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Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029
- radicalbyte 7y agoWe shouldn't be using nuclear energy for power. Solar, wind and batteries will solve that. What we should be doing is using nuclear energy for HEAT. We need a LOT of heat for a variety of chemical and industrial processes, not to mention heating of homes in colder climates. For these uses nuclear fission has massive potential.
- pauljurczak 7y agoBaseline power based on batteries is not practical yet and it won't be for a while. Way too expensive and resource intensive.
- Retric 7y agoSolar + batteries averaged over the 24 hour demand curve are cheaper than current generation nuclear power plant operating 24/7/365. The issue is turning off nuclear power plants don’t significantly reduce costs so their competing head to head vs x hours @ 2c/kWh + y hours @ ~20c/kWh. At first glance it seems to slightly favor nuclear when it can operate 24/7, but nuclear power plants have a very long lifecycle 40+ years and projected battery costs for future replacements are lower than today’s values. Worse nuclear has a much longer lead time so you already need to compare battery prices ~5 years from now when you’re looking at building a new nuclear power plant. PS: Note grid batteries are significantly cheaper when they can share inverters with solar generation and be directly charged via DC. Standalone prices are higher. Also, fast discharge peaking power reduces battery lifetimes over longer discharge nighttime useage.
- hokkos 7y agoIn some countries maybe but in a lot of others there are days with almost no sun, batteries are not for seasonal storage.
- e12e 7y agoI don't know about a lot. I live in Tromsø, Norway (69N). There aren't many populated areas this far north. And even here, solar is pretty decent for a lot of uses (Esp in combination with insulation to reduce the need for heating). We also have quite a lot of precipitation - but again, solar isn't hopeless even here. As for seasonal storage, I suspect some kind of kinetic/potential energy storage might be better than batteries? Like lifting a weight, or pumping a liquid up hill/up a tower?
- manfredo 7y agoOver 99% of Norway's electricity is from hydroelectric plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Norway
- e12e 7y agoYes, sure. It's hard to compete with already built hydro. So there's little incentive to move from cheap hydro. But for those that want, it's possible. And feasible. But with a solid grid built out - it's mostly as a supplement.
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- koheripbal 7y agoThe important flaw in your argument is the use of the word average. A grid cannot make use of average power generation. It needs consistent power generation. ...and storage needed to make that happen is orders of magnitude higher than what's being factored in here.
- Retric 7y agoBatteries inherently allow for peaking power, it’s nuclear that has issues with fluctuations in demand. So, by average I mean how much are you able to use directly vs how much do you need to store in batteries. To be more clear only using solar with battery backup you can provide 24/7 power that covers demand but at lower costs per kWh than current nuclear numbers operating 24/7 and vastly lower than trying to reach 100% nuclear generation in almost every country.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoYour argument is completely shot down by the mere fact that 75% of France's power is provided by nuclear energy.
- Retric 7y agoNope, ~60% of France’s power is provided by nuclear while 71.6% of it’s power production is nuclear. They export 86.3 TWh almost entirely nuclear power and import 26.1 TWh almost entirely non nuclear power (2016). Even then their nuclear capacity factor is 77% where it’s generally 90+% in the US because frequently nobody want’s to import electricity from France. So, France’s high percentage of nuclear power results roughly 17% higher costs per kWh for nuclear power due to oversupply. Or more depending on what it exports at. Further, the more you increase nuclear capacity globally, the less anyone is going to be importing it at night and weekends when everyone is over supplied.
- Retric 7y agoThat’s one of those ideas that seems great on the surface but is much more expensive to implement than you might think. Moving heat around involves significant energy loss over long distances. That’s offset with combined heat and power generation which is very popular in Russia etc, but on it’s own it’s a tougher sell.
- christophilus 7y agoI wonder, though, how much we could bring the price of nuclear down if we were to actively develop the technology, rather than letting it languish. I also wonder how much toxic waste batteries will produce vs nuclear. Do we have clear numbers on that?
- hokkos 7y agoWhy not both ? With cogeneration you raise the efficiency from only electric generation from 40% to 80% with heat, but in summer you can still generate electricity only. And SMR are better positioned than classic reactor because the smaller size and inherent passive security from surface to volume problem (heat raise with volume in power of 3 and cooling only with surface in power of 2) make them easier to build them near populated cities.
- radicalbyte 7y agoI should have been more nuanced: we shouldn't be building out the current design of fission power in order to decarbonize our electricity production. The biggest reason is that it just takes far too long to build: we're talking 15-20 years. Wind and solar can scale far more quickly than that. Closing existing nuclear power plants like they're doing in Germany is absolute lunacy. For heat that timeline is acceptable given that it can be "decarbonized" by switching to burning biomass to cover the transition. If we could build safe nuclear electric plants within a reasonable timeframe and cost then we should absolutely do it (this would make so much sense in huge countries like the US or China because you can have the reactors located well away from large populations).
- koheripbal 7y agoThe batteries at the scale needed to provide consistent baseload, simply do not exist and are still entirely theoretical at this point.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoYes I try to bring it up to my "only natural sources!" friends but they won't hear it. We need at least a 100 fold improvement in energy storage to make it practical and provide "base load" on par with what we have now with nuclear and fossil fuels.
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago> Solar, wind and batteries will solve that. Pretty sure that's not true if you account for total costs. (Including the energy and materials budget for making solar panels and batteries at scale.)
- Kaibeezy 7y ago"Production line mistakes may lead to generic defects that propagate throughout an entire fleet of reactors and are costly to fix," (person from University College London) warned. Wouldn’t the knowledge gained by fixing a large one-off reactor be of limited transferable value, as compared to expensive knowledge that could be used to upgrade an existing “fleet” plus improve subsequent versions?
- osobo 7y agoThe point is that every mistake propagated over 10 reactors has to be fixed 10 times. If you have a single reactor, you just fix it once.
- imtringued 7y agoThat's a massive benefit. That means there 10 opportunities to optimize the process.
- klyrs 7y agoThe point is rather short sighted: after fixing the production line issue, you make another 100 and recoup the expense of those first 10.
- imtringued 7y agoYou can also just decide to get rid of the first 10 and never repair them because it's cheaper to build 10 new ones.
- ainiriand 7y agoThat sounds like a very bad idea. Although I am confident that the tech has evolved since Chernobyl, terrorism has evolved as well. It just takes a bunch of assholes to destroy a small town. And yes, I think they will be pretty well guarded. But if you have lots of them some of them will have security flaws.
- matthewmacleod 7y agoThis is both a flawed argument, and a point addressed directly by the article – with the proposal being to place these reactors in existing nuclear sites with security strategies in place.
- xorfish 7y agoYou can't just walk into a nuclear reactor and take away bomb grade material. Even if you run a reactor, you can't get bomb grade material out of it if you allow regulators in. Dirty bombs are also far less dangerous as they are made out to be.
- willvarfar 7y agoAssholes can already destroy small and even large towns by conventional means. I'm sure you yourself can come up with a dozen ways of killing everyone in the town you are in via conventional explosives, poisons, toxins etc.
- arcturus17 7y agoHow many attacks with the scale and sophistication needed to pull off something like that have we seen in the last 10 years in the West? I mean, how many successful terrorist attacks on nuclear plants have we really seen?
- thomasedwards 7y agoI really wanted this to be about Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited rather than Rolls-Royce Holdings plc. A nuclear-powered Rolls-Royce Phantom would be incredibly boss.
- LeoPanthera 7y agoWould a nuclear powered EV ever need refuelling?
- brnt 7y agoI remember Toshiba having a decay-based laptop battery in development (at least 10 years ago, maybe 20). You wouldn't have to charge, ever. Now that would be something!
- Stratoscope 7y agoWhen I was five or so, I had a watch with a radium dial. I read in a kid's science book that if you went to bed and waited until your eyes were adjusted to the dark, and then held the watch dial against your closed eyelid, you would be able to see the sparks as individual radium atoms decayed. I did this, and it worked! I could see each spark!
- missosoup 7y agoRadium is primarily an alpha emitter. Alpha won't cross through the glass of the watch face, or even your skin. Maybe you were seeing the much more rare beta decays.
- FiatLuxDave 7y agoI doubt it was from the betas, they are all fairly low energy for typical radium. It was probably from the gammas produced by Ra-226. Ra-226 produces a 186 keV gamma in 3.3% of decays. Cherenkov radiation flashes in the eye are observed by patients undergoing clinical radiation therapy (see this interesting paper where this was explored and tested: https://www.redjournal.org/article/S0360-3016(19)33947-1/fulltext https://www.redjournal.org/article/S0360-3016(19)33947-1/ful... ). The test done in the paper was with much higher energy gammas, but it is feasible that the 186 keV lines could cause the same effect. I've never observed this when working with radium, but then I don't stick it in my eye.
- ed_balls 7y agoI've been thinking about this for a bit and had a similar model in mind. You build small nuclear reactors in a containers - similar how Google builds their DC. You find an abandoned coal mine shaft and put them deep in the ground. The cost optimizations come from: - economies of scale - no decommission costs - you just leave them to decay. - fewer security measures.
- mkl 7y agoWouldn't you need a water supply for steam turbines? And if there's water in your mine, it seems like it could transport radioactive particles out.
- ed_balls 7y agoYes, you need to exchange heat, most likely water since it's most cost effective. > And if there's water in your mine, it seems like it could transport radioactive particles out You need to pick a really deep and isolated shaft (Some gold mine shafts can reach 4 km)
- koheripbal 7y agoThe best economies of scale comes from building many LARGE reactors - not small ones.
- ed_balls 7y agoI'm not sure how do you mean. You get economy of scale by saving in costs gained by an increased level of production. It's cheaper to create 100 widgets for 100 small reactors in 10 locations, then for 10 large reactors.
- Nasrudith 7y agoThe efficency also scales with size in this case - separate from the per unit production scale. It is still cheaper and more efficient to have a 1.2 GW diesel power plant instead of a warehouse of thousands of back up generators wired together.
- grabbalacious 7y ago>Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 all technologies are needed. Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inherently evil provided we learn how to do it safely, which is an ongoing process.
- luspr 7y agoAgree completely. It's a fallacy to believe we will require less energy in the long run. We need much more, if we want to advance as a species.
- chrisco255 7y agoYep, and nuclear is the only near-infinite source of energy.
- hannob 7y agoI'm always baffled by such statements. Can you explain in which way solar is not a "near-infinite source of energy"? I mean... there are without doubt technical challenges and all that (but arguably less technical challenges than to do the same with nuclear), but there really is no relevant limit to the deployment of solar cells if you include things like large-scale installations in the desert.
- threeseed 7y agoEspecially if there are advancements in power distribution e.g. high temperature superconductors. This would be a game changer for the major continents like Europe, US, Africa where you could have power coming from hydro, thermal, solar, wind etc and being shipped to where it is needed.
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- simonblack 7y agoNuclear reactors' biggest drawback is the cost and danger of dismantling and disposing of them after their working life is finished. Up till then they are clean and cost-effective.
- StreamBright 7y agohttps://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
- imtringued 7y agoThe huge cost leads to mismanagement. Obsolete or unsafe nuclear plants keep running even when they shouldn't. Those plants should have been replaced with new designs immediately but it is cost prohibitive and that is what lead to accidents like Chernobyl. If you can't afford to shut it down then don't build expensive big designs. Build smaller ones that you can actually afford to take offline.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoChernobyl's design was amazingly primitive compared to the vast majority reactors outside of the former USSR. Any reactors that unsafe in any western nation would be immediately shut down.
- koheripbal 7y agoWhy does no one ever factor in the cost of dismantling other major projects, like the Hoover Dam, or the Three Gorges Dam? ...or thee solar plants being built, or the wind turbines? Why does nuclear power have this enormous additional requirement that literally no other power source seems to have to account for?
- stjohnswarts 7y agothose dams can basically survive indefinitely as long as they are properly maintained so I don't think that is a fair comparison.
- LatteLazy 7y agoLol, a technology we can't make work economically WITH economies of scale and on site experts will now be offered without those benefits.
- EliRivers 7y agoIs this not what we expect from technology? That over time it becomes commodified and increasingly easy to operate?
- LatteLazy 7y agoNo, in a word. You expect a technology to be made to work first, then to be made to work profitably, and only then commodified, miniaturised, etc. Nuclear works, but no one has made it work profitably. There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable. Quite the opposite in fact: nuclear has big fixed costs. That's why you usually see multiple reactors build close together on single sites. The more profitable (less loss making really) sites are the biggest ones. This is why the first computers were not laptops.
- EliRivers 7y agoI believe you have not disagreed with me, but you have introduced additional intermediate stages and conditions with which I disagree. I disagree that it is necessary for technology to be made profitable before becoming commoditised. I would argue that some technologies only become profitable when they are commoditised. There is no reason to think shrinking it will make more profitable. I cannot see into the minds of Rolls Royce, but I would hazard that they think it can be done. They suggest that if they can export this technology overseas as well, they can turn a profit on it. While I don't know if they're correct, they clearly believe it's possible.
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- LatteLazy 7y ago
- mrarjen 7y agoPersonally I'm all for having mini reactors if it means we can generate reliable energy with minimal pollution. Anything that helps reduce emissions should be considered. But this would need to be a fail save type of reactor and with a clear plan(s) all the way down to how the waste is handled till it's no longer active.
- pferdone 7y agoTerraPower [1] seem to have a good alternative with its Traveling Wave Reactor. It can be run on nuclear waste we already have and provide energy to 10bln people with US per capita power consumption for basically eternity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower
- nolok 7y agoAlways be wary of grandiose claims like this that amount as much to facts as to marketing material.
- pferdone 7y agoIf it wasn‘t for Bill Gates I‘d be much more sceptical about it, but he‘s a huge advertiser which gives hope.
- DennisP 7y agoThese are well-known properties of any fast reactor, like Terrapower's. Only about one percent of high-level nuclear waste is fission products, the broken-apart atoms left after fission. The rest is U238, unused U235, plutonium, and other transuranics produced by absorbing neutrons without fissioning. Fast reactors can fission all of these. That's why they can run on nuclear waste. For the same reason, they can get over a hundred times as much energy from the same amount of uranium ore. Conventional reactors can only use the U235, which is 0.7% of natural uranium. That's a great start, but with such efficient use, it's practical to get the uranium from seawater. We can do that now at five times the cost of mining; if we only need 1% as much uranium, then total fuel cost would be 5% as much as nuclear reactors spend on fuel today. Fast reactors fueled from seawater would last for millions of years.
- benevol 7y agoWe'll soon have the magnetic engine which will produce endless electricity. So there won't really be a need for any new nuclear reactors anymore.
- ptah 7y agoan aside: why d nuclear reactors have to be built on the coast? does that not make them more vulnerable to natural disasters
- mytailorisrich 7y agoThey rely on water for cooling so are built near a source of it, be it the sea or a river.
- imtringued 7y agoRivers tend to have different flow rates over the course of the year. If there is a heat wave the plant may not have enough water for cooling. The ocean is more dependable.
- rjsw 7y agoFrance has some nuclear plants that are on rivers where this problem has been seen.
- shawabawa3 7y agoI believe the problem in France wasn't the flow rate of the river, but the maximum temperature the power plants are allowed to leave the river at During the heatwave the rivers were so warm the reactors weren't allowed to dump any more heat into them
- hokkos 7y ago"Seen" as a few percent only a few days every two years.
- lorenzhs 7y agoThe problem is not so much the flow rate as it is the river's temperature. You can't raise that too much without harming the river's ecosystem. This is what limits several of France's nuclear power stations during summer.
- 7y ago
- socialdemocrat 7y agoSure why not, but let us not get carried away and think THIS is the solution to global warming. It is unproven, it will be too late, and not scale up quick enough. By unproven I mean that the economics of it is unproven. We have no proof that SMR will be cheaper than large reactors. The article points this out as well. By late I mean at current fast pace of development a lot of will happen with wind and solar in the 10 years it will take for this to get online.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoIf wind, solar and storage have made these plants obsolete in ten years then that's fine. Nobody will lose any sleep over that. Most likely though it won't, then we are stuck relying on a couple of unproven large reactors.
- gonational 7y agoNothing is ever enough. The only solution is to give our money to the overlords.
- koheripbal 7y agoAgreed. There are way too many advocates for theoretical solutions. The reality is that nuclear power, as is, can solve global warming.
- auiya 7y agoAnd the US at least has a long way to go before wind/solar even come close to being the majority sources of our energy production - https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
- stjohnswarts 7y agoThanks for the "too late" explanation :) . I feared it was of the "world is going to end in 12 years!" as if climate change is a binary thing.
- ars 7y agoBy your standards there are NO energy sources available. All of them will be too late and are of unproven economics. I guess best option is to sit back and watch the fireworks?
- dana321 7y agoWhen a read the title i thought that maybe they were going to put tiny nuclear reactors in everyone's home.
- growlist 7y agoRR have a good background in this tech, having manufactured the reactors that power the UK's nuclear deterrent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_PWR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_PWR
- baybal2 7y agoI long said that "mini" reactors don't make sense when 1.7GW reactor and a mini one both have dramatic minimal cost for a single unit, initial startup cost, and operational costs. Only if mini-reactor gets cheaper than the coal plant, can they get competitive.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoOn the other hand the huge projects like Hinkley Point C are so big they might never come to fruition. If Rolls Royce can get good at building these ractors they could be making them quickly and cheaply enough to make a big difference.
- mechhacker 7y agoHaving worked in the industry, I like seeing companies pledging to get involved with nuclear power. However, there is a dearth of people experienced with the design and development of new reactor technology. The development pathway of building up the supply lines, understanding the complexities of the various systems, etc. is long. I laughed at first many years ago when I saw some new reactor designs taking 10years but it turns out in a lot of cases that's optimistic. It's a shame, because development in the mid 20th century was a LOT faster. And the people involved moved from one new reactor design to the next, bringing valuable experience. Much of the work force entering this industry are entirely green and need an understanding of existing reactor technologies and why some designs were made a certain way before trying to reinvent them. Looking at the development in Russia and India could be very helpful.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoWhat's missing is a $/kwh quote. It's important because renewables are the cheapest option on the market right now and nowhere near done dropping further in price. If the last ten years are any indication, an order of magnitude further drop in prices before the end of the decade is not unreasonable considering mass production of batteries, solar, and wind is still ramping up and considering the enormous amount of R&D currently being spent on reducing cost and increasing efficiencies further. In the UK it's going to be hard to compete with wind (Scotland exports more of that than its total energy consumption already) and people installing solar panels on their roof and putting batteries in their house and cars (which can power a house for several days).
- wazoox 7y agoNo, renewable are incredibly expensive, on the contrary. Why is that? Because renewable produce when wind blows or sun shines, and not when we need power. That's the first point, we need to produce exactly as much energy as we consume, at any time. Renewables fail utterly at that, and that's why renewable energy appears so cheap when you simply consider the price at which it's sold on the markets: production occurs at random times when it isn't needed, pushing market prices down in the toilet. But that's an undesirable side-effect, and not a good thing. Renewable produces only a fraction of their nominal output (typically 15-20%), and at random times. So typically a huge, sprawling 12km2 900MW solar plant produces a small amount of power during the year, in the best case (in the desert) 1.4TWh, while a 900MW nuclear reactor produces typically (actual numbers) 6.5TWh every year. You also need to complement renewable production with an equivalent amount of steerable power (usually natural gas), or a large amount of batteries which multiplies the price by 5, 10 or more. So you can't consider the renewable price alone; you must take into account the price of the substitute power source, too... And its environmental price! So renewable energy is cheap because it isn't worth much. It puts extra pressure on the grid, it forces nuclear plant to run at reduced capacity, which reduces the yield, and artificially lowers their profitability for no good reason at all. In fact, renewables, by reducing profitability of nuclear power, has another very undesirable side-effect: making nuclear power companies cut corners on safety to save money. Renewable power is better than coal; but it isn't, by large, as good as nuclear.
- Koshkin 7y agoThe natural reserve of radioactive material, like that of fossil fuel, is finite. We cannot count on it in the long run. On the other hand, we are awash with the huge amounts of the free solar energy. We just need better batteries, which is a purely technical problem.
- Beltiras 7y agoIf we moved to Thorium the supply is virtually endless.
- Brometheus 7y agoOf which we have not a single working reactor. Just saying. We in Germany spend a lot of money on it and did not get it to work.
- manfredo 7y agoUranium seawater extraction makes fission fuel effectively limitless [1], on the order of billions of years of supply. If you want to get pedantic, it is limited but so is the hydrogen in the sun. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#19b4112a159a https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
- Beltiras 7y agoI'm amazed that the industry is still propagating the mistake made in the early nuclear age of using PWR and solid fuel. The more I read about nuclear the more convinced I become that SMRs for next gen plants are safest and most efficient using the Thorium-U233 fuel cycle and employing molten salt to transfer heat. It's automatically safe since if a runaway reaction takes place the fuel will drain into a tank and reactions will stop. This happens if no action is taken so all the humans at the plant and all the machinery could be incapacitated and a meltdown automatically stops. It uses a cheaper fuel of which we have a virtually endless supply of and enrichment is not needed as it is with U238-U235. There's less waste as well and it's less problematic waste (decaying in hundreds of years instead of millions). Operationally it's easier to load up fuel and wastes are easier to remove. Is it just "this is how we always do these things" or is there something else going on here?
- pentae 7y agoI also went down that rabbithole and I'm also convinced, but I'm not aware of any Thorium reactors currently in operation. Not being a proven technology would certainly be a business risk to consider though Thorium would be an easier pill to swallow politically and socially once the population is aware of the safety benefits.
- Beltiras 7y agoIt was proven to work back in the 60's. With way worse material tech than we have today. The reinvigoration of Thorium research happened when that design was declassified and shared with some NASA folks. EDIT: wrong decade
- pjc50 7y agoPlumbing is a problem for hot radioactive molten salt. It's one of the few things that will erode ordinary stainless steel.
- Beltiras 7y agoI haven't researched those issues but apparently it could be done with stone age tech (1960's) compared to the material sciences we have today.
- rstuart4133 7y agoI wish them luck, but the projected price of £70/MW hr sounds very expensive. I gather the retail price in the UK is about double that. That must put them right on the edge of profitability now, and the things have a design life of 60 years. If they have to hit that 60 life to get that £70/MW hr they must know they are already screwed, surely?