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Safer Nuclear Reactors Are on the Way
- throw0101a 7y ago* Safer Nuclear Reactor Designs Are on the Way Whether actual reactors get built is another matter.
- 420codebro 7y agoYup. One of those few areas where the capital required is so massive it can bankrupt even big dogs if they fuck up. See Westinghouse. Need some more gov joint investment or it will be the same state in 20 years as it is now.
- T-A 7y agohttps://www.iaea.org/topics/small-modular-reactors https://www.iaea.org/topics/small-modular-reactors
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- masklinn 7y agoThat's supposed to be the promise / fix of SMR: plop down a fully self-contained reactor of a few tens~hundreds MWe in a shaft, plug it to the grid and leave it there for a few decades, when it's out of fuel swap it out and go recycle it in a dedicated facility. Though of course aside from not quite existing yet and probably needing a smart grid to coordinate properly these will take full-bore hits from NIMBY.
- jjoonathan 7y agoThe predominant NIMBY strategy is to request a new impact study every 6 months so as to insert delays and restarts into the capital-intensive, highly coordinated construction process, bringing it from merely arduous to nearly impossible. Pre-fabbed reactors would reduce both the attack surface and the per-hit damage considerably.
- epistasis 7y agoWhere has that happened? There are plenty of sites that would be happy to host nuclear, if it were possible to build. Vogtle and Summer are our recent examples, and NuScale is deploying soon too. NIMBYs have not held back nuclear as much as the industry itself.
- T-hawk 7y agoThe nuclear power plant at Shoreham on Long Island is possibly the most famous example of NIMBYism killing nuclear. The reactor was built and operated at test levels, but the NIMBYs demanded for full operation to include a disaster plan to evacuate all of Long Island (5+ million people) in a completely impossible time span of a few hours.
- throw0101a 7y ago> That's supposed to be the promise / fix of SMR I'm surprised the (US) military isn't looking into these more. I would think it would reduce /simplify the logistics of hauling diesel for generators over hell's half-acre.
- ethbro 7y agoThey did. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program One issue was that small-package reactor designs of the 50s and 60s required highly enriched uranium... which doesn't seem like the best idea to leave lying around at (by definition) remote outposts.
- jyounker 7y agoA nuclear reactor in a battle zone is a dirty bomb sitting in your territory.
- jswizzy 7y agoYep a simple WOG value you can buy for $9 dollars at home depot costs $500 dollars after it is certified and tested and approved for use in a plant.
- mikepurvis 7y agoDoesn't SpaceX sidestep a bunch of this stuff by achieving reliability via redundancy instead? Like, put three valves in series when it needs to fail closed, and three in parallel when it need to fail open, that kind of thing. I wonder if there's potential for a similar approach here?
- NegativeK 7y agoA rocket total failure has a more obvious, bounded cost that's lower than a reactor failure.
- jyounker 7y agoMy understanding from a friend who worked on nuclear subs was that transmutation due to radiation is what makes working with reactors so complicated and error prone. You can't assume anything about common tools and materials since the metallurgy becomes quite important in ways that we're not used to.
- pfdietz 7y agoWell, tools better not be exposed to much neutron radiation, or else the person holding the tools will be in trouble. :) What he may have been talking about is activation of troublesome elements that cause contamination that interferes with access. A prime example of this is the wear resistant alloy Stellite, used in valve seats. It's an alloy of cobalt. Some cobalt does wear off, gets circulated through the reactor, and is transmuted to 60Co, which increases the radiation field around all the piping. All the materials in your reactor that are exposed to neutrons need to be purged of troublesome trace elements that can cause this sort of activation.
- jhayward 7y ago
- winter_blue 7y agoI've always wondered: why isn't it possible to make tiny, safe, low-cost reactors? Do reactors really always have to be so big and expensive?
- nradov 7y agoReactors can be small and (relatively) cheap, but those aren't cost effective for power production. Producing power for sale on the grid requires huge economies of scale to compete with other sources. Tiny, safe, low-cost reactors are a better fit for off-grid power and heat in remote areas.
- philpem 7y agoHuman factors. It's easier to secure a massive plant than a thousand small ones. Imagine the outcome of some underpaid and overworked cable runner digging into a buried mini-reactor with a JCB digger. Or a trucker falls asleep at the wheel and drives their Mack truck through an above-ground reactor. The difference is between the media coverage being "Idiot drives truck into nuclear facility, is arrested, no damage" and "Idiot digs into mini-reactor, irradiates neighbourhood". And that's before people start yelling "Not in my back yard!"
- wahern 7y agoThere are already thousands of medical and industrial sites which contain material arguably scarier and more susceptible to accidents than what would be in a small reactor. The most recent was several months ago at UW Harborview: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/hazmat-response-for-radioactive-breach-in-seattles-first-hill-neighborhood/945941940 https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/hazmat-response-for-radioac... I think your last reasons are probably more influential. Nobody knows or seems to care much about sites like where the above incident occurred. And so far such incidents have been fairly contained, at least in the U.S. In some other parts of the world neighborhoods do become contaminated on rare occasion.
- 08-15 7y agoBecause the licensing cost is the same per reactor, regardless of its power.
- danmaz74 7y agoThe article is talking about new fuel rods that would work in existing reactors. So, your suggestion change to the title would be wrong.
- throw0101a 7y ago> Manufacturers are also experimenting with “fourth generation” models that use liquid sodium or molten salt instead of water to transfer heat from fission, removing the possibility of dangerous hydrogen production.
- RocketSyntax 7y agoNot if Professor Legasov can help it.
- Gudin 7y agoNot great, not terrible.
- sprash 7y agoMore important would be cheaper nuclear reactors. If you factor in all the cost involved nuclear energy doesn't make sense.
- dham 7y agoYea but it's pretty much all we/we'll have
- mtgx 7y agoIf the reactors are much safer by design and default, then they'll also need fewer regulations/patched-up protections later on = cheaper to build and maintain.
- tremon 7y agoBut meanwhile, they still have to conform to all existing regulations required by previous designs.
- sametmax 7y agoWhile I'm in favor of nuclear energy, this is something that bothers me. We rarely takes that into factors when comparing it to wind or solar. Indeed, wind and solar projects can be of much smaller scales. You can iterate on them. Try several places, several designs. And of course, retiring wind turbines or a solar panels, even when you multiply it to get to the same scale of a full blown nuclear reactor, it way easier and cheaper. In fact, those costs and scales are in such disfavor to nuclear that when officially calculating it, we are not including cheap wiring for the reactor, while we are including expensive underground wiring for wind turbine in my country. It looks better on paper. The problem is so important, building and retiring reactors is such a pricey thing that we keep postponing it. In France, we are still running reactors that should have been decommissioned long ago. So I hope we will be able to build some of those awesome new designs. But our society will be more independent, safe and stable if we diversify, and keep investing in wind/solar massively. A mix of energy source is much better right now.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y agoThe story mentions that the new designs would be cheaper. They don't go into detail as to why. I suspect that a lot of the cost is process and regulatory overhead. If that can be made more efficient, things are likely to get cheaper. However, the story only mentions running efficiency, which may not have as much impact.
- nerdponx 7y agoUntil we can find a safe and permanent way to store spent fuel (or otherwise render harmless fission products with long half-lives), nuclear power is always going to fail the "Facebook mom test". And, in my opinion, rightly so.
- pdonis 7y agoYou don't store spent fuel. You reprocess it, getting out new fuel and a much smaller amount of waste that is much less hazardous and only needs to be stored for a much shorter time.
- ffghhh 7y agoExcept: 1. No one does that, or has the ability to do that except the Russians [0] 2. Much less hazardous is still tons of extremely dangerous stuff that will last 100 k years. [1] [0] fast breeders. I know you can re-process fuel for normal nuclear reactors. But that doesn’t give you: “less hazardous and only needs to be stored for a much shorter time” waste [1] to a first approximation linger lived isotopes are less dangerous. But the conclusion that they’re not a problem is not correct: - An isotope that lives 100k years is incredibly radioactive! - these isotopes can produce children that are very short lived, and therefore nasty (think short lived radon, produced from geologically decaying isotopes) Edit: spelling of “extremely”
- jcroll 7y agoWhy do only the Russians have the ability to reprocess these fuels?
- ancientworldnow 7y agoThey're the only nation with operating fast breeder reactors than can handle this type of waste.
- Bootvis 7y ago
- liveoneggs 7y agosafer ones are always on the way but they need to be built for upgrade cheaply. Vogtle is building additional capacity from new reactors but the old ones are still expected to keep working, afaik. Also they're years over plan and billions (with a B) over budget.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chr1 7y agoThere is also ongoing work on LFTR reactors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reac... which are much simpler and safer than reactors using solid uranium, because they have only fraction of fuel of solid reactors, do not have any pressurised containers, and have stable rate of reaction. Two experimental reactors of this type have worked in 60s, but technology was abandoned because it didn't produce the isotope of plutonium used in nuclear weapons.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThe "doesn't make bombs" story of the molten salt reactor program's cancellation is largely a myth, albeit one that's extremely common on the internet [1]. Fluid fueled reactors, mostly in the form of Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs), of which the LFTR is one brand name of, do have lots of potentially huge benefits in terms of simplicity, online refueling, and straightforward reactivity effects. We do only have about 5 reactor-years of experience with them, and so we don't fully understand the costs of building, operating, and maintaining such systems in today's regulator regimes. There is some reason to be concerned. When the fuel is dissolved in fluid, the radioactive fission products are dispersed everywhere. Literally half the periodic table of the elements is in there, and lots of it is volatile and mobile. It gets on your pumps, your valves, your heat exchangers, etc. Doing routine maintenance becomes very challenging and will need to be done remotely. A line I heard recently regarding MSR maintenance is: "You'll need robots to do the maintenance of your maintenance robots." Another memorable gem is "If you can make robots that can do that, you should just sell the robots" We should absolutely work on progressing this technology, but in the face of a climate disaster, we should just build more of what we know is already safer than almost every kind of energy system we can deploy, which is regular Gen III LWRs. We need to solve problems on the construction yard so we can build them much more cheaply. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html#myth1 https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html#myth1
- philpem 7y agoGood points. How do some of the other alternatives like Pebble Bed fit into this? I imagine PBRs would be more challenging to recycle fuel as it's combined with the moderator(?), but are there other issues which make it unrealistic compared to traditional PWR/BWR/LWR/Magnox reactors?
- kurlberg 7y agoA long time ago, as part of a "Industry Study Visits"-course at university, we went to visit Asea-Atom and were told about the "PIUS" reactor ("Process Inherent Ultimate Safety"). Supposedly the construction was "passively safe" (i.e., breakdown of cooling pumps etc would not matter.) The idea was to have the reactor encased in an open pipe contained in a larger (closed) tank with borated water. Using stable stratification, the non-borated water was more or less kept contained in the inner pipe using density locks; if something would go wrong the borated water would get sucked in and and shut the reactor down. The engineers were very optimistic about selling this even as small municipal thermal power plants (for heating water) very close to city centers. The idea of passive safety is quite beatiful, but it seems no PIUS reactors were produced. Rosatom seems to have had some success. More info about PIUS can be found at https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull31-3/31302392529.pdf https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... https://www.euronuclear.org/e-news/e-news-17/nps-kth.htm https://www.euronuclear.org/e-news/e-news-17/nps-kth.htm
- derefr 7y agoSounds a bit like a Pythagorean cup, just with the liquid overflowing the “lip” due to heat rather than volume.
- jabl 7y agoThe Chinese are doing something vaguely similar, the DHR-400, which is a low-pressure pool-type reactor for district heating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Nuclear_Corporation#DHR-400 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Nuclear_Corpora...
- ethbro 7y agoI think the issue with safe reactor designs is economic and regulatory / political, instead of intentional. Nuclear power was invented. A few nuclear accidents happen. The solution was to put more regulation in place. Regulation increases costs and limits reactor designs (large plants, conservative / pre-existing design). End result? It's impossible to build "safer" reactors, because they're economically uncompetitive under the regulatory burden designed for older reactors. And the regulations never change because no one builds anything but old-style reactors. I understand the DoE and other similar organizations have prototype programs, but from results evaluation they seem to have gaps in the path to production. Essentially, we're letting 1960s nuclear fear of 1960s reactor designs write our regulations instead of science.
- jabl 7y agoI'm slightly skeptical of accident tolerant fuels (ATF). In terms of deaths per kWh generated, nuclear is already the safest form of energy generation we have. Where nuclear fails, and where improvement is desperately needed, is ability to deliver on budget and within schedule. What is NOT needed is minor incremental safety improvements at significant cost (e.g. ATF's that the article discusses). Now, more substantial improvements, e.g. non-LWR designs, passive walk-away safety, modular design, etc., I'm all for those.
- igravious 7y agoVery good point. Incremental safety measures with an eye to swaying public opinion is pretty pointless as public opinion changes very slowly I imagine and we must be hitting the law of diminishing returns w.r.t this particular set of tech. On the other hand a pure win would be figuring out how to enlarge the market share of nuclear by persuading those who are already willing but balk at the large up-front costs, the insurance, the regulatory environment, the long planning processes (etc. etc. – basically everything but the tech). If the USA and the EU both made a commitment to doubling the share of nuclear tech in their jurisdictions to combat climate change (and we're going to need loads of cheap juice to power all those EVs) by streamlining the processes and creating an Atoms for Peace mark II umbrella that would make this HNer a happy camper. Don't see it happening unfortunately. Every time this topic comes up I get so disheartened.
- epistasis 7y agoPublic opinion won't matter at all until construction itself becomes a reliable process. There are plenty of sites willing to host nuclear, and as our current fleet ages out many sites would welcome replacement reactors to keep the community's economic base going. However it's abundantly clear that the current tech's time has come and gone. The current designs can't be constructed in the US, as it becomes a Mexican standoff between utility, designer, and contractor, each just waiting to sue the others for what they assume will be inevitable and costly delays and construction/design errors. The Rankine cycle for converting heat to electricity is just not super exciting any more, and wind/solar/storage may outcompete thermal electricity generation as an entire class of technologies.
- beders 7y agoWho is going to pay for all this? And wouldn't it be more efficient to spend the money on energy technology that has none of the problems and is carbon-neutral? The potential for renewables in the US is fantastic. For solar alone a recent report states: The total estimated annual technical potential in the United States for urban utility-scale PV is 2,232 terawatt-hours (TWh). Full report at https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51946.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51946.pdf
- ethbro 7y agoMinor note: nuclear is carbon neutral too.
- philpem 7y agoSecondary minor note: carbon neutral power sources (e.g. wind or solar) also have a carbon cost. It comes from building the damn thing and continuing to maintain it (e.g. new parts, setting up crane access...)
- goda90 7y agoWind and solar have peaks and valleys of production, requiring some storage to meet demand. Meanwhile, nuclear can be used for carbon sequestration at geoengineering scales when it's not being used by the grid.
- gdubs 7y agoCould you explain a little more? I think you’re saying that if we have carbon sequestration machines but their constraint is that they take a lot of power to run, we can use nuclear to run those machine. Is that right? Or is there some other carbon sequestration potential of nuclear power that I’m missing?
- ethbro 7y agoBelieve parent is comparing and contrasting the problems inherent in intermittent renewables vs nuclear. Intermittent renewables (in scenarios shy of wanton overbuilding) result in deficits, which requires energy storage to address. Energy storage (aside from pumped hydro) is pretty carbon-messy. Surplus, on the other hand, can be bled off into energy-negative carbon sequestration. There's obviously lots of other points, but it's mostly fair under economically realistic scenarios.
- kjar 7y ago"Safer Nuclear Reactors Are on the Way" this kind of headline pops up every few years. Too bad it takes a decade to build these things, they cost billions, they produce harmful waste that persists for thousands of years, and in failure cases produce exclusion zones for thousands of years. Effort and investment would be better spent on solar and wind power projects.
- kjar 7y ago"Too cheap to meter" - my ass
- carapace 7y agoThat's fusion not fission apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gdubs 7y agoFossil fuels already kill millions. According to Stewart Brand, the nuclear waste for one’s entire life would fit into a can of soda. And despite nimbyism, there’s already a solution for the waste in the US: Yucca Mountain. Oh, and it doesn’t produce the greenhouse gases that are currently threatening global stability in a timeframe of decades. We shouldn’t minimize a technology’s shortcomings, but we should at least frame it fairly and soberly among our set of options.
- neilk 7y agoIs it possible to design a nuclear reactor that’s resistant to widespread corruption and incompetence? In 2019, we have to consider that even advanced democracies with great scientists and technologists might descend into some form of illiberal rule. Imagine if you could not depend on leaders to shut down a plant if problems are discovered, or if contracts were awarded based on cronyism, or if it was impossible to guarantee the quality of materials, or if whistleblowers were not protected. I'm not sure anyone can guarantee that any country will definitely remain stable over the lifetime of a nuclear reactor. Black Swans are out there.
- baybal2 7y agoIf things descend to that, you have bigger issues than the possibility of a nuclear accident.
- goda90 7y agoThere are reactor designs that can't be used to make weapons, and when they fail, passive systems prevent meltdown.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoNot that I'm aware of. All reactors, bar none, require safeguards to prevent the owner from making weapons-usable material on the sly. Civilian nuclear is a fairly impractical and round-about way to get weapons material (just use centrifuges... way easier), but if you think it's easier to get a nuke than a centrifuge, or if you are a corrupt leader who takes over a country that has nukes, you can generally make some pretty good U-233 or Pu-239 with any nuclear reactor. Yes, even Thorium reactors (they're the ones that make U-233). China, India, USA, Russia, France, UK, Pakistan, and Israel already have nuclear weapons. If you look at the fraction of world energy that that set of countries and their collective military allies uses (nevermind Israel), you can feel pretty good about transitioning more to nuclear even given a non-zero risk of proliferation.
- garmaine 7y agoThorium reactors can’t make weapons grade material. It’s just not part of the process. Thorium is also more abundant and easier to work with. The only reason why we have an uranium/plutonium nuclear industry is because those fuels permit dual-purpose (weapons generating) designs. Now it is just industrial* inertia. Edit: *industrial and regulatory.
- spsrich2 7y agoThey have decided to build the containment chamber out of something other than meringue at last!
- stewbrew 7y agoSo, the problem of nuclear waste is solved now?
- xbmcuser 7y agoNuclear is not an option as the major energy consumption growth in the next 20-30 years will be in countries/regions where the current nuclear powers will not be willing to trust with nuclear power.
- pojzon 7y agoNuclear power is the ONLY option, because no renewable energy source allows for all: - easy storage - constant availability - cheap construction per MW/h And we cannot afford to pollute our environment even more burning fossil fuels.
- ben509 7y agoAnd energy density is another major issue with renewables in the long run.
- pfdietz 7y agoIt's not. If we run out of land for solar, our energy demand would be so high that the direct thermal pollution from nuclear would be a showstopper.
- cygx 7y agoThere are various studies on the topic. For Germany, the figures that stuck in my brain were these: We can go 60% renewable without much of a problem, 80% with strategic storage and significant grid improvements, 100% via off-shore windparks and power-to-gas (our natural gas infrastructure can store hundreds of TWh).
- jillesvangurp 7y agoEnergy storage cost is dropping rapidly and given enough storage, you have constant availability. Unlike what you claim, there's a lot of innovation on this front and solar/wind bids usually include it these days. These combined bids routinely underbid nuclear/coal/gas: it's already cheaper now; even when you don't consider subsidies. So, you bring up an interesting point with cost per mwh. Nuclear is not nearly cheap enough to be competitive right now and would have to come down by magnitudes to out-compete solar/wind + storage in a few decades. I'd say a good price to shoot for with new nuclear designs that might still be too high would be around 0.1-0.5 cents per kwh in a few decades. That's only 10x less than current bids; you'd probably want to stay below that even. But anything over that would be dead on arrival in terms of profitability.
- donarb 7y agoPBS/NOVA ran a documentary a couple of years ago talking about safer nuclear reactor designs. This included lessons learned from Fukushima. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDCEjWNGv6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDCEjWNGv6Y
- e40 7y agoJust finished this. The end gives me more hope in nuclear reactors. Thanks!
- heisenbit 7y agoA big part of the Fukushima disaster were not the reactors but the spent fuel tanks. Their existence there and close to many reactors is testament to the still unsolved challenges of storing the waste.
- superkuh 7y agoUntil the Dept. of Energy approved of the NASA Kilopower fission reactor (~1kW, a couple years ago) they had not ever (ever!) approved of a new nuclear reactor design. All currently operating US nuclear reactor designs were approved by the Atomic Energy Comission, an agency that hasn't existed for 45 years. The Dept. of Energy simply isn't interested in doing it's job. They will not approve new nuclear reactor designs or create new regulations to make building safer nuclear reactor designs feasible economically or legally.
- naruciakk 7y agoWell, it's nice to have safer nuclear reactors, but the current ones are already very safe and clean
- Krasnol 7y agoSafe journey than. Hope to never see you again.
- kediz 7y agoIf Nuclear power becomes a viable safe and clean energy, how are we going to deal with countries that don't have nuclear technology? https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-powe... There are only 31 nations in the world that has nuclear power. If, in the unlikely case, we successfully distribute the nuclear technology to the rest of the world. How do we prevent/contain states go rogue and start enriching fuels for nuclear bomb? This might be a harder problem to solve than technology break through.
- afterburner 7y agoExcellent point; using money for development and installation of much safer renewables is a much better option for export to less rich countries.
- redbeard0x0a 7y ago> How do we prevent/contain states go rogue ... By using different fuels. The fuel we currently use (enriched uranium) was chosen because we could also use it to build weapons. A different fuel (i.e. thorium, etc) could be used that couldn't be used in making weapons.
- kediz 7y agoI didn't know that! Thanks for sharing! I am not familiar with nuclear technology and I do have a question: Is the technology used to make Thorium power plant very similar to that of making Uranium rode? This question aside, I feel states can not resist the temptation to get nuclear bomb technology: It's a great equalizer for power. Looking at how North Korea was able to repeatedly get U.S to the bargaining table, I think none of the nuclear powered country would want any other country on Earth to gain such technology.
- magnamerc 7y agoIMO, safety with regards to nuclear reactors is a moot point. The problem with nuclear reactors is that they are centralized and costly. You can't deploy a nuclear reactor in undeveloped countries because you still need to deploy the infrastructure. That's why solar and wind are the only viable solutions. Solar is decentralized, cheap, and mass produced and can be deployed in a matter of days. Storage is following a variation of Moore's Law, so we can expect storage cost to continue to drop over the next decades.
- gdubs 7y agoThat renewables have certain advantages doesn’t make nuclear a moot point. The developing world will indeed be an area with enormous carbon emission potential, but where things stand now it’s the developed world that is emitting at a rate far greater than anyone else; and in these countries, the infrastructure exists.
- magnamerc 7y agoThe issue is still design/construction and political red tape. It sometimes takes decades to fund and build a nuclear plant, and we don't have decades. We should be focusing on easily deployable solar and wind, even in developed countries. I'm not against existing nuclear power plants (I get my energy from a CANDU reactor), I just think we need to ramp up solar because it kills two birds with stone by tackling the issue in all parts of the world simultaneously.
- PeterStuer 7y agoJust let candidates that want to build/operate these things pay the costs for a cleanup upfront.
- kragen 7y agoTalking about safety is kind of missing the point. Existing nuclear reactors are quite safe (aside from nuclear proliferation risk), and new designs using things like accident-tolerant fuels and molten-salt thorium reactors could improve this further, but safety isn't the main problem with nuclear power, and in fact even public opinion isn't; the main problem is the price of the generated energy. And there are no designs in the works that attempt to solve this problem. With the exception of betavoltaic batteries, nuclear reactors provide energy by driving some kind of heat engine, and the cheapest large heat engines are steam engines. (Specifically, supercritical steam turbines, using Charles Parsons's 1884 turbine design, but with better metals, better bearings, and hotter steam.) These are the same engines that convert heat into power in coal power station; a coal power station is basically a nuclear power station without the nuclear reactor and with a lot more global warming. So, no matter what design improvements come along for nuclear power, we can't expect nuclear power stations to be cheaper to build than coal power plants. https://www.solarserver.de/service-tools/photovoltaik-preisindex.html https://www.solarserver.de/service-tools/photovoltaik-preisi... says that low-cost photovoltaic panels are now €0.19 per peak watt, unchanged since January. Last year they fell by 30%, but apparently the PV panel industry has formed some kind of cartel to keep prices high, like the DRAM price-fixing racket in the early 1990s — they announced last year that module prices would stop falling, and so far, that's holding true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002696. (Chuck's skepticism in that comment that the cartel would actually be able to raise prices seems to have been borne out thus far.) So we're stuck with €0.19 per peak watt until the cartel breaks down and pricing reverts to the long-term learning curve in a year or three. But, in much of the world, that makes installing photovoltaic capacity already far cheaper than building new coal power plants, not counting the cost of the coal. And that means it's also cheaper than the cost of building new nuclear power plants. Whether solar power is cheaper or not in a particular place depends on the "capacity factor", the ratio between a power station's average output and its peak output or capacity. For example, solar panels don't produce power at night, and they produce a lot less when it's cloudy. In the US, this averages about 25% for utility-scale PV, with 27% in Arizona and only 15.5% in Maine. That means that an average watt of solar power costs €0.70 (US$0.79) in Arizona but €1.23 (US$1.37) in Maine. More equatorial and less cloudy places like the Sahara and the Atacama have even higher capacity factors, so solar energy is even cheaper there: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power-the-entire-world-by-harnessing-solar-energy-from-1-of-the-sahara/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power... (Note that the pricing in that article is from 2016, when panels cost €0.53 per peak watt, two and a half times what they cost today.) (Those prices are per watt, not per watt-hour. How much it adds up to per watt-hour depends on the discount rate you use and what lifetime you use. Crystalline silicon solar panels, which are the kind we use, last basically forever, although they lose about 20% of their initial power output after a decade or three. If you just divide the above numbers by 15 years, US$0.79/W comes out to US$1.67 per GJ, or in folk units, 0.6¢ per kilowatt hour. That doesn't include an inverter, batteries, or the rooftop panel installer's worker's-comp insurance, much less long-distance power transmission.) And that's why, in April, Solarpack signed a contract with Chile to build a 120-megawatt PV plant in the Atacama, selling the energy at US$29.10 per megawatt-hour: https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/cheapest-solar-power/ https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/cheapest-solar-po... This will lower the cost of electrical energy to businesses by 25% starting in 2021, and this price does not include any subsidies. 2.9¢/kWh (US$8.08 per gigajoule, to use SI units) is cheap enough that no coal or nuclear power station has ever reached that average price — and, unless we find a cheaper way to build steam engines or other heat engines, none ever will. The intermittency of solar power — much bruited by nuclear-energy promoters — will eventually start to become a problem as more and more coal and nuclear baseload plants are decommissioned, but at least for several years, batteries are cheap enough to solve that problem, and they're getting cheaper, too. Gas peaker plants are inefficient, but they're also quick to build pretty cheap, and they still emit less greenhouse gases and carcinogens than coal. Through the 2020s, we'll see more combined-cycle gas peakers, more utility-scale storage projects, and more long-distance transmission projects, including HVDC. We'll also see more demand response, and in the end I think that will play a bigger role in solving the problem than utility-scale storage — ice-reservoir chiller systems, phase-change reservoir space heating and process heating, daytime EV charging, and simply shutting down energy-intensive production lines at night. If solar panels get sufficiently cheap, even long-distance transmission infrastructure and rural distribution will cease to be profitable except in extreme cases.
- dghughes 7y agoIsn't the Canadian CANDU design already safe? Or at least safer than many reactor types which usie plutonium and highly pressurized vessels. CANDU use natural uranium, can be refueled at full power plus many other advantages most being passive safety features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
- pfdietz 7y agoCanada gave up on CANDU, and sold AECL for just $15M. They decided there was simply no market for the reactor technology.
- teslaberry 7y agothe only reason not to have nuclear power is that if you expect world war 3 to happen in the next 30 years and you expect nuclear reactors to fail catastrophically, or worse, be attacked deliberately by sabotage or bombings/missiles in order to induce a meltdown. still, my take on germany's recent denuclearizaiton is that it was done more out of suicidal green stupidity than deliberate preparation for world war three. still, there is no such thing as a 'hardened' above ground nuclear reactor in a period of wartime. all you need to do is launch a direct hit small nuclear weapon , or a lot lot less of a weapon, to induce a meltdown of a reactor. the meldown will result in far more problems than the mere destruction of its capacity.... if you are a real conspiracy theoreist you might think fukushima was a deliberate test case to see what it looks like. if , like me, you are an optimist, you see the massive upside of fukushima, is that it is an effective follow up to chernobyl to remind the world not to forget what can happen. after all there are 450 operational reactors in the world. and probbly just as many that have been decomissioned combined with those that are planned to be built in indo-china. 1 reactor accident every 35 years isn't so bad. if it reminds humanity to be very very careful with both nuclear reactors and nuclear war, and conventional war that can detonate nuclear reactors. while the 'greens' worry about vague notions of globally catastrophic destruction over decades or centuries. the simple truth is, with 450 power reactors online and many more still as viable targets. the world can dive into an instant catastrophe at ANY moment, not centuries or even decades from now, but in the next hour. anytime. you are forewarned
- systemBuilder 7y agoWhen I last did a calculation ( 3 accidents of the once every thousand years type in 25 years ) I concluded that Nuclear accidents would render the entire land mass of Earth uninhabitable within 250,000 years. This BS oxymoron "nuclear reliability" is just that, BS.
- dotsarefun 7y agoNuclear power is already the safest method to create electricity.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoSafer or safe ?
- tehabe 7y agoI wonder what the trade-offs of this technology are. Usually with nuclear power you can make it better in one area and it gets worse in another area. That is why nuclear power couldn't really keep the promisses it gave us in the 1950s. As for me, I think nuclear power is a dying technology. This year two new reactor might go online, after construction time of over 10 years and costs around 10 billion euros each. I wonder how much renewable energy you could set up 2 billion euros per year. And how much closer we would be in storing electricity if we had spent this money in research. I think nuclear fission or fusion is interesting and has its applications but commercial electricity production is in my humble opinion not one of them.