4 ms·

Author here. Just got an alert from server. I enjoyed writing this in January and am happy to see it here. Happy to discuss more or make corrections.

java-man 6y ago
Thank you! Very interesting read and solid work. Any plans to publish a book?
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  You're welcome. It was a labor of love. After completing this, I thought geez I should just make this a book. It's a relatively fringe subject, but hey maybe it'd be a good use of a sabbatical or something. There is a lot of investor interest in advanced nuclear reactors because of climate change, so it could be useful to make this info more broadly available.
  - java-man 6y ago
    It's a pity we seem to be losing knowledge from time to time. Like Antikythera mechanism, representing technology that was developed and lost for 1,500 years. The little bits of information - that are currently scattered across hundreds of impenetrable reports - might still be interesting to a regular person, and who knows, inspire someone to pick up the new research.
  - mtreis86 6y ago
    Thanks for writing all of this
godelski 6y ago
For anyone reading this I also suggest acidburn's article on waste[0] and economics[1]. (I always recommend searching for his comments in HN nuclear discussions) Also, always good to see you and congrats on a post of yours getting to the front page. [0] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Also worth checking out: https://anchor.fm/chris15401/episodes/Existing-Nuclear-and-Imaginary-Nuclear-feat--Mark-Nelson-eibgl9 https://anchor.fm/chris15401/episodes/Existing-Nuclear-and-I...
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    I loved this episode. It resonated with all I learned in writing the history page. There's almost no type of reactor that hasn't been tried, and so hoping that some new kind of reactor is the answer to all problems in nuclear is a bit misguided.
    - mncharity 6y ago
      > There's almost no type of reactor that hasn't been tried, and so hoping that some new kind of reactor is the answer to all problems in nuclear is a bit misguided. Reading the history and economics pages, and searching for hopeful paths forward, I thought of the NASA-SpaceX partnership. Where it wasn't that the component technologies had never been tried, or weren't known, but that company and systems optimized for atypical objectives might find an order of magnitude to pick up, and maybe soon two.
petrohi 6y ago
This is great! Would be also interesting to have side-by-side history of US, Russian and French nuclear power programs.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
OP here - thanks for writing it! Really enjoyed it!! Curious if you wrote anything more specific about future of nuclear power, and if you have any readings to recommend.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  Thanks for posting it. It's always a dream to get on here. The follow-up piece to this one is the Economics page, and this section in particular talks about what's likely necessary to have a good future in nuclear [1] (it's a collection of conclusions from expert groups on the topic, mostly focused on economics). [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nuclear-power-economics https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nu... The MIT Future of Nuclear in a Carbon-Constrained World report is excellent [2]. [2] https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-constrained-world/ https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon...
  - spenrose 6y ago
    Your work is a gift to the rest of us: excellent scholarship on a crucial topic. Thank you. The "economics" essay underplays two important issues and elides a third. First, learning curves. You are reluctant to let go of "economies of scale", for which you seem to place, ahem, a thumb on the scale against "economies of mass production". What you miss is the dynamic nature of learning. If you produce two reactors of size X/2 rather than 1 reactor of size X, you get twice as much learning, and that learning compounds. C.f. wind turbines. Second, nuclear has many more serious competitors than it used to. Geothermal and various storage technologies produce market-friendly energy at gigawatt scale, and capital is being deployed to improve them as fast as it can be absorbed. Third (and related): all economies are political economies, and nuclear has the worst politics of any technology. To their enormous credit, nuclear advocates are finally taking this issue seriously, but they have so much work to do. Unfortunately, these three issues feed into each other. The happy case—the one I'm rooting for—is that a 5-10 megawatt technology gets so much capital behind it that costs are brought down to "vaguely competitive with offshore wind", and that it becomes an important option with gigawatts deployed annually starting around 2030. Unfortunately, by that point we're going to have GWh-storage paired with solar that is either 1/10th that cost or twice as efficient as currently, or both. The path for nuclear is narrow and treacherous.
winter_blue 6y ago
Just curious: what sort of monitoring software do you use on the server that it notifies you of traffic spikes?
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  I have a 100-line Python script that I wrote that runs hourly via cron. It scours my apache access log and counts up the number of times each referrer has shown up in the past hour. If it's above a threshold, it emails me with the referrer names in order. So I just get email that basically say: "Hey you're on hacker news" or "Hey check this reddit thread" or whatever.
  - winter_blue 6y ago
    That's great! It'd be cool if you could put it on Github or something.

java-man 6y ago

Thank you! Very interesting read and solid work. Any plans to publish a book?

acidburnNSA 6y ago
You're welcome. It was a labor of love. After completing this, I thought geez I should just make this a book. It's a relatively fringe subject, but hey maybe it'd be a good use of a sabbatical or something. There is a lot of investor interest in advanced nuclear reactors because of climate change, so it could be useful to make this info more broadly available.
- java-man 6y ago
  It's a pity we seem to be losing knowledge from time to time. Like Antikythera mechanism, representing technology that was developed and lost for 1,500 years. The little bits of information - that are currently scattered across hundreds of impenetrable reports - might still be interesting to a regular person, and who knows, inspire someone to pick up the new research.
- mtreis86 6y ago
  Thanks for writing all of this

godelski 6y ago

For anyone reading this I also suggest acidburn's article on waste[0] and economics[1]. (I always recommend searching for his comments in HN nuclear discussions) Also, always good to see you and congrats on a post of yours getting to the front page. [0] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

andromeduck 6y ago
Also worth checking out: https://anchor.fm/chris15401/episodes/Existing-Nuclear-and-Imaginary-Nuclear-feat--Mark-Nelson-eibgl9 https://anchor.fm/chris15401/episodes/Existing-Nuclear-and-I...
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  I loved this episode. It resonated with all I learned in writing the history page. There's almost no type of reactor that hasn't been tried, and so hoping that some new kind of reactor is the answer to all problems in nuclear is a bit misguided.
  - mncharity 6y ago
    > There's almost no type of reactor that hasn't been tried, and so hoping that some new kind of reactor is the answer to all problems in nuclear is a bit misguided. Reading the history and economics pages, and searching for hopeful paths forward, I thought of the NASA-SpaceX partnership. Where it wasn't that the component technologies had never been tried, or weren't known, but that company and systems optimized for atypical objectives might find an order of magnitude to pick up, and maybe soon two.

petrohi 6y ago

This is great! Would be also interesting to have side-by-side history of US, Russian and French nuclear power programs.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

OP here - thanks for writing it! Really enjoyed it!! Curious if you wrote anything more specific about future of nuclear power, and if you have any readings to recommend.

acidburnNSA 6y ago
Thanks for posting it. It's always a dream to get on here. The follow-up piece to this one is the Economics page, and this section in particular talks about what's likely necessary to have a good future in nuclear [1] (it's a collection of conclusions from expert groups on the topic, mostly focused on economics). [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nuclear-power-economics https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nu... The MIT Future of Nuclear in a Carbon-Constrained World report is excellent [2]. [2] https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-constrained-world/ https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon...
- spenrose 6y ago
  Your work is a gift to the rest of us: excellent scholarship on a crucial topic. Thank you. The "economics" essay underplays two important issues and elides a third. First, learning curves. You are reluctant to let go of "economies of scale", for which you seem to place, ahem, a thumb on the scale against "economies of mass production". What you miss is the dynamic nature of learning. If you produce two reactors of size X/2 rather than 1 reactor of size X, you get twice as much learning, and that learning compounds. C.f. wind turbines. Second, nuclear has many more serious competitors than it used to. Geothermal and various storage technologies produce market-friendly energy at gigawatt scale, and capital is being deployed to improve them as fast as it can be absorbed. Third (and related): all economies are political economies, and nuclear has the worst politics of any technology. To their enormous credit, nuclear advocates are finally taking this issue seriously, but they have so much work to do. Unfortunately, these three issues feed into each other. The happy case—the one I'm rooting for—is that a 5-10 megawatt technology gets so much capital behind it that costs are brought down to "vaguely competitive with offshore wind", and that it becomes an important option with gigawatts deployed annually starting around 2030. Unfortunately, by that point we're going to have GWh-storage paired with solar that is either 1/10th that cost or twice as efficient as currently, or both. The path for nuclear is narrow and treacherous.

winter_blue 6y ago

Just curious: what sort of monitoring software do you use on the server that it notifies you of traffic spikes?

acidburnNSA 6y ago
I have a 100-line Python script that I wrote that runs hourly via cron. It scours my apache access log and counts up the number of times each referrer has shown up in the past hour. If it's above a threshold, it emails me with the referrer names in order. So I just get email that basically say: "Hey you're on hacker news" or "Hey check this reddit thread" or whatever.
- winter_blue 6y ago
  That's great! It'd be cool if you could put it on Github or something.