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As a huge fan of nuclear power, I never felt like NuScale style 'SMR' were all that great of an idea. Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory constr

by nickik 6y ago

As a huge fan of nuclear power, I never felt like NuScale style 'SMR' were all that great of an idea. Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction and that you can start small and scale a location, but on the other side you lose that again because you lose the economics of scale that traditional PWR gets. I really believe we should be a nuclear society by now, and that regulations both around reactors and fuel availability prevented this from happening. In the 1960 lots and lots of innovative reactors were build, often with relatively low budgets at that. The amount of untapped potential in nuclear energy is incredible. We don't need fusion, fission is plenty energy dense, if we can't figure out how to make fission practical, we want with fusion either. Yet here we are in the year 2020 and we are still building new PWR reactors. But the reality is, in the US it is essentially impossible to build anything else. Regulations are designed so that the only reactor that can really get approval is a PWR. If you attempt to build anything new, you have to basically pay the government to study your design and after a unknown amount of time and money, the government might develop a new regulatory framework. By the time that happens of course you have run out of money already, no buissness plan that depends on the government figuring out how to regulate a new type of reactor would ever really happen. The good thing at least is that the DoE in the last 5 years seem to have realized that their whole approach was a problem and they have done a lot of good things to try to change. Outside of the US the energy sector is government controlled or to small for a nuclear reactor startup to have a large enough market to make a new reactor worth it. Canada has established itself as basically the only viable place for new reactor development, with Terrestrial Energy and Moltex Energy (moved from Britain to Canada because regulation). So, good luck to NuScale, I hope they can prove me wrong and deploy many of these in an economical way.

rubber_duck 6y ago
>Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction and that you can start small and scale a location, but on the other side you lose that again because you lose the economics of scale that traditional PWR gets. You mean they lose operational efficiency ? Economies of scale come from the ability to mass produce. You forgot to mention the largest differentiator - eliminates the possibility of a global catastrophe.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  Not in nuclear they haven't historically. Economies of scale drove light water reactor designs from tens of megawatts to hundreds to over a thousand universally from all vendors around the world historically. The big institutional nuclear economics reports all agree that going big improves nuclear economics. The hypothesis that SMRs will somehow overpower this is popular but is very much unproven. This agrees with OECD reports like last month's [1] and all the older ones listed in [2]. [1] http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2020/7530-reducing-cost-nuclear-construction.pdf http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2020/7530-reducing-cost-nuc... [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nuclear-power-economics https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nu...
- jabl 6y ago
  > You mean they lose operational efficiency ? Historically, one of the few successful ways to lower the price per generated power from a nuclear power plant has been to make the reactor larger. So yeah, there's a reason why the latest traditional PWR designs such as the French EPR are huge (1600 MWe). The gamble with these small reactors like Nuscale is that series production of the reactors in a factory would make up for the loss of the traditional economy of scale due to size. It remains to be seen how well that will work out.
- evilos 6y ago
  If you can pump out standardized large scale reactors like France did, then they are way more efficient than these smaller reactors. The problem of course is that takes a large government to mandate a huge public project, which is not really likely these days. The advantage of these small reactors for now is that they hopefully prevent expensive,bloated, one-off site designs that go over budget and miss their schedules.
- nickik 6y ago
  Economics of scale are the reasons modern Gen3+ reactors are so huge. From AP1000 wikipedia: > The design traces its history to the System 80 design, which was produced in various locations around the world. Further development of the System 80 initially led to the AP600 concept, with a smaller 600 to 700 MWe output, but this saw limited interest. In order to compete with other designs that were scaling up in size in order to improve capital costs, the design re-emerged as the AP1000 and found a number of design wins at this larger size. So modern PWR are usually build with 1GWe one location one reactor, huge economics of scale in terms of the size of the power plant. A AP1000 is not much bigger then an AP600. > You forgot to mention the largest differentiator - eliminates the possibility of a global catastrophe. I disagree. First of all, I think the possibility of a global catastrophe with a traditional PWR are already incredibly small, and when talking a modern build like an AP1000 the NuScale doesn't have that much better safety characteristics. PWR are inherently problematic and require tons and tons of complex engineering to make them save and the error potential in such a solution are always there.
pfdietz 6y ago
> Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction They have given up on that, I read.

by nickik 6y ago

rubber_duck 6y ago

>Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction and that you can start small and scale a location, but on the other side you lose that again because you lose the economics of scale that traditional PWR gets. You mean they lose operational efficiency ? Economies of scale come from the ability to mass produce. You forgot to mention the largest differentiator - eliminates the possibility of a global catastrophe.

acidburnNSA 6y ago
Not in nuclear they haven't historically. Economies of scale drove light water reactor designs from tens of megawatts to hundreds to over a thousand universally from all vendors around the world historically. The big institutional nuclear economics reports all agree that going big improves nuclear economics. The hypothesis that SMRs will somehow overpower this is popular but is very much unproven. This agrees with OECD reports like last month's [1] and all the older ones listed in [2]. [1] http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2020/7530-reducing-cost-nuclear-construction.pdf http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2020/7530-reducing-cost-nuc... [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nuclear-power-economics https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nu...
jabl 6y ago
> You mean they lose operational efficiency ? Historically, one of the few successful ways to lower the price per generated power from a nuclear power plant has been to make the reactor larger. So yeah, there's a reason why the latest traditional PWR designs such as the French EPR are huge (1600 MWe). The gamble with these small reactors like Nuscale is that series production of the reactors in a factory would make up for the loss of the traditional economy of scale due to size. It remains to be seen how well that will work out.
evilos 6y ago
If you can pump out standardized large scale reactors like France did, then they are way more efficient than these smaller reactors. The problem of course is that takes a large government to mandate a huge public project, which is not really likely these days. The advantage of these small reactors for now is that they hopefully prevent expensive,bloated, one-off site designs that go over budget and miss their schedules.
nickik 6y ago
Economics of scale are the reasons modern Gen3+ reactors are so huge. From AP1000 wikipedia: > The design traces its history to the System 80 design, which was produced in various locations around the world. Further development of the System 80 initially led to the AP600 concept, with a smaller 600 to 700 MWe output, but this saw limited interest. In order to compete with other designs that were scaling up in size in order to improve capital costs, the design re-emerged as the AP1000 and found a number of design wins at this larger size. So modern PWR are usually build with 1GWe one location one reactor, huge economics of scale in terms of the size of the power plant. A AP1000 is not much bigger then an AP600. > You forgot to mention the largest differentiator - eliminates the possibility of a global catastrophe. I disagree. First of all, I think the possibility of a global catastrophe with a traditional PWR are already incredibly small, and when talking a modern build like an AP1000 the NuScale doesn't have that much better safety characteristics. PWR are inherently problematic and require tons and tons of complex engineering to make them save and the error potential in such a solution are always there.

pfdietz 6y ago

> Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction They have given up on that, I read.