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"Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round at the company to develop the country's first small modular nuclear reactor (SMR), part of its drive to r

"Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round at the company to develop the country's first small modular nuclear reactor (SMR), part of its drive to reach net zero carbon emissions and promote new technology with export potential." Cool. Although I foresee exporting this technology will be difficult as far as fuel and waste supply chain goes. Having the possibility of multiple new, smaller countries receive nuclear power makes moving fuel and waste across multiple borders more difficult. Also, protecting the technology so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands becomes more difficult as well (assuming these things can enrich uranium). "Each mini plant can power around one million homes...". This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power.

dr_orpheus 5y ago
> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Yeah, "mini" seems like it would be an order of magnitude less than the existing nuclear reactors. But the 470 MW mini reactor is just on the low side of current operational reactors which are in the 400 - 1200 MW range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
- moralestapia 5y ago
  More specs: Land footprint: ~2 football pitches [1] Cost: ~2.4 billion USD [2] 1:https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor... 2:https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secures-funding-for-SMR-deployment#:~:text=The%20target%20cost%20for%20each,operated%20by%20power%20generation%20companies https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secu....
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    The second article says "The target cost for each station is GBP1.8 billion (USD2.4 billion) by the time five have been built, with further savings possible." This indicates that cost per station could be significantly higher before 5 of them have been built. It's reasonable to believe that doggedly continuing to build more of them will bring costs down eventually, but if early units have high costs (or worse, if build progress falls behind schedule) then it could be difficult to maintain support for building more of them.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      I imagine given that the whole point of these small units is batch manufacturing that several would be ordered together.
      - mywittyname 5y ago
        Also that building multiple facilities at once will streamline regulations and building codes. What killed the large nuclear reactors was the need for so many "one-off" design changes to accommodate safety regulations, which would vary by site. This means that economies of scale are lost when compared to gas power stations, because every nuclear reactor was essentially unique.
        Manuel_D 5y ago
        There were plenty of repeated design that started during the 1960s and 70s. Accordingly, costs were considerably lower, often in the range 1 to 2 billion USD per GW.
        mywittyname 5y ago
        After this period, costs to build nuclear power plants skyrocketed. When the reasons behind these escalating costs were studied in depth, it was found to be due to the fact that plants lack standardization across the board, leading to ballooning engineering and labor costs as designs are reworked in site-specific ways: > Overall, a common theme emerging from this analysis is the lack of anticipation in engineering models of the cost-increasing contributions of soft technology external to standard reactor hardware, in response to changing regulations and other factors such as variable project-specific conditions. Prospective modeling shows the potentially transformative effect of rethinking engineering design to adapt to these factors, for example through reduced commodity usage and the automation of some construction processes. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS254243512030458X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r...
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  That’s not even midi in my book.
- fortysixdegrees 5y ago
  Really, they top out at 1200MW and not 1210MW?! Come on now
  - willis936 5y ago
    EPRs are 1750 MWe (4950 MWth).
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Are these going to produce 470MW?! A 1MW wind turbine costs ~$4M and is competitive with oil/gas. At $2.4Bn - anything above 400+ megawatts sounds like a great deal - since you don't have to worry about the wind blowing or the sun shining. If these can produce 470MW at that price - what has been the hold up?!
  - dijit 5y ago
    1) People are skittish on Nuclear because of the perceived danger. 2) We still can't solve the waste problem, the best we have is putting it underground in Finland. I disagree with these opinions, since the waste is minuscule for the amount of power generated. (1 cubic centimeter of uranium per million homes per day or so) and coal is killing more than nuclear ever will.. but, hey ho.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Coal is a bit of a red herring in the UK as we don’t burn much of it anymore.
      - infinityio 5y ago
        To be fair, even oil and gas are orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear per unit energy
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      The French seem to have solved the waste problem. And either way, at least it's less urgent than the climate one
      - Balero 5y ago
        Could you please elaborate or provide some further reading for the French solution?
        diordiderot 5y ago
- Animats 5y ago
  Right. It's comparable in power to Fukushima Unit 1. Is there any good info about this? Why is it smaller? Do they claim it doesn't need a containment vessel? NuScale and some others have tried that. RR has a brochure, which is all about "creates jobs", not how it works.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    > Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round That buys jobs not products. Its still vapourware - barely a drawing on a piece of paper. 5 years to approve gives plenty of time to turn an idea into an actual design.
- wdb 5y ago
  In the Netherlands they had plans for neighbourhood level nuclear-based power plant
ajross 5y ago
> $546 million funding round This is where nuclear just loses me. The first number I pulled up on Google says that this is what you would pay to build, site and install 400 MW of wind capacity. The reactor when eventually built (at much greater cost, of course) is only going to produce 470 MW. You'd need to get a second reactor installed just to break even for one round of R & D funding. It just doesn't work. I'm all for nuclear power in principle. I'm broadly opposed to tearing down existing capacity. But I'm absolutely horrified at the degree to which people want to throw money at this boondoggle. There is low hanging fruit all over the renewables market. Can we please pick it first before chasing radioactive unicorns?
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  As it stands wind and solar can’t power 100% due to them being unavailable at times. Not to mention the insane amount of land and storage capacity required. Nuclear is ideally suited for the last 30% or so that’ll continue to be some form of steady state power generation required to augment renewables.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Nuclear is horrible for the last 30%, since that last part is highly intermittent (if it weren't renewables could easily address some of it.) Nuclear either addresses just about all the demand, or none. There's not much middle ground.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  > 400 MW of wind capacity Isn't that 400 MW when it's windy vs 470 MW all day long?
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Is that a peak or sustained 400 MW of wind power?
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  > You'd need to get a second reactor installed just to break even for one round of R & D funding. It just doesn't work. They aren’t planning to make one or two, they want to make dozens of them.
leephillips 5y ago
> infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. What infrastructure do you have in mind? Are you thinking of places without an existing power grid?
blibble 5y ago
> Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. would it? they'd plug directly into the super-grid, presumably in locations that are currently undergoing decommissioning and then you could slowly replace CCGTs with them after that point if you need more energy you'd have to upgrade the grid
- russdill 5y ago
  Ideally, it would be nice to drop it in as a replacement for an existing plant. However, it may be that the grid cannot sustain the existing plant being shut down without new capacity already in place and there's the more problematic issue of location. There's plenty of gas peaker plants in locations where people would not accept a nuclear plant, such as in the middle of cities.
  - blibble 5y ago
    > However, it may be that the grid cannot sustain the existing plant being shut down without new capacity already in place it already handles this whenever a station trips I think the grid is far more resilient than you give it credit for > There's plenty of gas peaker plants in locations where people would not accept a nuclear plant, such as in the middle of cities. the UK will shortly have a dozen former nuclear power station sites ready for a couple of new reactors it's not an immediate problem for this project (did you know there used to be not one but two nuclear reactors right in the middle of London? one in a 17th century building)
    - russdill 5y ago
      We're not talking about a plant being down for a few hours, it'd be a few months for the existing plant to be decommissioned and the new plant to be installed, assuming the existing footprint does not allow the two plants to exist side by side But yes, many existing nuclear sites may be an ideal location if available.
hirundo 5y ago
> these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. Nah, I've done it in Factorio, a single wire can handle the full output of multiple reactors.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  Pretty sure there's several mods that make that not-true anymore :)
KaiserPro 5y ago
> difficult as far as fuel and waste supply chain goes Sellafield was one of the biggest waste processors around, taking fuel from all around the world. So I don't see if being that big of a problem. well not impossible, there are reasonably well established processes for this.
topspin 5y ago
"This is where I did a spit take." That's understandable. 470 MW is not "small." It's over 50% of the size of conventional PWRs. Also 470 MW is probably not sufficient for "one million homes." It might be sufficient for one million small efficiency apartments, assuming they are well built, equipped with modern appliances and not over occupied. But a conventional detached residential structure is 1 KW+. That's without charging any electric vehicles. Marketing exaggerations aside, good to see at least some innovation in nuclear design. The design anticipates factory built reactor vessels, which is a fundamental improvement.
- IanCal 5y ago
  Not in the UK. While there's peaks, we don't average 24kwh/day, that would be enormous. Even looking at detached houses, it's less than half of that.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    This is an excellent summary from 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37M7ffjro3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37M7ffjro3I -- what's notable is how much gas (as in ethane, propane, and butane) is used in place of coal.
  - Balero 5y ago
    Plus a great deal of UK housing is semi-detached or terraced housing. European home energy usage is about a third of the USA's on average per person.
- rowanajmarshall 5y ago
  > It might be sufficient for one million small efficiency apartments, assuming they are well built, equipped with modern appliances and not over occupied So I live in a small, not especially energy-efficient Victorian-era London apartment with my partner, without fancy appliances. The boiler is gas-powered but the cooker is electric. And last month we averaged about 6-7 KwH/day, and this was working from home 90% of the time.
- GFischer 5y ago
Manuel_D 5y ago
> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. Centralized power sources mean you can build generation facility close to places with energy demand (usually population centers). People keep touting decentralized grids as some sort of advantage over centralized grids. It's the complete opposite. A decentralized grid needs more transmission infrastructure to connect large areas often far away from where energy is actually consumed. Renewable projects are often blocked because transmission infrastructure can't support them, e.g. [1]. 1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
- stubish 5y ago
  > This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. Centralized power sources mean you can build generation facility close to places with energy demand (usually population centers). People keep touting decentralized grids as some sort of advantage over centralized grids. It's the complete opposite. A decentralized grid needs more transmission infrastructure to connect large areas often far away from where energy is actually consumed. Renewable projects are often blocked because transmission infrastructure can't support them. This all seems backwards. Decentralized power generation means building the power sources where there is energy demand. Centralized power generation means building them somewhere and needing to use the grid to send the power everywhere else. Centralized power generation usually means large power plants generating power for entire cities, usually built a long way from those cities due to economics, logistics or pollution concern. Decentralized power generation usually means solar or wind farms built near enough to the population centers that residents protest against the perceived eyesore. Decentralized power generation in some cases means no grid at all in the cases dealing with remote locations (often served with diesel generators, the traditional decentralized power generation tech). Renewables change this somewhat, as you do need a grid connecting it all to deal with intermittent power generation, but it is the same capacity as needed to transmit the same power from some centralized power source 250km away.
downrightmike 5y ago
Having many small reactors all over the place has been done, and yes poses the problems when people who don't know what they even are find them and try to scrap them https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0931jtk/the-nuclear-lighthouses-built-by-the-soviets-in-the-arctic https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0931jtk/the-nuclear-lighthou...
Gravityloss 5y ago
Current reactors can be 1600 MW. This is more like the seventies and eighties reactors at 400-500 MW. Which is great! Maybe it's not a coincidence that a lot of nuclear energy was built back then, which we are benefiting from, to this day. Finland has the famous Olkiluoto 3 EPR project that is being ramped up currently. There is a next reactor project in Hanhikivi that is in very early phases. But it was to have been supplies by Rosatom, a mostly Russian consortium. Pressure vessel manufacturing in Ukraine etc. So that project is frozen now. It has been suggested that perhaps multiple SMR units could replace it. Infrastructure has been planned and permits for the large part already exist.
youngtaff 5y ago
> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. AFAIK the initial plan is to place them in locations that had nuclear plants already (many being decommissioned) One advantage of this is the power distribution infrastructure from there is already in place (plus UK has a national power distribution grid anyway)
foxyv 5y ago
Yeah, the reactor vessels are usually pretty small. Usually it's the containment, generation, and cooling facilities that take up the most space even on traditional plants. Nuclear is nuts with energy densities almost a million times greater than chemical fuels. https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/ With a lot of these SMR designs, they don't transport fuel or waste separate from the reactor. It is generally sealed within the reactor itself before delivery and then the entire reactor is transported intact for disposal or remanufacturing years later. They typically fit on the back of large trucks, trains, or barges. Manufacturing enriched fuel from these designs would not be cost effective. Technology for enriching weapons grade nuclear fuel is widespread and tightly monitored. A group with one of these reactors would be hard pressed to do anything other than generate heat with it or make dirty bombs (Hospitals would be a better target for this.) Also the dang thing is pretty hard to run off with compared to smaller casks or rods of waste. Edit: Almost certainly they are referring to an entire plant with more than a few SMRs when they say a million homes.

dr_orpheus 5y ago

> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Yeah, "mini" seems like it would be an order of magnitude less than the existing nuclear reactors. But the 470 MW mini reactor is just on the low side of current operational reactors which are in the 400 - 1200 MW range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

moralestapia 5y ago
More specs: Land footprint: ~2 football pitches [1] Cost: ~2.4 billion USD [2] 1:https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor... 2:https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secures-funding-for-SMR-deployment#:~:text=The%20target%20cost%20for%20each,operated%20by%20power%20generation%20companies https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-secu....
- philipkglass 5y ago
  The second article says "The target cost for each station is GBP1.8 billion (USD2.4 billion) by the time five have been built, with further savings possible." This indicates that cost per station could be significantly higher before 5 of them have been built. It's reasonable to believe that doggedly continuing to build more of them will bring costs down eventually, but if early units have high costs (or worse, if build progress falls behind schedule) then it could be difficult to maintain support for building more of them.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    I imagine given that the whole point of these small units is batch manufacturing that several would be ordered together.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      Also that building multiple facilities at once will streamline regulations and building codes. What killed the large nuclear reactors was the need for so many "one-off" design changes to accommodate safety regulations, which would vary by site. This means that economies of scale are lost when compared to gas power stations, because every nuclear reactor was essentially unique.
      - Manuel_D 5y ago
        There were plenty of repeated design that started during the 1960s and 70s. Accordingly, costs were considerably lower, often in the range 1 to 2 billion USD per GW.
        mywittyname 5y ago
        After this period, costs to build nuclear power plants skyrocketed. When the reasons behind these escalating costs were studied in depth, it was found to be due to the fact that plants lack standardization across the board, leading to ballooning engineering and labor costs as designs are reworked in site-specific ways: > Overall, a common theme emerging from this analysis is the lack of anticipation in engineering models of the cost-increasing contributions of soft technology external to standard reactor hardware, in response to changing regulations and other factors such as variable project-specific conditions. Prospective modeling shows the potentially transformative effect of rethinking engineering design to adapt to these factors, for example through reduced commodity usage and the automation of some construction processes. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS254243512030458X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r...
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
That’s not even midi in my book.
fortysixdegrees 5y ago
Really, they top out at 1200MW and not 1210MW?! Come on now
- willis936 5y ago
  EPRs are 1750 MWe (4950 MWth).
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Are these going to produce 470MW?! A 1MW wind turbine costs ~$4M and is competitive with oil/gas. At $2.4Bn - anything above 400+ megawatts sounds like a great deal - since you don't have to worry about the wind blowing or the sun shining. If these can produce 470MW at that price - what has been the hold up?!
- dijit 5y ago
  1) People are skittish on Nuclear because of the perceived danger. 2) We still can't solve the waste problem, the best we have is putting it underground in Finland. I disagree with these opinions, since the waste is minuscule for the amount of power generated. (1 cubic centimeter of uranium per million homes per day or so) and coal is killing more than nuclear ever will.. but, hey ho.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Coal is a bit of a red herring in the UK as we don’t burn much of it anymore.
    - infinityio 5y ago
      To be fair, even oil and gas are orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear per unit energy
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    The French seem to have solved the waste problem. And either way, at least it's less urgent than the climate one
    - Balero 5y ago
      Could you please elaborate or provide some further reading for the French solution?
      - diordiderot 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
Right. It's comparable in power to Fukushima Unit 1. Is there any good info about this? Why is it smaller? Do they claim it doesn't need a containment vessel? NuScale and some others have tried that. RR has a brochure, which is all about "creates jobs", not how it works.
- blitzar 5y ago
  > Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round That buys jobs not products. Its still vapourware - barely a drawing on a piece of paper. 5 years to approve gives plenty of time to turn an idea into an actual design.
wdb 5y ago
In the Netherlands they had plans for neighbourhood level nuclear-based power plant

ajross 5y ago

> $546 million funding round This is where nuclear just loses me. The first number I pulled up on Google says that this is what you would pay to build, site and install 400 MW of wind capacity. The reactor when eventually built (at much greater cost, of course) is only going to produce 470 MW. You'd need to get a second reactor installed just to break even for one round of R & D funding. It just doesn't work. I'm all for nuclear power in principle. I'm broadly opposed to tearing down existing capacity. But I'm absolutely horrified at the degree to which people want to throw money at this boondoggle. There is low hanging fruit all over the renewables market. Can we please pick it first before chasing radioactive unicorns?

8ytecoder 5y ago
As it stands wind and solar can’t power 100% due to them being unavailable at times. Not to mention the insane amount of land and storage capacity required. Nuclear is ideally suited for the last 30% or so that’ll continue to be some form of steady state power generation required to augment renewables.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Nuclear is horrible for the last 30%, since that last part is highly intermittent (if it weren't renewables could easily address some of it.) Nuclear either addresses just about all the demand, or none. There's not much middle ground.
willcipriano 5y ago
> 400 MW of wind capacity Isn't that 400 MW when it's windy vs 470 MW all day long?
Buttons840 5y ago
Is that a peak or sustained 400 MW of wind power?
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
> You'd need to get a second reactor installed just to break even for one round of R & D funding. It just doesn't work. They aren’t planning to make one or two, they want to make dozens of them.

leephillips 5y ago

> infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. What infrastructure do you have in mind? Are you thinking of places without an existing power grid?

blibble 5y ago

> Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. would it? they'd plug directly into the super-grid, presumably in locations that are currently undergoing decommissioning and then you could slowly replace CCGTs with them after that point if you need more energy you'd have to upgrade the grid

russdill 5y ago
Ideally, it would be nice to drop it in as a replacement for an existing plant. However, it may be that the grid cannot sustain the existing plant being shut down without new capacity already in place and there's the more problematic issue of location. There's plenty of gas peaker plants in locations where people would not accept a nuclear plant, such as in the middle of cities.
- blibble 5y ago
  > However, it may be that the grid cannot sustain the existing plant being shut down without new capacity already in place it already handles this whenever a station trips I think the grid is far more resilient than you give it credit for > There's plenty of gas peaker plants in locations where people would not accept a nuclear plant, such as in the middle of cities. the UK will shortly have a dozen former nuclear power station sites ready for a couple of new reactors it's not an immediate problem for this project (did you know there used to be not one but two nuclear reactors right in the middle of London? one in a 17th century building)
  - russdill 5y ago
    We're not talking about a plant being down for a few hours, it'd be a few months for the existing plant to be decommissioned and the new plant to be installed, assuming the existing footprint does not allow the two plants to exist side by side But yes, many existing nuclear sites may be an ideal location if available.

hirundo 5y ago

> these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. Nah, I've done it in Factorio, a single wire can handle the full output of multiple reactors.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
Pretty sure there's several mods that make that not-true anymore :)

KaiserPro 5y ago

> difficult as far as fuel and waste supply chain goes Sellafield was one of the biggest waste processors around, taking fuel from all around the world. So I don't see if being that big of a problem. well not impossible, there are reasonably well established processes for this.

topspin 5y ago

"This is where I did a spit take." That's understandable. 470 MW is not "small." It's over 50% of the size of conventional PWRs. Also 470 MW is probably not sufficient for "one million homes." It might be sufficient for one million small efficiency apartments, assuming they are well built, equipped with modern appliances and not over occupied. But a conventional detached residential structure is 1 KW+. That's without charging any electric vehicles. Marketing exaggerations aside, good to see at least some innovation in nuclear design. The design anticipates factory built reactor vessels, which is a fundamental improvement.

IanCal 5y ago
Not in the UK. While there's peaks, we don't average 24kwh/day, that would be enormous. Even looking at detached houses, it's less than half of that.
- gjvc 5y ago
  This is an excellent summary from 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37M7ffjro3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37M7ffjro3I -- what's notable is how much gas (as in ethane, propane, and butane) is used in place of coal.
- Balero 5y ago
  Plus a great deal of UK housing is semi-detached or terraced housing. European home energy usage is about a third of the USA's on average per person.
rowanajmarshall 5y ago
> It might be sufficient for one million small efficiency apartments, assuming they are well built, equipped with modern appliances and not over occupied So I live in a small, not especially energy-efficient Victorian-era London apartment with my partner, without fancy appliances. The boiler is gas-powered but the cooker is electric. And last month we averaged about 6-7 KwH/day, and this was working from home 90% of the time.
GFischer 5y ago

Manuel_D 5y ago

> This is where I did a spit take. I was really underestimating the capacity for these "mini" reactors. Being able to power so many homes (and being more centralized than I thought) means these reactors would still require huge infrastructure investment in order to spread the power. This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. Centralized power sources mean you can build generation facility close to places with energy demand (usually population centers). People keep touting decentralized grids as some sort of advantage over centralized grids. It's the complete opposite. A decentralized grid needs more transmission infrastructure to connect large areas often far away from where energy is actually consumed. Renewable projects are often blocked because transmission infrastructure can't support them, e.g. [1]. 1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...

stubish 5y ago
> This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. Centralized power sources mean you can build generation facility close to places with energy demand (usually population centers). People keep touting decentralized grids as some sort of advantage over centralized grids. It's the complete opposite. A decentralized grid needs more transmission infrastructure to connect large areas often far away from where energy is actually consumed. Renewable projects are often blocked because transmission infrastructure can't support them. This all seems backwards. Decentralized power generation means building the power sources where there is energy demand. Centralized power generation means building them somewhere and needing to use the grid to send the power everywhere else. Centralized power generation usually means large power plants generating power for entire cities, usually built a long way from those cities due to economics, logistics or pollution concern. Decentralized power generation usually means solar or wind farms built near enough to the population centers that residents protest against the perceived eyesore. Decentralized power generation in some cases means no grid at all in the cases dealing with remote locations (often served with diesel generators, the traditional decentralized power generation tech). Renewables change this somewhat, as you do need a grid connecting it all to deal with intermittent power generation, but it is the same capacity as needed to transmit the same power from some centralized power source 250km away.

downrightmike 5y ago

Having many small reactors all over the place has been done, and yes poses the problems when people who don't know what they even are find them and try to scrap them https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0931jtk/the-nuclear-lighthouses-built-by-the-soviets-in-the-arctic https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0931jtk/the-nuclear-lighthou...

Gravityloss 5y ago

Current reactors can be 1600 MW. This is more like the seventies and eighties reactors at 400-500 MW. Which is great! Maybe it's not a coincidence that a lot of nuclear energy was built back then, which we are benefiting from, to this day. Finland has the famous Olkiluoto 3 EPR project that is being ramped up currently. There is a next reactor project in Hanhikivi that is in very early phases. But it was to have been supplies by Rosatom, a mostly Russian consortium. Pressure vessel manufacturing in Ukraine etc. So that project is frozen now. It has been suggested that perhaps multiple SMR units could replace it. Infrastructure has been planned and permits for the large part already exist.

youngtaff 5y ago

foxyv 5y ago

Yeah, the reactor vessels are usually pretty small. Usually it's the containment, generation, and cooling facilities that take up the most space even on traditional plants. Nuclear is nuts with energy densities almost a million times greater than chemical fuels. https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/ With a lot of these SMR designs, they don't transport fuel or waste separate from the reactor. It is generally sealed within the reactor itself before delivery and then the entire reactor is transported intact for disposal or remanufacturing years later. They typically fit on the back of large trucks, trains, or barges. Manufacturing enriched fuel from these designs would not be cost effective. Technology for enriching weapons grade nuclear fuel is widespread and tightly monitored. A group with one of these reactors would be hard pressed to do anything other than generate heat with it or make dirty bombs (Hospitals would be a better target for this.) Also the dang thing is pretty hard to run off with compared to smaller casks or rods of waste. Edit: Almost certainly they are referring to an entire plant with more than a few SMRs when they say a million homes.