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I am a lifelong proponent of advanced nuclear, and I study it daily and professionally. I can tell you that advanced reactors will not be cheaper, at least at f
by acidburnNSA 7y ago
I am a lifelong proponent of advanced nuclear, and I study it daily and professionally. I can tell you that advanced reactors will not be cheaper, at least at first. Nuclear technology development is challenging and takes time, and is very heavily regulated and NIMBY'd. Proving out new reactors requires in-reactor experimentation, which itself is very expensive and time consuming. Building a new First of a kind reactor is always expensive, and is followed by long test/shakedown periods where heat/electricity will not be getting sold for a large fraction of the time. Delayed revenue causes financing costs to skyrocket.
The small/micro reactors are less expensive from a total investment point of view, but you still are paying at least tens of millions for your core and probably hundreds of millions for your license, regardless of how small you are. The payback on a $100M license for a 1 MWe reactor is infinite.
Furthermore, we've had small/micro reactors in the past, like the one that powered McMurdo Station in Antarctica for 10 years. It was shut down because it was expensive to operate. How do we make sure this doesn't happen with the new gen of SMRs?
We need to be developing reactors that approach full autonomy, somehow design out the need of having 4 shifts of security, somehow design out expensive site-specific licenses, have a clear story for their final waste disposition, are clearly and demonstrably safe, and so on. I'd like to see the advanced nuclear industry focus less on hype and more on practical solutions to these particular problems. Some are working on it, but there's still a lot of seemingly vapid hype in the advanced nuclear circles. I worry that it will lose credibility someday.
Meanwhile if we could figure out how to build Gen III light-water reactors more cheaply, like the Koreans largely have, then we'd have a great low-carbon stopgap that we could deploy significantly, today, with no technology development, and help avoid climate change.
Regardless, we the nuclear industry have to work super hard to get both capital and O&M costs down dramatically if we want to contribute to the energy future.
- potiuper 7y ago> figure out how to build Gen III light-water reactors more cheaply, like the Koreans largely have You are suggesting to fake all the expensive paperwork and playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who would take certain contracts? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal Along with keeping "Only about 10% to 20% of the [post Chernobyl] safety additions" and abandoning an extra wall in the reactor containment building: 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... I apologize if this comment may seem sarcastic, but after reading the TR article I would not want to live anywhere near one of those reactors.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoNo, that's not what I'm suggesting. That scandal's contribution to the overall success of Korea to be able to build a standardized reactor is small. > ... eight cases out of 2,075 samples of foreign manufactured reactor components that were supplied with fake documents. S. Korea learned how to build nukes from the failing American company, Combustion Engineering. They then tweaked the design a bit and totally serialized its production. They have total alignment because there's one big utility doing all the work (no contract wars, suing each other, etc.). They optimized the hell out of the construction management for those projects. Many of the pioneers of Korea's nuclear industry now want to help bring the technology back to the US, they feel it's repaying a debt to the Americans from the early days of their partnership with CE. For example, this long podcast is an incredible and rare view into this stuff. [1] [1] https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung# https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung#!
- liveoneggs 7y agoYour use the term "NIMBY'd" shows you as an apologist or some other bad faith actor.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoCaptain Planet, the Simpsons, The China Syndrome, Teenage mutant ninja turtles, Macgyver, Godzilla, and Greenpeace might disagree with you on that when standing next to an actuarial table showing risks from nuclear generation compared to everyday/as normal fossil air pollution, hydro dam failures, natural gas explosions, oil spills, and climate change. Tell me more about my bad faith.