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It's been an exciting year or so for nuclear in the US. (1) the democratic party switched stances to support nuclear energy (2) the US allowed several small nuc

It's been an exciting year or so for nuclear in the US. (1) the democratic party switched stances to support nuclear energy (2) the US allowed several small nuclear reactor designs to move forward (3) fusion research got extra funding (4) pushing some work from government to private sector (5) encouraging NASA and the DOD to cooperate on small reactor work. It's reasonably likely that in 10 years we have nuclear energy that is near the cost of other energy sources, which has always been it's blocker.

DataWorker 6y ago
That assumes the incentives and policies do not shift. Is that a good assumption? I hear very antinuclear sentiments all the time.
baybal2 6y ago
> It's reasonably likely that in 10 years we have nuclear energy that is near the cost of other energy sources, which has always been it's blocker. You will not get nuclear energy that is near the cost of other energy sources in 10 years because they route they chose to achieve it is incorrect. They can't get the cost of nuclear power down by making reactors smaller, because doing so increases its cost, not reduces. I can't fathom how anybody with above high school education can come with an idea easily provable wrong in 10 minutes of work on handheld calculator. When you see somebody obviously aware of such mistakes pretending that there aren't, don't assume goodwill.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- m463 6y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but making fewer bigger reactors doesn't seem right either.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    No, it is right, because the alternative is not more smaller reactors, but more smaller hydrocarbon fueled power stations. You need multi-gigawatt reactors to compete with fossil fuel boilers.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Making zero reactors is the right call, nowadays. They cost so overwhelmingly much more than renewables, you have no buyer for the power, so never match the investment. White elephants. There are good reasons industry never came up with portables. The major market for nukes has always been as a long-term feeder for corruption. The longer they take to build, and the bigger they are, the bigger the gravy train. With no prospect of a corruption gravy train, rational economics comes to the fore, and says NO.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Small reactors have lower power density than large ones, but the question of cost is far removed from that. Mass produced reactors can use mass produced components, be built under standardized conditions by a standardized team, have a standard regulatory pathway, undergo rigorous testing to increase community good-will, and have a standard decommissioning process. There are thousands of experts working on and hundreds of millions of dollars being put into modular reactor concepts; if you've found something in just 10 minutes with a highschool level education that proves they're all wasting their time and money, I'm sure they'ed love to hear it.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > Small reactors have lower power density than large ones, but the question of cost is far removed from that. The question of cost is the one most closely related to the powerplant size! It's beyond my imagination how anybody in power engineering can babble something like that. > have a standard decommissioning process. And yes, you will have 10x*n times the commissionings, and decommissionings, and refuelings, and inspecions, and road closures, and building permits, and nuisance permits, and grid hookups, and turbines, and generators, and transformators, and fuel shipments... > if you've found something in just 10 minutes with a highschool level education that proves they're all wasting their time and money, I'm sure they'ed love to hear it. If somebody with highschool level education, and a pocket calculator busts the math of "thousands of experts working on and hundreds of millions of dollars" in a few minutes, then, those are very lousy experts not worth their millions of dollars.
    - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      Just want to preface this that nuclear is not competitive with solar/wind and won't be for decades until solar/wind complete their "main sequence" descent of economies of scale. LFTR/MSR's prototype fit in a closet. LFTR breeds its fuel and "burns" almost all of it, none of that solid fuel rod crap where only a small fraction is used and then you have "spent fuel rods". Fuel shipments would be Thorium, not hyper-radioactive dirty bomb materials. No chance of meltdown. No high pressure containers. As for the pace of research, from what I understand nuclear is WEIRD. The permitting process is controlled by government forces that: 1) don't want you researching it due to proliferation risk 2) are military so if you are permitted want access to weapons grade isotopes 3) are the spent fuel rod lobbyists trying to keep their bacon rolling in 4) NIMBY to the nth power So everything is almost impossible to get going. The replaceable shipping container sized LFTR has great potential.
- credit_guy 6y ago
  Pretty much everything that's being manufactured today can be manufactured for 10 to 100 times cheaper. But you can't drive the cost down if you can't iterate enough. A few hours ago I bought a smartphone for $35. It's an LG smartphone, and while it doesn't hold a candle to the latest iPhone 12 Pro, it will smoke any phone manufactured just 7 years ago. And it's only $35. Can you imagine that? Some hundreds of millions of transistors, two cameras, some wireless antennas, a GPS chip, an FM receiver, a screen with millions of colored pixels, etc, etc, for only $35. All these things would not have been available in such a small package 20 years ago, and they would have cost thousands of dollars in any size. Now they fit in something that's 100 grams heavy and costs $35. So, yes, a large reactor costs $20 BN today, a small reactor is probably of the order of $1 BN, but a small reactor allows you to iterate. Once you are able to iterate, there's nothing that stops that cost from going down by a factor of 10 or 100, just like the cost of solar and wind went down.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Past the reactor containment building, a nuclear power station look pretty much like any other rankine cycle plant, which were already delivered on scales those guys can only dream about. This only reinforces the rationale for much bigger nuclear plants, not reduces. > But you can't drive the cost down if you can't iterate enough. > A few hours ago I bought a smartphone for $35. A low-end price for a smartphone SoC tapeout on the latest node is $100-$150m. Iterate that. All of what you spoke about, and microelectronics in particular, could've never been done without sisyphean effort to nail hardest engineering problems in one go, because the nature of the problem does not afford "a half-solution." You absolutely must solve such kind of engineering problems in fullest in one go, or it's not going to work. A reactor vessel is not like a piece of software you can let crashing for a few beta versions. It either has no holes, and it work, or it does have holes, and it leaks.
    - credit_guy 6y ago
      I don't know much about nuclear reactors and Rankine cycles, just like I don't know much about rockets. But somehow Musk found a way to drive down the cost of launching things into space quite a lot.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Yeah and furthermore, what price will that be? Solar/wind is already under gas turbine. And it's still dropping 10%+ per year and looking at the necessary economies of scale to replace incumbent coal and gas, has a long way to go. Your competitive price in ten years is a total unknown, but likely is 1/2 to 1/3 the current price. Your 10 years is probably just for research. Then installation/production of any substantial number of small reactors is another 10 years. Another 10 years of price reductions in wind/solar/storage. I, a LFTR stan, encourage moderate research into these exciting technologies, nuclear just has too much advantage in density of power. But they won't be in mainstream power fo 30 years. Also, "hot" take: fusion has the exact same challenges, and chasing the same cost problem.

DataWorker 6y ago

That assumes the incentives and policies do not shift. Is that a good assumption? I hear very antinuclear sentiments all the time.

baybal2 6y ago

> It's reasonably likely that in 10 years we have nuclear energy that is near the cost of other energy sources, which has always been it's blocker. You will not get nuclear energy that is near the cost of other energy sources in 10 years because they route they chose to achieve it is incorrect. They can't get the cost of nuclear power down by making reactors smaller, because doing so increases its cost, not reduces. I can't fathom how anybody with above high school education can come with an idea easily provable wrong in 10 minutes of work on handheld calculator. When you see somebody obviously aware of such mistakes pretending that there aren't, don't assume goodwill.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
m463 6y ago
I'm not saying you're wrong, but making fewer bigger reactors doesn't seem right either.
- baybal2 6y ago
  No, it is right, because the alternative is not more smaller reactors, but more smaller hydrocarbon fueled power stations. You need multi-gigawatt reactors to compete with fossil fuel boilers.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Making zero reactors is the right call, nowadays. They cost so overwhelmingly much more than renewables, you have no buyer for the power, so never match the investment. White elephants. There are good reasons industry never came up with portables. The major market for nukes has always been as a long-term feeder for corruption. The longer they take to build, and the bigger they are, the bigger the gravy train. With no prospect of a corruption gravy train, rational economics comes to the fore, and says NO.
jjk166 6y ago
Small reactors have lower power density than large ones, but the question of cost is far removed from that. Mass produced reactors can use mass produced components, be built under standardized conditions by a standardized team, have a standard regulatory pathway, undergo rigorous testing to increase community good-will, and have a standard decommissioning process. There are thousands of experts working on and hundreds of millions of dollars being put into modular reactor concepts; if you've found something in just 10 minutes with a highschool level education that proves they're all wasting their time and money, I'm sure they'ed love to hear it.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Small reactors have lower power density than large ones, but the question of cost is far removed from that. The question of cost is the one most closely related to the powerplant size! It's beyond my imagination how anybody in power engineering can babble something like that. > have a standard decommissioning process. And yes, you will have 10x*n times the commissionings, and decommissionings, and refuelings, and inspecions, and road closures, and building permits, and nuisance permits, and grid hookups, and turbines, and generators, and transformators, and fuel shipments... > if you've found something in just 10 minutes with a highschool level education that proves they're all wasting their time and money, I'm sure they'ed love to hear it. If somebody with highschool level education, and a pocket calculator busts the math of "thousands of experts working on and hundreds of millions of dollars" in a few minutes, then, those are very lousy experts not worth their millions of dollars.
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    Just want to preface this that nuclear is not competitive with solar/wind and won't be for decades until solar/wind complete their "main sequence" descent of economies of scale. LFTR/MSR's prototype fit in a closet. LFTR breeds its fuel and "burns" almost all of it, none of that solid fuel rod crap where only a small fraction is used and then you have "spent fuel rods". Fuel shipments would be Thorium, not hyper-radioactive dirty bomb materials. No chance of meltdown. No high pressure containers. As for the pace of research, from what I understand nuclear is WEIRD. The permitting process is controlled by government forces that: 1) don't want you researching it due to proliferation risk 2) are military so if you are permitted want access to weapons grade isotopes 3) are the spent fuel rod lobbyists trying to keep their bacon rolling in 4) NIMBY to the nth power So everything is almost impossible to get going. The replaceable shipping container sized LFTR has great potential.
credit_guy 6y ago
Pretty much everything that's being manufactured today can be manufactured for 10 to 100 times cheaper. But you can't drive the cost down if you can't iterate enough. A few hours ago I bought a smartphone for $35. It's an LG smartphone, and while it doesn't hold a candle to the latest iPhone 12 Pro, it will smoke any phone manufactured just 7 years ago. And it's only $35. Can you imagine that? Some hundreds of millions of transistors, two cameras, some wireless antennas, a GPS chip, an FM receiver, a screen with millions of colored pixels, etc, etc, for only $35. All these things would not have been available in such a small package 20 years ago, and they would have cost thousands of dollars in any size. Now they fit in something that's 100 grams heavy and costs $35. So, yes, a large reactor costs $20 BN today, a small reactor is probably of the order of $1 BN, but a small reactor allows you to iterate. Once you are able to iterate, there's nothing that stops that cost from going down by a factor of 10 or 100, just like the cost of solar and wind went down.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Past the reactor containment building, a nuclear power station look pretty much like any other rankine cycle plant, which were already delivered on scales those guys can only dream about. This only reinforces the rationale for much bigger nuclear plants, not reduces. > But you can't drive the cost down if you can't iterate enough. > A few hours ago I bought a smartphone for $35. A low-end price for a smartphone SoC tapeout on the latest node is $100-$150m. Iterate that. All of what you spoke about, and microelectronics in particular, could've never been done without sisyphean effort to nail hardest engineering problems in one go, because the nature of the problem does not afford "a half-solution." You absolutely must solve such kind of engineering problems in fullest in one go, or it's not going to work. A reactor vessel is not like a piece of software you can let crashing for a few beta versions. It either has no holes, and it work, or it does have holes, and it leaks.
  - credit_guy 6y ago
    I don't know much about nuclear reactors and Rankine cycles, just like I don't know much about rockets. But somehow Musk found a way to drive down the cost of launching things into space quite a lot.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Yeah and furthermore, what price will that be? Solar/wind is already under gas turbine. And it's still dropping 10%+ per year and looking at the necessary economies of scale to replace incumbent coal and gas, has a long way to go. Your competitive price in ten years is a total unknown, but likely is 1/2 to 1/3 the current price. Your 10 years is probably just for research. Then installation/production of any substantial number of small reactors is another 10 years. Another 10 years of price reductions in wind/solar/storage. I, a LFTR stan, encourage moderate research into these exciting technologies, nuclear just has too much advantage in density of power. But they won't be in mainstream power fo 30 years. Also, "hot" take: fusion has the exact same challenges, and chasing the same cost problem.