41 ms·

US to build six nuclear power plants in India

272 points by sandwall 8y ago

sabareesh 8y ago
India undoubtedly become power hungry, when I was visiting couple of years back power cut has become a norm which i don't remember when I grew up. There are so many wind mill installation around my hometown but at the same time there is so much opposition for nuclear power. https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0f/a1/06/fa/the-sky-the-clouds-the.jpg https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0f/a1/06/fa/...
elsonrodriguez 8y ago
> India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia's third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels. One has to admire the no-nonsense problem solving happening here.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up. Until then, it’s PR, not energy policy. Aspiration alone is no different than failure.
  - mav3rick 8y ago
    Aspiration is also the first step to success.
    - idDriven 8y ago
      Also pretty much anything is better than coal and fossil fuels. I can't hear the phrase 'clean coal' bandied about without wanting to bang my head against the nearest wall.
  - Alupis 8y ago
    > I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up Meanwhile, the United States continues to shut down Nuclear Reactors and prevent modern constructions out of irrational fearmongering. At least India recognizes the benefits of Nuclear Power...
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I’ll bet you lunch the US replaces every GW of nuclear generation with solar, wind, and utility scale energy storage in 10 years (sooner than any nuclear generator would come online). Disclaimer: I am an armchair energy policy enthusiast, and aggregate generator permitting, construction, turn up, operation, and decommissioning data for visualization and production siting. Edit: Lunch bet email in my profile.
      - sremani 8y ago
        I will take that bet.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - Alupis 8y ago
        Sure, maybe that happens. Only an irrational culture would squander an obviously great energy source. But you cannot dispute the massive resources, and square footage it requires to accomplish that future of massive wind farms, every building with solar panels installed, and huge battery warehouses littered throughout the nation... especially when compared to a handful of modern Nuclear Reactor Plants. More people die installing Solar Roof Panels than from all the Nuclear energy production combined [1][2][3] [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... [2] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull21-1/21104091117.pdf https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... [3] https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forgotten-dangers-of-solar-panels/ https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forg...
  - gdy 8y ago
    Russian-built reactors are already generating electricity.
  - kortilla 8y ago
    >Aspiration alone is no different than failure. By that measure solar and wind are catastrophic failures given that they still depend on non-existent storage technologies to hit any kind of baseload replacement goals.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia's third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels. That's a really short timeline. India's newest reactor Kudankulam 2 took 14 years from construction start to first criticality: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=853 https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.... The only American reactors currently under construction, Vogtle 3 and 4, were originally supposed to be built in less than 5 years but are now projected to take 8 years. But maybe the American reactors aren't intended to be part of the generation added by 2024. India does have 7 reactors currently under construction.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    2024 is an eyewatering timeframe, but the actual construction might not be the hardest part. The Chinese have figured out how to do prefabbed skyscrapers in 19 days [0] and the prefabbing is probably highly parallel. If a nuclear plant is 100 times harder than a skyscraper to build that is still only about 5 years as a lower bound. If they've already done the scoping, fundraising, location picking and had a construction firm who optimised for speed & quality but not cost then I can see ~5 years as achievable, although they probably won't manage it. This is one of nuclear many advantages over more usual nonrenewable, things can happen orders of magnitude more quickly because the physical footprint is so small. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-construction-firm-erects-57-storey-skyscraper-in-19-days https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-constr...
    - jabl 8y ago
      AFAIK one limitation is forging of the large pressure vessels, mainly the reactor itself and the steam generators. Those take a long time. Of course you can do multiple ones in parallel, but then the limit is that there's about 25 heavy forge presses on the planet, of which only a subset are doing nuclear work. So in total the capacity at the moment is maybe 50 large pressure vessels per year worldwide. If one plant requires one reactor and 4 steam generators that would then be 10 plants per year. Of course it's possible to increase the worldwide heavy forging capacity, but again, something that takes time. Then there are many reactor designs that don't use water as a coolant or moderator; those are obviously not restricted by heavy forge capacity. But those reactors are mostly on the drawing board and not available off the shelf.
- m0zg 8y ago
  Anyone who, at the same time, claims that "we're all gonna die" if something is not done in the next decade, and doesn't want to consider nuclear is a hypocrite, and not a very bright person. If you believe in the first premise (for the record, I do not, although I do believe in man-made climate change), then you have to concede that nuclear is the only way out that's anywhere near viable without pretending that we can spend tens of trillions of dollars on infrastructure that needs to be replaced every 20 years.
jwr 8y ago
Finally something that helps us avoid the beginning climate catastrophe. Nuclear power is of the very few effective means of working towards that goal.
KorematsuFred 8y ago
While Afganistan is called the graveyard of empires, India is where emperors face their first miserable defeat. There is a book titled "Confessions of an economic Hitman". The book is written by an ex-CIA agent to was an economist and would write a lot of fake reports claiming developing nations can grow much faster only if they invest heavily in infrastructure. Then US would generously offer loans in return of assurance that the contracts will be awarded only to American companies. Fe decades down the line those countries would be left holding the can and debt. This model failed miserably for USA in India because India' growth story after 1990s turned out of be true, India's hunger for infra actually grew. Enron who had a weird misadventure in India eventually had to file for bankruptcy. While I am happy that India is tripling the nuclear energy capability I am unhappy that American companies are involved. It might end up badly for Indian but more than likely to Americans.
- DuskStar 8y ago
  Your premise here seems to be "countries paying back their loans is bad for the companies that built the infrastructure", and I think I'm really going to need some more explanation for that one.
  - coliveira 8y ago
    Companies are paid anyway: if the country cannot make payments, it will have to agree to an IMF loan that is used to pay the American companies first, and then left holding the debt along with draconian austerity measures. So for these companies the more outlandish the promises, the better! The payment is "guaranteed" by the IMF deals. During a period from the 60s on this has been the biggest cash cow for American companies operating on developing countries.
    - DuskStar 8y ago
      Right, but that seems to suggest that it's getting countries to agree to take huge loans that's good for the companies, which is kind of independent of their eventual ability to pay the loans back. GGP was saying that countries paying back the loans was bad for the companies in question, when their relationship will have been over for years at that point.
i_am_proteus 8y ago
> The two countries have been discussing the supply of US nuclear reactors to India, the world's third-biggest buyer of oil, for more than a decade. I doubt that any nuclear capacity will significantly affect India's oil consumption. Nuclear typically displaces coal or gas.
- sampo 8y ago
  India has one nuclear reactor's worth of diesel power plants (about 1000 MW). And 90 times more (90 GW worth) of all kinds of smaller diesel generators used as backups during power outages. If the new nuclear electricity decreases the outages in the grid, I am sure it will almost 1:1 turn to savings in burned diesel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_and_gas_industry_in_India#Electricity_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_and_gas_industry_in_India#...
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    It could replace it faster and cheaper by financing distributed solar or wind and batteries.
    - merpnderp 8y ago
      Sun and wind must be coupled with nat-gas, or at least that's how it works in the US. Either that or prepare for brown/blackouts.
      - dv_dt 8y ago
        LCOE estimates for at least the short duration gaps has solar+ batteries beating nat-gas peakers. This is pretty recent, in actual construction bids for IIRC < 4hr capability. Expect more encroachment onto basically mature nat-gas tech space as batteries and solar continue to get cheaper.
        igravious 8y ago
        What about solar pv module and battery module waste? What about the environmental impact of mining and extracting the rare and not so rare elements that go into making solar pv modules and battery modules? What about the water use in the production of these modules? What about the greenhouse gas emissions in the industrial scale processes involved in producing these modules? What about the impact on wildlife and the environment through land clearance, habitat destruction, species dislocation, threats to bird species, … --- From the way people go on about solar pv and battery tech you'd swear they had zero externalities. > It could replace it faster and cheaper by financing distributed solar or wind and batteries. Faster, probably. Cheaper, probably. But at what cost to animal and human lives, and at what cost to the environment? Coal plants can be built fast and cheap too. That's why we've so many of them.
khuey 8y ago
Meanwhile in the US SCE&G abandoned their two under construction AP1000s after Westinghouse went bankrupt and the remaining two that Southern is building at Vogtle are on life support. The only AP1000s actually operating are in China.
kp666 8y ago
What happens to the liability act?
gdy 8y ago
Here is an article about how Russia dealt with India's civil nuclear liability law. Perhaps, something similar was agreed for American reactors. https://www.powermag.com/indias-nuclear-liability-law-breakthrough-for-russia-stalemate-endures-for-u-s/ https://www.powermag.com/indias-nuclear-liability-law-breakt...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
logfromblammo 8y ago
I'm starting to get the feeling that all terrestrial energy generation should ultimately come from sunlight, and our nuclear reactors should be out in space, and on other celestial bodies, especially those further away from the sun. But in order to do that, we need to further develop nuclear reactor technology by building utility-scale nuclear energy plants here on Earth--not because we need our energy to be nuclear, but because we need our nuclear energy to be reliable and efficient. The cynical part of me is thinking that the US can apparently build nuclear plants anywhere on Earth except in the US.
- sandwall 8y ago
  Less restrictive regulations; NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) policies :)
- nickik 8y ago
  Why? There is literally no reason to have nuclear reactors in space. Building a modern reactor that is not based on 60 year old technology would make more sense, but regulation have made that impossible and the government itself has 0 interest in doing so.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Radiothermal generators already power satellites and space probes. Nuclear fuel has the highest energy density of any fuel currently available to us. Wind and water power is unavailable when there is no atmosphere or weather cycle. Solar power requires more surface area as you get further from the sun. Solar panels and storage batteries have mass, too. Combustion fuels have mass, and the rocket equation hates superfluous mass in objects launched to orbit. A good engine for low-gravity propulsion would be a nuclear reactor that heats propellant to a very high temperature and then releases it at high velocity. That's not the sort of engine that could get you to orbit, but it does provide a lot of delta-V once you are up there. Propellant can be found outside of gravity wells, and a refuel mission carrying nuclear fuel is cheap to launch on a dollar per joule basis. Nuclear waste does not endanger the environment if there is no environment to endanger. No one is likely to stumble across it accidentally. Criticality accidents would only kill the crew, if there even is a crew. Habitats that are buried deeply to protect against radiation and to contain a bio-friendly environment may not be able to rely on solar alone. They would likely need a large mass of batteries to make it through storms and nights, and an RTG or a full-blown reactor might provide more reliable power for less mass.
niftich 8y ago
India has an intricate history with nuclear technology. Both the Soviet Union and the US courted India in the 1950s, but in the end it was Canada who donated a design for the first Indian reactor that came online in the 1960s. The US assisted with building another. Indian testing of nuclear weapons in the 1970s drew a sharp rebuke from several countries and the US and Canada withdrew their assistance. This also resulted in the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an export control regime to prevent nuclear proliferation. Cut off from exporters of nuclear technology, they slowly continued with domestic designs and new research. But their tremendous size and influence made them an attractive partner in geopolitical power plays. In 1988 the Soviet Union and India announced they would build two new reactors, and the US fiercely protested at the time. The Soviet Union fell apart, and the Russians didn't resume the project for another 10 years, but construction eventually began in 2002. In 2006 the US and India reached an agreement to cooperate and the US lobbied for an exemption for India from the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which was granted. It quickly became obvious that everyone wanted a slice of the Indian nuclear energy market. Disregarding climate change for a moment, it's clear that the energy demand in India is increasing, and despite a rapid rise in the deployment of renewables, utility-scale generation is still 75% coal. This contributes greatly to pollution. Local coal lower quality than elsewhere, requiring more per unit of power. Nuclear will be an important complement to renewables as the energy mix slowly migrates off of coal. Unlike the US, which is awash in cheap natural gas that's readily stored and piped where needed, helping to even out the mismatch between solar generation and demand, India has very little natural gas, so it can't afford to pursue a strategy that deemphasizes nuclear energy.
- ergothus 8y ago
  Missing from that history was India developing nuclear weapons in the late 90s - I imagine that changed the politics immensely. Today they are an even more important and influential geopolitical ally, and the pollution argument you raise is as important as you say, but the concerns about a power supplying them with nuclear weapons ala the alleged Israel/US history is no longer a part of it (I assume). ...then again, I could be completely wrong in any of this. Comments welcome.
  - 8y ago
Torwald 8y ago
Can somebody explain to me what happens with all the nuclear waste? How is nuclear power anything else but an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen? We pile the waste on and on, how do we deal with that?
- merpnderp 8y ago
  France burns its waste in nuclear plants. The US created a geologically stable dump that was shut down for political reasons. The EPA had certified it as safe for 10,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    France does not burn its waste in nuclear plants. Use of MOX fuel in thermal reactors doesn't count, as it only uses a fraction of the produced transuranics, and cannot then be recycled into more MOX fuel. And of course it doesn't do a damned thing to fission products.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- MFLoon 8y ago
  When we burn fossil fuels a huge volume of hazardous waste just goes into the environment, and we know what it does then. With nuclear there is also a huge volume of hazardous waste, but at least it remains spatially consolidated and in our control. The consensus best solution is deep burial. Sure we might run out of space and create nuclear "landmines" over the very long term, but it's a preferable tradeoff to the much more imminent threats of the global warming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_w...
  - Torwald 8y ago
    How would you describe: >and we know what it does then. What is it that it does then?
kumarm 8y ago
This is great new not just from environment perspective. This is a move that significantly reduces dirty politicians influence in India. Guess who is awarded most of new Power Generation plants in India since private sector started building power plants? It almost entirely politicians and their family members. Example (Owned by Member of Parliament Galla Jayadev's Family) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amara_Raja_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amara_Raja_Group
- gigatexal 8y ago
  Don’t get me started about corruption in India: PM Modi is a thug and a murderer[1]. The BJP use Hinduism to just further their nationalistic, xenophobic, autocratic nature. And the RSS (the enforcement arm of the BJP) can is the reincarnation of the gestapo. I’be first hand experience of what being on the wrong side of the RSS means. [1] you think even the Supreme Court of India is impartial enough to find the then PM of Gujarat responsible when non-Hindus die at the hands of a Hindu mob? Hah didn’t think so.
  - dang 8y ago
    This crosses into political flamewar. Please do not use HN for that or call names in comments here, regardless of how right you are or feel. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - gigatexal 8y ago
      I’m sorry. I got carried away. I spent two days in an Indian jail while doing NGO social work in rural areas during the election when Modi took power. I later found out his goons the RSS had targeted me. As the son of a first generation Indian American I felt betrayed. I wasn’t doing anything wrong just being an American in India in the wrong place at the wrong time.
      - gigatexal 8y ago
        Also I never made any blanket statements about the Indian people — who I love. It’s the government of India that I have fault with especially the current administration.
throwawaysea 8y ago
I count 45 planned reactors and 12 reactors currently under construction in China at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China Somehow the two under construction in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...) are estimated to cost $25B and are complicated by Westinghouse having declared bankruptcy. Others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Units_2_and_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...) have been cancelled. The same AP1000 reactor model was installed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station at a cost of just $6b, although they were also 4 years late in becoming operational. But it does seem like other countries are capable of getting these large projects done while they whither and drag out in the US.
- xvilka 8y ago
  Inability to buid high-speed rail in US corroborates with this conclusion. It is not economically ineffective，it is US infrastructure projects huge inefficiency (sadly). If we check other industries, I think we would able to find more failed big projects.
fmajid 8y ago
Big mistake. The US nuclear industry is a wreck because of the lack of standardization and economies of scale, unlike, say, France. India should also be investing in thorium reactors given its indigenous reserves and the inherent safety advantages. Another issue is cooling: water supplies in Andhra Pradesh are highly erratic, and this will only get worse with global warming.
- sjwright 8y ago
  The water lost to cooling ends up as steam and then precipitation. So it doesn't exactly delete water, it just disperses it. Some of it will fall straight back into the same river systems. A lot of it would probably be absorbed into the local water table—which is valuable if the table is already being tapped. Does anyone know if there's any modelling to show how widely such activity disperses water? How much of the water is expected to land somewhere functionally useless (e.g. into oceans)? Or, if they built a desalination plant next to each nuclear plant, would they be able to compensate for the water loss efficiently?
  - adrianN 8y ago
    The trouble with nuclear in regions where water can be scarce is that you can't cool your plant sufficiently and have to turn it off. You can take only a small fraction of a river's flow for cooling without kill all fish in the river. If the river is low on water, your plant can't be cooled.
- throwwarm 8y ago
  About Thorium- Subramanyam Swamy agrees- I wonder why there isn't more research on this, despite BJP being in the center and Modi seemingly listening to him. The president of United States of America is on record saying Global warming is a hoax (asterisk), a fact he has repeated multiple times in his online communications on the micro-blogging website twitter.com [1], thereby throwing his full weight behind the claims. (asterisk) A chinese hoax but the chinese part was before the said person became the president. I am not sure if he has skipped the Chinese part in his post inauguration communication for matters of international relationships or because he has changed his opinion on the origins of the hoax. [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump. Greenpeace cofounder says that while the president is wrong and that earth is indeed getting hotter- people-made climate change is indeed a hoax and that people have no contribution to global warming. (or it's d/dx, or d2,dx2) I'm not sure whom to listen to but either way, I would say that since peoplekind is not responsible, then it's God's will and in that case we shouldn't worry about it.
bargl 8y ago
I wonder what types of reactors they'll be building. I've recently heard of Thorium reactors (and I don't understand enough about them) but I'd love to see them start spinning up around the world to see if they actually are as good as they seem.
blackflame7000 8y ago
Nuclear power gets a bad rap. Instead of abandoning the technology we should be focusing on how to safely contain a meltdown. I mean if we use boron control rods to absorb the neutrons, then why not encase the whole thing in a boron tomb that vacuum seals when radiation is detected?
- javagram 8y ago
  modern reactors have core catching devices that are supposed to catch a meltdown and prevent it from going into the ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher of course these have never been tried in an accident because both Chernobyl and Fukushima are very old reactors. On the other hand before Fukushima I used to see people say that the problem with Chernobyl is there was no containment vessel as there is in western reactors, then in Fukushima the containment vessel did melt through. So who knows how well the core catcher would work in practice.
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    The cores at Fukushima didn't "go into the ground" either. That doesn't prevent water in the core carrying radioactive material all over the place, once things are compromised.
    - blackflame7000 8y ago
      True, but radioactive water is much easier to deal with than radioactive air because the hydrogen will capture the neutrons converting to Deuterium which is relatively safe and isotopes of oxygen are relatively shortlived. So as long as you can filter the heavy metals, it's in theory, less of a mess.
Krasnol 8y ago
Let's hope they got their waste management figured out https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/indias-nuclear-industry-pours-its-wastes-into-a-river-of-death-and-disease/ https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/indias-nuclear...
RickJWagner 8y ago
I wish the US would build six new (clean, safe) nuclear plants in the US.
- standardUser 8y ago
  There's two under construction now in Georgia and one came online in late 2016 in Tennessee. But these are all additions to existing facilities. The cost of new nuclear power is far beyond most traditional and even renewable power generation, so we're not likely to see many more any time soon.
thecybernerd 8y ago
This is exciting I wonder if Westinghouse will ever use some of the technology that Transatomic developed.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
thisisit 8y ago
In the meantime Solar Power is one of the fastest growing industries in India. Government is targeting 100GW by 2022: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India India's history with nuclear power plants hasn't exactly been great. Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant faced tons of protests: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudankulam_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
known 8y ago
I wish all civilian nuclear power plants operate under UN https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build%E2%80%93operate%E2%80%93transfer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build%E2%80%93operate%E2%80%...
- sachin18590 8y ago
  I guess that would be the peak of globalization, when you wean off energy control from individual countries.
fuckyah 8y ago
This is just sad. We already have all the green technology we need and yet we destroy our planet :(
ahamedirshad123 8y ago
Hope they don't built it in Tamil Nadu. We already have two.
sureshn 8y ago
India is the key ally to all developed countries in the western world, be it the Rafael Deal for fighter aircrafts to other countries like Israel agreeing to setup defence manufacturing in India all are keen to be engaged with India. US especially after Trump became president has been very much Pro India as opposed to Obama who was definitely anti-india and Pro Pakistan, If the US has to tame china it needs India , these geo political equations I believe favours India and that is why you see all these things happening now
matthewfelgate 8y ago
Hopefully nuclear power can help India grow more greenly and catch up economically with China.
tracker1 8y ago
Could we get 6 new reactors in the US? I'm actually serious... I don't get why we still have coal power plants at all. I know there are various risks involved, and disposal is another, but a lot of lessons have been learned and there's a lot of room here for this. It's just incredible that a couple of movies could set back nuclear power in the US for as many decades as has happened.

272 points by sandwall 8y ago

India undoubtedly become power hungry, when I was visiting couple of years back power cut has become a norm which i don't remember when I grew up. There are so many wind mill installation around my hometown but at the same time there is so much opposition for nuclear power. https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0f/a1/06/fa/the-sky-the-clouds-the.jpg https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0f/a1/06/fa/...

elsonrodriguez 8y ago

> India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia's third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels. One has to admire the no-nonsense problem solving happening here.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up. Until then, it’s PR, not energy policy. Aspiration alone is no different than failure.
- mav3rick 8y ago
  Aspiration is also the first step to success.
  - idDriven 8y ago
    Also pretty much anything is better than coal and fossil fuels. I can't hear the phrase 'clean coal' bandied about without wanting to bang my head against the nearest wall.
- Alupis 8y ago
  > I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up Meanwhile, the United States continues to shut down Nuclear Reactors and prevent modern constructions out of irrational fearmongering. At least India recognizes the benefits of Nuclear Power...
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I’ll bet you lunch the US replaces every GW of nuclear generation with solar, wind, and utility scale energy storage in 10 years (sooner than any nuclear generator would come online). Disclaimer: I am an armchair energy policy enthusiast, and aggregate generator permitting, construction, turn up, operation, and decommissioning data for visualization and production siting. Edit: Lunch bet email in my profile.
    - sremani 8y ago
      I will take that bet.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - Alupis 8y ago
      Sure, maybe that happens. Only an irrational culture would squander an obviously great energy source. But you cannot dispute the massive resources, and square footage it requires to accomplish that future of massive wind farms, every building with solar panels installed, and huge battery warehouses littered throughout the nation... especially when compared to a handful of modern Nuclear Reactor Plants. More people die installing Solar Roof Panels than from all the Nuclear energy production combined [1][2][3] [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... [2] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull21-1/21104091117.pdf https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... [3] https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forgotten-dangers-of-solar-panels/ https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forg...
- gdy 8y ago
  Russian-built reactors are already generating electricity.
- kortilla 8y ago
  >Aspiration alone is no different than failure. By that measure solar and wind are catastrophic failures given that they still depend on non-existent storage technologies to hit any kind of baseload replacement goals.
philipkglass 8y ago
India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia's third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels. That's a really short timeline. India's newest reactor Kudankulam 2 took 14 years from construction start to first criticality: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=853 https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.... The only American reactors currently under construction, Vogtle 3 and 4, were originally supposed to be built in less than 5 years but are now projected to take 8 years. But maybe the American reactors aren't intended to be part of the generation added by 2024. India does have 7 reactors currently under construction.
- roenxi 8y ago
  2024 is an eyewatering timeframe, but the actual construction might not be the hardest part. The Chinese have figured out how to do prefabbed skyscrapers in 19 days [0] and the prefabbing is probably highly parallel. If a nuclear plant is 100 times harder than a skyscraper to build that is still only about 5 years as a lower bound. If they've already done the scoping, fundraising, location picking and had a construction firm who optimised for speed & quality but not cost then I can see ~5 years as achievable, although they probably won't manage it. This is one of nuclear many advantages over more usual nonrenewable, things can happen orders of magnitude more quickly because the physical footprint is so small. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-construction-firm-erects-57-storey-skyscraper-in-19-days https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-constr...
  - jabl 8y ago
    AFAIK one limitation is forging of the large pressure vessels, mainly the reactor itself and the steam generators. Those take a long time. Of course you can do multiple ones in parallel, but then the limit is that there's about 25 heavy forge presses on the planet, of which only a subset are doing nuclear work. So in total the capacity at the moment is maybe 50 large pressure vessels per year worldwide. If one plant requires one reactor and 4 steam generators that would then be 10 plants per year. Of course it's possible to increase the worldwide heavy forging capacity, but again, something that takes time. Then there are many reactor designs that don't use water as a coolant or moderator; those are obviously not restricted by heavy forge capacity. But those reactors are mostly on the drawing board and not available off the shelf.
m0zg 8y ago
Anyone who, at the same time, claims that "we're all gonna die" if something is not done in the next decade, and doesn't want to consider nuclear is a hypocrite, and not a very bright person. If you believe in the first premise (for the record, I do not, although I do believe in man-made climate change), then you have to concede that nuclear is the only way out that's anywhere near viable without pretending that we can spend tens of trillions of dollars on infrastructure that needs to be replaced every 20 years.

jwr 8y ago

Finally something that helps us avoid the beginning climate catastrophe. Nuclear power is of the very few effective means of working towards that goal.

KorematsuFred 8y ago

While Afganistan is called the graveyard of empires, India is where emperors face their first miserable defeat. There is a book titled "Confessions of an economic Hitman". The book is written by an ex-CIA agent to was an economist and would write a lot of fake reports claiming developing nations can grow much faster only if they invest heavily in infrastructure. Then US would generously offer loans in return of assurance that the contracts will be awarded only to American companies. Fe decades down the line those countries would be left holding the can and debt. This model failed miserably for USA in India because India' growth story after 1990s turned out of be true, India's hunger for infra actually grew. Enron who had a weird misadventure in India eventually had to file for bankruptcy. While I am happy that India is tripling the nuclear energy capability I am unhappy that American companies are involved. It might end up badly for Indian but more than likely to Americans.

DuskStar 8y ago
Your premise here seems to be "countries paying back their loans is bad for the companies that built the infrastructure", and I think I'm really going to need some more explanation for that one.
- coliveira 8y ago
  Companies are paid anyway: if the country cannot make payments, it will have to agree to an IMF loan that is used to pay the American companies first, and then left holding the debt along with draconian austerity measures. So for these companies the more outlandish the promises, the better! The payment is "guaranteed" by the IMF deals. During a period from the 60s on this has been the biggest cash cow for American companies operating on developing countries.
  - DuskStar 8y ago
    Right, but that seems to suggest that it's getting countries to agree to take huge loans that's good for the companies, which is kind of independent of their eventual ability to pay the loans back. GGP was saying that countries paying back the loans was bad for the companies in question, when their relationship will have been over for years at that point.

i_am_proteus 8y ago

> The two countries have been discussing the supply of US nuclear reactors to India, the world's third-biggest buyer of oil, for more than a decade. I doubt that any nuclear capacity will significantly affect India's oil consumption. Nuclear typically displaces coal or gas.

sampo 8y ago
India has one nuclear reactor's worth of diesel power plants (about 1000 MW). And 90 times more (90 GW worth) of all kinds of smaller diesel generators used as backups during power outages. If the new nuclear electricity decreases the outages in the grid, I am sure it will almost 1:1 turn to savings in burned diesel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_and_gas_industry_in_India#Electricity_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_and_gas_industry_in_India#...
- dv_dt 8y ago
  It could replace it faster and cheaper by financing distributed solar or wind and batteries.
  - merpnderp 8y ago
    Sun and wind must be coupled with nat-gas, or at least that's how it works in the US. Either that or prepare for brown/blackouts.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      LCOE estimates for at least the short duration gaps has solar+ batteries beating nat-gas peakers. This is pretty recent, in actual construction bids for IIRC < 4hr capability. Expect more encroachment onto basically mature nat-gas tech space as batteries and solar continue to get cheaper.
      - igravious 8y ago
        What about solar pv module and battery module waste? What about the environmental impact of mining and extracting the rare and not so rare elements that go into making solar pv modules and battery modules? What about the water use in the production of these modules? What about the greenhouse gas emissions in the industrial scale processes involved in producing these modules? What about the impact on wildlife and the environment through land clearance, habitat destruction, species dislocation, threats to bird species, … --- From the way people go on about solar pv and battery tech you'd swear they had zero externalities. > It could replace it faster and cheaper by financing distributed solar or wind and batteries. Faster, probably. Cheaper, probably. But at what cost to animal and human lives, and at what cost to the environment? Coal plants can be built fast and cheap too. That's why we've so many of them.

khuey 8y ago

Meanwhile in the US SCE&G abandoned their two under construction AP1000s after Westinghouse went bankrupt and the remaining two that Southern is building at Vogtle are on life support. The only AP1000s actually operating are in China.

kp666 8y ago

What happens to the liability act?

gdy 8y ago

Here is an article about how Russia dealt with India's civil nuclear liability law. Perhaps, something similar was agreed for American reactors. https://www.powermag.com/indias-nuclear-liability-law-breakthrough-for-russia-stalemate-endures-for-u-s/ https://www.powermag.com/indias-nuclear-liability-law-breakt...

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logfromblammo 8y ago

I'm starting to get the feeling that all terrestrial energy generation should ultimately come from sunlight, and our nuclear reactors should be out in space, and on other celestial bodies, especially those further away from the sun. But in order to do that, we need to further develop nuclear reactor technology by building utility-scale nuclear energy plants here on Earth--not because we need our energy to be nuclear, but because we need our nuclear energy to be reliable and efficient. The cynical part of me is thinking that the US can apparently build nuclear plants anywhere on Earth except in the US.

sandwall 8y ago
Less restrictive regulations; NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) policies :)
nickik 8y ago
Why? There is literally no reason to have nuclear reactors in space. Building a modern reactor that is not based on 60 year old technology would make more sense, but regulation have made that impossible and the government itself has 0 interest in doing so.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Radiothermal generators already power satellites and space probes. Nuclear fuel has the highest energy density of any fuel currently available to us. Wind and water power is unavailable when there is no atmosphere or weather cycle. Solar power requires more surface area as you get further from the sun. Solar panels and storage batteries have mass, too. Combustion fuels have mass, and the rocket equation hates superfluous mass in objects launched to orbit. A good engine for low-gravity propulsion would be a nuclear reactor that heats propellant to a very high temperature and then releases it at high velocity. That's not the sort of engine that could get you to orbit, but it does provide a lot of delta-V once you are up there. Propellant can be found outside of gravity wells, and a refuel mission carrying nuclear fuel is cheap to launch on a dollar per joule basis. Nuclear waste does not endanger the environment if there is no environment to endanger. No one is likely to stumble across it accidentally. Criticality accidents would only kill the crew, if there even is a crew. Habitats that are buried deeply to protect against radiation and to contain a bio-friendly environment may not be able to rely on solar alone. They would likely need a large mass of batteries to make it through storms and nights, and an RTG or a full-blown reactor might provide more reliable power for less mass.

niftich 8y ago

India has an intricate history with nuclear technology. Both the Soviet Union and the US courted India in the 1950s, but in the end it was Canada who donated a design for the first Indian reactor that came online in the 1960s. The US assisted with building another. Indian testing of nuclear weapons in the 1970s drew a sharp rebuke from several countries and the US and Canada withdrew their assistance. This also resulted in the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an export control regime to prevent nuclear proliferation. Cut off from exporters of nuclear technology, they slowly continued with domestic designs and new research. But their tremendous size and influence made them an attractive partner in geopolitical power plays. In 1988 the Soviet Union and India announced they would build two new reactors, and the US fiercely protested at the time. The Soviet Union fell apart, and the Russians didn't resume the project for another 10 years, but construction eventually began in 2002. In 2006 the US and India reached an agreement to cooperate and the US lobbied for an exemption for India from the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which was granted. It quickly became obvious that everyone wanted a slice of the Indian nuclear energy market. Disregarding climate change for a moment, it's clear that the energy demand in India is increasing, and despite a rapid rise in the deployment of renewables, utility-scale generation is still 75% coal. This contributes greatly to pollution. Local coal lower quality than elsewhere, requiring more per unit of power. Nuclear will be an important complement to renewables as the energy mix slowly migrates off of coal. Unlike the US, which is awash in cheap natural gas that's readily stored and piped where needed, helping to even out the mismatch between solar generation and demand, India has very little natural gas, so it can't afford to pursue a strategy that deemphasizes nuclear energy.

ergothus 8y ago
Missing from that history was India developing nuclear weapons in the late 90s - I imagine that changed the politics immensely. Today they are an even more important and influential geopolitical ally, and the pollution argument you raise is as important as you say, but the concerns about a power supplying them with nuclear weapons ala the alleged Israel/US history is no longer a part of it (I assume). ...then again, I could be completely wrong in any of this. Comments welcome.
- 8y ago

Torwald 8y ago

Can somebody explain to me what happens with all the nuclear waste? How is nuclear power anything else but an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen? We pile the waste on and on, how do we deal with that?

merpnderp 8y ago
France burns its waste in nuclear plants. The US created a geologically stable dump that was shut down for political reasons. The EPA had certified it as safe for 10,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- pfdietz 8y ago
  France does not burn its waste in nuclear plants. Use of MOX fuel in thermal reactors doesn't count, as it only uses a fraction of the produced transuranics, and cannot then be recycled into more MOX fuel. And of course it doesn't do a damned thing to fission products.
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MFLoon 8y ago
When we burn fossil fuels a huge volume of hazardous waste just goes into the environment, and we know what it does then. With nuclear there is also a huge volume of hazardous waste, but at least it remains spatially consolidated and in our control. The consensus best solution is deep burial. Sure we might run out of space and create nuclear "landmines" over the very long term, but it's a preferable tradeoff to the much more imminent threats of the global warming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_w...
- Torwald 8y ago
  How would you describe: >and we know what it does then. What is it that it does then?

kumarm 8y ago

This is great new not just from environment perspective. This is a move that significantly reduces dirty politicians influence in India. Guess who is awarded most of new Power Generation plants in India since private sector started building power plants? It almost entirely politicians and their family members. Example (Owned by Member of Parliament Galla Jayadev's Family) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amara_Raja_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amara_Raja_Group

gigatexal 8y ago
Don’t get me started about corruption in India: PM Modi is a thug and a murderer[1]. The BJP use Hinduism to just further their nationalistic, xenophobic, autocratic nature. And the RSS (the enforcement arm of the BJP) can is the reincarnation of the gestapo. I’be first hand experience of what being on the wrong side of the RSS means. [1] you think even the Supreme Court of India is impartial enough to find the then PM of Gujarat responsible when non-Hindus die at the hands of a Hindu mob? Hah didn’t think so.
- dang 8y ago
  This crosses into political flamewar. Please do not use HN for that or call names in comments here, regardless of how right you are or feel. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - gigatexal 8y ago
    I’m sorry. I got carried away. I spent two days in an Indian jail while doing NGO social work in rural areas during the election when Modi took power. I later found out his goons the RSS had targeted me. As the son of a first generation Indian American I felt betrayed. I wasn’t doing anything wrong just being an American in India in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    - gigatexal 8y ago
      Also I never made any blanket statements about the Indian people — who I love. It’s the government of India that I have fault with especially the current administration.

throwawaysea 8y ago

I count 45 planned reactors and 12 reactors currently under construction in China at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China Somehow the two under construction in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...) are estimated to cost $25B and are complicated by Westinghouse having declared bankruptcy. Others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Units_2_and_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...) have been cancelled. The same AP1000 reactor model was installed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station at a cost of just $6b, although they were also 4 years late in becoming operational. But it does seem like other countries are capable of getting these large projects done while they whither and drag out in the US.

xvilka 8y ago
Inability to buid high-speed rail in US corroborates with this conclusion. It is not economically ineffective，it is US infrastructure projects huge inefficiency (sadly). If we check other industries, I think we would able to find more failed big projects.

fmajid 8y ago

Big mistake. The US nuclear industry is a wreck because of the lack of standardization and economies of scale, unlike, say, France. India should also be investing in thorium reactors given its indigenous reserves and the inherent safety advantages. Another issue is cooling: water supplies in Andhra Pradesh are highly erratic, and this will only get worse with global warming.

sjwright 8y ago
The water lost to cooling ends up as steam and then precipitation. So it doesn't exactly delete water, it just disperses it. Some of it will fall straight back into the same river systems. A lot of it would probably be absorbed into the local water table—which is valuable if the table is already being tapped. Does anyone know if there's any modelling to show how widely such activity disperses water? How much of the water is expected to land somewhere functionally useless (e.g. into oceans)? Or, if they built a desalination plant next to each nuclear plant, would they be able to compensate for the water loss efficiently?
- adrianN 8y ago
  The trouble with nuclear in regions where water can be scarce is that you can't cool your plant sufficiently and have to turn it off. You can take only a small fraction of a river's flow for cooling without kill all fish in the river. If the river is low on water, your plant can't be cooled.
throwwarm 8y ago
About Thorium- Subramanyam Swamy agrees- I wonder why there isn't more research on this, despite BJP being in the center and Modi seemingly listening to him. The president of United States of America is on record saying Global warming is a hoax (asterisk), a fact he has repeated multiple times in his online communications on the micro-blogging website twitter.com [1], thereby throwing his full weight behind the claims. (asterisk) A chinese hoax but the chinese part was before the said person became the president. I am not sure if he has skipped the Chinese part in his post inauguration communication for matters of international relationships or because he has changed his opinion on the origins of the hoax. [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump. Greenpeace cofounder says that while the president is wrong and that earth is indeed getting hotter- people-made climate change is indeed a hoax and that people have no contribution to global warming. (or it's d/dx, or d2,dx2) I'm not sure whom to listen to but either way, I would say that since peoplekind is not responsible, then it's God's will and in that case we shouldn't worry about it.

bargl 8y ago

I wonder what types of reactors they'll be building. I've recently heard of Thorium reactors (and I don't understand enough about them) but I'd love to see them start spinning up around the world to see if they actually are as good as they seem.

blackflame7000 8y ago

Nuclear power gets a bad rap. Instead of abandoning the technology we should be focusing on how to safely contain a meltdown. I mean if we use boron control rods to absorb the neutrons, then why not encase the whole thing in a boron tomb that vacuum seals when radiation is detected?

javagram 8y ago
modern reactors have core catching devices that are supposed to catch a meltdown and prevent it from going into the ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher of course these have never been tried in an accident because both Chernobyl and Fukushima are very old reactors. On the other hand before Fukushima I used to see people say that the problem with Chernobyl is there was no containment vessel as there is in western reactors, then in Fukushima the containment vessel did melt through. So who knows how well the core catcher would work in practice.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  The cores at Fukushima didn't "go into the ground" either. That doesn't prevent water in the core carrying radioactive material all over the place, once things are compromised.
  - blackflame7000 8y ago
    True, but radioactive water is much easier to deal with than radioactive air because the hydrogen will capture the neutrons converting to Deuterium which is relatively safe and isotopes of oxygen are relatively shortlived. So as long as you can filter the heavy metals, it's in theory, less of a mess.

Krasnol 8y ago

Let's hope they got their waste management figured out https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/indias-nuclear-industry-pours-its-wastes-into-a-river-of-death-and-disease/ https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/indias-nuclear...

RickJWagner 8y ago

I wish the US would build six new (clean, safe) nuclear plants in the US.

standardUser 8y ago
There's two under construction now in Georgia and one came online in late 2016 in Tennessee. But these are all additions to existing facilities. The cost of new nuclear power is far beyond most traditional and even renewable power generation, so we're not likely to see many more any time soon.

thecybernerd 8y ago

This is exciting I wonder if Westinghouse will ever use some of the technology that Transatomic developed.

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thisisit 8y ago

In the meantime Solar Power is one of the fastest growing industries in India. Government is targeting 100GW by 2022: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India India's history with nuclear power plants hasn't exactly been great. Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant faced tons of protests: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudankulam_Nuclear_Power_Pla...

known 8y ago

I wish all civilian nuclear power plants operate under UN https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build%E2%80%93operate%E2%80%93transfer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build%E2%80%93operate%E2%80%...

sachin18590 8y ago
I guess that would be the peak of globalization, when you wean off energy control from individual countries.

fuckyah 8y ago

This is just sad. We already have all the green technology we need and yet we destroy our planet :(

ahamedirshad123 8y ago

Hope they don't built it in Tamil Nadu. We already have two.

sureshn 8y ago

India is the key ally to all developed countries in the western world, be it the Rafael Deal for fighter aircrafts to other countries like Israel agreeing to setup defence manufacturing in India all are keen to be engaged with India. US especially after Trump became president has been very much Pro India as opposed to Obama who was definitely anti-india and Pro Pakistan, If the US has to tame china it needs India , these geo political equations I believe favours India and that is why you see all these things happening now

matthewfelgate 8y ago

Hopefully nuclear power can help India grow more greenly and catch up economically with China.

tracker1 8y ago

Could we get 6 new reactors in the US? I'm actually serious... I don't get why we still have coal power plants at all. I know there are various risks involved, and disposal is another, but a lot of lessons have been learned and there's a lot of room here for this. It's just incredible that a couple of movies could set back nuclear power in the US for as many decades as has happened.