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Fundamentally I'm very positive to nuclear, but I feel like it's hard to see that existing fission tech is going to help in the short term. The lesson from rec
by audunw 8y ago
Fundamentally I'm very positive to nuclear, but I feel like it's hard to see that existing fission tech is going to help in the short term.
The lesson from recent nuclear power plants in Europe is that we can't build them on budget and on time anymore. Maybe nuclear is affordable if it's on budget, but is it still when there's massive budget overruns?
How does the cost trend look? It doesn't seem likely that we'll be able to relax regulations on nuclear.. so is it likely to get significantly cheaper? If you look at cost projections 20 years into the future, will it still beat solar- and wind with storage?
And are there developments in load following nuclear power plants? Solar and wind needs to be paired with load following plants, not base load.
It seems to me like we need to put massive investments in R&D to develop a small plant (so it's easier to iterate) that can be a perfect match with solar/wind, yields less dangerous waste and has low proliferation risk..
I've seen some interesting startups in this area. Everyone working on it should be given more money and regulatory support. I feel like there's a significant risk that those developments could be made irrelevant if there's further breakthroughs in renewables and storage, but we need to hedge our bets.
- acidburnNSA 8y agoI appreciate that you recognize the hedge. This is how I think of it too now. Various parties have differing beliefs about what a world with >50% intermittent energy harvesting looks like, and how easy the energy storage issue really is to solve. Nuclear in the West is in rough shape, but again the Chinese, Russians, Koreans, and even the Japanese are pretty good at popping them out on time/budget. They all have established supply chains and trained craftsmen. Korea, in particular, is amazing. They chose one design and standardized it and built a bunch of them. This is the model of success in nuclear. For this reason, it worries me a bit that lots of small startup in the US are trying to build different reactors in relative isolation. This is not the kind of industry where that is likely to go well. It takes billions of dollars to get to first product. I think the open source model is much more likely to succeed in nuclear. Most of the tech is commodity anyway, so finding a business plan around this shouldn't be overly challenging. The guy who built Korea's nuclear industry just did a great interview where he basically said that the US taught him how to build nukes, they perfected it, and now he wants to partner with the US again to decarbonize effectively with standardized nukes. [1] [1] https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung
- pfdietz 8y agoAbout that Korean nuclear industry... https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-corr...