adds complexity to a system that’s already too difficult to maintain.
Couldn’t this be a stepping stone though? It seems to be a move in the right direction at least. Once costs come down they’ll be more investment in the tech you mentioned.
Also this one does seem to have a good failsafe even though it has those risks.
That's why I don't want to say "WE NEED TO USE LFTR".
But the LFTR features are what we need in next gen nuclear: meltdown proof, full fuel use / vast waste reduction, scalable.
Oak Ridge National Lab had a molten salt reactor that was closet-sized that they were working on. So it existed. Were all materials issues solved for a high temperature molten salt with all those neutrons flying around from breeding? No.
China is (somewhat thankfully, why does fucking CHINA have to represent the major economic funding for solar, wind, batteries, and nuclear solutions to global warming?) bringing an MSR/LFTR online at utility scale in a couple years.
But the point is I don't see nuclear being a viable solution unless it alleviates the Fukushima risk (unexpected meltdown) and the nuclear waste NIMBY issues. Scalability is necessary for economic viability.
The Chinese system of government is demonstrating itself capable of funding and following through on long-term, large-scale public infrastructure in a way the American system currently struggles to match. Westerners could perhaps ask why this is the case, study the differences, and take some notes from the Chinese in this and some other areas. That doesn't mean sacrificing desirable characteristics of the western system, and it doesn't mean Chinese governance doesn't have its own problems. It means we can all learn from one another in pursuit of improvement. Is this a controversial position?
Because it is also demonstrating itself capable of suppressing all personal freedom, constant surveillance of its populace, and genocide of entire cultures. The US also has its problems, but there is no reason we can't fund the same types of projects without autocratic, genocidal tendencies.
The waste storage (Yucca mountain, find some geological scale safe place) would seem to, but again we run into the "old nuclear" view of things.
Fukushima showed the flawed thinking that underpins "old nuclear": well, we have fixed the risks for everyday conditions ... that is, we put the minimum amount of required thought into safety from a political but not a fundamental design aspect.
Waste TRANSPORT falls into this. Are we pretending that this isn't the transport of nuclear dirty bomb material? That's the fundamental issue. Sure it can be safe when it gets there, but the security of the waste in transport and the other dangers is just too high. I mean, a deer crossing the road could cause a crash and spill. Tire blowouts. etc.
And there are just too many examples of corporations not giving a shit about truly dealing with environmental/waste/pollution procedures. Look at the fracking industry, they likely poisoned a great deal of water tables and other widespread effects, but didn't care in the least. They could get away with it.
For waste storage, we can have some regulatory rubberstamp that "it is compliant" but all we need is some spill or something similar and you have nuclear waste in the water table. Great.
Power generation and nuclear generation companies are full of conservative and environmental-hostile people. I don't know why this is, but it is, and it is another big issue with "old nuclear". I suspect it is a combination of the military origin of nuclear technology, regulatory fatigue, and the contempt of the Greenpeace antinuke types. But it is a fundamental organizational and culture problem of the nuclear industry. These organizations are hostile to the safety regulations and environmental concerns to the point that they will do the absolute minimum or backburner the risk mitigations.
So that's why I view the LFTR's near-100% fuel use as a critical aspect of a next gen nuclear approach. It eliminates the problem of waste, and instead changes it to an efficiency challenge. There is no waste issue to deal with so it won't be down-prioritized on contemptuously viewed. No NIMBY issues on transport and storage.
> Are we pretending that this isn't the transport of nuclear dirty bomb material
How are you proposing that someone could even open a cask with nefarious purposes and build a bomb without receiving a fatal dose of radiation? Dirty bombs basically aren’t a thing anyway. They would require a lot of material since the heavy and dangerous isotopes wouldn’t hang in the air for long or go very far. To get all of that in the air you need a very large bomb. Essentially your looking T something like a truck bomb that would be hot enough to cook the driver. Totally impractical.
Indeed. It's not costly to just put spent fuel in dry casks. At least, if one has solid fuel elements. I'm not sure how the molten salt people propose to do it.
It seems to me that the nuclear lobby is particularly active these days. My impression is that the window for nuclear is rapidly closing. The alternative (wind, solar and batteries) is becoming cheaper and cheaper (even Texas is adopting it). Soon nuclear will be completely irrelevant.
It's never an "or" thing, it's an "and" thing, we need both. The more renewable we have, the better, but for a base-load it's hard to have this everywhere and batteries are far from an ideal solution. We don't need nuclear to replace wind/solar, we need it to replace the oil/coal/gas which we can't seem to get rid of for that base-load.
And Texas has a lot of sun during moments with peak usage (aircos) - so it you'd have to be an absolute moron not to see the advantages there, but for example in Germany they're going backwards here, they use coal and gas to replace nuclear - in a time where our primary focus should be on producing as little CO2 as possible - which is just another level of stupidity.
How about the world installs such an excess of solar/wind/renewable that the even the lowest variable takes care of the base-load?
I don't know ... call me suspicious ... but having Ukraine and and Russia fighting in amongst a nuclear reactor gives me the willies.
Something previously unthinkable. Until the unthinkable becomes thunk.
You don't know what's around the corner. And those in support of nuclear have such a hard-on about it that they're starting to sound like the crypto cult. I'm not convinced.
> And those in support of nuclear have such a hard-on about it that they're starting to sound like the crypto cult.
Please don't. There are plenty of valid reasons to support more nuclear power, there are plenty of valid reasons to oppose it, but there are no good reasons to go ad hominem.
Who is the "nuclear lobby"? I'd be interested to know about which industrial interests are pushing the government for nuclear investment. I was under the impression there weren't many, especially compared to the fossil fuel and environmental lobbies (although nothing really compares to the omnipotent fossil fuel lobby, I guess).
I suppose it depends on the country, but nuclear power (with the exception of the just-approved SMR) is generally produced by large industrial conglomerates.
The US lost its own companies due to mergers, but there is certainly an industrial complex in, say, France, where Areva was bailed out and restructured by the state, or Japan, where TEPCO enjoyed a close relationship to the government.
You don't need to focus only on batteries. You could also generate heat and store that for later use or hydrogen or other synfuels. Once you give consumers price incentives to follow current production, many things are possible (for instance running washing machines when power is cheapest etc.)
Storage batteries are now LiFePO4. Lithium, Iron and Phosphate are all incredibly common worldwide. The latter 2 are already being mined in massive quantities for other uses, batteries would not use a noticeable portion of that output.
Battery minerals are not an issue, as you say. I'm still worried about the electrolytes and stuff - not in scarcity, but eventual pollution. They don't typically advertise them and I have a hunch they are nasty stuff.
That's even more of a problem with the uranium ore required to feed into fuel rod production, however. Battery materials like lithium-iron are also quite recyclable.
The United States today has close to 100 GW of nuclear power plants installed (almost all built decades ago). Most uranium ore bodies seem to hover around 1.0 - 0.1 % uranium by mass. Each GW appears to require about 200 tons of pure uranium (enriched somewhat from the natural 0.7% U235). Assuming we take an average, that's on the order of (200 tons of ore/ton of fuel) * (20,000 tons of fuel rods per year) = ~4 million tons of ore per year (non recyclable).
Or you know tech nerds have looked at current "green" solutions and found them wanting and want action now with reliable proven energy sources? Until there is grid scale power storage that can handle a week long outage and peaks and valleys of typical grid system most of us will be skeptical of wind and solar as the main solution.
Can someone correct me if I'm wrong but I remember one of the reasons the RMBK reactor is so large was because there are efficiency gains with a large reactor (among other reasons you lose fast neutrons at a higher rate in a smaller volume right?). How do these small modular reactors get around this?
i thought fuel cost for nuclear was a teeny tiny part of the cost and maintenance, safety, day to day operations were the real money sink. So why does a bit more cost matter even if it's 10x?
Personally, I have no idea. Smaller reactors have larger fuel costs, and some mixed results on investment costs. The also have as simplified operation. I have no idea what side the net result turns on.
Anyway, the one thing that I know is that a really large share of their initial costs comes from the small scale they are built. If smaller reactors work commercially, the costs may become more similar to coal.
With nuclear, efficiency really doesn’t matter that much. It’s not the cost of the fuel that matters almost at all, it’s the cost of the reactor itself. The cost of the fuel and the efficiency of using that fuel is really a secondary cost compared to building the reactor in the first place, and operating the reactor with people
> Claims resulting from nuclear accidents are covered under Price-Anderson; for that reason, all U.S. property and liability insurance policies exclude nuclear accidents. Claims can include any incident (including those caused by theft or sabotage) in transporting nuclear fuel to a reactor site, storing nuclear fuel or waste at a site; during operation of a reactor, including the discharge of radioactive effluent; and transporting irradiated nuclear fuel and nuclear waste from the reactor.
> The Act establishes a no fault insurance-type system in which the first approximately $15 billion (as of 2021) is industry-funded as described in the Act. Any claims above the $12.6 billion would be covered by a Congressional mandate to retroactively increase nuclear utility liability or would be covered by the federal government.
Let me try again, since I was snotty and got flagged.
This is not a kosher industry. It reaches its influence into the academic realm and has an epic PR budget. It can take advantage of the obscurity of the tech to promote talking points that seem quite reasonable, but generally mask a desire by energy suppliers to maintain the current means of distribution.
And a good part of that PR budget certain goes into negative marketing against wind and solar, specifically because they are disruptive to the distribution model. Profit. There's no conspiracy theory in profit. We know that's what industries want. And historically, industries are not invested in public safety to the extent that it cuts into profits.
So then, why does anyone TRUST the nuclear industry. And even if we do, why would we EVER trust governments to regulate that technology, given that history of absolutely clear about the likelihood of self-regulation?
All I see is billions spent to keep power generation out of our homes. Wind and solar are ready to deploy and yet people seem to suggest that tech in development, which might not be ready of commercial application for a decade, are the solution to our problems?
I highly encourage you to look at this factsheet I only just found today [1]. Some highlights:
> - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) includes the lifetime costs of building, operating, maintaining, and fueling a power plant. Estimated LCOE for plants built in the near future are: combined cycle natural gas: 3.71 ¢/kWh; advanced nuclear: 6.31 ¢/kWh; and biomass: 8.92 ¢/kWh
and
> - Spent fuel is placed in a storage pool of circulating cooled water to absorb heat and block the high radioactivity of fission products
> - Many U.S. spent fuel pools are reaching capacity, necessitating the use of dry cask storage.
This point is often overlooked. Nuclear waste generates heat. It needs to be actively cooled, possibly for a decade or longer, until it can be stored in dry storage. There's transportation risk there (for tens of thousands of tons per year at current rates) and facilities that need to be maintained to do that. Plus adding water increases the risk of site contamination.
Also consider:
> - ... Managing nuclear waste requires very long-term planning. U.S. EPA was required to set radiation exposure limits in permanent waste storage facilities over an unprecedented timeframe—one million years
> - The U.S. has no permanent storage site.
TIL:
> - The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
WHY?
This is the big problem with nuclear: failure modes have incredibly high cost but relatively low likelihood. Companies have limited liability so they get to pocket the profits for under-maintaining plants and move the costs to the government.
In addition to being a bad idea this presents a falsely cheap picture of the true costs of nuclear power.
In this same vein:
> - The Nuclear Waste Policy Act required the U.S. federal government to begin taking control of spent nuclear fuel in 1998.
Another cost shifted to the government.
EDIT: over the years I've learned that the more rabid one side of an argument is, the more likely they are to simply downvote anything they disagree with, regardless of the merit. This, sadly, is my experience with nuclear on HN (which isn't plagued with downvote-as-disagreement like, say, Reddit is). It's not a reason to be anti-nuclear but it sure makes it hard to be swayed by pro-nuclear arguments.
I don't necessarily agree with this comment, but I do agree that it's sad this is getting downvotes. The comment is thoughtful and I learned something from it.
I support building more reactors but I don't support reflexively shouting down commenters which take the opposite stance.
I support _every_ method of power generation getting this treatment. But it's only nuclear that's held to this standard. No other source routinely has all deaths in the life cycle from ground to ground counted as part of a piece that's essentially a press release.
Imagine if we had a solar article that started with:
>While promising the new solar cell tech does nothing to address the ever increasing number of deaths associated with roof top solar, which has surpassed Chernobyl as of 2015.
You'd call that article a coal industry hit job. Yet this is exactly what the OP's article does.
The difference is that installation of solar panels without adhering to industry safety standards affects the individual, which makes the decision and profits from it, only. In case of nuclear and coal, consequences are shifted from the individuals, which make decisions and profits from them, to completely innocent people.
It's written in clear text about this responsibility shifting in the comment, but you continue to do that responsibility shifting.
I'm affected by Chornobyl, my parents are affected by Choronobyl, my brothers are affected by Chornobyl, my children are affected by Chornobyl, while we have zero profit from nuclear energy, and nobody asked our consent when the nuclear station was constructed. Moreover, our then government (Moscow) tried to hide all facts about tragedy, while our current government postponing research about cancer induced by Chornobyl radioactive pollution, so people like you can continue to claim that only few people killed by Chornobyl while thousands die every year due to increased levels of cancer.
The difference is that the costs of solar are hidden behind flowery language.
Until people become honest that solar without batteries is impossible and we don't have the technology to store a days worth of energy then any comparison is misleading at best and a disaster at worst. Germany is looking at a winter where people may well freeze to death if Putin decides they should.
Nuclear might sound bad when you know all the details about it. Renewables are just propaganda until their downsides are aired just as publicly.
We don't live in a world where we get everything we want. Nuclear accidents are the only way we can have a first world life style with current technology without killing billions in 30 years from climate change. The longer we keep lying about this the more people will die.
A bit of radioactive waste is the least of our worries relative to global warming from CO2 and not all nuclear produces waste that lasts thousands of years. Some newer nuclear plants cannot melt down and have no risk of killing people by radiation.
Right now we don't have sufficient means to produce excess or store solar power for nighttimes or wind for windless times. Nuclear can make up the difference when solar and/or wind are insufficient. It's the best interim solution we have. Without nuclear, temperatures will become much higher than if we build more nuclear.
>This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity.
We could have Nuclear Fusion but we will still using turbine to generate electricity. :P
>these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.
>nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.
Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer? Edit: Solar and Wind aren't constant, and nuclear waste is a solved problem.
>SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.
I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?
>Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
Nobody has managed to build even an experimental fusion reactor that produces more power than is necessary to start each reaction cycle... unless you count bombs.
Assuming we did, to get away from mechanical turbines and generators as the heat->motion->electricity step would require a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator -- which have had more success but still face serious material issues.
As for "why does it take so long?" -- the first of anything takes longer. And the US has terrible problems in building anything new or big.
We have more knowledge of the terrible ways things go wrong.
A bridge has failure consequences that are predictable: bridge breaks, people on the bridge die, local economy suffers. All of those are understandable by an elementary school student playing with toys and imagining the town around it.
The failure consequences of fission plants were not known to include things that had to be discovered years after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Not to mention -- who knew that exhausting hot non-radioactive water into a river could be bad for it?
Let's also include the US propensity to fall victim to charlatanry: enough of us want to believe so much, we will give lots of money to Juicero, uBeam, and Nigerian Princes. (Hyperloop, cough.)
So if you want to do something big, it needs to be well-understood. If you want to do something new, it needs to be proven and well-examined.
>> Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
> Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
The NuScale VOYAGR, in particular, is a really big SMR in terms of [plant size]/[megawatt]. The economies of SMR come when you can reduce that footprint by making smaller safety systems or eliminating active safety features (because the plant is small enough not to need them) AND factory-build them with on-site assembly. Other SMR designs seem to have more promising ideas for doing both, but NuScale's is just too big. (There are also micro-reactors that optimize for replacing diesel engines and gas turbines with a very small footprint at the tradeoff of cost.)
>I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
There's a lot going between "approved today" and "SMR online": particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first). It's very conceivable to me that the Nth SMR could be a ~3ish year project, but longer for the FOAK unit is almost inevitable.
Thank You. I should have read the article more carefully. It does state the reactor "consists of a 76-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide cylindrical containment vessel that houses the reactor". Looks like NuScale's SMR doesn't fit my mental model of SMRs. I was thinking SMRs size that could easily fit within a 40ft container.
>particularly that factory infrastructure needs to come on line and site licensing need to happen, and then the plant needs to get commissioned after it is built (which takes longer for the first).
Oh Ok. So it is only the "design" that has been approved. ( Again I should have read it carefully ). No wonder why it is taking so long.
I argue the opposite, a steam turbine maxes out at about 37% efficiency.
The inefficiency and massive capital costs of of steam turbines is a major reason why natural gas is so much cheaper than coal or fission -- natgas uses a combined cycle turbine rather than a steam turbine.
I believe modern heat --> electric conversion systems use the turbine and several other additional heat --> electricity recapture systems to approach 50-60% efficiency at large scales so they can beat the Carnot Limit of just the turbine engine.
LFTR presentations said they could use the brayton cycle I think due to high temps, I'd imagine a fusion would also have the temps to enable brayton cycle and several other tricks to achieve good efficiency.
Remember, what matters at scale is cost cost cost. Turbines might not be sexy, but if they are cheap, then that is what you use.
> Remember, what matters at scale is cost cost cost. Turbines might not be sexy, but if they are cheap, then that is what you use.
Exactly. Turbines (along with the accompanying water treatment, condensers, generators, power transformation) aren't cheap. A 600MW coal plant costs $2B.
Wind and photovoltaics just skip the heat part in the cycle. Electricity is generated without converting heat to kinetic energy.
This is also the case of helion energy fusion solution. Aneutronic fusion with direct energy conversion. No heat in the cycle.
The issue with these thermal power solutions is the waste heat. It means you need water nearby to cool down your reactor. Side effect: thermal pollution, raising the temp of rivers and/or coastals water is detrimental to ecosystems. Plus: how do you deal with droughts?
There's a difference between "best possible efficiency" and "efficient," and I would argue that anything <75% efficiency is not "very efficient." Especially since a lot of people look to nuclear for applications in space, where it's hard to dissipate all that waste heat.
Turbines are a great, mature technology. The SMR alone is new enough.
Imagine writing a piece of software that needs to parse XML. It is probably better just to use an existing library for that, instead of reinventing the wheel.
> >This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity.
> We could have Nuclear Fusion but we are still using turbine to generate electricity. :P
This is actually one of the main points of why the whole talk about "economies of scale" for nuclear just doesn't make much sense. More than 50% of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any other thermoelectric plant. Despite the many power plants being build we haven't seen a this elusive cost reduction. Construction projects (in contrast to things build in factories) don't lend themselves to economies of scale (in terms of building many).
There was an HN submission that analysed the cost of a nuclear plant and showed that there is really not much room for any economies of scale reductions.
> >these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.
> >nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly.
> Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer?
> >SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.
Yes that's always the weird part of the discussion. There are reasons why nuclear plants are build large, it's cheaper.
> I thought the whole point of SMRs were economy of scale?
> >Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScale’s first project over cost concerns.
> Anyone could chime in here? Was it because NuScale is too expensive?
> I was expecting SMRs, once approved could be built much more quickly. I was thinking in terms of 3 years with perfect project planning. But right now even the earliest ( and likely optimistic ) first SMRs site is 2030. Why does it take so long?
It's also not necessary and is probably already outdated and won't be funded if was achieved today.
See fusion this way: it's like a coal power plant with infinite free coal (because the rest of it is the same - turbines, water treatment, condensers, generators, power transformation and transmission - and thermonuclear reactor will for sure never be cheaper than a coal-fired steam boiler). Which means, electricity cost will be same as of a coal plant minus the price of coal. Which will already be above cost of most renewable sources and, once electrolyzers for green hydrogen will start coming online, remembering that barely 15% of renewable electricity will need to be passed through them (rest can simply be balanced by different renewables), will still be sort of competitive.
And we don't have fusion yet, while renewables will keep getting cheaper.
Coal plants are comprehensively more expensive than solar/wind, as are current design nuclear plants, perhaps that's because of coal prices.
The other aspects of fusion get swept under the rug: high speed neutrons from sustained fusion energy production will degrade the equipment, so you build this HUGE EXPENSIVE facility and it will have a shelf life, and be somewhat radioactive, in ... well, I don't know the timeline, but I'll assume decades.
Even without that, fusion costs even with "free" fuel (I mean, it will probably be deuterium and separation will cost some money) will probably be quite high for operation, maintenance, to say nothing of the massive installation cost.
I think it is still worth the current investment in research though, it's not like I want the book closed on fusion power. But I wouldn't count on it getting us out of the global warming hole we are in.
That was exactly my point. And fusion can't probably be cheaper than "coal plant on free coal" for the reasons i have explained. So nah, it's not going to happen. Too late.
> Why are we repeating these same questions when we already have an answer?
The answer is not solar and wind. For solar and wind to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation will require ramping up mining activity by a factor of a few tens from current levels. Not to mention the fact that we still don't know how to produce solar panels and wind turbines without using fossil fuels - for mining, metallurgy and transport. The numbers are just not there.
The only possible answer is a significant reduction of energy consumption, but it seems very few people are ready to accept it.
"Significant reduction of energy consumption" is only a possible answer if you're able and prepared to suppress the lifestyles of billions of people through any means necessary.
This is a win for clean energy. End of story.
Smaller reactors have maintenance and footprint wins that are hard to appreciate. I think this is one of a few key turning points that are coming up that will help us transition to a better carbon future.
But if not, at least now we have more options which means more competition and more innovation.