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So glad Canada plans to litter our country with these soon. They want SMR's in every logging camp, remote community, mine, and so on. Sure they are more dangero

So glad Canada plans to litter our country with these soon. They want SMR's in every logging camp, remote community, mine, and so on. Sure they are more dangerous per GW and more costly per GW but they are MUCH cheaper initially so small unqualified companies can get involved. Let the good times roll.

pfdietz 6y ago
SMRs are not radioisotope thermal generators.
lxe 6y ago
I think SMRs are very different from RTG. SMR is an essentially a small and fairly complex reactor design, like a molten salt reactor. It heats water or other liquid, turns it into steam, steam spins a turbine, just like a regular power plant. An RTG is just a hot piece of radioactive material surrounded by thermocouples that directly convert the heat into electricity.
arcticbull 6y ago
Just a friendly reminder that nuclear power causes fewer deaths per terawatt hour than any other energy source known to man.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  ...as long as you completely ignore any catastrophic risk for the next 10.000 years.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Nothing is risk free. The nice thing about nuclear power is that radiation is really easy to detect, with you know, a Geiger counter. On the other hand, particulate matter emitted by oil and coal plants causes millions of deaths per year, right now. And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.
    - airtonix 6y ago
      OMG YOU HEATHEAN! How dare you! The church of climate catastrophe will seek an injuction on your slanderous lies! /s
    - bob29 6y ago
      Detecting radiation isn't the hard (or expensive) part https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225386510.html https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225... Its not nuclear vs oil and gas. Renewables are an alternative with lower cost and lower waste. A good safety history is a measure of what happened, not what could happen.
      - posix_me_less 6y ago
        Nuclear energy has exceptionally good safety history.
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      > Nothing is risk free. I specifically called out SYSTEMIC risk. What's the systemic risk of solar panels and wind power, for example? A terrorist attack destroying 100 millions solar panels? > On the other hand The usual false dichotomy between nuclear and oil/coal/gas. > And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe. ...not to mention the direct release of heat into the atmosphere due to poorly isolated house heating, industrial production and electric generation plants themselves. None of which is mitigated by nuclear. Rather, it's made even worse by any source of cheap electricity.
      - posix_me_less 6y ago
        Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand attacks from crazies. Terrorist attacks done so far have had minimal impact on infrastructure. It is a very minor and manageable threat. Release of heat due to chemical and nuclear sources does heat the planet, but the contribution to heating compared to effect of increasing CO2 concentration is negligible in the range of 1%, this is well known.
  - scaladev 6y ago
    Do you want a bit of perspective from someone who's been living under a very thick pall of coal-produced smog for many years? 100-500 µg/m³ of PM2.5 at day time (depends on wind speed mostly, right now it's 550 µg), twice or thrice that at night. I don't think my body can tolerate this much longer. If we were to switch the coal power plants to nuclear energy, I'd jump up and down like a little girl. A small risk of second Chernobyl seems just fine in comparison to this. I'd be fine with a risk of nuclear explosion with no chance to escape, honestly.
    - oddmiral 6y ago
      We cannot switch coal plants to nuclear. We can switch them to gas or hydro. > A small risk of second Chernobyl seems just fine in comparison to this. I'd be fine with a risk of nuclear explosion with no chance to escape, honestly. Chornobyl was near-miss. Potentially, it was able to turn whole Europe into radioactive wasteland, affecting lives of 1B of people. Can you just kill yourself only, please?
    - rob74 6y ago
      Sorry for that, but may I ask where you live? Because if the pollution is coming from a coal power plant, there are filters for that. And I shudder to think what the people (mis)managing that coal power plant could do if it was nuclear instead...
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      > Do you want a bit of perspective Thanks but I don't need a strawman.
    - mixermachine 6y ago
      How about switching to renewables + batteries? Solar is now as cheap as coal power in China. When you add some batteries you will be fine with no pollution. And no waste your childerns childern (and beyond) have to take care of.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        It's not actually true that batteries and solar are a perfect clean solution - and neither is wind. Better than coal to be sure, but it's not what you're making it out to be. Rare earth metals have to be mined in remote portions of China in dystopian hellscapes. Lithium and other minerals also have to be mined, and leave toxic tailing ponds. Solar panels frequently have cadmium and tellurium, which are also hazardous, and need to be managed. Plastics and composites in wind turbines also cannot be recycled. There are no perfect solutions, and the future will almost certainly require a mixture of kinds of energy.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Just a friendly reminder that nuclear power has an unbounded cost of dismantling, which will be borne by the local taxpayers. Which is one of the reasons we keep extending the operating certificates, to kick that can down the road.
- oddmiral 6y ago
  We will know that after cooling of nuclear waste to background level only, which will not happen soon.
  - posix_me_less 6y ago
    Nuclear waste is safely stored in pools and other facilities, it does not hurt anybody.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    if you bury it in the same place you dug the uranium ore from, doesn't that resolve it?
- lovemenot 6y ago
  A friendly rejoinder. Concorde was the safest form of commercial air-travel, until one day in Paris it wasn't. Nuclear currently has around 3% share of power generation globally. More share than Concorde had, certainly. But not enough to say definitively that nuclear's comparative safety is not just because of its comparative scarcity. It's been a low-hanging fruit. Scale up to 30% share and be necessarily exposed to new risks which were not exposed at current levels of deployment. Many of these additional risks would be from economic factors: we'd probably never achieve 30% share without a less rigorous and much less costly safety regime.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    30% is a completely arbitrary level that you’ve picked with no justification. I’d suggest you cite some sources to provide depth to the argument that 30% of world power is materially different.
    - lovemenot 6y ago
      Arbitrary yes. Pick another number that is substantially larger than current share. I am not going to be able to give statistics, but to me it's obvious. After all these decades, what's been holding nuclear down to its present market share is its economics of safety. Cost overruns all but bankrupted Toshiba, just to give one recent example. If you want an order of magnitude more installations, you will have to relax those constraints. So we cannot use today's safety record as proof of tomorrow's safety if we also expect massive increase in deployment.
  - jaakl 6y ago
    Which day in Paris? Single accident did not increase overall air travel safety significantly, regardless of what impression you could get from the press.
    - lovemenot 6y ago
      A single Concorde crash drove that aircraft's safety profile down from the very best to amongst the worst per passenger mile of any aircraft.
SquareWheel 6y ago
As a Canuck I'm enthused about an increased adoption of nuclear energy. It's far safer than coal or oil, and is able to generate energy on-demand. It's a great pairing to solar, wind, and hydro.
- rixed 6y ago
  > and is able to generate energy on-demand Last time i studied this topic one of the main drawback of nuclear energy was precisely that it required accurate forecasts of future demand, so not suitable for "on demand" production, because of how long it takes to cool down. Had anything improved in this area?
  - SquareWheel 6y ago
    That's a fair criticism. I don't know the numbers, but I'd be curious to see them. Especially around modern designs.
  - Gwypaas 6y ago
    More modern designs can ramp faster, but still not fast. The main issue is that the largest cost of a nuclear power plant is the capital investment to build it and staff to run it, which is fixed. In comparison fuel costs seem to hover at about 25%. Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear on price many hours of the day this becomes an even harder calculation. Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation of storage can make the same, and still undercut you. This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.
    - SquareWheel 6y ago
      It sounds like it makes more sense with sufficient battery technologies then (which don't yet exist). Thanks for the information.
kenned3 6y ago
i live within 10KM of pickering Nuclear. I have no concerns as nuclear is among the safest form of power available. A coal plant puts more radioactive isotopes into the air then any nuclear plant. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... dont let the facts get in the way..
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  Nuclear power plants aren't the same thing as portable nuclear batteries, which is what these are.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    No, but risk is all relative. The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds. These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.
- mikesabbagh 6y ago
  History of nuclear has taught us that nuclear is very safe until an accident happens. You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen. here in Quebec, we decided to close a nuclear reactor after Fukushima at a cost of $2 billion
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    > You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen I don't accept this characterisation. I see Fukushima as an example of being curiously diligent in one area, and negligent in another, perhaps because rather than have a "culture" of safety it was simply legislation driven, such that standards dropped as soon as there was a gap/oversight in the legislation. To clarify - as safe as the plant was, it was not in a safe chosen location. Concerns were raised, and ignored. legislation covered the building and operation of the plant, not diligence in planning its location. security is somewhat weakest-link - it doesn't matter if your doors are metal with strong locks if there are large windows without bars. Fukushima was always unsafe, just conditional on a relatively rare event - by the same measure the unstable warehouse cargo that exploded in Beirut was always unsafe, even if it existed for nearly 7 years.
airtonix 6y ago
lol. Hi there fellow spreader of FUD, shall we join forces and earn our keep from the oil companies?

pfdietz 6y ago

SMRs are not radioisotope thermal generators.

lxe 6y ago

I think SMRs are very different from RTG. SMR is an essentially a small and fairly complex reactor design, like a molten salt reactor. It heats water or other liquid, turns it into steam, steam spins a turbine, just like a regular power plant. An RTG is just a hot piece of radioactive material surrounded by thermocouples that directly convert the heat into electricity.

arcticbull 6y ago

Just a friendly reminder that nuclear power causes fewer deaths per terawatt hour than any other energy source known to man.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago
...as long as you completely ignore any catastrophic risk for the next 10.000 years.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Nothing is risk free. The nice thing about nuclear power is that radiation is really easy to detect, with you know, a Geiger counter. On the other hand, particulate matter emitted by oil and coal plants causes millions of deaths per year, right now. And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.
  - airtonix 6y ago
    OMG YOU HEATHEAN! How dare you! The church of climate catastrophe will seek an injuction on your slanderous lies! /s
  - bob29 6y ago
    Detecting radiation isn't the hard (or expensive) part https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225386510.html https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225... Its not nuclear vs oil and gas. Renewables are an alternative with lower cost and lower waste. A good safety history is a measure of what happened, not what could happen.
    - posix_me_less 6y ago
      Nuclear energy has exceptionally good safety history.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > Nothing is risk free. I specifically called out SYSTEMIC risk. What's the systemic risk of solar panels and wind power, for example? A terrorist attack destroying 100 millions solar panels? > On the other hand The usual false dichotomy between nuclear and oil/coal/gas. > And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe. ...not to mention the direct release of heat into the atmosphere due to poorly isolated house heating, industrial production and electric generation plants themselves. None of which is mitigated by nuclear. Rather, it's made even worse by any source of cheap electricity.
    - posix_me_less 6y ago
      Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand attacks from crazies. Terrorist attacks done so far have had minimal impact on infrastructure. It is a very minor and manageable threat. Release of heat due to chemical and nuclear sources does heat the planet, but the contribution to heating compared to effect of increasing CO2 concentration is negligible in the range of 1%, this is well known.
- scaladev 6y ago
  Do you want a bit of perspective from someone who's been living under a very thick pall of coal-produced smog for many years? 100-500 µg/m³ of PM2.5 at day time (depends on wind speed mostly, right now it's 550 µg), twice or thrice that at night. I don't think my body can tolerate this much longer. If we were to switch the coal power plants to nuclear energy, I'd jump up and down like a little girl. A small risk of second Chernobyl seems just fine in comparison to this. I'd be fine with a risk of nuclear explosion with no chance to escape, honestly.
  - oddmiral 6y ago
    We cannot switch coal plants to nuclear. We can switch them to gas or hydro. > A small risk of second Chernobyl seems just fine in comparison to this. I'd be fine with a risk of nuclear explosion with no chance to escape, honestly. Chornobyl was near-miss. Potentially, it was able to turn whole Europe into radioactive wasteland, affecting lives of 1B of people. Can you just kill yourself only, please?
  - rob74 6y ago
    Sorry for that, but may I ask where you live? Because if the pollution is coming from a coal power plant, there are filters for that. And I shudder to think what the people (mis)managing that coal power plant could do if it was nuclear instead...
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > Do you want a bit of perspective Thanks but I don't need a strawman.
  - mixermachine 6y ago
    How about switching to renewables + batteries? Solar is now as cheap as coal power in China. When you add some batteries you will be fine with no pollution. And no waste your childerns childern (and beyond) have to take care of.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      It's not actually true that batteries and solar are a perfect clean solution - and neither is wind. Better than coal to be sure, but it's not what you're making it out to be. Rare earth metals have to be mined in remote portions of China in dystopian hellscapes. Lithium and other minerals also have to be mined, and leave toxic tailing ponds. Solar panels frequently have cadmium and tellurium, which are also hazardous, and need to be managed. Plastics and composites in wind turbines also cannot be recycled. There are no perfect solutions, and the future will almost certainly require a mixture of kinds of energy.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Just a friendly reminder that nuclear power has an unbounded cost of dismantling, which will be borne by the local taxpayers. Which is one of the reasons we keep extending the operating certificates, to kick that can down the road.
oddmiral 6y ago
We will know that after cooling of nuclear waste to background level only, which will not happen soon.
- posix_me_less 6y ago
  Nuclear waste is safely stored in pools and other facilities, it does not hurt anybody.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  if you bury it in the same place you dug the uranium ore from, doesn't that resolve it?
lovemenot 6y ago
A friendly rejoinder. Concorde was the safest form of commercial air-travel, until one day in Paris it wasn't. Nuclear currently has around 3% share of power generation globally. More share than Concorde had, certainly. But not enough to say definitively that nuclear's comparative safety is not just because of its comparative scarcity. It's been a low-hanging fruit. Scale up to 30% share and be necessarily exposed to new risks which were not exposed at current levels of deployment. Many of these additional risks would be from economic factors: we'd probably never achieve 30% share without a less rigorous and much less costly safety regime.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  30% is a completely arbitrary level that you’ve picked with no justification. I’d suggest you cite some sources to provide depth to the argument that 30% of world power is materially different.
  - lovemenot 6y ago
    Arbitrary yes. Pick another number that is substantially larger than current share. I am not going to be able to give statistics, but to me it's obvious. After all these decades, what's been holding nuclear down to its present market share is its economics of safety. Cost overruns all but bankrupted Toshiba, just to give one recent example. If you want an order of magnitude more installations, you will have to relax those constraints. So we cannot use today's safety record as proof of tomorrow's safety if we also expect massive increase in deployment.
- jaakl 6y ago
  Which day in Paris? Single accident did not increase overall air travel safety significantly, regardless of what impression you could get from the press.
  - lovemenot 6y ago
    A single Concorde crash drove that aircraft's safety profile down from the very best to amongst the worst per passenger mile of any aircraft.

SquareWheel 6y ago

As a Canuck I'm enthused about an increased adoption of nuclear energy. It's far safer than coal or oil, and is able to generate energy on-demand. It's a great pairing to solar, wind, and hydro.

rixed 6y ago
> and is able to generate energy on-demand Last time i studied this topic one of the main drawback of nuclear energy was precisely that it required accurate forecasts of future demand, so not suitable for "on demand" production, because of how long it takes to cool down. Had anything improved in this area?
- SquareWheel 6y ago
  That's a fair criticism. I don't know the numbers, but I'd be curious to see them. Especially around modern designs.
- Gwypaas 6y ago
  More modern designs can ramp faster, but still not fast. The main issue is that the largest cost of a nuclear power plant is the capital investment to build it and staff to run it, which is fixed. In comparison fuel costs seem to hover at about 25%. Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear on price many hours of the day this becomes an even harder calculation. Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation of storage can make the same, and still undercut you. This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.
  - SquareWheel 6y ago
    It sounds like it makes more sense with sufficient battery technologies then (which don't yet exist). Thanks for the information.

kenned3 6y ago

i live within 10KM of pickering Nuclear. I have no concerns as nuclear is among the safest form of power available. A coal plant puts more radioactive isotopes into the air then any nuclear plant. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... dont let the facts get in the way..

hannasanarion 6y ago
Nuclear power plants aren't the same thing as portable nuclear batteries, which is what these are.
- thu2111 6y ago
  No, but risk is all relative. The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds. These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.
mikesabbagh 6y ago
History of nuclear has taught us that nuclear is very safe until an accident happens. You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen. here in Quebec, we decided to close a nuclear reactor after Fukushima at a cost of $2 billion
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen I don't accept this characterisation. I see Fukushima as an example of being curiously diligent in one area, and negligent in another, perhaps because rather than have a "culture" of safety it was simply legislation driven, such that standards dropped as soon as there was a gap/oversight in the legislation. To clarify - as safe as the plant was, it was not in a safe chosen location. Concerns were raised, and ignored. legislation covered the building and operation of the plant, not diligence in planning its location. security is somewhat weakest-link - it doesn't matter if your doors are metal with strong locks if there are large windows without bars. Fukushima was always unsafe, just conditional on a relatively rare event - by the same measure the unstable warehouse cargo that exploded in Beirut was always unsafe, even if it existed for nearly 7 years.

airtonix 6y ago

lol. Hi there fellow spreader of FUD, shall we join forces and earn our keep from the oil companies?