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First U.S. Small Nuclear Reactor Design Is Approved
- dsimms 6y agoalso: earlier recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24358850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24358850
- geogra4 6y agoWe need to build thousands of these immediately to provide baseload power and decommission all fossil fuels
- epistasis 6y agoBack in the mid-2000s there was a huge policy, PR, and financing push to have a nuclear renaissance. Lots of plans were made. Economics were ignored (and honestly should have been ignored because the worst case nuclear cost is still cheaper than climate change). After that huge push, we have nothing to show for it except for a tiny number of half-finished, over-budget, behind schedule construction projects, and a toooooon of abandoned projects. The UK can't even find somebody to build their projects anymore. Hope has turned towards these small reactors, after the failure to build big reactors--despite immensely favorable regulatory, finance, and PR settings. I don't know of local opposition to a single reactor! At least not enough to cause a stir. Thousands of small reactors won't be enough, and we won't be able to build thousands for another 10-20 years. So we are instead stuck with renewables and storage. And just like we were right to throw experimental money at nuclear in the mid-2000s when we didn't really believe the numbers, I think we are far better grounded to throw equal billions of dollars (at least $40B in the US) at storage projects that the industry currently disregards. We have far better pricing data for storage, it's deployable within a year, and it has massive benefits. And investing now will decrease the cost more quickly. Throw several billion each at more speculative storage techs like flow chemistries and cryogenic air storage, and then the rest at standard, shipping, off the shelf lithium ion. We will see massive industries come into formation whose economic productivity and value dwarfs the tiny $40B we spent on kickstarting it. This will work, without a doubt. Nuclear may or may not work, it remains to be seen.
- ArkVark 6y agoThe missing component is the need to integrate Electric Vehicles into the grid on a fundamental basis including selling electricity. We need a technical, regulatory and user regime to support this. For starters, by transmitting power demand/price information to cars so they can decide when to charge, and also allowing cars to deposit electricity back into the network. If we manage this smartly, we can have battery storage and EVs in one go.
- epistasis 6y agoYes, exactly! A Tesla-size battery is three days' of electricity use for many people's homes. So we will be building massive amounts of storage as we shift our car fleet to electric (though personally I hope that we can massively cut down on car use too, due to the amount of PM2.5 pollution even EVs cause. The biggest source of microplastics in CA is tire road wear, not plastic bags or straws, yet the idea of reducing car travel is faaaaaar outside the Overton window even as we try to ban single use plastics.) I think there's lots of room for demand response, both in terms of pre-cooling houses or pre-charging batters. But I would love to be able to power my house with the 50amps that my car battery could provide. If you're only taking a couple kWh at peak times, it has nearly an effect on battery longevity and could provide great value to both the grid and user if price signals could be used in an automated fashion. For a model that won't scale to the general population, OhmConnect in CA will pay residences to reduce usage at certain hours, averaging about 6 hours per month for me. During the recent CA high load days, I made about $50 with minimal action on my part (used all the normal lighting, etc. just didn't run the dishwasher or clothes dryer during that period).
- bananabreakfast 6y agoWait what? Where exactly is that pollution from EVs coming from? Seems a pretty big leap you took there.
- epistasis 6y agoEVs still have tires, and though regenerative braking is far better than using brake pads, at low speeds and frequent braking that occurs in congestion and city driving forces EVs to use brake pads. This is the source of fine particulate matter, reported as PM2.5 in air quality, that results in ~50k premature US deaths per year [1] [2]. Tire particulates are the major source of oceanic microplastics off the CA coast [3]. Tire manufacturers produce tires that produce fewer particulates and last longer and are more expensive upfront, but which have a lower total cost of ownership. [4] Sorry for the big leap, I accumulate all these news bits by trawling deeply in a few narrow topics, and forget that they are not common knowledge and often obscure. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231013004548 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522... [2] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/10/22/mit-study-vehicle-emissions-cause-58000-premature-deaths-yearly-in-u-s/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/10/22/mit-study-vehicle-emi... [3] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-02/california-microplastics-ocean-study https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-02/califor... [4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyres-plastic-environment-insight-idUSKCN22413H https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tyres-plastic-environment...
- Krasnol 6y ago"immediately"? In nuclear terms it's not earlier than in 10 years. Later being more likely just like more expansive. Luckily nobody besides the Michael Shellenberger Fan Club is falling for this line these days.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoAt >$6 Billion per, I don't think we're going to be build thousands any time soon.
- stmw 6y agoThis was covered before but it's very good news. More of these (with different designs) are in the NRC approval pipeline.
- hikerclimber 6y agoboom!
- ogre_codes 6y agoThe anti-nuke environmentalists spend massive amounts of time and energy building public distrust of nuclear. They managed to shut down existing nuclear reactors with safe track records. This makes me pretty skeptical we'll be able to get new ones on line regardless of how much safer they are. Getting the NRC to approve them is one thing, getting a city to allow a nuclear power plant of any kind in their back yard is a whole other ball-game.
- nemo44x 6y agoIt's not just them though. No one wants to handle the waste. If I recall, the middle of nowhere Nevada was designated to take on the waste from quite a few places and they fought it and won. Additionally, no one wants that waste passing through their town on the way. I support nuclear but acknowledge the worst case scenarios of it.
- tdy721 6y agoWell, the bombs are way more dangerous than power applications. How do we get rid of these bomb cores? Throw them into the reactors! Someone’s gonna have to do it, Canada already blends ex weapons plutonium into their CANDU reactors. http://ccnr.org/mox_griffith_1.html http://ccnr.org/mox_griffith_1.html
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>Getting the NRC to approve them is one thing, getting a city to allow a nuclear power plant of any kind in their back yard is a whole other ball-game. Some rust belt city that doesn't have the luxury of making decisions in a way other than "strictly by the numbers" in a state that isn't inclined to meddle in local matters will go for it if those numbers make sense.
- underdown 6y agoThere is a cost to long distance transmission which distorts those numbers, presumably.
- detritus 6y agoIt amuses me to wonder what an entity with the value of one of the current market behemoths could accomplish if only they put a % or ten of their capitalisation into 'nuclear' research, be it fission or fusion. A sort of modern day swords to ploughshares in terms of the Apples and whatnots.
- tehjoker 6y agoKind of an amusing reference given the name of one of the prominent anti-nuclear (weapons) organizations: https://www.ploughshares.org/ https://www.ploughshares.org/
- Krasnol 6y agoWe know what they could accomplished because billions has been sunk into nuclear research in the last DECADES. Decades which we could have spend that money on renewables and storage a technology already so cheap that it makes nuclear utterly pointless. A technology which would have made the whole discussion obsolete and in fact: it is obsolete today. The time scale in which "nuclear" is researched, approved or build is being counted in decades. We don't have decades so why waste a single $ on it?? It makes no sense at all.
- epistasis 6y agoI think you're right, and that it's very clear that research funds have been systematically misinvested for the past 40 years. IMHO it's because there has been a false belief that energy consumption is tied by a constant factor to GDP. We knew this was BS even back in the 1970s, but perpetuating that economic falsehood was extremely beneficial to entrenched energy interests and lobbyists. If we were 15-25 years ahead of where we are now, because we provided the same tax benefits to solar and wind investors in the 80s that we give to small-time oil investors to this day... the entire world would be so much better positioned.
- vaccinator 6y agoWhen can I get a nuclear car?
- redisman 6y agoIn the 1950's.
- GloriousKoji 6y agoThere's the one we left on Mars.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoHere ya go: https://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html https://www.tomswift.info/homepage/atomicar.html
- vaccinator 6y agothanks I ordered one from aliexpress
- christiansakai 6y agoA little bit OT, but I watched a Youtube video that mentioned that "hydrocarbon is inexhaustible". Is this true?
- bserge 6y agoHydrocarbons are fossil fuels, basically. They are not inexhaustible.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoBiofuels are
- bserge 6y agoOh yeah, good point. I haven't thought about it, but yeah if you do agriculture just for biofuel, it could be considered inexhaustible (and even renewable?). But that seems like a terrible waste of agricultural production (which is better used for feeding people and animals).
- cultus 6y agoSoil loss and salinification is always a danger. It's better to farm as little and as un-intensively as reasonable, in my opinion.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoThat depends on the alternative, doesn’t it? I think there is a place for biofuels, even if it is just replacing fossil jet fuel powering airliners
- sidpatil 6y ago> I haven't thought about it, but yeah if you do agriculture just for biofuel, it could be considered inexhaustible (and even renewable?). Only if the inputs are inexhaustible. Industrial agriculture is driven by fertilizer produced from fossil fuels.
- millstone 6y agoWhat is significant here is that the NRC has approved a design, rather than a single plant. Nuclear plants in the US have been traditionally built like airports, each one bespoke to its site, each one separately assessed for safety. This pushes the plants to be very large, to offset the high up-front costs. We should build reactors like airplanes instead of airports. You get your airplane design and factory approved, then you can churn out thousands. That's the hope for microreactors. I learned about these ideas from this podcast episode: https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21155995/jessica-lovering-nuclear-energy https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21155995/jessica-lovering-nucl...
- Krasnol 6y ago> We should build reactors like airplanes instead of airports. You get your airplane design and factory approved, then you can churn out thousands. That's the hope for microreactors. Good there are some people with a sense of safety and this is not the case. A nuclear reactor is not a plane. Maybe you should question the opinion of a lobbyist first before you start repeating their ads.
- kiddico 6y agoOf course, modern planes, known for their constant crashing and terrible safety standards.
- Krasnol 6y agoModern bikes are also not know for terrible safety standards. I wouldn't compare them to a car or a plane or a NUCLEAR REACTOR. You'd assume this board is full of people with some technical understanding but somehow every single time nuclear comes up, this thing turns into some kind of 9gag.
- manicdee 6y agoEvery safety standard that modern aircraft have to meet is written in blood. Even then, Boeing thought they were better than they are, and we have lives lost to 737 MAX because they tried to play the rules to get a completely new aircraft certified as an existing one. The reason we don't have planes constantly crashing is because if a serious problem is found we can stop the planes flying, grounding the entire fleet of that model/variant around the world because airlines know that they'll be taken to the cleaners by governments if they keep flying a known-dangerous plane. Companies everywhere are placing profits ahead of safety and reliability. You order parts for a nuclear reactor that have to be made out of a specific alloy due to radiation, the contractor ends up giving you a slightly different alloy that is just as strong mechanically, but costs them 20% less, and it turns out that the bit they removed is the trace material that makes the specified alloy radiation resistant (they're casting contractors, not metallurgists). But because we're all cutting costs you're certifying the factory not the part, so you end up shipping a thousand small nuclear reactors with coolant systems that perish due to radiation and end up leaking toxic radioactive waste two or three years after being powered up. How do you ground a fleet of nuclear reactors? It's not like having a fridge or hot water is a luxury that we can just do without for a few months while the problem is resolved.
- jeffbee 6y agoThere always seem to be so many assumptions in these safety claims. I'm not really for or against fission power but I don't like to feel like I'm being conned by sales literature masquerading as science. Questions that seem unanswered by NuScale revolve around their subterranean cooling pool. The ultimate safety claims require this thing to be full of water, so the obvious question is: what if it springs a leak? What if the pool drains around the containment structure in such a way that the hydrostatic pressure of its own lost coolant forces it out of the ground, like an empty swimming pool in a flood? Speaking of which, what about floods? Also their safety claims rely on vacuums and anoxic environments, but this is Earth so what happens during oxygen intrusion? Fission people spent the entire 1990s hyping pebble bed reactors but ultimately they had these problems. The safety of a PBR lies in having an inert atmosphere. During an air or water intrusion event the whole this will burn, explode, and melt. Again, Earth is absolutely filthy with oxygen so this is a legitimate concern.
- mchusma 6y agoFusion already has the advantage of being the safest energy source by a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... The "problem" with nuclear is the misconception and economic cost.
- mechEpleb 6y agoNobody has a working fusion power plant.
- jbob2000 6y agoWhat's the smallest nuclear reactor possible? Could I have one to power my home, for example? Or is the energy released from even a single particle so great that it needs a huge structure to capture it?