3 ms·

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if by cheaper they mean simply cost, rather than cost per MW. Perhaps if you are going to build a traditional nuclear re

by giarc 10y ago

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if by cheaper they mean simply cost, rather than cost per MW. Perhaps if you are going to build a traditional nuclear reactor, you might as well build the 1,150MW, $5 billion reactor, even if you only need 570MW. Thereby generating a bunch of excess energy that you need to sell and transmit somewhere else. If you are a special case (US military base, remote area) and you only want 1 or 2 NuScale modules, and therefore is cheaper.

acidburnNSA 10y ago
I think you're right. There are few customers willing and able to bet the farm on huge nuclear megaprojects. The Small Modular Reactor concept emerged as a response to this. The massive nuclear buildouts are happening in China where the capital and patience exists and there's incentive to invest in hundreds of GWe of long-term sustainable clean-air baseload power. As a nuclear industry person, I wish NuScale very well. I just don't think they're targeting world-scale energy. The name of the game in nuclear innovation is to bring down costs while improving safety and minimizing proliferation and waste. Costs are dominated by construction (fuel costs are <10% of a nuclear venture because nuclear fuel is so energy-dense) so ideas like modularization and standardization are intriguing. Many nukes are built by assembling lots of pre-fab modules to try to take advantage of this. But sometimes the modules show up and don't fit together, costing more and causing long delays. So it will take a while for modular construction to be really figured out enough to make a big impact. For what it's worth, from my view one of the most exciting ideas is to build big nukes on big ships. Sounds crazy but hear me out. You construct in a shipyard which is very controlled and standardized so you can pump them out rapidly and cheaply with high QA. You park them 10km offshore of your customer and run underground cables so there are zero people in your exclusion zone for worst-case accidents. If something goes wrong, you're in the water so you can't run out of cooling and the protective fission product barriers always stay intact. You even design to let it sink, stay intact, and have a pre-planned recovery operation worked out. If you have a fleet of 20 customers, you can have one extra plant that relieves another to go home for maintenance and refueling, allowing very high capacity factors. Russians and Chinese are building nukes on ships already (mostly to power oil rigs and remote areas), and we know the navy nukes work great. Could be fun.
- germinalphrase 10y ago
  Cool idea. Though, wouldn't such a ship-based system be vulnerable to, say, hurricanes? If you're tethered to shore and suppling a population with (their expected) power - you can't exactly maneuver out of the hurricane's path without interrupting service(?). This clearly isn't an everyday occurrence.
  - acidburnNSA 10y ago
    Thanks. That's a key question. Inclement weather is a challenge, but not an unmanageable one. Case in point, behold the Prelude [1], Shell's new 500m long floating LNG facility (and the biggest ship in the world). It is designed to handle a category 5 cyclone off the north-western coast of Australia (the crew may be evacuated beforehand though). You can design ships to handle pretty much anything, for a price. Finding the balance is required. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_FLNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_FLNG Another new concern of offshore nuclear is the physical protection. Can some terrorist in a mini-sub get near it and sink it? With high frequency sonar and whatnot this should be doable. It's probably harder to get to a big ship than to a land-based plant. And again the worst case would be the sink and recover plan.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    The population should be evacuating anyways. And it's much preferable than the alternative, which is lost power and also a meltdown...
- Kaizyn 10y ago
  I don't care for the idea of contaminating the ocean with nuclear radiation in the case of something going wrong with the reactors. That seems like a really bad idea.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    The ocean is really, really, really, really big. Also, "radiation" isn't a substance that can be mixed into things like a poison (with the sort of exception of neutron radiation).

by giarc 10y ago

acidburnNSA 10y ago

I think you're right. There are few customers willing and able to bet the farm on huge nuclear megaprojects. The Small Modular Reactor concept emerged as a response to this. The massive nuclear buildouts are happening in China where the capital and patience exists and there's incentive to invest in hundreds of GWe of long-term sustainable clean-air baseload power. As a nuclear industry person, I wish NuScale very well. I just don't think they're targeting world-scale energy. The name of the game in nuclear innovation is to bring down costs while improving safety and minimizing proliferation and waste. Costs are dominated by construction (fuel costs are <10% of a nuclear venture because nuclear fuel is so energy-dense) so ideas like modularization and standardization are intriguing. Many nukes are built by assembling lots of pre-fab modules to try to take advantage of this. But sometimes the modules show up and don't fit together, costing more and causing long delays. So it will take a while for modular construction to be really figured out enough to make a big impact. For what it's worth, from my view one of the most exciting ideas is to build big nukes on big ships. Sounds crazy but hear me out. You construct in a shipyard which is very controlled and standardized so you can pump them out rapidly and cheaply with high QA. You park them 10km offshore of your customer and run underground cables so there are zero people in your exclusion zone for worst-case accidents. If something goes wrong, you're in the water so you can't run out of cooling and the protective fission product barriers always stay intact. You even design to let it sink, stay intact, and have a pre-planned recovery operation worked out. If you have a fleet of 20 customers, you can have one extra plant that relieves another to go home for maintenance and refueling, allowing very high capacity factors. Russians and Chinese are building nukes on ships already (mostly to power oil rigs and remote areas), and we know the navy nukes work great. Could be fun.

germinalphrase 10y ago
Cool idea. Though, wouldn't such a ship-based system be vulnerable to, say, hurricanes? If you're tethered to shore and suppling a population with (their expected) power - you can't exactly maneuver out of the hurricane's path without interrupting service(?). This clearly isn't an everyday occurrence.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  Thanks. That's a key question. Inclement weather is a challenge, but not an unmanageable one. Case in point, behold the Prelude [1], Shell's new 500m long floating LNG facility (and the biggest ship in the world). It is designed to handle a category 5 cyclone off the north-western coast of Australia (the crew may be evacuated beforehand though). You can design ships to handle pretty much anything, for a price. Finding the balance is required. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_FLNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_FLNG Another new concern of offshore nuclear is the physical protection. Can some terrorist in a mini-sub get near it and sink it? With high frequency sonar and whatnot this should be doable. It's probably harder to get to a big ship than to a land-based plant. And again the worst case would be the sink and recover plan.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  The population should be evacuating anyways. And it's much preferable than the alternative, which is lost power and also a meltdown...
Kaizyn 10y ago
I don't care for the idea of contaminating the ocean with nuclear radiation in the case of something going wrong with the reactors. That seems like a really bad idea.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  The ocean is really, really, really, really big. Also, "radiation" isn't a substance that can be mixed into things like a poison (with the sort of exception of neutron radiation).