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Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear fission. Most have not. Most countries have at least some regions that would be happy t

Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear fission. Most have not. Most countries have at least some regions that would be happy to accept the good, stable employment and tax base offered by a nuclear power plant in exchange for the very slight risk of accidents. So why aren't more fission power plants getting built in countries where they are not formally excluded? I believe the single greatest factor is that they take too long to build and require too large a lump of money, because a single modern reactor is too big. Modern Generation III/III+ reactor designs have actually made this "chunkiness" worse; there's no modern reactor design under 500 MWe that's certified in the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, or the EU. Designs in that lower power range were built decades ago, and a few still run, but now it's big-or-nothing. AP1000 and EPR are 1117 and 1600 MWe, respectively, and all projects using them are behind schedule/over budget. And since these large projects are leading to such poor outcomes for involved companies, it will be difficult to get follow-on orders that will benefit from the hard earned lessons of their initial builds. Even if all the technical problems are solved and fusion proves capable of producing net electricity, fusion power risks hitting this same too-big-to-build problem afflicting fission if it can't scale down. If the only approaches that work are enormous tokamaks with an entry level price of $10-billion-or-more, then they'll be engineering marvels that hardly anyone builds. Maybe they'll someday supply 10% of China's electricity.

dest 9y ago
Maybe someday those power plants will be available in smaller sizes, e.g. for fusion with the discovery of better confinement techniques, or high magnetic field materials
- milcron 9y ago
  Nuclear plants were originally designed small, as for submarines. For some reason the design trend has been towards larger plants. Perhaps for economies of scale? An interesting watch is Adam Curtis' documentary "A is for Atom", which covers the history of nuclear power. It's usually pretty easy to find Adam's content on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc Summary on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Part_6._.27A_Is_for_Atom.27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Pa...
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    The larger reactors were supposed to improve the economics of nuclear power once they reached series production. Making the minimum size larger seems to have impeded progression toward series production, zeroing out (and then some) the expected reduction in cost-per-megawatt from larger units. For example, the 1117 MWe AP1000 design that's driven Westinghouse to bankruptcy derives from the AP600 design of only 600 MWe. After-the-fact criticism is too easy, but it seems to me that Westinghouse and its US partners would have suffered less if they were trying to build 4x 600 MWe reactors, and the projects fell behind schedule/over budget, than in their actual situation where they're behind schedule/over budget on 4x 1117 MWe reactors.
    - otp124 9y ago
      Would it be possible to make them modular? As in, build X number of the best submarine-size reactors and drop them in side-by-side in essentially secure concrete warehouses cooled by water pumped from a nearby lake? Kind of like racking servers is what I'm picturing.
      - philipkglass 9y ago
        That's the "small modular reactor" concept, under development by a few companies. I think that the concept has considerable merits. I hope that it will be tested in practice. I'm pretty bullish on renewables but nuclear power is very low emissions over its life cycle, safe enough (IMO), and nuclear construction capability should be (again IMO) maintained as a complement/alternative to renewable generation for the post-fossil era. For continued viability new nuclear construction needs lower, more predictable costs or steady long-term support from governments; I think that cost improvements would be the better of the two.
        otp124 9y ago
        Sounds like a viable model, thanks!
      - acidburnNSA 9y ago
Spooky23 9y ago
Money. Fission is both expensive and risky.
21 9y ago
Fission was killed by Fukushima. While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise.
- Aron 9y ago
  We've certainly shown that reactors designed in the 60s and built in the 70s are problematic in very rare cases.
  - 21 9y ago
    So you're saying that the nuclear industry was saying before that "yes, we fully agree that we could have a full blown meltdown at one of the older reactors in very rare cases". BTW, how it's a tsunami a very rare case on a decades long horizon? There were warnings about the possibility of a big tsunami. It wasn't a black swan, it was a white one. > A spokesman from the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation [TEPCO] told FRONTLINE that the company was aware of Minoura’s work and was in the process of considering plant modifications in case of a massive tsunami. Fission fails deadly, and humans are really bad at managing these kinds of things (ie: I don't want to pay 200 mil to build a better tsunami barrier for a 1 in a million chance...)
  - logicallee 9y ago
    Like the sibling commenter, I can't parse your sentence and intention except as "we've certainly shown they're not commonly problematic" which is quite a weak statement. Is your sentence a positive sentence (do you mean we've certainly shown they're problematic essentially never) or is your sentence negative (we've certainly shown they're problematic definitely sometimes - which is unacceptable)? I tried to read your attitude but failed.
    - Aron 9y ago
      I was mostly rebuffing the structure of the argument "While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise" which has two different reference classes for reactors (modern safer ones, and less safe fukushima ones).
continuations 9y ago
> Modern Generation III/III+ reactor designs have actually made this "chunkiness" worse; there's no modern reactor design under 500 MWe that's certified in the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, or the EU China has Generation IV pebble bed reactors coming online this year that are smaller (210 MWe) [1]. They would be the world's first Gen IV reactors in production. Would be interesting to see how that goes. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916301552 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916...
- MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
  There was an experimental pebble bed test reactor in Germany. That didn't end well, it will be interesting to see if China does it better.
  - honestoHeminway 9y ago
    A collague of my grandfahther spend most of his lives work errecting that reactor, and then building it back until there was only green fields left where the building did stand. Strange thing to do.
acidburnNSA 9y ago
The South Koreans are building large, Gen-III APR-1400s on time and on budget. They picked a standard design, perfected the project management of constructing them, and can now sell them internationally.
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  South Korea already sold APR-1400 to UAE. Four of them are currently in construction.
hsod 9y ago
For anyone else curious, MWe stands for "megawatt electric". The average American home uses very roughly 1000 watts on average [0], so a 500 MWe plant serves very roughly 500,000 American homes. [0]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 901,000 watt-hours per month / (30 * 24) ~= 1,250 watts
- beojan 9y ago
  An average isn't very helpful here. A single kettle / oven / heater will use 1 kW by itself.
  - theandrewbailey 9y ago
    Not every house will have one of those on at all times. Sure, a house could use many multiples more than 1 kW for a bit, but will go back down eventually.
    - beojan 9y ago
      Yes, that's why an average isn't too meaningful. The times these things are on aren't the same for every house, but they are correlated.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
With the growing understanding of externalizing costs and risks is a bad thing for communities and countries making externalized costs explicit to companies more and more, in many countries energy companies fear they would need to insure their plants which together with sinking costs of solar would make fission too costly and non-competing.
Jedd 9y ago
> Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear fission. Most have not. Most countries have not formally committed to eliminating power from fossil fuels, either - though there's obviously more of a trend in that direction. Point being that past lack of commitment is no indicator of future direction. > Most countries have at least some regions that would be happy to accept the good, stable employment and tax base offered by a nuclear power plant in exchange for the very slight risk of accidents. Given there's 195 countries - 'most' may be misapplied here. I think it's optimistic to believe that there'll be stable employment for more than a handful of people per nuclear fission power plant. Tax legislation comes and goes. And as to slight risk .. I think that's misrepresenting things too. A risk matrix typically takes into account likelihood vs effect. You may be suggesting there's a 'small likelihood', while ignoring the massive potential effects of an incident -- equating to significant actual risk. A review of the history and progress <sic> of the Hinkley nuclear fission power plant in the UK - a country that certainly meets the pro-nuclear-fission requirement - is sobering. This article (from late 2015), and apologies for Telegraph link [1] is highly depressing. The wikipedia page [2] has a few more recent details. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11945485/Nuclear-go-ahead-construction-of-new-plant-to-begin-within-weeks.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

dest 9y ago

Maybe someday those power plants will be available in smaller sizes, e.g. for fusion with the discovery of better confinement techniques, or high magnetic field materials

milcron 9y ago
Nuclear plants were originally designed small, as for submarines. For some reason the design trend has been towards larger plants. Perhaps for economies of scale? An interesting watch is Adam Curtis' documentary "A is for Atom", which covers the history of nuclear power. It's usually pretty easy to find Adam's content on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc Summary on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Part_6._.27A_Is_for_Atom.27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Pa...
- philipkglass 9y ago
  The larger reactors were supposed to improve the economics of nuclear power once they reached series production. Making the minimum size larger seems to have impeded progression toward series production, zeroing out (and then some) the expected reduction in cost-per-megawatt from larger units. For example, the 1117 MWe AP1000 design that's driven Westinghouse to bankruptcy derives from the AP600 design of only 600 MWe. After-the-fact criticism is too easy, but it seems to me that Westinghouse and its US partners would have suffered less if they were trying to build 4x 600 MWe reactors, and the projects fell behind schedule/over budget, than in their actual situation where they're behind schedule/over budget on 4x 1117 MWe reactors.
  - otp124 9y ago
    Would it be possible to make them modular? As in, build X number of the best submarine-size reactors and drop them in side-by-side in essentially secure concrete warehouses cooled by water pumped from a nearby lake? Kind of like racking servers is what I'm picturing.
    - philipkglass 9y ago
      That's the "small modular reactor" concept, under development by a few companies. I think that the concept has considerable merits. I hope that it will be tested in practice. I'm pretty bullish on renewables but nuclear power is very low emissions over its life cycle, safe enough (IMO), and nuclear construction capability should be (again IMO) maintained as a complement/alternative to renewable generation for the post-fossil era. For continued viability new nuclear construction needs lower, more predictable costs or steady long-term support from governments; I think that cost improvements would be the better of the two.
      - otp124 9y ago
        Sounds like a viable model, thanks!
    - acidburnNSA 9y ago

Spooky23 9y ago

Money. Fission is both expensive and risky.

21 9y ago

Fission was killed by Fukushima. While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise.

Aron 9y ago
We've certainly shown that reactors designed in the 60s and built in the 70s are problematic in very rare cases.
- 21 9y ago
  So you're saying that the nuclear industry was saying before that "yes, we fully agree that we could have a full blown meltdown at one of the older reactors in very rare cases". BTW, how it's a tsunami a very rare case on a decades long horizon? There were warnings about the possibility of a big tsunami. It wasn't a black swan, it was a white one. > A spokesman from the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation [TEPCO] told FRONTLINE that the company was aware of Minoura’s work and was in the process of considering plant modifications in case of a massive tsunami. Fission fails deadly, and humans are really bad at managing these kinds of things (ie: I don't want to pay 200 mil to build a better tsunami barrier for a 1 in a million chance...)
- logicallee 9y ago
  Like the sibling commenter, I can't parse your sentence and intention except as "we've certainly shown they're not commonly problematic" which is quite a weak statement. Is your sentence a positive sentence (do you mean we've certainly shown they're problematic essentially never) or is your sentence negative (we've certainly shown they're problematic definitely sometimes - which is unacceptable)? I tried to read your attitude but failed.
  - Aron 9y ago
    I was mostly rebuffing the structure of the argument "While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise" which has two different reference classes for reactors (modern safer ones, and less safe fukushima ones).

continuations 9y ago

> Modern Generation III/III+ reactor designs have actually made this "chunkiness" worse; there's no modern reactor design under 500 MWe that's certified in the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, or the EU China has Generation IV pebble bed reactors coming online this year that are smaller (210 MWe) [1]. They would be the world's first Gen IV reactors in production. Would be interesting to see how that goes. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916301552 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916...

MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
There was an experimental pebble bed test reactor in Germany. That didn't end well, it will be interesting to see if China does it better.
- honestoHeminway 9y ago
  A collague of my grandfahther spend most of his lives work errecting that reactor, and then building it back until there was only green fields left where the building did stand. Strange thing to do.

acidburnNSA 9y ago

The South Koreans are building large, Gen-III APR-1400s on time and on budget. They picked a standard design, perfected the project management of constructing them, and can now sell them internationally.

sanxiyn 9y ago
South Korea already sold APR-1400 to UAE. Four of them are currently in construction.

hsod 9y ago

For anyone else curious, MWe stands for "megawatt electric". The average American home uses very roughly 1000 watts on average [0], so a 500 MWe plant serves very roughly 500,000 American homes. [0]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 901,000 watt-hours per month / (30 * 24) ~= 1,250 watts

beojan 9y ago
An average isn't very helpful here. A single kettle / oven / heater will use 1 kW by itself.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  Not every house will have one of those on at all times. Sure, a house could use many multiples more than 1 kW for a bit, but will go back down eventually.
  - beojan 9y ago
    Yes, that's why an average isn't too meaningful. The times these things are on aren't the same for every house, but they are correlated.

_Codemonkeyism 9y ago

With the growing understanding of externalizing costs and risks is a bad thing for communities and countries making externalized costs explicit to companies more and more, in many countries energy companies fear they would need to insure their plants which together with sinking costs of solar would make fission too costly and non-competing.

Jedd 9y ago

> Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear fission. Most have not. Most countries have not formally committed to eliminating power from fossil fuels, either - though there's obviously more of a trend in that direction. Point being that past lack of commitment is no indicator of future direction. > Most countries have at least some regions that would be happy to accept the good, stable employment and tax base offered by a nuclear power plant in exchange for the very slight risk of accidents. Given there's 195 countries - 'most' may be misapplied here. I think it's optimistic to believe that there'll be stable employment for more than a handful of people per nuclear fission power plant. Tax legislation comes and goes. And as to slight risk .. I think that's misrepresenting things too. A risk matrix typically takes into account likelihood vs effect. You may be suggesting there's a 'small likelihood', while ignoring the massive potential effects of an incident -- equating to significant actual risk. A review of the history and progress <sic> of the Hinkley nuclear fission power plant in the UK - a country that certainly meets the pro-nuclear-fission requirement - is sobering. This article (from late 2015), and apologies for Telegraph link [1] is highly depressing. The wikipedia page [2] has a few more recent details. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11945485/Nuclear-go-ahead-construction-of-new-plant-to-begin-within-weeks.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...