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Can the US, China, and India agree on a design then create an economy of scale to build a few hundred reactors? The AP1000 was supposed to be such a next gener

Can the US, China, and India agree on a design then create an economy of scale to build a few hundred reactors? The AP1000 was supposed to be such a next generation plant? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

stcredzero 8y ago
One would think that France already has economies of scale for nuclear power.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  France, like the US, has ample experience with operating power reactors but retains little institutional knowledge of how to build them. It also appears that early cost-and-schedule claims about building the French EPR and American AP1000 designs were extremely optimistic. These reactors are finished years late even when built in China, which currently has the world's most active nuclear construction program.
ryanmercer 8y ago
>Can the US, China, and India agree on a design then create an economy of scale to build a few hundred reactors? Depends on the reactor. If you did something like naval reactors you could probably manufacture at scale up to probably 700MW. If we get something like Oklo Inc is trying to do, 1 MW-decade reactors could be churned out at scale and used to augment large cities, provide for smaller cities, provide for individual customers that use large amounts (think factories), distributed around a section of a grid with large distances between power plant and customers to reduce transmission loss, etc. I also imagine if they, or a similar company, gets something like they are trying to build operational then it would be relatively easy to scale it for a larger output (the point though here is to make something that is easily portable for remote locations, disaster relief, dedicated power for a specific subscriber etc). Even if you couldn't scale these to larger outputs, you could place as many of them as you want on a piece of property and move them if ever needed as well as move them offsite at their end of life for refill/refurb/recycle and swap them out with a new unit if needed.
- blacksmith_tb 8y ago
  I think you meant Oklo[1]? There are quite a few organizations working in this space[2]. 1: http://oklo.com/ http://oklo.com/ 2: https://www.thirdway.org/infographic/the-advanced-nuclear-industry-2016-update https://www.thirdway.org/infographic/the-advanced-nuclear-in...

stcredzero 8y ago

One would think that France already has economies of scale for nuclear power.

philipkglass 8y ago
France, like the US, has ample experience with operating power reactors but retains little institutional knowledge of how to build them. It also appears that early cost-and-schedule claims about building the French EPR and American AP1000 designs were extremely optimistic. These reactors are finished years late even when built in China, which currently has the world's most active nuclear construction program.

ryanmercer 8y ago

>Can the US, China, and India agree on a design then create an economy of scale to build a few hundred reactors? Depends on the reactor. If you did something like naval reactors you could probably manufacture at scale up to probably 700MW. If we get something like Oklo Inc is trying to do, 1 MW-decade reactors could be churned out at scale and used to augment large cities, provide for smaller cities, provide for individual customers that use large amounts (think factories), distributed around a section of a grid with large distances between power plant and customers to reduce transmission loss, etc. I also imagine if they, or a similar company, gets something like they are trying to build operational then it would be relatively easy to scale it for a larger output (the point though here is to make something that is easily portable for remote locations, disaster relief, dedicated power for a specific subscriber etc). Even if you couldn't scale these to larger outputs, you could place as many of them as you want on a piece of property and move them if ever needed as well as move them offsite at their end of life for refill/refurb/recycle and swap them out with a new unit if needed.

blacksmith_tb 8y ago
I think you meant Oklo[1]? There are quite a few organizations working in this space[2]. 1: http://oklo.com/ http://oklo.com/ 2: https://www.thirdway.org/infographic/the-advanced-nuclear-industry-2016-update https://www.thirdway.org/infographic/the-advanced-nuclear-in...