39 ms·

The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Smaller and Safer

• wahern 7y ago
  Are modular nuclear reactors popular science's new flying car--one in every garage, arriving tomorrow? Modular reactors have been on the horizon for at least 20-30 years. Large nuclear reactors aren't viable because of the immensely costly regulatory burden imposed by a fearful, democratic population. To focus on reducing costs without considering the reason for those costs seems naive. The fear is irrational. The population won't permit modular reactors anymore than they'd permit traditional reactors. Science, engineering, and reason don't matter. Necessity may matter, but the oceans may need to start boiling before people's fear of nuclear is overcome by other fears.
  • philipkglass 7y ago
    There are places where the local population consents to new reactors and then the projects still end up years late and badly over budget. SMRs wouldn't necessarily help to make nuclear-hostile regions more welcoming of reactors, but they might help builders to actually meet their cost and schedule estimates after they start building in a friendly region. See these projects to understand why utilities in Western Europe and North America aren't ordering additional reactors recently, even in locales where the population already accepts nuclear power: 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... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Units_3_and_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_(France) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi... I live near an operating nuclear reactor. I much prefer it as my neighbor over a fossil generating station. But if it were put to a popular vote, I wouldn't support building a new reactor here because I don't want my electric rates to soar after the project ends up late and over budget.
    • wahern 7y ago
      Vogtle is a jobs project, an odd, almost absurd artifact of the high costs. I have family members working on that site. The Summer units across the river were canceled. Vogtle barely survived. The loss of Vogtle would have caused too much unemployment in the region. I'd bet money the others are jobs projects, too, presuming they're still ongoing. But they'll be the last such nuclear jobs projects. I hope modular reactors work out. I just don't think they'll work out in the U.S. or most other democratic countries, not until they're so well established elsewhere that nuclear becomes boring again. Failure to appreciate this--to shift focus to applications and regions where they have a viable, near-term future--will only ensure the total death of nuclear. I had the same criticism for Rolls-Royce marketing piece last week about starting a modular reactor project in the U.K. I hope it works out, but Rolls-Royce claimed they were going to install the reactors in the U.K., which I believe is highly unlikely--certainly much more unlikely than if they attempted to first install them somewhere with less organized political opposition. My complaint is that popular science pieces such as this Wired article create the wrong expectations. Articles about modular reactors are formulaic and periodic, exactly like articles about flying cars many years ago.
      • 7952 7y ago
        So about the opposition in the uk. When people talk about modular nuclear there is an expectation that it would be built close to towns and cities. That you could have one pop up down the road. I think this is unlikely for now in the UK. It is just easier and more economical to cluster them together onto a single site close to a large grid connection. This would probably be an existing nuclear site or power station site. A lot of these sites in the UK are being decommissioned anyway and are looking for new opportunities. This is much less likely to cause opposition than a new site on green field land (like fracking). And an existing nuclear site will have a local population that are more comfortable with the technology.
    • baking 7y ago
      Think of the term "Economies of Scale." In one sense, it means building a larger steel mill, oil refinery, aluminum smelter, etc. to lower production costs. Applied to nuclear reactors, you get large, one-of-a-kind designs, that have to go through a long approval process, complicated construction, with major financial risk, defeating any economies of scale they had (primarily higher temperatures leading to higher energy efficiency.) Another way to look at economies of scale is to produce a lot of identical widgets, in this case modular reactors that can be manufactured in one factory and shipped on trucks to the site ready to be installed, with streamlined permitting and approval based on a proven track record with identical units. One additional benefit is you can do the site permitting "on spec" submitting for multiple locations and then you have 10-20 years to decide where you want to build, only investing the money if it turns out the market is there.
  • tlb 7y ago
    Well, it's our job as technically literate people to educate our friends and family about such things. Although the article talks about cities, the early installations will probably be remote industrial sites like mines, where they're currently trucking in diesel fuel for generators.
  • sneak 7y ago
    For both, technology and price/perf is here. The society/regulators/coordination is the legwork that needs to be done now. https://youtu.be/RYLGhVPp8lw https://youtu.be/RYLGhVPp8lw
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Agreed. Ironically, small reactors were all the rage in the 1950s [1]. As the Atomic Energy Commission struggled to find ways to make nuclear power economical, there was a conference of reactor advisory committee in October, 1957. They decided that the only way to make the most well-known tech (water-cooled reactors) economical was to scale them up, and how. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/img/aec-plan-1.png https://whatisnuclear.com/img/aec-plan-1.png Meanwhile, throughout the 1970s the combination of a large number of license applications plus an increasingly concerned public (now fully terrified of radiation from the nuclear weapons atmospheric testing debate) caused regulatory scrutiny to ratchet. Quality assurance, equipment qualification, inspections all became more rigorous. The Browns Ferry fire in 1975 made cable spreading rooms require 3-hour fire barriers and major redundancy. Rooms were added. More expensive materials were needed. Economic struggles continued. Then Three Mile Island happened in 1979. In 1980, the viability of nuclear electricity was in question. Amazingly, the capacity factor of the fleet then increased steadily from 60% all the way up to 90%, making them profitable in the 90s and 00s to the point that a nuclear renaissance was set to occur in 2006-7, helped along by renewed concerns about carbon emissions. At the time, the US nuclear fleet produced about 65% of the nation's low-carbon energy. But then the fracking boom happened. Low natural gas prices brought electricity revenue down in deregulated electricity markets, and the drop in revenue put many nuclear plants in the red. Utilities started replacing nuclear reactors with high-carbon fracked gas plants. Environmentalists didn't care much because solar costs fell 10x and wind was doing great too. Buzz about 100% renewable swept the nation as 10 GW of gas fire up every night in California. Now, the nuclear industry looks back at small reactors, hoping the capital costs can be kept reasonable. It is indeed likely, that small water-cooled reactors using enriched fuel will be very expensive to operate, as they were in the 1950s. Many advanced reactor companies talk about using high-assay low-enriched uranium (20% enriched rather than 5%), which is economic bonkers. But enrichment and uranium are dirt cheap at the moment due to overcapacity from the Japanese and German nuclear shutdowns. This won't last though, and the HALEU reactors will very likely be too expensive to operate if they do actually get built. The ML-1 military microreactor of 1961-65 was 10x more costly than fossil [2]. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1 The most cost-effective thing the nuclear industry can do right now is invest in telling its story. Explain why it's an interesting power source. Explain the value in tiny footprint 24/7 low-carbon power. Most american don't even know that nuclear is low carbon. On the technical side, we need venues to try out some of the crazier reactors that may lead to real cost reductions in today's regulator environment. Put simply, this means we must build reactors that have only a tiny number of valves, cables, motors, etc. that are needed to safely shut down and cool the reactor. Low-pressure coolant reactors may be able to put this together, even though historically they've always been significantly more expensive due to the complexities of dealing with exotic coolants (liquid metals, molten salts, etc.) In 1957, Walter Zinn (director of Argonne National Lab) suggested that liquid metal cooled (low pressure) natural uranium fueled (like a CANDU) reactors were most likely to succeed economically. They'd have low capital cost, very few safety-related systems, and would require very little fuel cycle costs. Today, I think there's a good chance that this kind of concept is still true. Could be molten salt or liquid metal at this point (molten salt reactors weren't really proven until a few years after Zinn's suggestion).
  • hanniabu 7y ago
    > The population won't permit modular reactors anymore than they'd permit traditional reactors I'd much rather a smaller nuclear plant per every few square miles that isn't vulnerable to meltdowns than large nuclear plants that are more complex and susceptible to meltdowns that will destroy all adjacent land. And to say the fear is irrational is ignorant to history.
• smaddox 7y ago
  TIL about liquid metal cooled nuclear reactors. Wikipedia makes lead-cooled reactors sound pretty amazing, and yet lead-bismuth seems to be preferred, presumably simply because of the lower melting point, despite the disadvantages of bismuth (polonium byproduct, high cost). I'd be interested to hear if there are other reasons pure lead cooling isn't being more actively pursued. Especially for small, single-use reactors, it seems like it would be perfect.
  • mechhacker 7y ago
    Lead has some nice benefits: Provides shielding or reflection (depends on the reactor spectrum) High boiling point Doesn't have the same chemical reactivity as other liquid metals like sodium or NaK But, it needs to be balanced with the drawbacks: High density. Liquid sodium is less than a tenth of the density of liquid lead. This becomes more of a problem the larger the reactor gets due to seismic loading. Poorer heat transfer qualities than sodium (which is why liquid metals have mostly stuck to sodium) Must be designed to flow with low velocities due to corrosion/erosion* *This can drastically affect the size of the piping or flow passages required for cooling. Flowing above a certain velocity will erode and destroy pumps, piping, etc. A low performance reactor won't be as highly impacted as a high performance reactor that needs to flow as much coolant as fast as possible. The Russians have done a lot of work in this area.
    • marcosdumay 7y ago
      Hum... All those drawbacks are things that improve at least linearly when you reduce the reactor size and power. Looks like lead would be a great option for those small reactors.
  • minikites 7y ago
    The reactor is difficult to turn off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine >The issue was that the lead/bismuth eutectic solution solidifies at 125 °C (257 °F). If it ever hardened, it would be impossible to restart the reactor, since the fuel assemblies would be frozen in the solidified coolant. Thus, whenever the reactor is shut down, the liquid coolant must be heated externally with superheated steam.
• RickJWagner 7y ago
  Awesome. Nuclear is a necessary step as we move away from petro-energy.
  • pfdietz 7y ago
    Nuclear is not necessary. It's not even clear if it's even useful for that.
• spenrose 7y ago
  Maybe nuclear reactors will be easier to deploy in China, where the government has more control: https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656 https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/1162772916125126656
• natch 7y ago
  Smaller, safer, and just as friendly to centralized top-down control by governments, utilities, and mega corporations. Unlike solar which can be controlled by yourself on your own property.
  • Tagbert 7y ago
    It’s not an either / or. Nuclear makes a good backfill for the variable output of solar and wind.
    • natch 7y ago
      Sort of agree. But unfortunately as a taxpayer or ratepayer you still end up sharing the cost of centralized boondoggles when they happen. Less so with decentralized elements of the system.
      • masklinn 7y ago
        Nuclear is not that expensive over its entire lifetime though, the biggest issue (aside from safety and security concerns) is the huge up-front investment. In theory SMRs improve that significantly by providing smaller self-contained units which are easier to reclaim (unlike a traditional power plant site which can't really be reused even if you decommission it).
        • pfdietz 7y ago
          People try to point to operating cost once the investment cost is amortized, but that's only relevant for the decision of whether to shut down an existing nuclear plant. The fully loaded cost, including the cost to build and finance the plant, is the relevant figure when deciding whether to build a new nuclear plant. And even on operating cost, many nuclear plants in the US have failed to be cash flow positive in recent years, and have been shut down before their end of their lives. The remaining reactor at Three Mile Island had not made an operating profit in six years before it was ended.
        • natch 7y ago
• symplee 7y ago
  From the article: >> NuScale’s reactor is 65 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter, and is housed in a containment vessel only slightly larger. About the size of two school buses stacked end to end, you could fit around 100 of them in the containment chamber of a large conventional reactor. Yet this small reactor can crank out 60 megawatts of energy. >> The review process is brutal—NuScale submitted a 12,000 page technical application—and will likely stretch on for at least another year. But the company has already secured permission to build its first 12-reactor plant at the Idaho National Laboratory, which may start supplying power to communities in Western states as soon as 2026.
  • symplee 7y ago
    A couple extra ideas for these beyond land-based power generation: 1) Put a couple of these on trans-Atlantic cruise ships, designed for speed, to make the journey in 3 days (at 50 MPH) carrying 2,000+ people. 2) Cargo ships that operate on the backbone long haul routes. If there are concerns about these getting too close to shoreline or population, just have them only operate 10 miles from land. Other cargo ships can then load and unload them in open water. (This would require some faster loading/unloading mechanism, maybe something where the front would open up and slide out the entire deck into the other ship.) Thoughts?
    • yellow_lead 7y ago
      The damage from an emergency at sea could be much greater than one on land.
      • missosoup 7y ago
        The thing you get in the sea is unlimited free cooling and radiation shielding. You could dump the core onto the seafloor and not really have to worry about anything except the fuel elements eventually corroding and polluting a small area. There are 11 known reactors dumped into various oceans and nothing terrible has come about from them.
        • 7y ago
• Causality1 7y ago
  Great, except those aren't the problems facing nuclear. The issues are cost and public perception. Reactors are already exceptionally safe compared to fossil fuel plants. People don't like nuclear and even when they do they don't want it near their home. This has resulted in among other things an absurdly expensive and drawn-out process for getting approval to build a new plant.
  • fuckyah 7y ago
    I’m glad people are rational after all.
  • 7952 7y ago
    The hope is that small reactors are cheaper to produce and maintain. Also, can you give more detail on why you think regulation is so over the top?
    • Causality1 7y ago
      In short, deliberate regulatory obstructionism. Telling people you'll protect them from nuclear meltdown is a great way to get votes. Estimates for the cost of nuclear energy without the past four decades of anti-nuke activism are as low as 10% of current costs. https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169 https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169
      • EricE 7y ago
        lol - love how the logic and reason posts are getting voted down by the hysterical anit-nukers.
        • 7952 7y ago
          I didn't down vote. But it's not like the parent really gave much evidence that regulation was the actual proximate cause of decline. Or anything to prove that the regulation was excessive. Reactively blaming everything on hysteria is irrational.
• pkaye 7y ago
  On Netflix there is a three part documentary about Bill Gates. One of the parts is about him funding a new generation nuclear plant.
  • very_nice 7y ago
    Nice
  • specialist 7y ago
    I wholeheartedly support traveling wave reactors. Mostly as a way to reduce our stockpiles of waste. Energy generation is a nice side benefit. I'm now unclear if Gates funded TerraPower is still working on TWR (or some variant). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor FWIW, I oppose creating any new nuclear power facilities using any other technology. Excepting maybe pebble bed. Until the problems of proliferation, disposal, financing, incompetence, and corruption are addressed.
  • petre 7y ago
    Too bad he was working with China. I want it to succeed but I imagine it cannot in the curent political reality (trade war, Xi, HK, Taiwan independence, etc).
    • specialist 7y ago
      There's got to be other options for hosting (locating) their work. I hope their lobbyists are pitching to DARPA and DOE as a way to reduce our stockpiles of waste. An alternative to Yucca Mountain.
    • loeg 7y ago
      The major setback highlighted in the documentary was Fukushima, which predates the recent political climate.
      • qes 7y ago
        I thought I recalled that the major setback was the current U.S. administration's trade policies with China. Everything was set to go, but then the plans got trumped.
• Ididntdothis 7y ago
  If these proliferate how do we deal with fuel being stolen and used by terrorists or similar? I don’t know how realistic a dirty bomb scenario but right now nuclear fuel is tightly controlled in a small number of locations. With these reactors it would spread out into more locations and potentially into countries that don’t take maintenance and disposal seriously.
  • sneak 7y ago
    I think that if dirty bombs were a real threat, we would see more of the people who would want to use them doing more traditional bombing first/now, and bomb attacks are extremely rare. I think this is perhaps more movie-plot threat than real risk.
    • mantap 7y ago
      Extremely rare in the west in 2019. Not rare in some other parts of the world with an unstable security situation. They were also common in the UK in the 90s and earlier during the troubles, so it's not like western countries are magically immune from instability.
  • jillesvangurp 7y ago
    Given that ordinary materials like fertilizers have been used to create bombs, I would say that the mass availability and distribution of nuclear material creates a near certainty that it will end up in the wrong hands sooner or later. And it's a problem because that means that each and every micro reactor will need to have very strict and expensive security. The security cost alone makes this a non starter compared to using batteries and solar. We already have those all over the place and it's not a problem. Also theft is going to be an issue. If micro reactors fit on a truck, those trucks could be hijacked. Or a deployed unit could be stolen. So, yes, I would say this is a show stopper.
  • ryacko 7y ago
    Require long lead times for planning and coordination, ensuring that they would almost certainly be caught before using them. As for dirty bombs, the mafia takes low-grade radioactive waste and dumps it in the ocean. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/16/shipwreck-waste-mafia-italy https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/16/shipwreck-wast...
• mdorazio 7y ago
  No word here on how much they will cost to build and decommission or how much water they require, or what the plan for waste management is. I'd love to see some numbers here because without them it's easy to assume this is not cost competitive with solar+battery in +5 years given current trends.
  • boomboomsubban 7y ago
    I imagine you can find all sorts of numbers in their 12000 page report to the NRC, I assume located here https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/design-cert/nuscale.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/design-cert/nuscal...
    • Animats 7y ago
      Yes, and this is the main document to read.[1] There's some hand-waving on safety issues in Table 1.9-2. NuScale passes the buck on flooding issues to the plant owner. Also, there's some hand-waving on software safety issues: "The NuScale design applies RG 1.152, Revision 3 and IEEE Std. 7-4.3.2-2003 that it endorses. For RG 1.168, the requirements of IEEE 1012-2004 are tailored to the NuScale I&C development lifecycle, which is different from the conceptual waterfall lifecycle in IEEE 1012-2004. The applicable tasks from IEEE 1012-2004 to the I&C development are mapped. Some administrative mandatory requirements in the standard conflict with established Engineering or QA documentation requirements. The requirements of IEEE 1028-2008 are tailored to the NuScale I&C development lifecycle." This may mean "We use Agile and your outdated rules don't apply". The key concept is that, since these plants are passively cooled and don't require pumps for cooling, many of the concerns about keeping cooling water flowing to prevent a meltdown don't apply. "For the NuScale design, the safety analysis shows that core damage does not occur during any design basis event.", says the application. What could possibly go wrong? A big concern is that NuScale proposes to put up to 12 reactors in one connected pool. I haven't found the part yet where they discuss what happens if one leaks and contaminates the whole pool. Or the pool springs a leak and drains into the ground. These are not small plants. A 12-unit plant is 720MW of electrical power, so it's getting close to a typical gigawatt sized plant. More small units, instead of one big one. The history of power reactor meltdown incidents is roughly as follows: - Three Mile Island - meltdown, big containment vessel, fully contained, expensive but not hazardous. - Chernobyl - fire, meltdown, no containment vessel, radioactive material dispersed over large area. - Fukishima - meltdowns, undersized containment vessels breached, radioactive material dispersed over moderate sized area. A certain amount of skepticism about designs that "don't need" a big containment vessel is perhaps justified. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1924/ML19241A398.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1924/ML19241A398.pdf
• acd 7y ago
  We could build these reactors underground in areas where there are not seismic activity. That would also protect the atmosphere should there be any kind of incident.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• xorfish 7y ago
  > “I am skeptical of the ability to license advanced nuclear reactors and deploy them on a scale that would make a difference for climate change” I know of at least one design that is likely to be commercialiced in 5-10 years. The 195 MWe IMSR is much smaller than the nuScale reactor and is already in the middle of the second pre licicing review of cnsc. Main advantage of the imsr is that it operates at normal pressure and it has a much better fuel economy. It produces six times more with the same amount of fuel as a LWR.
  • baking 7y ago
    I had to look this up. The CNSC is the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Their Pre-Licensing Review is an optional process intended to streamline the eventual license application. (https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-licensing-vendor-design-review/index.cfm https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li...) The NRC and the CNSC have also agreed to a joint review process that might perhaps allow the same design to be used in both Canada and the US. (https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/2019/12/terrestrial-energy-imsr-advanced-reactor-selected-by-canadian-and-u-s-regulators-for-joint-review/ https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/2019/12/terrestrial-energy...) However, the ISMR is at least three years behind NuScale who started their NRC application in December 2016 and are well along in the process.
    • xorfish 7y ago
      If you look at the progress at the CNSC, then NuScale appears to be one year ahead. The IMSR should finish the second phase in October 2020. Terrestrial Energy plans to have the first commercial plant on the grid in the next decade.
      • baking 7y ago
        I don't know enough about the process to make comparisons, but NuScale currently expects to be producing grid power in 2026. Nothing against Terrestrial Energy or molten salt reactors which is certainly an interesting tech. NuScale is about as boring as all get-out and might face fewer regulatory hurdles, but it might also have a harder time competing against better tech.
• baybal2 7y ago
  No, does make sense. Going smaller will shoot the price through the roof. The basic convention is the bigger reactor you have, the cheaper it per unit of power output.
  • imtringued 7y ago
    Nuclear powerplants suffer from high upfront costs that can be amortized if you mass produce the same model.
    • baybal2 7y ago
      Then, you must mass produce the biggest type you can make.
  • 7952 7y ago
    In a market with strike prices and capacity markets this may not be a serious issue though. The best is the enemy of the good. Particularly when you are investor who wants to see a return within the decade.
  • hwillis 7y ago
    That's totally backwards. The short version is that due to advances in manufacturing and metallurgy, there is no longer an advantage to scaling manufacture beyond a relatively small point. Economies of scale is not really a result of economic forces; it's dominated by engineering and other realities. Look at how Alcoa revolutionized US manufacturing by making large numbers of small-scale rolling mills instead of large mills. Look at how the heavy press program[1] has fallen apart. Look at how large nuclear plants must now be made globally, because no single country can even come close to manufacturing the whole thing themselves. Global manufacturing no longer has government investment driven towards the heavy presses required to create massive reactor vessels. Industries have figured out how to use welding, alloys, and smaller forgings to improve their products- both strength to weight and cost. Making big reactors nowadays is like an Apollo program, and subject to the same far higher one-off costs and inability to amortize. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
• chvid 7y ago
  Too “bad” it will be economically uncompetitive compared to next generation wind and solar.
  • koheripbal 7y ago
    Wind and solar produce variable power sources. Power for baseload has a 99.99% uptime requirement. The batteries needed to make variable power sources even 95% capable of meeting demand are economically unfeasible as well. As a couple examples.... The laegest solar plant in Arizona produces only 10% of its peak summer power in the winter. ...similarily, in Texas the wind turbines are usually not turning during Texas peak demand because it's during high pressure systems where there's not wind.
    • _ph_ 7y ago
      There is only one constraint for the electric system: the power produced needs to exactly match the power consumed at any point of time. If you mismatch those two numbers, the grid is going to fail. The baseload is just the number for the power under which the demand never drops in a giving time frame, typically 24 hours. The other number would be the peak load, which is just the maximum load in that timeframe. The actual load will be between these two numbers and at any time the constraint named applies. So "baseload" isn't some expecial part of the electricity. It is an accounting number. The challenge is to provide the correct power to the grid and for that, different technologies are used. Coal and nuclear power plants have a reasonably high availability, but as others have written, far away from 99% uptime. Their downside is, that their output can only be regulated very slowly. Both properties made them ideal for the amount of power which is called baseload. The problem is, they can't deliver much else due to their limitations. That is also the reason, that for decades the architects of the power systems tried to drive the baseload up. To increase demand at night, Belgium installed floodlights on their freeways, Germany for a while pushed electric heaters which would draw their main power at night at a reduced price. Solar and wind behave inverse, they might not be as reliably available, indeed the sun doesn't shine at night, but they can be switched off in an instant. But any time they produce enough electricity, they can carry the baseload. So currently in Germany wind easily provides large parts of the baseload (https://www.electricitymap.org https://www.electricitymap.org). Coal plants are almost shut down, even solar right now produces as much energy as coal. So without coal and nuclear, the challenge still is to match the grid demand. This is independant from the baseload number. And with the shift to reneweables, the baseload number can be driven down quite considerably, if incentives are given to use electricity in times of high supply.
• allard 7y ago
  But others remained unaware of the invisible dangers around them: soldiers lounged in the sun close to the reactor, smoking cigarettes and stripped to the waist in the summer heat; a group of KGB officers arrived in the zone incognito, clad in tank crew overalls and carrying expensive Japanese-made dosimeters—but approached the ruins of Unit Four without knowing enough to turn the devices on. Only the fate of the crows that had come to scavenge from the debris but stayed too long—and whose irradiated carcasses now littered the area around the plant—provided any visible warning of the costs of ignorance. (Higginbotham)
• HocusLocus 7y ago
  " Small Modular Reactors may be the nuclear industry's answer to avoiding obscurity, sadly, and one cannot blame them (though I am starting to) for failing to exhibit the courage or desire to commit attention to molten salt research. Because what is being presented by default is a practical absurdity. What if someone promoting utility wind approaches you and claims that wind is the future? BUT in place of today's standard size 3MW turbines it absolutely must be a far greater number of 1MW turbines. You'd take a step back, confident that the reason must have little to do with technology. You'd feel dubious, imagine you were being 'played' in some way. Even a layman would sense something wrong with the proposal, given the overhead of placing units. I have the same reaction when hearing discussion of Small Modular Reactors. I see them as a high ticket luxury item that is being fronted as the 'stealth solution' to a most pressing problem, to design something faux environmentalists and radiophobes might fear and hate less, even though they could never launch the nuclear industry into a new renaissance. Utility scale electric is geared to multiple ~1GWe+ solutions per plant, the round number that could practically be multiplied into a feasible grid solution. Aside from industry desperation I also wonder if SMRs are being promoted by a few billionaires, not from a desire to supply lesser developed countries (all of whom should never go in for less than 1GWe), but to power their own offshore enclaves, their survival retreats in places like New Zealand. Call it my pet conspiracy theory. They wish to see the technology put to practice on our collective dime as soon as possible. Helping to stock the pantries of billionaires may be a tidy business some day but SMR fixation today represents a foolish diversion of attention away from what needs to be the principal goal --- attaining energy self-sufficiency for the grid with >=1GWe sources, less fuel volatility and less risk. This is an existential crisis. " (from my 2017 letter to Energy Secy Perry) https://archive.org/download/20170629EmailToEnergySecretaryPerrySC/20170629%20Email%20to%20Energy%20Secretary%20Perry%20SC.pdf https://archive.org/download/20170629EmailToEnergySecretaryP... (2016 letter to Candidate Trump on Energy) https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/20160422%20trump%20energy%20letter%20SC.pdf https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201...
  • HocusLocus 7y ago
    Is anyone going to comment on my capitalization of the word 'but' for emphasis in the above quote? This place is starting to annoy me.
• k__ 7y ago
  Wasn't the main issue with nuclear plants in the past that they failed in ways that were deemed impossible before they happened?
  • hwillis 7y ago
    Not really. Chernobyl was explicitly known to have a vulnerability at a very unusual operating point. Fukushima was repeatedly flooded and officials refused to make protections against modest natural disasters. Three Mile Island was a mechanical failure. There aren't many examples where something that went wrong was thought to be impossible. Much more often it is scenarios that were known to be possible, but ignored for reasons of cost or politics. Nuclear plants are hardened against virtually everything. Certainly there may be things people haven't managed to think of, but there are many, many more things that we have thought of and haven't dealt with. A plant may be able to survive a bomb, but not a bunker buster or a full out war. We don't want to and often can't ensure safety in every event that is thought of, which is why fail-safer designs are so popular in research and press circles. It's a bit of an unfair rap since other thermal plants blow up all the time, dams burst, and windmills fall over. Radation makes everything more dangerous and has a permanent impact on our planet, but the actual rate of accidents is tiny. We do need more fail-safe plants (Fukushima in particular was inexcusable) but the real problem facing nuclear right now is cost.
• EricE 7y ago
  I won't be happy until I can have one of these in my basement. It's about time at least some people are becoming sensible about nuclear and dropping the "boogyman" attitudes towards it.