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New nuclear reactor designs promise safe, clean electricity

• WalterBright 7y ago
  Since everyone is noticing clear skies these days, I hope that motivates people to get rid of dirty power plants.
  • justinator 7y ago
    I hope these clear skies make people realize that it's probably from not driving personal cars, and that's what they get rid of. As far as I understand, there's not been an incredible shift of the type of powerplant that's been running in the last 3 months?
    • WalterBright 7y ago
      Goal and gas powerplants contribute, and this thread is about that.
  • SnowProblem 7y ago
    Is this just a meme? The skies look the same to me in southern California.
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      City air is far clearer worldwide.
• jhpriestley 7y ago
  could this be the year of "too cheap to meter"?
  • Arbalest 7y ago
    Seems unlikely. Maybe with reduced precision, so they can use lower maintenance meters. They do have to account for crazy usage still surely. But while you get a bill for the connection, they've still got a billing overhead.
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    I only hear "too cheap to meter" from wind and solar people these days.
  • pauljurczak 7y ago
    There is no such thing. You can always build cheaper meters. The cash must flow!
  • _ph_ 7y ago
    No, first comes the year of the Linux deskop :)
• simias 7y ago
  I want to believe that the mainstream could accept nuclear again but I don't have huge hopes. I'm French, we've been getting cheaper and cleaner electricity than our neighbors for a long time. Germany is about to open a coal plant (partially) to take over from one of the nuclear power plants we're shutting down. And yet, despite all that nuclear power is incredibly unpopular here and the vast majority of ecologists want to reduce our nuclear capacity more and more. I find it depressing personally. We're at 75% now, apparently we're on track to hit 50% by 2035. There's nuclear waste and there's a waste of nuclear.
  • jjoonathan 7y ago
    Ugh, if the US had just kept up the pace of nuclear construction in the 80s instead of shutting it down, we would be approaching 100% CO2-free electricity today. Not 50 years from now, today. But we threw it all away!
    • godelski 7y ago
      I'm not sure this is true. Simply because I'm not aware of a technology that has a 0 CO2eq lifetime emission. Production, yes (nuclear, renewables), but lifetime, no. It would be a HUGE step in the right direction and have dramatically reduced our load (20% of global) on the climate problem (probably influenced other countries too). But I want to be accurate here. (I know I'm splitting hairs here)
      • travisporter 7y ago
        You’re technically right (the best kind of right!) but so is he when he says nuclear approaches 100% CO2. Maybe solar+storage could get even closer close?
        • mrpopo 7y ago
          Most life-cycle estimations argue that solar itself has a higher carbon footprint than nuclear. Solar+storage would be worse. The rationale behind it is simple physics. Enriched nuclear fuel is the most energy-dense material we can access, so unless a new fundamental law is discovered, nuclear energy will have the best EROI, e.g. require the least energy overall to be produced (also note that most of the energy deployed is for security reasons). EDIT: another option for solar+storage to tend towards 0 residual carbon footprint is a life duration 10 or 100 times longer. Something to consider.
• dr_zoidberg 7y ago
  Fukushima was a big influence in the most recent hate on nuclear energy. In laymans views, the fact that a (perceived to be) secure, organized country such as Japan had such a terrible nuclear incident, meant that every nuclear plant on the planet was dangerous and we were being lied about. Politicians simply moved along that line. It doesn't matter that coal is worse for the environment. A nuclear incident can cost your head. Climate change? Clearly nobody cares.
  • Retric 7y ago
    Coal and nuclear are already on life support at this point. Nuclear and coal needs a 50 year lifespan to hit current cost estimates. Meanwhile power plants are being shut down early because operating costs are already to high let alone construction costs. This is a worldwide economic situation, with many players hedging their bets but that’s about it.
  • nexuist 7y ago
    One person officially died from Fukushima radiation, and it was a person who worked in the plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
    • totetsu 7y ago
      Is it just the number of people that have died that matters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...
      • roenxi 7y ago
        Even using the No-Threshold model the numbers are tiny (130 globally). And as Wikipedia notes in the opening paragraphs the December 2012 UNSCEAR statement uses polite language to remind everyone that No-Threshold linear is a really stupid model.
• tra3 7y ago
  IQ2 had a debate on nuclear power. One of the arguments against expansion was that nuclear reactor design is basically bespoke for every installation and that the promise of rapid, cheap deployment has not been realized in many years (decades). Interesting episode, I wish I retained more of it: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/02/10/iq2-debate-expand-nuclear-power https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/02/10/iq2-debate-expand-n...
  • throwanem 7y ago
    That's the primary problem that this project, the Small Modular Reactor design, aims to solve. More via Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
  • pdonis 7y ago
    > nuclear reactor design is basically bespoke for every installation Which is exactly what new modular designs like the one described in this article are trying to change: get away from the custom-built mentality and build nuclear reactors out of standardized, modular components. In other words, the way we already build lots of other things in order to make them cheaper and more reliable (since most of the assembly is done in factories in controlled environments).
    • projektfu 7y ago
      20 years ago it was just around the corner. In fact, they said the Russians were about to deploy them: container-sized nuclear power plants that were basically maintenance-free and just ran on their own until they shut themselves down. Made by the hundreds from standard pieces. Safe if messed with. Safe after retirement. There were websites and nice diagrams and mock-ups and everything. Tell me how we're in a different phase now.
      • p_l 7y ago
        Without funding it's not going to get moved anywhere. The main design work on them was upscaling them and lowering enrichment + work on reducing any possibility of reusing breed plutonium from them. If they kept to high enrichment, they could pretty start making and packing container-sized powerplants, but the old designs were designed for 50MW, while the uprated, civilian ones were for min. 100MWe
• DrNuke 7y ago
  NuScale’s small modular reactor is proven technology and seems now good enough to be approved, up and running in the US quite soon indeed. It also seems an acceptable answer to many of the current nuclear problems (shameless plug: https://www.tenproblems.com/2020/04/12/ten-problems-for-nuclear-in-the-2020s/ https://www.tenproblems.com/2020/04/12/ten-problems-for-nucl...), so good luck!
• wongarsu 7y ago
  We should have built more nuclear 20 years ago, but it seems it's too late now. The design of reactors that are actually built is extremely conservative, it still takes forever to plan them and get appropriate permissions, and then they take nearly a decade to build. Meanwhile the price of wind+storage is dropping. If you were to start planning a new reactor now, by the time it's operational it might be uneconomical to even turn on. And even if it isn't, it's extremely unlikely that you make your investment back over the lifespan of the plant, especially once you add the decommissioning (which is more expensive than the construction of the plant, because a lot of the structure turns slightly radioactive). We had our chance, we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs. Now the economics of those designs no longer make sense for new plants, and nobody is going to risk a fortune on building unproven large-scale reactor designs. There's some opportunity with reactors sized like those on ships, but that's it.
  • ggm 7y ago
    We were unable to build more nuclear power twenty years ago for the same reason we can't do it now, and it's never too late: it's only against someone's interests
    • epistasis 7y ago
      And the interests are purely financial, at least in the US. We can achieve carbon free electricity far cheaper by using renewables and storage. Nuclear construction is suuuuuuuper expensive, and perhaps more importantly, incredibly financially risky. The chances of completing a build are very low, and the chance of spending billions of dollars and having nothing to show are unacceptably high. If nuclear were our only option, we would have to go for it. But we now have better, cheaper, faster, more economically efficient carbon free energy sources.
      • dev_tty01 7y ago
        Many parts of the world will not be serviceable by solar. Too much darkness over extended periods. Storage is also still a huge issue that has its own particular environmental consequences. If nuclear could be made safe and affordable, it would make energy widely available everywhere. Why wouldn't we want to try and make that viable? I doubt there is anything that raises standards of living quicker than abundant energy. Old style reactors are "suuuuuuuper expensive", but several modern designs may be much less expensive. Older designs were inherently unstable and needed many layers of safety systems to "guarantee" safety. This of course also needed many layers of regulation and validation to make sure it would actually work. The rest of your concerns about completing builds hinge on these same factors. A modern design that is inherently stable and safe should require a much simpler overall system design. We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.
• rpiguy 7y ago
  How many similar headlines have I read since 1980... lol. I do want it to happen, but my faith is shaken after 35 years of waiting.
  • roenxi 7y ago
    It probably has happened. I don't think we've had a post-1980s designed nuclear reactor fail miserably yet. Nuclear remains the safest and cleanest form of power we know about. It was competitive on cheapness last time I checked but the trend favours renewables AFAIK.
    • acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Today's nuclear is actually already competitive with all clean energy futures. Yes, wind and solar LCOE is dirt cheap today, but only when the wind is blowing or sun is shining. They're riding on the back of the fossil-dominated grid. As we deeploy decarbonize, all studies I've seen show costs rising 30-50 $/MWh to deal with intermittency. At those prices, current nuclear is already in the game.
      • pfdietz 7y ago
        No. With reasonable assumptions for the cost of renewables, nuclear, and storage, the grid optimizes out to 0% nuclear.
        • acidburnNSA 7y ago
          Yes. Costs of power sources have frequently increased as a function of penetration due to regulations, NIMBY, realities of technology, etc. You're assuming renewables will do the opposite. While popular, this is unconventional. Japan building 22 coal plants right now proves the point. Serious studies I've seen say 30-50 $/MWh delta is required to deal with reconductoring, storage, recycling, load management, etc. Nuclear has to standardize and serialize to play. If they don't do that they're out. But if they pull off another France of Korea or Japanese ABWRs its game on. You're also assuming that will not happen. If you assume nuclear will never improve and other sources will, sure nuclear looks bad.
• nickik 7y ago
  I don't believe in PWR SMR (Pressurized Water Reactor, Small Modular Reactor) will actually solve the problem with nuclear. The only reason to do it, is because the whole regulation is expecting PWRs and to have LITERALLY ANY chance to get a new reactor threw regulation it needs to be a PWR (in the US). However, while PWR SMR can help you with modular construction and factory mass production, you lose the economics of scale of a larger reactor. I wish NuScale success, but I do not think the technology is very promising to actually reduce cost by the required amount. You need to be competitive with cheap gas prices. PWR in general are a technological deadend that should never made it past the 70s. Even the inventor of PWR said so in the 60s and that is why he worked on Molten Salt Reactors. However if you want to know about the future of nuclear, the only place where we see serious development in the Western world, look at Canada. They had a strong program of CANDU reactors and a globally respected regulatory agency. CANDU has now been privatized and the Canadians started to look more into Generation IV reactors (even while I totally dislike this terminology). This has lead to Canada becoming a hub for nuclear innovation, as the Canadian regulatory system 'only' requires you to prove a safety case that is technology independent. In the US they just say 'show us the secondary pump for the steam', 'my reactor does not have any steam inside of it', 'PLEASE SHOW US THE SECONDARY STEAM PUMP'. facepalm The company that is most advanced in the regulatory process is Terrestrial Energy (www.terrestrialenergy.com) and another one that is a couple years behind is Moltex Enery (www.moltexenergy.com) an originally British company who moved to Canada because the British regulatory agency is possibly even more disfunctional then the US one. Both of these reactors are based on the Molten Salt reactors and really nice designs. The are both Fast Burners in their first iteration, while Moltex initially focuses more using Canadian CANDU Waste as fuel, Terrestrial Energy has opted to take the most commercially available fuel, 5% enriched Uranium. However, both hope to eventually develop a Molten Salt Thorium Breeder design, long consider the holy grail among nuclear fans. Terrestrial Energy is already working on a project to deploy their first US reactor in Idaho. The hope is that the US Regulatory Agency (who have realized how nonsensical their regulation are) are ready with a improved framework and that much of the work done for Canada will be accepted in the US. The Moltex Ractor is special because it combines Molten Salt with a more traditional fuel assembly design (reusing well tested materials from Sodium Reactors). Listen here if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvXcoSdXYlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvXcoSdXYlk Terrestrial Energy is building a more traditional Molten Salt reactor but instead of switching out fuel assemblies, they just replace the whole core. See here for more on their design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgTgV3Kq49U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgTgV3Kq49U For a more economic focus analysis on their design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsAfUBzRp3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsAfUBzRp3M One thing that is often missed with this discussion is how irrelevant fusion really is in some ways. Fission has an energy density of 10^12 over chemical, Fusion is much better at 10^15, but really if we are not willing to switch to Fission, a technology we already have, why would be do it for Fusion.
• jfranche 7y ago
  Not great, not terrible.
• save_ferris 7y ago
  I just watched the Chernobyl HBO series, and I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between that disaster and COVID-19, at least in the US. Those who lead governments are inherently motivated by self-preservation first and foremost, meaning that when something really bad happens, the inclination is to minimize the perception of a problem without considering the cost. That inclination cost thousands of lives in Ukraine in 1986, and will cost thousands of lives around the world now because leaders didn’t listen to the experts early on. Not to mention the constant war on science and intellectualism that has been permeating American politics for years. This is the price we pay to live in the political environment we have.
  • godelski 7y ago
    I had a similar take, but most around me didn't. Most around me took away that nuclear is dangerous and shouldn't be used. Never mind that every country (USSR included) knew that a positive void reactor was a dumb idea. But as to the fear, most people I know thought the three men that went into the reactor died of horrible deaths. Despite the show even mentioning that they survived (I believe only one is dead now and died of a heart attack at old age. Could be radiation related, could be old, probably both, but it wasn't an abnormal death IIRC). There's even a lot of misinformation about how many people Chernobyl killed. We say "thousands of deaths" but it is hard to put that in perspective. If we say a thousand people dead in front of us, that's a lot. But if we're talking <30k deaths from 1986 - 2065, that's not that many people[0]. That total number is less than the average flu kills in just the US PER YEAR. It is about 380 people/year. A lot, but this pales in comparison to what our usage of coal does in a single country per year. As in some estimates of coal pollution kill more people in the US per year than all will from the worst nuclear disaster in the history of mankind ever will [1]. It is hard to compare our energy sources because we do not do them one to one. Nuclear's deaths have been caused from 3 disasters, one of which killed nobody, and one of which accounts for 99%[2] of those deaths. I think the thing about nuclear is that when things go wrong it is temporally and geographically localized. This is easy to see the damage. But it is hard to say that coal in the US kills more a year than all the world's nuclear power plants combined. If you bring stats in you generally get called inhumane, even if you are trying to use stats to save lives. It is a complicated and tricky subject. It is just hard to compare because the coal deaths are not temporally and geographically localized. Our brains weren't designed to easily reason about information like that, whereas they were designed to reason about the former. You're definitely right about a lot of what you've said. But my inclination is that while people did take a political message from the Chernobyl show (which I did love), they also took away an anti-nuclear sentiment. I think this is unfortunate because I believe there is overwhelming evidence that the technology directly saves hundreds of thousands of human lives and significantly help our environment. [0] https://science.time.com/2011/04/22/how-many-did-chernobyl-kill-more-than-4000/ https://science.time.com/2011/04/22/how-many-did-chernobyl-k... [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-to-shift-away-from-coal-air-pollution-that-kills-thousands-every-year/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-... [2] I'm not joking. 99% is concervative. Fukushima has only a single recorded radiation death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
• mrnobody_67 7y ago
  I blame Homer. The Simpsons painted a horrific picture of nuclear safety - greedy billionaire owner, incompetent safety inspector, three eyed fish, glowing green waste flowing into rivers... Two decades of TV viewers where indoctrinated with that as a worldview of Nuclear Power.
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    It's more than Homer. Nuclear and radiation being scary is absolutely pervasive in pop culture, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to MacGyver to Spiderman to HBO miniseries. Part of the problem is that nuclear PR wing is run by utility companies that have a bunch of fossil assets that they don't want to make look bad by pointing out what's good about nuclear (no air pollution, no carbon emissions)
  • hakfoo 7y ago
    The fun thing about that series is how shifting expectations have impacted our perception of Homer. Here's a barely-graduated-fron-high schooler, with no special training and skills, yet he enjoys a secure, unionized job, home ownership, and is a single-income earner for a family of five plus supporting a parent in a care home. In 1988 he was a cautionary tale for our kids. In 2020 he's an unattainable aspiration for our kids' kids. I wonder if there's room for a "this isn't Homer's time, and it's not Homer's plant" messaging pivot.
  • hristov 7y ago
    The simpsons were generous. Despite all the high jinks that reactor has not yet made springfield an unlivable ghost town, yet that has already happened to several towns around nuclear reactors. And the simpsons were funny because they reflected what happened in the real world. People knew about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl when the simpsons were on.
• Animats 7y ago
  That's NuScale again. They're building a reactor at the Idaho reactor test station, where, if something goes wrong, it's not too bad. It's not a technical breakthrough. It's an argument that full containment isn't necessary. While the design is supposed to be immune to loss of cooling power, it still has other potential problems. Multiple reactors share the same cooling pool, so if one has a leak, the whole group gets contaminated. If the cooling pool leaks into the ground and you can't refill, as might happen in an earthquake, you could have a meltdown. It's not really small, either. Each unit is 60 megawatts, and a plant is 12 units, at 0.72GW. Almost 3/4 of an AP 1000.
  • noahtallen 7y ago
    > If the cooling pool leaks into the ground and you can't refill, as might happen in an earthquake, you could have a meltdown. The article claims that these reactors don’t not have that problem. They didn’t describe why or how, but they say the heat would simply dissipate into the atmosphere even if the cooling pool dries out.
    • Animats 7y ago
      The article may claim that, but NuScale itself does not.[1] NuScale says they do not need additional water during cool-down. Not that they can shut down dry. NuScale is interesting, but it's really just a medium-sized (60MW) pressurized-water reactor. Same size as Shippingport (1957), interestingly. [1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features
• acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Advanced nuclear reactor designer here. It is tough times in the industry. The large traditional reactors in the West (US, France, UK) are really struggling. Existing reactors have operations costs that were fine until fracked natural gas pulled the floor out on electricity prices. Now they're struggling. New builds have been boondoggles because contracts went to lowest bidders, who had no idea how to build nuclear plants. The people are focused on intermittent clean sources like wind and solar, with due cause as solar PV prices fell by a factor of 10x since 2009 (as long as the sun is shining). Meanwhile there has been a bunch of hype about "new" reactors (quoted because they were all initially conceived of and tested in the 1950s). Thorium. Molten Salt. Small Modular. Traveling Wave. Microreactors. These will have less waste and be safer! But will it matter? As I've grown in experience and expertise, I've started looking at the numbers more. Nuclear waste has great solutions in crystalline bedrock (Onkalo), massive salt (WIPP), and deep boreholes (Deep Isolation). If a reactor makes a little bit less, will that move the needle for the public? In terms of safety, current reactors are statistically extraordinarily safe because they don't participate in causing the 4.2 million deaths/year from air pollution (a Chernobyl of death every 2.5 days from the fossil industry). So if a new reactor is slightly safer, will all the anti-nuclear institutions roll over begging for one? I highly doubt it. Besides, with tech development in nuclear, it's fleet experience that matters. Many MSR designs make vast amounts of tritium and require remote maintenance. Will this be doable? Will releases be acceptable? Only fleet experience can tell. Never believe someone who's never built a nuclear plant on what their design will cost. These smaller reactors will absolutely struggle economically, especially at first. More and more I think it's really public communication/PR/education that matters most for nuclear. Chinese and Russian reactors, on the other hand, are doing better, with Russia seemingly selling VVERs like hotcakes, and moving into markets like Nigeria soon. I recently wrote up an elaborate page about early reactor development history [1] and about more modern nuclear economics [2] if anyone wants a deep dive. I've been thinking of turning these into a book. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
  • projektfu 7y ago
    Everywhere I've lived in the US that has nuclear power in the mix (Pittsburgh and Georgia) has a surcharge on rates because of the cost of the plant, and we end up paying a higher rate than other areas that don't have nuclear. Are there localities in the US where nuclear has beaten the cost-benefit curve?
• irjustin 7y ago
  Many of us want to believe this. The problem is the general public doesn't have an appetite for it. The HBO series Chernobyl is helping/not-helping that cause, but mostly not helping. It is really important not to forget history, not repeat, of course, but the series is bringing nuclear fears to the forefront. For better or worse, we're teaching a whole new generation to interalize those fears about a design that is still very much active [0]. As much as I want to believe the gen 4 reactors are safe and worth attempting, getting this to fly in the public minds is going to take more effort than it's probably worth. For the public, fission power has been poisoned. Single disasters that ruin 20+ years and whole regions of countries are valid/non-ignorable fears. Large parts of me simply want to dump the money into chasing fusion. Even if it costs 1000x to get there, today money is not the problem - it's sentiment. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
  • sv9 7y ago
    Corporations and governments use ad campaigns effectively all the time. I'm convinced that if you took a fraction of that fusion money and bombarded people with "nuclear is fine" ads for a year or two, public opinion would change. If a TV show can swing opinion one way, why can't something else swing it back?
    • pauljurczak 7y ago
      In addition to "nuclear is fine", I would add that fusion is not as clean as the public imagines. It is being promoted as power generation without nuclear waste, but in reality you are going to get at least mildly radioactive fusion chamber cladding, which will have to be replaced yearly or so. So there will be a huge pile of radioactive waste generated over the lifetime of fusion power plant. This is in addition to a little problem of fusion power being 25 years away for the last 60 years or so.
      • willis936 7y ago
        1. The quantity of activated material in a magnetic continent fusion reactor would be orders of magnitude less than what is produced (the exhaust is not radioactive). 2. We get to close the radioactive components. It is much more manageable to put up a sign that says “No entry until 2100” than it is to put up a sign that says “No entry until 30000”. The public at large cares about this.
• justatdotin 7y ago
  paper-moderated, ink-cooled
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    To be fair, they're mostly digital reactors these days, not paper ones.
• chris_engel 7y ago
  While reading the article, I repeatedly thought "wow this reads like a big ad for nuclear power". Almost all passages of the very long text pointed out how great it is. It gives only a hand-wavey comment to the problem of what do we do with the waste that will remain toxic for thousands of years to come. Its not a technical but a political problem. Uhm, okay. And the other problem that uranium is much scarcer than previously thought is not even mentioned. Atomic energy is way cleaner when it comes to immediate CO2 generation - true. But the long term problem of waste is not solved at all.
  • jfindley 7y ago
    This is a wildly oversimplified and inaccurate picture of nuclear waste, that I've seen all too often. Nuclear waste is problematic because it emits radiation. It emits radiation because the atoms are unstable, and are decaying into other, more stable atoms. The rate of this decay is normally measured by the half-life - which is the time by which 50% of the element has changed into another, more stable element. The by-product of this decay is that it emits radiation, which is harmful to life. However, it emerges from this that the rate of the decay is directly proportional to the amount of harmful radiation that is emitted. Many things encountered in ordinary life are unstable to some degree or another, but ordinarily either the quantity is so low, or the rate of decay is so slow, that the amount of radiation we recieve under normal conditions isn't particularly harmful. Now, nuclear waste. This falls into three broad categories. First is those with a half life of less than 50 years, like strontium-90 and cesium-137. These are horribly, horribly dangerous isotopes, and will do horrible things to you if you get near large quantities of them. However the fact that they are so very dangerous means that they are by turn, not going to be a threat for very long. After a short period of time (~30 years for the two I mentioned), they are half decayed already. Devising a storage system to store these sin't very challenging - the quantities are small, and they don't need to be stored for terribly long. The second category is the one that the anti-nuclear lobby loves to blur with the first. These are isotopes like plutonium-239, with half lives in the tens or hundreds of thousands of years timelines (~24000 years for Pu-239). However what the anti-nuclear lobby fails to mention is that by the very fact that these elements have such a long half life, they are by definition not emitting all that much harmful radiation - many of the waste products in this category similar radiation per kg than coal ash. If we're happy storing coal ash behind nothing more than a chain-link fence, objecting to these waste products is sheer fear mongering, nothing else. The third category is the problematic one. Here we have things like radium-226, which have half-lives in the thousand-year range (1300 years for ra-226), but are still radioactive enough you want a bit more safety than just piling them up behind a fence. However the good news here is that the quantities of radioactive products in this range are tiny. So tiny the entire non-military waste of these isotopes we, as a species, have ever produced would probably fit onto a single train. I think getting rid of one of the most effective ways of power production we've discovered to date for this amount of waste might, just maybe, be described as a colossal overreaction. Sorry this post got a bit long!
• zipwitch 7y ago
  The whole article reads like a punchline for a joke involving Admiral Rickover's famous letter. (We just had a thread on it here not two weeks ago!) "An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." Link to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    I appreciate Rickover's quote more and more every year in I spend in the nuclear industry. My hope for some of these reactors, especially the very small ones, is that they will provide a way for new reactor designers to get some practical experience while risking less than a few billion dollars.
• trimbo 7y ago
  Nukes should be the future but it won't happen. People are scared of it, and don't understand fission. Popular docudrama shows, like Chernobyl, propagate myths that reactors can explode with "2-4 megaton power".[1] Politicians won't back it because no one wants it in their back yard. And carbon gives them new revenue they can leverage and borrow against to balance the budget.[2] I list more reasons at [3], which I link every time this comes up. [1] - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480113/how-large-would-the-steam-explosion-at-chernobyl-have-been https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480113/how-large... [2] - https://www.eenews.net/stories/1059981189 https://www.eenews.net/stories/1059981189 [3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167207
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    I ROFL'd so hard when the HBO miniseries said 2-4 megatons from a steam explosion. Like, what!? We engineers did a similar bounding calc as the one in your link and got about the same conclusion. So ridiculous. I do a lot of nuclear outreach in seattle. Audiences are skeptical but open. If we can scale the facts and education, I still think nuclear can and will play a major role in decarbonizing. Especially as intermittent renewable fleets get bigger and the intermittency issue becomes more serious.
    • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
      Do you ROFL at this https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1384269 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1... also? Especially the conclusion at the end?
      • acidburnNSA 7y ago
        No. I read this right when it came out with much interest. Why would I ROFL? It's not physically impossible like a 2-4 MT stream explosion postulated to happen days after the nuclear excursion when decay-heat melted fuel was dipped in the suppression pool. The best statement I heard in that regard was: "If that was true, then Hawaii would be wiped off the map multiple times per day as lava falls into the ocean" Related to this paper, nuclear chain reactor excursions are limited in energy by the vaporization and dispersal of fuel.
• tasty_freeze 7y ago
  What we need it a viable battery to make wind and solar viable for 24 power delivery. How about a rechargeable nuclear battery? What if during times when there is an excess of power being generated, the excess is used to accelerate protons into a block of some material that (a) captures the protons well and (b) has a half life on the order of 24 hours. Generate the isotopes, when then decay and generate heat over the course of a day or two. Obviously, the isotopes don't wait for night to decay, so it would be generating heat continuously. In effect, it would be a big capacitor. Just how inefficient would it be? (Yes, I know very little about nuclear, and I expect it is terribly inefficient, but I'm curious to hear just how bad)
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Extraordinarily inefficient. The energy in nuclear fission comes not from when a proton is accelerated, but when a neutron splits a large nuclear fuel atom. To store energy in nuclear reactions, you'd have to fuse the fission products back into uranium. This process can only be done at scale in very large supernovas. But what we can do is store heat. You can have a nuclear plant storing heat in a thermal storage system (e.g. a huge vat of molten salt). As the sun sets, this tank can fill in the extra energy while the (constant power) nuclear reactor keeps the pace. Effectively, the nuclear plant can now ramp rapidly from 50% to 100% full capacity since the salt tank can be sized to double the reactor capacity. Lots of reactor companies are talking about doing this thermal energy storage thing to best help out in an increasingly intermittent energy world. You can also steam bypass the nuclear reactor to make hydrogen, desalinated water, etc.
• jariel 7y ago
  The issues is partly political. We could overcome that. Partly technological: risk of fallout, and more ugly - long term storage. But really, the issue nobody thinks about is proliferation. If the West started pumping out 5 cent/mmh electricity and booming, you can be darn sure every tin pot fool everywhere in the world would be as well. After all, why shouldn't they? But Canada will manage it's boring, hardened facilities extremely well. The entire economy of Canada is not based on anything really intelligent - just 'boring, consistent responsibility and stability' - which is exactly what you want for such things. But how long will stability remain around Nigeria's 20 new reactors? Hey - they convinced us that 'everything was fine' and that it was 'Colonialist and Evil to require external, rigorous inspection'. But now there's a regime change, a civil war breaking out. A rebel group has nabbed a reactor. A second reactor the staff are fleeing because Boko Haram is in the area. The US president wants to send in Marines to lock down the facilities immediately, but wary it will just erupt in more violence immediately. Obviously that's hugely speculative, but if/when nuclear power breaks up with 100's of reactors popping up everywhere - something like this will happen - somewhere. I think we can conquor public opinion and figure out 'long term' issues with enough focus and innovation. But this requires 'highly responsible civilisation' almost universally so that something doesn't blow up somewhere in the long tail. Since most of the world actually isn't ready for that responsibility, what do we do? Controls? How? Can we tell them 'no'? We could block Somalia from getting nuke power ... but probably not most other places.
• dredmorbius 7y ago
  "Paper Reactors": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715730
• viburnum 7y ago
  This magazine is mostly know for its racist intellectuals so sure let’s see what they have to say about energy.
• Alkhwarizmi 7y ago
  Screw nuclear power!! Utter garbage
• songshuu 7y ago
  Oh yes, yes. Every 15 years or so we get another piece that goes like "Sure nuclear was bad, but we're going to be reaaaally safe starting... now!"
  • pfdietz 7y ago
    And cheap. Don't forget that "promise" also. Never mind that turbines and generators and cooling towers all have serious cost problems when scaled down, the Hail Mary Reactors will save the day!
• hristov 7y ago
  They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't. I wish we just were not wasting so much money and effort on this. Solar and wind are already far cheaper, we need to be researching energy storage solutions to make the already cheap solar and wind energy more reliable and not looking for another dangerous boondoggle to make energy for, if we are lucky, ten times the price of solar. Even before the corona-virus hit, this past summer solar cell prices were 15 cents per watt. This is about half of what it was last year. Offshore wind prices are difficult to pin down in a per watt metric, but power companies are saying they are even cheaper than solar and the cheapest option. This is where our efforts should be pointed. We already have the cheap and safe energy we just need to make it more usable and reliable on the grid. This is all institutional inertia. I know there are a lot of very smart people that studied fission and wanted to dedicate their careers to it and now they are really pissed off that the field is declining rapidly. I know they will all write angry posts in response and down vote me rapidly. I am sorry, I feel bad for you all but I do not wish to risk my life just so you have careers doing something unnecessary and dangerous. You are all very smart I am sure you can re-target your expertise towards power electronics, solid state physics or many of the other fields of physics that are hot right now. And there is a lot of institutional inertia as well. During the cold war there was an endless stream of tax payer money pointed at anything and everything nuclear and now a lot of the institutions that benefited from it are fighting tooth and nail for relevance. I have the same thing to say to them -- there are other very needed and useful fields where you can direct your efforts.
  • pas 7y ago
    It's already safer than almost all forms of electricity generation (and probably cheaper in bulk than solar and wind). However, it doesn't matter, because market forces favor small incremental additions, changes, and there is not enough inertia to properly do a 50+ plant megaproject.
  • ehsankia 7y ago
    > They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't. What is "it" here? Fukushima for example was built in the 70s with a design which was even older. That seem like a very strange bar for "always promise it will be safe". What nuclear plant designed in this century has ever been shown to not be safe? Are we always going to stay stuck on false promises made half a century ago?
• lazylizard 7y ago
  Why not talk more about spent fuel disposal?
• jerzyt 7y ago
  I'm concerned about safety not from the engineering side (although not dismissing it), but from the standpoint of an easy access to sufficiently large amount of radioactive material to build a dirty nuke. As the nuclear plants get smaller, the security is going to become a larger percentage of the operating costs and operators will be tempted to skimp in this area.
• noad 7y ago
  I feel like I've read this article every three years or so for the past 30 years. According to my calendar this means we're due for another wave of "the singularity is right around the corner, uh, for reals this time! again!" articles.
• melbourne_mat 7y ago
  It's such a b.s. article and is likely written by the nuclear industry. There are many factual problems but I'll just point out one: the idea that wind and solar will never be enough. Here's a study that includes wind, solar & storage and gets 100% coverage: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/ee/c7ee03029k#!divAbstract http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/ee/c7ee03...
  • maelito 7y ago
    This article costs £40. What's the cost of the 80% and 100% solutions ? What's their lifecycle climate impact (including storage, disposal of course) ?
• spenrose 7y ago
  I am rooting for lots and lots of new nuclear, but this piece is silly. Let's dig in: "But what if there were sources of zero-carbon electricity that didn’t require heavy-handed regulation to make them viable in the marketplace? ..." Wind and solar are cheaper now than nuclear advocates hope nuclear will be by 2030. 1.https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... 2. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/30/latest-bnef-report-finds-levelized-cost-of-renewables-continues-to-fall/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/30/latest-bnef-report-find... "... What if we could produce more power—and do it affordably, with minimal environmental impact? That’s the almost utopian vision that some backers see for the next generation of nuclear power. ..." Utopian?! We are adding gigawatts of wind and solar this year, and modulo coronavirus we'll add more next year. New geothermal plants are measured in dozens of megawatts: * https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-01-22/california-needs-clean-energy-after-sundown-geothermal-could-be-the-answer https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-01-22/califor... "According to Ted Nordhaus, founder of the “eco-modernist” Breakthrough Institute, SMRs could offer a more decentralized, entrepreneurial approach to reducing CO2 emissions without hobbling the economy." Wind and solar are extremely de-centralized and competitive. The economies that install them at scale—China, California—are doing as well as any. “Will any of them ultimately be a success in the marketplace? You can’t say for sure,” he said. “But I think a bunch of them will get licenses to build test plants.”" While we are waiting, offshore wind farms will continue to be installed at hundred-megawatt scale: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms#Largest_operational_offshore_wind_farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms#La... Please continue promoting new nuclear; we could really use it. But please stop with the anti-variable-renewable BS, and FFS stop giving Nordhaus airtime when he insist on talking like this.
  • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Wind and solar still don't scale as well as a nuclear plant. It is the the most compact way to generate a few gigawatts of energy in one place without re-routing a huge river. Likewise, the big problem with wind and solar is that the areas where they are economical to install (e.g. Western China) are often far away from where the energy is needed (e.g. Eastern China), and transmission over long distances still hasn't been worked out.
• every 7y ago
  >New nuclear reactor designs promise safe, clean electricity. Don't they always?
• cwillu 7y ago
  Need to re-brand. Weak-force power stations are the future!
• ksec 7y ago
  No body seems to have address the cost of Nuclear. There are solar farms in Portugal and Abu Dhabi that cost below $0.02 / kWh non-subsidise. And it seems Sub 1 cents / kWh, what was previously thought to be impossible are now within reach in this decade. How is Nuclear going to compete? I think right now the race is for utility scale Battery. And this goal seems to be a lot easier to achieve than having a cost competitive Nuclear reactor. Note: I am not pro Solar or Anti Nuclear, in fact I pretty much want Nuclear to succeed in the long term since I dont like the idea massive land area being used for solar, not every country has the luxury of doing so especially those with limited sunlight hours. But looking at the cost alone it seems solar is hard to compete against.
• beders 7y ago
  A technology with a 1% catastrophic failure rate that will devastate whole regions for centuries is a nightmare and should be replaced ASAP. Keep it in the ground: Oil, coal, gas and uranium! It's over
• simonCGN 7y ago
  That is utterly nonsense. There is no safe and clean nuclear reactor, there never will be.
• _ph_ 7y ago
  A very interesting concept and I am looking forward to see how it works out. Industrial production of small reactors has the potential to improve the economics a bit and I hope their safety is as good as promised. However the article doesn't talk about a few key points: what are the costs per kWh being produced they are aiming for? The article talks about the reactors being "clean", but doesn't mention what happens with the nuclear waster. What other costs for longterm operations (many decades) have to be calculated? Can the whole reactors be returned to the manufacturer for recycling? The viability of any new concept depends on answering these questions. Meanwhile, especially these small reactor units are under strong competiton from renewables. Solar plus battery becomes very cost-competitive, especially for small units. If we look towards Africa, solar is ideal there. Not only because the output level is high, but also because the seasonal variation is minimal. Storage mostly would have to last only over night. And lets not forget about wind energy, which doesn't care about day or night and works very far up north.
• DeathArrow 7y ago
  If we ever come up with a cheap and safe energy solution, people will find more creative ways to waste energy, instead of doing more useful things with it. I.e. mining bitcoins.
• ngcazz 7y ago
  I’m sorry but this article sounds like some pretty egregious reactionary astroturfing. Harping on and on about the cost of the Green New Deal as a given is suspicious in itself. Of course infrastructure investment programs have costs. It just happens that the public would see dividends from it, not just a handful of industrialists.
• ElDji 7y ago
  What's strikes me is that the cost of operating a nuclear plant during its lifetime is actually unknown, making it the expensivest energy source. Why it is still in use : obviously because it serves as base technology and knowledge to build weapons. Some example of hidden costs not included in nuclear kwh price : - Cost of managing waste: How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes ? - Risk prime to insure huge damage that could arise from accident or future leaks in storage area : Again this amount is so big, that this externality has to be socialized. - Cost of dismantling a plant : Beside one or two exceptions, no plant has been successfully dismantled. All the planning and costs for the currently plan in dismantling are exploding and will take years and tons of capital ... leaving more unmanageable wastes and unusable lands. All those aspects will become increasingly difficult to manage in countries that made the (bad) choice of going full nuclear a few years ago, like France.
  • kolinko 7y ago
    Just because the cost is diffucult (or impossible) to calculate doesn’t mean it’s expensive. Also, you have to compare the cost of Nuclear to the cost of coal/gas, which is currently the only alternative. Our co2 footprint will kill the planet in 50-100 years - unless you can somehow show that nuclear will kill it sooner, I’d say alternative cost is way higher. Finally, the cost of doing simething forever (managing nuclear waste) is not infinite. Read up on NPV.
  • contrapunter 7y ago
    >How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes? I think we need to be optimists. Not 'glass is half full' optimists, or 'humans are perfect' optimists but 'progress is possible if we keep trying' optimists. If we decide to be optimists then our wealth, technological capability and sense of responsibility will all continue to increase. Handling historical waste will become safer and cheaper. An exciting future university project, perhaps, with documentaries, museums and spin-offs abounding. What it isn't possible to do is to prophesy the precise means by which it will happen. We may build reactors that produce less and less waste or no waste at all. Nuclear engineers and physicists may figure out how to transmute harmful elements into safe ones. We may end up launching material directly into the Sun. Or we might just dig a better hole. Or something else. Or something else again. The fact that we don't know in advance is not grounds for pessimism. “Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.” (Howard Zinn)
• gandalfian 7y ago
  So what did the old reactor designs promise?
• Mvandenbergh 7y ago
  There are a number of factual errors and misunderstanding in this article. "New research suggests that wind and solar will never fully replace today’s electricity sources. We will always need more reliable sources of energy—ones that don’t fluctuate with the weather." Why no proper reference to this "new research"? Especially since it looks like conventional wisdom which new research has shown is not the case: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-8 https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-... That paper shows that for continent sized grids (the US is a continent sized country), electrification of heat and transport creates a demand profile that can be matched by a renewable portfolio in every 30 second time period in a year. Not to mention that the perfect complement to high capex intermittent generation with no marginal production cost is not a steady-producing technology with high capital costs but low to no marginal production cost like nuclear. The perfect complement is low capital cost, high marginal cost gas reciprocal engines. No surprise that this is a fast growing area of generation and that gas turbine manufacturers are hard at work adapting their designs to deal with greater intermittency. "Joe Biden puts the cost of his plan at $1.7 trillion over ten years. Some analysts estimate the total cost of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal at over $50 trillion." Conveniently not looking at the cost per year explicitly in the Biden proposal or giving a timescale at all for (one interpretation of) the AOC plan. 1.7 trillion over 10 years is 170bn/yr. That's 8% of US GDP. Quite a lot of money, but it just doesn't seem reasonable to only look at the cost of something which is a set of long life capital investments that way. That's because: 1) The lifetime of renewable generation and transmission infrastructure (and nuclear generation of course) is measured in decades and the operating costs are <<< capital costs. 2) We don't treat capital investments the way we treat recurring expenditures. I "spent" several times my income buying a house. You need to look at the annualised cost over the lifetime of the investment not at the capital cost. 3) Looking at the total upfront cost is only relevant to the degree that in-year budgets or borrowing are constrained. Those constraints are effectively set by the capital markets and by monetary policy for countries borrowing in their own currencies. In government decision making, this distinction is expressed by calculating economic value for money separately from affordability. 4) Only stating the total capital cost doesn't take into account the capital and operating costs in the alternative nor does the author make any attempt to quantify the cost of the nuclear option. "Moreover, these plans call for unprecedented regulation of the energy sector, something closer to a command economy than a free market." Dumb as a rock. The energy sector is second only to healthcare in the amount of regulation that applies to it already. The most regulated part of the energy sector is... nuclear. "But what if there were sources of zero-carbon electricity that didn’t require heavy-handed regulation to make them viable in the marketplace?" I'm glad to hear that nuclear SMR's will be able to buy private insurance rather than relying on the government to backstop them. Again, the size and complexity of the "regulatory surface" is much bigger for nuclear than for renewables. Not only that, but basically all the expensive basic research and prototyping for GenIV nuclear has been done by governments. That's true for renewable generation as well of course, but it does seem strange to see descriptions of private sector start-ups as being basically scrappy entrepreneurs when in most cases they are attempting to commercialise ideas that were tested at great expensive and sometime substantial scale using government money in the 1980s.
• JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Other uses: failsafe generators for critical city infrastructure (communications, fire and police, hospitals). Rural self-sufficient towns far from the grid. City-center car-charging capacity (the grid is most places woefully inadequate to run massive car-charging needs).
• zw123456 7y ago
  I was thinking that if you could shrink them down a bit further it would be a great back up generator for cell sites or hub sites. But then, that would really make the 5G conspiracy theorists heads explode.