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Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has come

144 points by helsinkiandrew 5y ago

edf13 5y ago
None paywall: https://archive.ph/Yv0EA https://archive.ph/Yv0EA
yodelshady 5y ago
The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this. Last calendar, it produced > 1 GW for 784 hours. In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with > 100 GWh shortfall. The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating. Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall. edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they've been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just feel like the right amount. We're all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn't get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.
- raphaelj 5y ago
  Where do you get that data from? I checked on electicityMap [1] and the British wind farms are producing more than 6 GW at the moment [2]. -- [1] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB [2] https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png
  - yodelshady 5y ago
    https://gridwatch.org.uk/ https://gridwatch.org.uk/ currently 0.63 GW. That's interesting that they disagree. Gridwatch has been around a while but I'll have a look. edit: yep, electricitymap's free figures are not even close to live.
  - sdflhasjd 5y ago
    It looks like electricitymap is showing "estimated" data for the UK. It's fairly calm at the moment, and it probably doesn't take weather into account when estimating.
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      I think "estimated" is a recent addition they show, when the input data sources fail. Which unfortunately they do quite often. But then, I am not paying for the service, so who am I to complain? :) When values are non-estimated, they are about 2 hours behind in the free version.
    - JonChesterfield 5y ago
      Could also be called "fraudulent" data
      - hkt 5y ago
        Not so. Fraud requires an intent to deceive to make unlawful (or unfair) gains. They're probably just abiding by the license of the data or struggling with a technical limitation.
        EricE 5y ago
        lol - fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? Fraud comes into play any time someone intentionally tries to mislead - for whatever reason. And there has been plenty of fraud around energy reporting - again, for various reasons.
        magicalist 5y ago
        > fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? The common and legal definition of "fraud".
        hkt 5y ago
- jacquesm 5y ago
  You should see how little those solar panels generate at night!
  - hkt 5y ago
    While you're not wrong to imply PV doesn't work at night, concentrated solar power (CSP) actually does. It achieves this by heating salt into a molten state which can then discharge heat (and drive turbines) overnight. CSP is very promising for helping manage peak loads in place of gas, too. There's also batteries: virtual power plants that give us the ability to arbitrage between when power is cheap and when power is needed. These can be rolled out in conjunction with residential PV systems and eventually pay for themselves. A similar approach can be used to store hot water produced during the day by PVT (photovoltaic-thermal) cells. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_review_meeting_042413_reddy.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_revie... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant
    - EricE 5y ago
      CSP plants have never gotten beyond the prototype phase because no one has figured out how to make them economically viable. One near me in California just shut down because maintenance costs were skyrocketing. Batteries, in their current form, have all sorts of issues that haven't made them economically viable either. Liquid electrolytes (liquid batteries) do show promise for grid level storage, and I am pleased to see lots of activity around them but we are still probably 5-10 years away from anything worth scaling up around. Hot water is fine for extreme micro uses - individual buildings - but again not even remotely viable for something at scale, let alone replacing base load generation for the grid. Base load is the real nut to crack - and so far solar is no where near being anything but a nice supplement for base load.
      - hkt 5y ago
        I'll not argue with anything in your post and accept the issues with CSP as per the status quo, but hot water needn't be a micro, single household scale. I've benefited from a CHP plant powered district heating system and it more than halved my energy use. There's definitely nothing wrong with big centralised heat generation and storage schemes. It also helps address baseload.
- gnfargbl 5y ago
  > Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall. I like nuclear. I have always liked nuclear. However: it's always sunny somewhere on Earth, and the total amount of solar energy delivered to us by nature's finest fusion reactor is something like 170TW. If you will indulge me the geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place, is there any particular reason we couldn't switch to all-solar?
  - edf13 5y ago
    Reason why is as you state: >geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place That combined with geo-politics, war, big oil etc.
    - DanielVZ 5y ago
      Yet we do manage to wire the internet accross oceans and continents.
      - r9 5y ago
        The infrastructure scale is not even in the same ballpark, or even neighbourhood. Besides the fact that you can't just "make" internet from a coal/petrol/etc generator somewhere nearby. Imagine a ship's anchor damaging a cable carrying a couple megawatts of power (this happens frequently to the undersea fibre optic cables, and even those are a nightmare to repair).
      - edf13 5y ago
        Internet connection doesn't suffer as much power loss over larger distances
      - Balero 5y ago
        The internet does not go from A -> B it is a web. You can (and some countries do) cut yourself out of it. But you cannot cut others out of it. Solar generation of power across countries will pretty much go one way. The most obvious and likely one is from North Africa to Europe. If the North African states decide to turn off the power to Europe they can. This is why geo-politically you cannot rely on this as a 100% solution. It can add to a solution, but it is not a good idea to let another country hang a sword over your head like that. (Or more precisely to hang the sword there yourself)
- makomk 5y ago
  Yeah, and the UK's wind capacity factor should be better than average because most of the recently-added capacity is offshore, which is more expensive per GWh produced but produces it more reliably. There just doesn't seem to be a realistic non-nuclear path to ending fossil fuel dependence, and green groups have got away with obfuscating this fact because most of the press supports them.
- pydry 5y ago
  It's also just turned warm and sunny in the UK. I turned the heating off for the first time in months today and solar is producing just as much as nuclear right now. At a much much lower cost. Those wind shortfalls have a strong tendency to line up with good weather when solar produces more and heating is less needed. The UK also has more pumped storage coming online and octopus even has home electricity tarriffs that promote time shifting demand.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. So connectivity helps, storage helps, having people with solar on their roofs helps. There's a need for "base load". I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it's probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We're talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual. The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They're putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they'll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe. A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I'm not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.
  - pydry 5y ago
    >The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost. Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants. Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.
    - jillesvangurp 5y ago
      Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too. That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well. That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%. Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  I think "plans" is putting it quite strongly re the UK planning to move to electricity for heating. We've had a "plan" do something about emissions in <today> + 5 Years for about 40 years now. So I wouldn't rely on anything actually happening. Especially given that it would be practically impossible to switch from gas...
- adrianN 5y ago
  If you have enough installed capacity that the production averaged over a year is sufficient, you can store excess energy as hydrogen or methane and turn it back into electricity while renewable production is insufficient. The amount of storage you need is a function of how much capacity you install, how large the grid is, and how smart e.g. electric car chargers are. Some clever economists probably can figure out the cheapest configuration. Currently it's much cheaper to just burn fossil fuels or import power from your neighbors than to build hydrolyzers, which is why you don't see many, but pilot facilities in the multiple-MW range exist, so the technology is available.
  - EricE 5y ago
    conversion has losses - if it was remotely economically viable people would be doing it ALL OVER the place. Energy storage is the magic bullet to make renewables truly feasible for base load support and if this was remotely viable AT ALL someone would have implemented it already. Just because a tech is available doesn't mean it's practical for every day use.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Conversion has losses, true. For electricity to gas and back the losses are around 50%. That's perfectly fine for a technology you need for maybe a couple of weeks per year. The real question is how expensive the equipment is. Power is essentially free for renewables, all costs are depreciation of equipment. And as I said above, people _have_ implemented it already. There are dozens of MW of hydrolyzers installed in Germany alone.
m463 5y ago
This is an untapped resource that should see the light of day... From wikipedia's energy density page: material specific energy w*h/kg ----------- ---------------------- uranium 22,394,000,000 ... diesel fuel 12,666
- greggsy 5y ago
  I recall seeing a study in the 2000’s stating that there wasn’t even enough nuclear material necessary to fulfil the world’s energy needs, assuming that it could be swapped out 1:1 overnight. I don’t know if that’s still the case. At any rate, it’s a poor argument against it, as it will always be just one part of the broader energy picture, along with renewables, and (almost certainly) fossil fuels
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jason0597 5y ago
    You're probably thinking of U238 vs U235 supply. Most reactors today use U235, which is as rare as platinum (if not more rare!). If we switched to breeder reactors that used U238, we wouldn't have this problem of running out of uranium.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Imagine if you powered cars with only what fuel outgassed naturally from a tank full of kerosene, and dumped the liquid remainder regularly - and you'd have close comparison to how much we are actually using up of the Uranium available due to focus on light water Boiling and Pressurized Water Reactors. There are designs with much higher burnup rates (how much fuel in a rod is actually used), as well as designs that do not need enrichment and will happily run on naturally occurring uranium mix - self-enriching as they work. There are designs that will take mixed in waste from other designs and further burn it down, reducing amount of high-level radioactive waste. All of that is barely scratched in practice.
  - acidburnNSA 5y ago
    The long term plan in all nuclear programs is to switch over as appropriate to breeder reactors, which are just as renewable as the solar fusion fuel that leads to wind and solar and hydro. Breeder reactors invest excess neutrons from the chain reaction into abundant 'fertile' nuclear fuel like U-238 and Th-232 to generate more rare fissile material (Pu-239 or U-233) than they consume. Breeders are a proven technology but just aren't very common yet due to the wide availability of high grade uranium ores. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
lbriner 5y ago
One of the concerns I had never considered with these smaller reactors is the potential security concerns. Although they might not be overly dangerous, they are still realistic targets for terror groups. It's easier protecting a small number of large sites even though they are horrifically expensive to build.
- XorNot 5y ago
  The terrorism threat has always been more media then reality with reactors though. The idea of these small reactors is that they're not big complicated structures, so there protection needs are different - i.e. the reactor body can be built into the ground and concreted over until its time to decommission it. Such a unit would be pretty close to impenetrable to any terrorist threat - there's no building to crash into, no structure or employees to attack. The literal attack surface is greatly reduced - and any operation to penetrate the unit would be large, highly visible, and take time.
  - hkt 5y ago
    > the reactor body can be built into the ground and concreted over until its time to decommission it. This seems wild. Who is doing or proposing it?
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Westinghouse are big into the concept and have been for a few decades - obviously anti-nuclear sentiment tends to hold it back, though the economics are tricky.
  - Gupie 5y ago
    What is the risk of sabotage from someone working in and very knowledgeable about how the unit works?
    - upsidesinclude 5y ago
      Minimal. You're talking about highly trained, licensed nuclear power engineers. That's a community in the US that can safely be estimated as 70% prior US Navy nuclear reactor techs and officers.
pmontra 5y ago
Putting aside any consideration about the safety of running those reactors and disposing of the spent fuel, I wonder about the wisdom of investing in an energy source which would not decrease West's dependency on authoritarian and openly adversarial states. Kazakhstan + Russia + Uzbekistan + China = about 54% of the world production in 2018. [1] Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are both in Russia's sphere of influence, especially the former one which accounts for 40% of the world production. On the other side, Canada is the number 2 producer (13%) and Australia is estimated to have more reserves than all of the above countries combined. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
- maratc 5y ago
  Can other elements, except uranium, be used for power generation? I thought uranium is used in reactors because it also produces A-bomb material as a by-product.
  - dtx1 5y ago
    > Can other elements, except uranium, be used for power generation Plutonium, Thorium and a few others yes > I thought uranium is used in reactors because it also produces A-bomb material as a by-product. It doesn't and it's used mostly because it was easiest to work with and best researched when the majority oft reactors Werke build
    - maratc 5y ago
      But wasn't it "best researched" because of the potential for military use, and all the military R&D money?
      - p_l 5y ago
        No, it was just easiest to get running. You can make natural uranium reactor with no enrichment of fuel needed, even - it's how Manhattan Project could get fissile material in the first place. Thorium was actually more of military-only solution than Uranium->Plutonium chain, as unlike Uranium it doesn't have obvious "easy" energy use path, but early on it was researched as mix of uranium and thorium fuels due to uranium availability concerns.
sandGorgon 5y ago
lets hope this works. The two fastest growing energy consumers in the world - India & China - are pulling people out of the poverty line by the millions every year. And so are not signatories to any climate accord. Both are incidentally also the worlds largest reserves of Thorium. And has no military use. An accelerated nuclear power research could end up being the next "COVID vaccine marathon". Cleaner air for everyone.
- p_l 5y ago
  Thorium is more useful as pathway to nuclear weapons than as reactor fuel :V
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Disagree. If you were now in the 1960s and could plan out a long term energy strategy thorium thermal breeders are by far thebest long term bet from a number of perspectives.
    - sandGorgon 5y ago
      Im not an expert here, but from what I have read - every one of those programs are not getting funding because of a larger disinterest in nuclear power per se. Im fact US, China, Russia, etc have all a thorium reactor in some stage of late stage development. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
      - panick21_ 5y ago
        I don't really care about Thorium that much. A Uranium Fast Breeder can be almost as economical and is more achievable in the short term. The most important is to get a molten salt cooled or molten salt fueled reactor licensed. The problem with all these projects is that they are either government driven and then the resources are very devised and 99% of the time it will not be commercial. Or its semi commercial and then those companies have huge issues with financing. The closest thing to a molten salt reactor that might actually be commercial (with an actual operational license) in the Western world will almost certainty come from Canada. Canada after their Candu project was sold commercially looked for a next generation project. They have a very well respected regulator that is fully committed to actually supporting next generation designs and have implemented a process that actually makes it practically possible to get to a real commercial reactor. See: https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-licensing-vendor-design-review/index.cfm#p3 https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li... Terrestrial Energy is the closest in actually passing Phase 2. They hope to complete it this year.
lucidguppy 5y ago
Nuclear should compete with fossil fuels - not renewables. Nuclear power provides 50% of the US's clean energy. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf301/node/457 https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf301/node/457 We need to replace natural gas with nuke plants. Fossil fuel extraction is the worlds largest source of nuclear waste, not nuclear energy. No one worries about the tons of radon released from fracking. They call it "natural". https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-14/fracking-increases-radon-gas-hazard-us-study-finds/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-14/fracking-incre... I'm all for renewable - don't stop it. But there are many places in the world where a nuke plant would be the right choice. It would be great if we got this amount of resistance to new hydrocarbon vehicles or plants.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  The huge problem with nuclear vs. natural gas is, that nuclear power plants have only a limited range, in which the power output can be regulated and they are not too quick in that either. So you need something else you can power switch quickly to maintain grid integrity. Natural gas is great for that, as the plants are very quick in response and can be regulated between 0 and 100% and back. Nuclear is great to replace coal, but you still need the same amount of e.g. storage to complement changing net load and production (renewables).
  - milesward 5y ago
    No, you just build extra for the peaks and use the low-demand period to drive capture of carbon.
    - ianai 5y ago
      I think the real problem there is carbon capture is very new and often still on the drawing board. But definitely one way to get carbon capture working is to start with whatever we’ve got.
  - ianai 5y ago
    It’s not really that huge of a problem to have more energy than needed. It just takes additional engineering to put the excess to use. Having a national grid it can be moved around. Or used for energy intensive uses that can be useful elsewhere. Kind of like the flare gas oil rigs burn when those gasses aren’t economic. I’d like to see us have that excess power pull useful gasses out of the atmosphere or sea water, for instance. Done right it could act as a hydrogen source for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, for instance. Or power a national water grid. Tons of uses for more power than needed.
LatteLazy 5y ago
I don't understand how modularity is meant to solve nuclear's issues. * Nuclear is expensive * Nuclear is unpopular locally (aka nimbys veto it) * Nuclear waste needs to be dealt with properly. Making reactors smaller doesn't seem to fix any of these does it? Are people willing to accept a 100MW reactor but not a 1000MW reactor next to their kids schools? Is it cheaper to build and run 10 100MW reactors than a single 1000MW one? I doubt it...
- regularfry 5y ago
  The point is that yes, it should be cheaper. More reliable, too. The way that happens is that if you're building them at all, you're building lots of them, on a production line, which lets you build them continuously, and build them well. At this point of industrial history we're far better at setting up production lines than one-off construction projects.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    I hadn't considered the production line side of it. I guess that comes with a lot of standardization, replaceable parts etc... Thanks!
- upsidesinclude 5y ago
  Portability, scale Nuclear is expensive the way we do it now. Nuclear is unpopular because there have been concentrated efforts to vilify it by corporations Nuclear waste is not an issue that any nuclear scientist or physicist considers worth debating
- EricE 5y ago
  Nuclear is expensive due to politics, not pure science or economics Nuclear is unpopular because it has been vilified and made an emotional argument. Plus you can't see, touch, taste or feel radiation - the ultimate boogyman to trigger our lizard brain. Nuclear "waste" is waste only due to politics and stupidity. Everything we classify as "waste" today is not waste for other reactor designs that will more than happily (and safely!) burn that "waste" and turn it into useful energy. If you were able to separate out politics and emotion from the nuclear "debate" there wouldn't be a debate. It would be a slam dunk no brainer decision. Luckily for China their despotic internal rule doesn't have to suffer fools for stuff like this. They are charging ahead with Thorium and god help the rest of the world if they crack it at scale. Then people will see just how critical a role energy is to the success of a civilization. All of our ridiculous and continued postering around energy while not really doing anything significant (and all the resources wasted on many renewables that are anything but) is going to bite the west in the ASS big time. Rome is burning and we are fiddling.
ComradePhil 5y ago
So the article mentions NuScale, which are planning to build a couple of test reactors in 2030, but fails to mention Rosatom modular reactors which are decades ahead and ready to go. Well, it's that same thing the US did with 5G. When Europe, Australia and most of the world was ready to build their 5G infrastructure, the U.S. cooked up some lies about some subsidiary of Huawei having some business deal with some company related to North Korea and sanctioned Huawei. How long until the world says enough is enough?
- upsidesinclude 5y ago
  Yeah, that is not a very thorough analysis of the situation. China's control of other countries communications infrastructure is a global concern as their footprint has expanded through commercial enterprise to match the US military footprint. You don't have to like the US, but unless you're Han Chinese, that isn't a good system for you.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    > China's control of other countries communications infrastructure is a global concern Except globally everybody wanted to use Huawei, until the US cooked up the lie and threatened everyone against it. Australia had a soft regime change because of this issue. You're fooling nobody.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  >So the article mentions NuScale, which are planning to build a couple of test reactors in 2030, but fails to mention Rosatom modular reactors which are decades ahead and ready to go. Is this a joke? How much is KGB paying you lmao.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    Nothing... as opposed to the large sum of money NuScale must have spent to get this article on the economist: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
PaulHoule 5y ago
So much in the energy literature is like a stopped clock because a lot of work gets done because of an ‘energy crisis’ and unfortunately the old books don’t get withdrawn from libraries when they are obsolete. You still hear people compare nuclear costs to coal because coal was competitive in the 1970s. They quit building coal plants at the same time they quit building nuclear plants, for the same reason —- gas turbine generators based on airplane engines have a capital cost about 10% of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear. Even if the heat were free and you could burn coal without asking “what do you do with the waste?” you would struggle to be profitable with either coal or nuclear…. Unless you could couple these energy sources to a gas turbine. In the case of coal you need to gasify it (say make hydrogen out of it and pump the carbon underground) in the case of nuclear you need a new reactor type that runs at higher temperatures (liquid metal, molten salt, gas cooled) and a breakthrough in closed-cycle power sets. If it succeeded though you could fit the power plant in the employee break room at the turbine house of today’s LWR.
- johnsonmd 5y ago
  >gas turbine generators based on airplane engines have a capital cost about 10% of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear. Do you have a source for this? Most gas power plants today are combined-cycle [0], meaning they first put the hot combustion gas through a gas turbine as you said and _then_ they use the waste heat to drive a steam turbine as well. This design is responsible for the significant efficiency advantage natural gas generation has over coal. So it doesn't make sense to claim that gas power plants are cheaper due to the turbine technology because most built today use both gas and steam turbines. [0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=34172 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=34172
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2020.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... The economics of the pure gas turbine vs the combined cycle depends on the fraction of the time it spends running. For a peaking plant you are only going to run it a fraction of the time so you care about the capital cost and not about the fuel cost... So you're going to use the cheaper to build but more expensive to operate pure gas turbine. If you are running the plant all day then the economics are favorable to go combined cycle where you start with a gas turbine, recover heat from the exhaust, and feed that through a steam turbine. The capital cost is more than the peaking plant, less than the steam turbine on it's own, but the fuel efficiency is great which leads to lower operating costs. (e.g. the steam turbine in a combined cycle plant is much smaller than a stand-alone steam turbine with the same energy output as the whole plant) In the case of nuclear it is worse though because you do absurd things: a PWR has "steam generators" which are huge heat exchangers, larger than the pressure vessel, that use hot water at high pressure to boil water at low pressure. For liquid metal reactors the heat exchangers are even larger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIkYOFxcqRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIkYOFxcqRg Contrast that to the heat recovery units used in the combined cycle turbine that couple hot gases to water or the sodium-to-air heat exchangers that rejected heat from the fast flux test facility. In terms of size these are like a bug splatter on the plans for a PWR.
acidburnNSA 5y ago
Nuclear reactor developer here. I personally have not really gotten on the small reactor bandwagon. I can see them as useful for trying out new tech but the way to really reduce costs is to pick a known and proven tech, serialize it, and increase power. I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects, but if and when a smr project goes well there will be lots of pressure to make bigger versions of the reactor. For decarbonising rapidly we should currently be building lots of ABWR and APR-1400 and Hualong One reactors (big, modern, proven). My take on economics of nuclear is here https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
- ch4s3 5y ago
  > I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects, but if and when a smr project goes well there will be lots of pressure to make bigger versions of the reactor. I think there's some value in that right? Proving designs, rebuilding public trust, and building up all of the economic infrastructure again will be really useful for scaling up. I'm definitely going to read your article, seems fascinating from the intro.
- bell-cot 5y ago
  > I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects... This +10 (if I could). Consider orbital-class rockets - another very advanced technology, and far less forgiving than nuclear power reactors. How much does it cost to launch (say) 10 tons of satellite on a rocket from plucky upstart SpaceX? Vs. how much did it cost back when only a few bloated "cost plus plus" mega-corporations were providing orbital rockets?
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    Orbital rockets are less forgiving than reactors in that they operate closer to engineering limits even when they work correctly. They are more difficult to make reliable. But they have a far more forgiving-to-neighbors failure mode. When a SpaceX test vehicle explodes only SpaceX is harmed. With reactors you can't start by testing a design that spontaneously disassembles itself and iterate toward a reliable one like the organizations that build rockets have done.
UltraViolence 5y ago
I believe they're right. The cost advantage of having standardized, factory built reactors is enormous. Instead of having one big reactor providing 1,5GW you can have five 300MW reactors strapped in parallel and have the same output. The reason nuclear reactors are so expensive is that each one is more or less a bespoke build, with regulators changing the rules constantly, sometimes during construction. There's no reason for nuclear reactors to be more expensive than a similar non-nuclear plant.
- EricE 5y ago
  >There's no reason for nuclear reactors to be more expensive than a similar non-nuclear plant. No reason other than politics and stupidity (over regulation, emotional fear mongering, ignorant baseless assumptions, etc.)
- panick21_ 5y ago
  While partly true, there is also a huge benefit of scale. And you need to actually hit way higher production numbers to truely hit economics of scale. Making 5 1.4GWe plants or making 24 300MWe doesnt garantee that it is much cheaper. Spezially if the 300MWe is a reactor of the same type. 300MWe PWRs will not be a huge benefit. Comparing a 500MWe (or even 1GWe) Molten Salt fueled reactor (or even Molten Salt cooled) will compare much better then any PWR, modular or not.
  - UltraViolence 5y ago
    The article already points out that a 17 hour job at a site can be done in one hour at a factory. That's a huge savings factor right there! You don't need economies of scale to make SMR's profitable. They already are from the get go.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      I have seen a some of analysis that suggested that as long as you are working with PWR you are not gone do a huge amount better economically. It might be a little better, but we have to break free of water cooled reactor. It makes simply no sense as a design point. The only reason we have it is because it made sense for nuclear submarines.
elkos 5y ago
I would definitely appreciate the reasons on why small hydroelectric plants aren't seen as a good alternative to other power generation systems in economic terms. To my understanding, they seem to be pretty responsive in demand fluctuations and pretty cheap with minor environmental impact.
- EricE 5y ago
  Well, they work fine if there is enough water for them. Quite a few people would take severe umbrage with the "minor environmental impact" view.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    I think OP's "small hydroelectric plants" point is important, there. Imagine something more akin to the water wheels that powered industry of yore along rivers prior to steam and then electric power, not valley-filling reservoirs behind huge hydroelectric dams. I believe the term is "run-of-the-river" hydroelectric. If there is sufficient continuous flow down the river, and a goodly elevation drop you can use to build head pressure, you can indeed tap a small canal off, pass the flow through some turbines, and feed it right back in to the river. I think it is a matter of scale, water flow, and NIMBY-ism. While such stations to generate power, individually its not a whole hell of a lot, and who wants their river-front view besmirched by penstocks and a concrete blockhouse of a turbine building?
    - EricE 5y ago
      >I think it is a matter of scale Or in other words, economic viability :)
      - Arrath 5y ago
        That is what it boils down to. I will say, if I had property with a little creek running year round on it, I'd be hard pressed not to install a waterwheel to get a little something out of it.
- 5y ago
Exendroinient00 5y ago
I can't wait to see a disappearance of the irrational fear of everything nuclear in the modern discourse. Popular culture by the likes of the Chernobyl tv series and fallout further instilled that fear.
- noiv 5y ago
  I really hope there will always be a map with reactors, so I can choose wisely a place of living. More reactors will mean more accidents.
bell-cot 5y ago
Two other big upsides to SMR's, which I don't see mentioned: - If 'most all of the expensive parts are shipped in from the factory, very late in the construction process - then there's far less construction debt to float (vs. traditional reactors), while years of regulatory, NIMBY, etc. legal crap drags out. - If your modest-sized country (think of Europe) has a bunch of SMR's...that's a sort of "our lights will not go out" energy security which recent events has made far more attractive. Gas pipeline from now-untouchable Russia? Natural gas wells in Texas that stopped working in cold weather? Massive spikes in wholesale energy prices? Solar or hydro-stored power from a country that "seemed stable and friendly when we cut the deal"? Calm & cloudy winter days, that you didn't spend enough $$$$ on storage to get through? SMR's sound like an insurance policy against a whole lot of nasty surprises.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
I am a LFTR stan, but: "War, climate worries and oil prices make nuclear power attractive" should be: "War, climate worries and oil prices make ALTERNATIVE ENERGY attractive" The economics of alternative energy + storage is basically a victory in LCOE terms, and the cost / technology curve of solar and storage and the economies of scale are still in ramp-up. So this will go from a "close narrow victory" to a landslide in five years. What nuclear project will be under ten years to delivery? What is the LCOE price point they are contending with to be marketplace competitive? No one knows this, but I would shoot for 1/3 the current nuclear LCOE at a minimum, probably 1/4. Again, I geeked out over LFTR presentations. Modular, safe, 99% fuel use/no solid rod waste, online products extaction, no long-term isotopes, "burn/breed" existing long-term waste into usable fuel, brayton cycle. It doesn't matter, economics are a clear win for alternative energy from a 10 year standpoint. Nuclear and Fusion should simply be research projects at this point. If energy security is the goal, then all-in on alternative energy and EV transportation is the goal. I'm not saying tear down existing generation. Just phase it out as soon as possible
panick21_ 5y ago
I think the sweet spot are about 500MWe reactors rhat use molten salt fuel. They are just way smaller then your AP-1000s and once we get going we can build them just way faster.
Animats 5y ago
There are several approaches to "small". One is, "we don't need containment because our design is safe". That's NuScale. It's worrisome. Then there's "we make it as big as we can but all the parts have to be transportable by road/rail so we can build it in a factory". That's Rolls-Royce. They're kind of hand-wavy about containment in their PR. There's a lot to be said for big, strong containment vessels. - Chernobyl - fire, containment insufficient, major disaster - Fukushima - meltdown, containment too small, major disaster - Three Mile Island - meltdown, big, strong containment, problem contained.

None paywall: https://archive.ph/Yv0EA https://archive.ph/Yv0EA

The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this. Last calendar, it produced > 1 GW for 784 hours. In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with > 100 GWh shortfall. The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating. Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall. edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they've been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just feel like the right amount. We're all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn't get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.

raphaelj 5y ago
Where do you get that data from? I checked on electicityMap [1] and the British wind farms are producing more than 6 GW at the moment [2]. -- [1] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB [2] https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png
- yodelshady 5y ago
  https://gridwatch.org.uk/ https://gridwatch.org.uk/ currently 0.63 GW. That's interesting that they disagree. Gridwatch has been around a while but I'll have a look. edit: yep, electricitymap's free figures are not even close to live.
- sdflhasjd 5y ago
  It looks like electricitymap is showing "estimated" data for the UK. It's fairly calm at the moment, and it probably doesn't take weather into account when estimating.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    I think "estimated" is a recent addition they show, when the input data sources fail. Which unfortunately they do quite often. But then, I am not paying for the service, so who am I to complain? :) When values are non-estimated, they are about 2 hours behind in the free version.
  - JonChesterfield 5y ago
    Could also be called "fraudulent" data
    - hkt 5y ago
      Not so. Fraud requires an intent to deceive to make unlawful (or unfair) gains. They're probably just abiding by the license of the data or struggling with a technical limitation.
      - EricE 5y ago
        lol - fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? Fraud comes into play any time someone intentionally tries to mislead - for whatever reason. And there has been plenty of fraud around energy reporting - again, for various reasons.
        magicalist 5y ago
        > fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? The common and legal definition of "fraud".
        hkt 5y ago
jacquesm 5y ago
You should see how little those solar panels generate at night!
- hkt 5y ago
  While you're not wrong to imply PV doesn't work at night, concentrated solar power (CSP) actually does. It achieves this by heating salt into a molten state which can then discharge heat (and drive turbines) overnight. CSP is very promising for helping manage peak loads in place of gas, too. There's also batteries: virtual power plants that give us the ability to arbitrage between when power is cheap and when power is needed. These can be rolled out in conjunction with residential PV systems and eventually pay for themselves. A similar approach can be used to store hot water produced during the day by PVT (photovoltaic-thermal) cells. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_review_meeting_042413_reddy.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_revie... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant
  - EricE 5y ago
    CSP plants have never gotten beyond the prototype phase because no one has figured out how to make them economically viable. One near me in California just shut down because maintenance costs were skyrocketing. Batteries, in their current form, have all sorts of issues that haven't made them economically viable either. Liquid electrolytes (liquid batteries) do show promise for grid level storage, and I am pleased to see lots of activity around them but we are still probably 5-10 years away from anything worth scaling up around. Hot water is fine for extreme micro uses - individual buildings - but again not even remotely viable for something at scale, let alone replacing base load generation for the grid. Base load is the real nut to crack - and so far solar is no where near being anything but a nice supplement for base load.
    - hkt 5y ago
      I'll not argue with anything in your post and accept the issues with CSP as per the status quo, but hot water needn't be a micro, single household scale. I've benefited from a CHP plant powered district heating system and it more than halved my energy use. There's definitely nothing wrong with big centralised heat generation and storage schemes. It also helps address baseload.
gnfargbl 5y ago
> Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall. I like nuclear. I have always liked nuclear. However: it's always sunny somewhere on Earth, and the total amount of solar energy delivered to us by nature's finest fusion reactor is something like 170TW. If you will indulge me the geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place, is there any particular reason we couldn't switch to all-solar?
- edf13 5y ago
  Reason why is as you state: >geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place That combined with geo-politics, war, big oil etc.
  - DanielVZ 5y ago
    Yet we do manage to wire the internet accross oceans and continents.
    - r9 5y ago
      The infrastructure scale is not even in the same ballpark, or even neighbourhood. Besides the fact that you can't just "make" internet from a coal/petrol/etc generator somewhere nearby. Imagine a ship's anchor damaging a cable carrying a couple megawatts of power (this happens frequently to the undersea fibre optic cables, and even those are a nightmare to repair).
    - edf13 5y ago
      Internet connection doesn't suffer as much power loss over larger distances
    - Balero 5y ago
      The internet does not go from A -> B it is a web. You can (and some countries do) cut yourself out of it. But you cannot cut others out of it. Solar generation of power across countries will pretty much go one way. The most obvious and likely one is from North Africa to Europe. If the North African states decide to turn off the power to Europe they can. This is why geo-politically you cannot rely on this as a 100% solution. It can add to a solution, but it is not a good idea to let another country hang a sword over your head like that. (Or more precisely to hang the sword there yourself)
makomk 5y ago
Yeah, and the UK's wind capacity factor should be better than average because most of the recently-added capacity is offshore, which is more expensive per GWh produced but produces it more reliably. There just doesn't seem to be a realistic non-nuclear path to ending fossil fuel dependence, and green groups have got away with obfuscating this fact because most of the press supports them.
pydry 5y ago
It's also just turned warm and sunny in the UK. I turned the heating off for the first time in months today and solar is producing just as much as nuclear right now. At a much much lower cost. Those wind shortfalls have a strong tendency to line up with good weather when solar produces more and heating is less needed. The UK also has more pumped storage coming online and octopus even has home electricity tarriffs that promote time shifting demand.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. So connectivity helps, storage helps, having people with solar on their roofs helps. There's a need for "base load". I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it's probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We're talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual. The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They're putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they'll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe. A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I'm not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.
- pydry 5y ago
  >The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost. Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants. Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.
  - jillesvangurp 5y ago
    Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too. That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well. That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%. Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.
LatteLazy 5y ago
I think "plans" is putting it quite strongly re the UK planning to move to electricity for heating. We've had a "plan" do something about emissions in <today> + 5 Years for about 40 years now. So I wouldn't rely on anything actually happening. Especially given that it would be practically impossible to switch from gas...
adrianN 5y ago
If you have enough installed capacity that the production averaged over a year is sufficient, you can store excess energy as hydrogen or methane and turn it back into electricity while renewable production is insufficient. The amount of storage you need is a function of how much capacity you install, how large the grid is, and how smart e.g. electric car chargers are. Some clever economists probably can figure out the cheapest configuration. Currently it's much cheaper to just burn fossil fuels or import power from your neighbors than to build hydrolyzers, which is why you don't see many, but pilot facilities in the multiple-MW range exist, so the technology is available.
- EricE 5y ago
  conversion has losses - if it was remotely economically viable people would be doing it ALL OVER the place. Energy storage is the magic bullet to make renewables truly feasible for base load support and if this was remotely viable AT ALL someone would have implemented it already. Just because a tech is available doesn't mean it's practical for every day use.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Conversion has losses, true. For electricity to gas and back the losses are around 50%. That's perfectly fine for a technology you need for maybe a couple of weeks per year. The real question is how expensive the equipment is. Power is essentially free for renewables, all costs are depreciation of equipment. And as I said above, people _have_ implemented it already. There are dozens of MW of hydrolyzers installed in Germany alone.

m463 5y ago

This is an untapped resource that should see the light of day... From wikipedia's energy density page: material specific energy w*h/kg ----------- ---------------------- uranium 22,394,000,000 ... diesel fuel 12,666

greggsy 5y ago
I recall seeing a study in the 2000’s stating that there wasn’t even enough nuclear material necessary to fulfil the world’s energy needs, assuming that it could be swapped out 1:1 overnight. I don’t know if that’s still the case. At any rate, it’s a poor argument against it, as it will always be just one part of the broader energy picture, along with renewables, and (almost certainly) fossil fuels
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jason0597 5y ago
  You're probably thinking of U238 vs U235 supply. Most reactors today use U235, which is as rare as platinum (if not more rare!). If we switched to breeder reactors that used U238, we wouldn't have this problem of running out of uranium.
- p_l 5y ago
  Imagine if you powered cars with only what fuel outgassed naturally from a tank full of kerosene, and dumped the liquid remainder regularly - and you'd have close comparison to how much we are actually using up of the Uranium available due to focus on light water Boiling and Pressurized Water Reactors. There are designs with much higher burnup rates (how much fuel in a rod is actually used), as well as designs that do not need enrichment and will happily run on naturally occurring uranium mix - self-enriching as they work. There are designs that will take mixed in waste from other designs and further burn it down, reducing amount of high-level radioactive waste. All of that is barely scratched in practice.
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  The long term plan in all nuclear programs is to switch over as appropriate to breeder reactors, which are just as renewable as the solar fusion fuel that leads to wind and solar and hydro. Breeder reactors invest excess neutrons from the chain reaction into abundant 'fertile' nuclear fuel like U-238 and Th-232 to generate more rare fissile material (Pu-239 or U-233) than they consume. Breeders are a proven technology but just aren't very common yet due to the wide availability of high grade uranium ores. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

lbriner 5y ago

One of the concerns I had never considered with these smaller reactors is the potential security concerns. Although they might not be overly dangerous, they are still realistic targets for terror groups. It's easier protecting a small number of large sites even though they are horrifically expensive to build.

XorNot 5y ago
The terrorism threat has always been more media then reality with reactors though. The idea of these small reactors is that they're not big complicated structures, so there protection needs are different - i.e. the reactor body can be built into the ground and concreted over until its time to decommission it. Such a unit would be pretty close to impenetrable to any terrorist threat - there's no building to crash into, no structure or employees to attack. The literal attack surface is greatly reduced - and any operation to penetrate the unit would be large, highly visible, and take time.
- hkt 5y ago
  > the reactor body can be built into the ground and concreted over until its time to decommission it. This seems wild. Who is doing or proposing it?
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Westinghouse are big into the concept and have been for a few decades - obviously anti-nuclear sentiment tends to hold it back, though the economics are tricky.
- Gupie 5y ago
  What is the risk of sabotage from someone working in and very knowledgeable about how the unit works?
  - upsidesinclude 5y ago
    Minimal. You're talking about highly trained, licensed nuclear power engineers. That's a community in the US that can safely be estimated as 70% prior US Navy nuclear reactor techs and officers.

pmontra 5y ago

Putting aside any consideration about the safety of running those reactors and disposing of the spent fuel, I wonder about the wisdom of investing in an energy source which would not decrease West's dependency on authoritarian and openly adversarial states. Kazakhstan + Russia + Uzbekistan + China = about 54% of the world production in 2018. [1] Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are both in Russia's sphere of influence, especially the former one which accounts for 40% of the world production. On the other side, Canada is the number 2 producer (13%) and Australia is estimated to have more reserves than all of the above countries combined. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

maratc 5y ago
Can other elements, except uranium, be used for power generation? I thought uranium is used in reactors because it also produces A-bomb material as a by-product.
- dtx1 5y ago
  > Can other elements, except uranium, be used for power generation Plutonium, Thorium and a few others yes > I thought uranium is used in reactors because it also produces A-bomb material as a by-product. It doesn't and it's used mostly because it was easiest to work with and best researched when the majority oft reactors Werke build
  - maratc 5y ago
    But wasn't it "best researched" because of the potential for military use, and all the military R&D money?
    - p_l 5y ago
      No, it was just easiest to get running. You can make natural uranium reactor with no enrichment of fuel needed, even - it's how Manhattan Project could get fissile material in the first place. Thorium was actually more of military-only solution than Uranium->Plutonium chain, as unlike Uranium it doesn't have obvious "easy" energy use path, but early on it was researched as mix of uranium and thorium fuels due to uranium availability concerns.

sandGorgon 5y ago

lets hope this works. The two fastest growing energy consumers in the world - India & China - are pulling people out of the poverty line by the millions every year. And so are not signatories to any climate accord. Both are incidentally also the worlds largest reserves of Thorium. And has no military use. An accelerated nuclear power research could end up being the next "COVID vaccine marathon". Cleaner air for everyone.

p_l 5y ago
Thorium is more useful as pathway to nuclear weapons than as reactor fuel :V
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Disagree. If you were now in the 1960s and could plan out a long term energy strategy thorium thermal breeders are by far thebest long term bet from a number of perspectives.
  - sandGorgon 5y ago
    Im not an expert here, but from what I have read - every one of those programs are not getting funding because of a larger disinterest in nuclear power per se. Im fact US, China, Russia, etc have all a thorium reactor in some stage of late stage development. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      I don't really care about Thorium that much. A Uranium Fast Breeder can be almost as economical and is more achievable in the short term. The most important is to get a molten salt cooled or molten salt fueled reactor licensed. The problem with all these projects is that they are either government driven and then the resources are very devised and 99% of the time it will not be commercial. Or its semi commercial and then those companies have huge issues with financing. The closest thing to a molten salt reactor that might actually be commercial (with an actual operational license) in the Western world will almost certainty come from Canada. Canada after their Candu project was sold commercially looked for a next generation project. They have a very well respected regulator that is fully committed to actually supporting next generation designs and have implemented a process that actually makes it practically possible to get to a real commercial reactor. See: https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-licensing-vendor-design-review/index.cfm#p3 https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li... Terrestrial Energy is the closest in actually passing Phase 2. They hope to complete it this year.

lucidguppy 5y ago

Nuclear should compete with fossil fuels - not renewables. Nuclear power provides 50% of the US's clean energy. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf301/node/457 https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf301/node/457 We need to replace natural gas with nuke plants. Fossil fuel extraction is the worlds largest source of nuclear waste, not nuclear energy. No one worries about the tons of radon released from fracking. They call it "natural". https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-14/fracking-increases-radon-gas-hazard-us-study-finds/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-14/fracking-incre... I'm all for renewable - don't stop it. But there are many places in the world where a nuke plant would be the right choice. It would be great if we got this amount of resistance to new hydrocarbon vehicles or plants.

_ph_ 5y ago
The huge problem with nuclear vs. natural gas is, that nuclear power plants have only a limited range, in which the power output can be regulated and they are not too quick in that either. So you need something else you can power switch quickly to maintain grid integrity. Natural gas is great for that, as the plants are very quick in response and can be regulated between 0 and 100% and back. Nuclear is great to replace coal, but you still need the same amount of e.g. storage to complement changing net load and production (renewables).
- milesward 5y ago
  No, you just build extra for the peaks and use the low-demand period to drive capture of carbon.
  - ianai 5y ago
    I think the real problem there is carbon capture is very new and often still on the drawing board. But definitely one way to get carbon capture working is to start with whatever we’ve got.
- ianai 5y ago
  It’s not really that huge of a problem to have more energy than needed. It just takes additional engineering to put the excess to use. Having a national grid it can be moved around. Or used for energy intensive uses that can be useful elsewhere. Kind of like the flare gas oil rigs burn when those gasses aren’t economic. I’d like to see us have that excess power pull useful gasses out of the atmosphere or sea water, for instance. Done right it could act as a hydrogen source for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, for instance. Or power a national water grid. Tons of uses for more power than needed.

LatteLazy 5y ago

I don't understand how modularity is meant to solve nuclear's issues. * Nuclear is expensive * Nuclear is unpopular locally (aka nimbys veto it) * Nuclear waste needs to be dealt with properly. Making reactors smaller doesn't seem to fix any of these does it? Are people willing to accept a 100MW reactor but not a 1000MW reactor next to their kids schools? Is it cheaper to build and run 10 100MW reactors than a single 1000MW one? I doubt it...

regularfry 5y ago
The point is that yes, it should be cheaper. More reliable, too. The way that happens is that if you're building them at all, you're building lots of them, on a production line, which lets you build them continuously, and build them well. At this point of industrial history we're far better at setting up production lines than one-off construction projects.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  I hadn't considered the production line side of it. I guess that comes with a lot of standardization, replaceable parts etc... Thanks!
upsidesinclude 5y ago
Portability, scale Nuclear is expensive the way we do it now. Nuclear is unpopular because there have been concentrated efforts to vilify it by corporations Nuclear waste is not an issue that any nuclear scientist or physicist considers worth debating
EricE 5y ago
Nuclear is expensive due to politics, not pure science or economics Nuclear is unpopular because it has been vilified and made an emotional argument. Plus you can't see, touch, taste or feel radiation - the ultimate boogyman to trigger our lizard brain. Nuclear "waste" is waste only due to politics and stupidity. Everything we classify as "waste" today is not waste for other reactor designs that will more than happily (and safely!) burn that "waste" and turn it into useful energy. If you were able to separate out politics and emotion from the nuclear "debate" there wouldn't be a debate. It would be a slam dunk no brainer decision. Luckily for China their despotic internal rule doesn't have to suffer fools for stuff like this. They are charging ahead with Thorium and god help the rest of the world if they crack it at scale. Then people will see just how critical a role energy is to the success of a civilization. All of our ridiculous and continued postering around energy while not really doing anything significant (and all the resources wasted on many renewables that are anything but) is going to bite the west in the ASS big time. Rome is burning and we are fiddling.

ComradePhil 5y ago

So the article mentions NuScale, which are planning to build a couple of test reactors in 2030, but fails to mention Rosatom modular reactors which are decades ahead and ready to go. Well, it's that same thing the US did with 5G. When Europe, Australia and most of the world was ready to build their 5G infrastructure, the U.S. cooked up some lies about some subsidiary of Huawei having some business deal with some company related to North Korea and sanctioned Huawei. How long until the world says enough is enough?

upsidesinclude 5y ago
Yeah, that is not a very thorough analysis of the situation. China's control of other countries communications infrastructure is a global concern as their footprint has expanded through commercial enterprise to match the US military footprint. You don't have to like the US, but unless you're Han Chinese, that isn't a good system for you.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  > China's control of other countries communications infrastructure is a global concern Except globally everybody wanted to use Huawei, until the US cooked up the lie and threatened everyone against it. Australia had a soft regime change because of this issue. You're fooling nobody.
adamsmith143 5y ago
>So the article mentions NuScale, which are planning to build a couple of test reactors in 2030, but fails to mention Rosatom modular reactors which are decades ahead and ready to go. Is this a joke? How much is KGB paying you lmao.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  Nothing... as opposed to the large sum of money NuScale must have spent to get this article on the economist: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

PaulHoule 5y ago

So much in the energy literature is like a stopped clock because a lot of work gets done because of an ‘energy crisis’ and unfortunately the old books don’t get withdrawn from libraries when they are obsolete. You still hear people compare nuclear costs to coal because coal was competitive in the 1970s. They quit building coal plants at the same time they quit building nuclear plants, for the same reason —- gas turbine generators based on airplane engines have a capital cost about 10% of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear. Even if the heat were free and you could burn coal without asking “what do you do with the waste?” you would struggle to be profitable with either coal or nuclear…. Unless you could couple these energy sources to a gas turbine. In the case of coal you need to gasify it (say make hydrogen out of it and pump the carbon underground) in the case of nuclear you need a new reactor type that runs at higher temperatures (liquid metal, molten salt, gas cooled) and a breakthrough in closed-cycle power sets. If it succeeded though you could fit the power plant in the employee break room at the turbine house of today’s LWR.

johnsonmd 5y ago
>gas turbine generators based on airplane engines have a capital cost about 10% of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear. Do you have a source for this? Most gas power plants today are combined-cycle [0], meaning they first put the hot combustion gas through a gas turbine as you said and _then_ they use the waste heat to drive a steam turbine as well. This design is responsible for the significant efficiency advantage natural gas generation has over coal. So it doesn't make sense to claim that gas power plants are cheaper due to the turbine technology because most built today use both gas and steam turbines. [0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=34172 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=34172
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2020.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... The economics of the pure gas turbine vs the combined cycle depends on the fraction of the time it spends running. For a peaking plant you are only going to run it a fraction of the time so you care about the capital cost and not about the fuel cost... So you're going to use the cheaper to build but more expensive to operate pure gas turbine. If you are running the plant all day then the economics are favorable to go combined cycle where you start with a gas turbine, recover heat from the exhaust, and feed that through a steam turbine. The capital cost is more than the peaking plant, less than the steam turbine on it's own, but the fuel efficiency is great which leads to lower operating costs. (e.g. the steam turbine in a combined cycle plant is much smaller than a stand-alone steam turbine with the same energy output as the whole plant) In the case of nuclear it is worse though because you do absurd things: a PWR has "steam generators" which are huge heat exchangers, larger than the pressure vessel, that use hot water at high pressure to boil water at low pressure. For liquid metal reactors the heat exchangers are even larger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIkYOFxcqRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIkYOFxcqRg Contrast that to the heat recovery units used in the combined cycle turbine that couple hot gases to water or the sodium-to-air heat exchangers that rejected heat from the fast flux test facility. In terms of size these are like a bug splatter on the plans for a PWR.

acidburnNSA 5y ago

Nuclear reactor developer here. I personally have not really gotten on the small reactor bandwagon. I can see them as useful for trying out new tech but the way to really reduce costs is to pick a known and proven tech, serialize it, and increase power. I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects, but if and when a smr project goes well there will be lots of pressure to make bigger versions of the reactor. For decarbonising rapidly we should currently be building lots of ABWR and APR-1400 and Hualong One reactors (big, modern, proven). My take on economics of nuclear is here https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

ch4s3 5y ago
> I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects, but if and when a smr project goes well there will be lots of pressure to make bigger versions of the reactor. I think there's some value in that right? Proving designs, rebuilding public trust, and building up all of the economic infrastructure again will be really useful for scaling up. I'm definitely going to read your article, seems fascinating from the intro.
bell-cot 5y ago
> I think SMRs are a response to boondoggle construction projects... This +10 (if I could). Consider orbital-class rockets - another very advanced technology, and far less forgiving than nuclear power reactors. How much does it cost to launch (say) 10 tons of satellite on a rocket from plucky upstart SpaceX? Vs. how much did it cost back when only a few bloated "cost plus plus" mega-corporations were providing orbital rockets?
- philipkglass 5y ago
  Orbital rockets are less forgiving than reactors in that they operate closer to engineering limits even when they work correctly. They are more difficult to make reliable. But they have a far more forgiving-to-neighbors failure mode. When a SpaceX test vehicle explodes only SpaceX is harmed. With reactors you can't start by testing a design that spontaneously disassembles itself and iterate toward a reliable one like the organizations that build rockets have done.

UltraViolence 5y ago

I believe they're right. The cost advantage of having standardized, factory built reactors is enormous. Instead of having one big reactor providing 1,5GW you can have five 300MW reactors strapped in parallel and have the same output. The reason nuclear reactors are so expensive is that each one is more or less a bespoke build, with regulators changing the rules constantly, sometimes during construction. There's no reason for nuclear reactors to be more expensive than a similar non-nuclear plant.

EricE 5y ago
>There's no reason for nuclear reactors to be more expensive than a similar non-nuclear plant. No reason other than politics and stupidity (over regulation, emotional fear mongering, ignorant baseless assumptions, etc.)
panick21_ 5y ago
While partly true, there is also a huge benefit of scale. And you need to actually hit way higher production numbers to truely hit economics of scale. Making 5 1.4GWe plants or making 24 300MWe doesnt garantee that it is much cheaper. Spezially if the 300MWe is a reactor of the same type. 300MWe PWRs will not be a huge benefit. Comparing a 500MWe (or even 1GWe) Molten Salt fueled reactor (or even Molten Salt cooled) will compare much better then any PWR, modular or not.
- UltraViolence 5y ago
  The article already points out that a 17 hour job at a site can be done in one hour at a factory. That's a huge savings factor right there! You don't need economies of scale to make SMR's profitable. They already are from the get go.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    I have seen a some of analysis that suggested that as long as you are working with PWR you are not gone do a huge amount better economically. It might be a little better, but we have to break free of water cooled reactor. It makes simply no sense as a design point. The only reason we have it is because it made sense for nuclear submarines.

elkos 5y ago

I would definitely appreciate the reasons on why small hydroelectric plants aren't seen as a good alternative to other power generation systems in economic terms. To my understanding, they seem to be pretty responsive in demand fluctuations and pretty cheap with minor environmental impact.

EricE 5y ago
Well, they work fine if there is enough water for them. Quite a few people would take severe umbrage with the "minor environmental impact" view.
- Arrath 5y ago
  I think OP's "small hydroelectric plants" point is important, there. Imagine something more akin to the water wheels that powered industry of yore along rivers prior to steam and then electric power, not valley-filling reservoirs behind huge hydroelectric dams. I believe the term is "run-of-the-river" hydroelectric. If there is sufficient continuous flow down the river, and a goodly elevation drop you can use to build head pressure, you can indeed tap a small canal off, pass the flow through some turbines, and feed it right back in to the river. I think it is a matter of scale, water flow, and NIMBY-ism. While such stations to generate power, individually its not a whole hell of a lot, and who wants their river-front view besmirched by penstocks and a concrete blockhouse of a turbine building?
  - EricE 5y ago
    >I think it is a matter of scale Or in other words, economic viability :)
    - Arrath 5y ago
      That is what it boils down to. I will say, if I had property with a little creek running year round on it, I'd be hard pressed not to install a waterwheel to get a little something out of it.
5y ago

Exendroinient00 5y ago

I can't wait to see a disappearance of the irrational fear of everything nuclear in the modern discourse. Popular culture by the likes of the Chernobyl tv series and fallout further instilled that fear.

noiv 5y ago
I really hope there will always be a map with reactors, so I can choose wisely a place of living. More reactors will mean more accidents.

bell-cot 5y ago

Two other big upsides to SMR's, which I don't see mentioned: - If 'most all of the expensive parts are shipped in from the factory, very late in the construction process - then there's far less construction debt to float (vs. traditional reactors), while years of regulatory, NIMBY, etc. legal crap drags out. - If your modest-sized country (think of Europe) has a bunch of SMR's...that's a sort of "our lights will not go out" energy security which recent events has made far more attractive. Gas pipeline from now-untouchable Russia? Natural gas wells in Texas that stopped working in cold weather? Massive spikes in wholesale energy prices? Solar or hydro-stored power from a country that "seemed stable and friendly when we cut the deal"? Calm & cloudy winter days, that you didn't spend enough $$$$ on storage to get through? SMR's sound like an insurance policy against a whole lot of nasty surprises.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

I am a LFTR stan, but: "War, climate worries and oil prices make nuclear power attractive" should be: "War, climate worries and oil prices make ALTERNATIVE ENERGY attractive" The economics of alternative energy + storage is basically a victory in LCOE terms, and the cost / technology curve of solar and storage and the economies of scale are still in ramp-up. So this will go from a "close narrow victory" to a landslide in five years. What nuclear project will be under ten years to delivery? What is the LCOE price point they are contending with to be marketplace competitive? No one knows this, but I would shoot for 1/3 the current nuclear LCOE at a minimum, probably 1/4. Again, I geeked out over LFTR presentations. Modular, safe, 99% fuel use/no solid rod waste, online products extaction, no long-term isotopes, "burn/breed" existing long-term waste into usable fuel, brayton cycle. It doesn't matter, economics are a clear win for alternative energy from a 10 year standpoint. Nuclear and Fusion should simply be research projects at this point. If energy security is the goal, then all-in on alternative energy and EV transportation is the goal. I'm not saying tear down existing generation. Just phase it out as soon as possible

panick21_ 5y ago

I think the sweet spot are about 500MWe reactors rhat use molten salt fuel. They are just way smaller then your AP-1000s and once we get going we can build them just way faster.

Animats 5y ago

There are several approaches to "small". One is, "we don't need containment because our design is safe". That's NuScale. It's worrisome. Then there's "we make it as big as we can but all the parts have to be transportable by road/rail so we can build it in a factory". That's Rolls-Royce. They're kind of hand-wavy about containment in their PR. There's a lot to be said for big, strong containment vessels. - Chernobyl - fire, containment insufficient, major disaster - Fukushima - meltdown, containment too small, major disaster - Three Mile Island - meltdown, big, strong containment, problem contained.