6 ms·

Cunningham's Law: "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." This paper seems to have rust

by p1mrx 4y ago

Cunningham's Law: "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." This paper seems to have rustled a lot of feathers: - NuScale's rebuttal: https://s24.q4cdn.com/104943030/files/PNAS-Letter-Reyes-NuScale-5.31.22-(002).pdf https://s24.q4cdn.com/104943030/files/PNAS-Letter-Reyes-NuSc... - Terrestrial Energy's rebuttal: https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Letter-to-PNAS-22-06-03-final2.pdf https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06...

ncmncm 4y ago
The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single utility reactor in operation.) Any citation suggesting competitiveness always neglects the subsidy of disaster insurance, which cost would exceed operations cost if paid. Instead, society at large pays it. Renewables are by a large margin the cheapest sustainable energy production systems ever fielded. Storage cost is falling even faster than renewables costs still are. (Until we have enough renewable generating capacity to charge storage while meeting demand, building out substantial storage would be a misuse of funds better spent getting to that point. By that time, storage will be very, very cheap.) Renewables are being built out faster than ever, but still way too slowly to fend off climate catastrophe. Diverting money from renewables build-out to anything else brings catastrophe nearer.
- p1mrx 4y ago
  I think this principle should drive cost competition: https://www.un.org/en/energy-compacts/page/compact-247-carbon-free-energy https://www.un.org/en/energy-compacts/page/compact-247-carbo... If enough people/companies commit to buying carbon-free energy for every hour of the year, then money will naturally flow toward reliable sources. Let the best technology win.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  Is there a source that you'd recommend to dig into this further?
- credit_guy 4y ago
  > The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage If you want to not find a way, it's very easy to not find a way. If you do want to find a way, then maybe you'll find one. Ukraine for example is trying to find a way to defeat the Russian invasion. I think they will find one. They are also trying to find a way to build more nuclear reactors, 9 of them [1]. I doubt Ukraine is in the mood to throw money down the drain. [1] https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/news/energoatom-and-westinghouse-reaffirm-clean-energy-partnership https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/news/energoatom-and-wes...
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Cost for nukes is not falling. Cost for renewables is still falling very fast. If nukes ever were honestly competitive, they get less so every day. Ukrainians are as subject to irrationality as any population, and had recently been perceived as suffering a corruption problem. It is the role of economic analysis to recommend action based on facts. Drawing recommendations from what people choose without, particularly where corruption prevails, produces pathological outcomes. When Ukraine is next in a position to invest in infrastructure, we may expect a bias for lower-cost, less-central infrastructure, thus favoring renewables. Erecting solar sharing fields with crops would be a good choice. Siting ammonia synthesis adjacent, for fuel, fertilizer, storage, and sale of surplus would be another. They might be motivated to equip themselves to produce their own nuclear weapons, for quite understandable reasons.
    - credit_guy 4y ago
      > Cost for nukes is not falling. This is not a law of nature. Nukes are technology. The cost of technology goes down in times as people make progress in that area. But if people stop building new stuff, they stop making progress, and they even regress. America and the West stopped building nuclear power plants 30 years ago. Except for the naval nuclear reactors. America still churns them at a steady pace. Roughly new Virginia-class submarine is being commissioned every year, and a new Gerald Ford class aircraft carrier every 4 years. Columbia class submarines will be build at a pace of about one every 4 years too, the first one is being built now. All in all, the US is manufacturing between 1 and 2 nuclear reactors per year. The costs are classified, but you can infer indirectly that they are around $2-3 BN / GW. That compares quite well with the more than $10 BN / GW for civilian reactors. It is even cheaper than the capital cost for a state of the art coal power plant. If we just increase the manufacturing of naval reactors from 1-2/year to 10-20/year, then why would we not see a decrease in cost? That's the whole idea of the Small Modular Reactors. NuScale estimates that their levelized cost of energy will be $40-65/MWh. The average price paid by the US consumers last year was about $140/ MWh. In New York State, the average price was $220/ MWh. You could say that the levelized cost of energy for solar is only $30/MWh. But that is based on the existing plants, and guess what, there are lots of plants in sunny California and few in New York State. If you want to build a new solar plant in NY State, then the levelized cost of energy will be higher. That cost cannot continue to decrease indefinitely, for the simple fact that the price of solar panels can only go to zero, but not less. After that, you're still left with the cost of land acquisition, of hooking to the network, with the maintenance, labor, etc, etc. Those costs won't significantly go down. The cost of land acquisition will actually go up, as you built on cheap land first, and then you need to move to more expensive one.
- opo 4y ago
  It is misleading to talk about solar when there is utility grid solar which provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar which does not. Rooftop solar was never, is not and will not ever be cheap and yet is usually highly promoted by advocates. The rooftop solar price is hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners are often paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme. China is planning on building about 228 nuclear plants to provide 250 GW of power. It looks like they are very serious about de-carbonizing their grid. They will likely develop a lot of expertise in building nuclear plants. https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-chinas-nuclear-pipeline-as-big-as-the-rest-of-the-worlds-combined https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-china...
  - natmaka 4y ago
    The main source for the current China's nuclear-building plan is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors). Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.
    - opo 4y ago
      >Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), Something to remember here is that the vast majority of that 26% is hydroelectric (maybe 18% or so). Wind and solar provide only a few percent of the power that is produced. The bad news with those numbers is that they won't be able to grow hydroelectric by very much as there aren't many places they haven't built a dam already. The good news is that with such low percentages for solar and wind, there is plenty of growth available before they run into real problems with the intermittent nature of wind and solar. If China can decarbonize its grid with solar/wind and some new grid storage they develop in the future that would be amazing. If China ends up decarbonizing its grid by building hundreds of nuclear power plants along with solar/wind, that would also be amazing. I think we are in agreement that the goal is really to decarbonize the grid.
credit_guy 4y ago
The wrong answer in this case is quite shoddy indeed. Terrestrial Energy's rebuttal is scathing. For example The authors then quote a value of greater than 10^12 n/cm2-sec as the IMSR’s thermal flux reaching the vessel; they conclude this will make the used vessel very radioactive. However, they reference a university paper (REF 29), whose authors clearly state they are unfamiliar with the IMSR design and that they merely made assumptions to do their modeling. There are lots of other inaccuracies. Here's another quite grievous mistake. The whole assertion that SMR's produce "increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30" relies in the calculation for sodium-cooled reactors, where the factor was found to be 30. For all other reactors, the factor was 5 or less. Now, for sodium-cooled reactors, their claim is that the vast majority of the waste (about 75%) is the sodium itself: Ultimately, the sodium coolant generated several hundred cubic meters of low-level radioactive waste. The 30-MWth Toshiba 4S reactor might generate 115 m3/GWth-y of contaminated pyrophoric sodium coolant in need of treatment, conditioning, and disposal. They forget to mention how low level the radioactive waste is. Fortunately, wikipedia gives us the answer [1] Sodium has only one stable isotope, sodium-23. Sodium-23 is a weak neutron absorber. When it does absorb a neutron it produces sodium-24, which has a half-life of 15 hours and decays to stable isotope magnesium-24. So those 115 cubic meters of waste become completely non-radioactive after one month. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor

by p1mrx 4y ago

ncmncm 4y ago

The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single utility reactor in operation.) Any citation suggesting competitiveness always neglects the subsidy of disaster insurance, which cost would exceed operations cost if paid. Instead, society at large pays it. Renewables are by a large margin the cheapest sustainable energy production systems ever fielded. Storage cost is falling even faster than renewables costs still are. (Until we have enough renewable generating capacity to charge storage while meeting demand, building out substantial storage would be a misuse of funds better spent getting to that point. By that time, storage will be very, very cheap.) Renewables are being built out faster than ever, but still way too slowly to fend off climate catastrophe. Diverting money from renewables build-out to anything else brings catastrophe nearer.

p1mrx 4y ago
I think this principle should drive cost competition: https://www.un.org/en/energy-compacts/page/compact-247-carbon-free-energy https://www.un.org/en/energy-compacts/page/compact-247-carbo... If enough people/companies commit to buying carbon-free energy for every hour of the year, then money will naturally flow toward reliable sources. Let the best technology win.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
acjohnson55 4y ago
Is there a source that you'd recommend to dig into this further?
credit_guy 4y ago
> The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage If you want to not find a way, it's very easy to not find a way. If you do want to find a way, then maybe you'll find one. Ukraine for example is trying to find a way to defeat the Russian invasion. I think they will find one. They are also trying to find a way to build more nuclear reactors, 9 of them [1]. I doubt Ukraine is in the mood to throw money down the drain. [1] https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/news/energoatom-and-westinghouse-reaffirm-clean-energy-partnership https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/news/energoatom-and-wes...
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Cost for nukes is not falling. Cost for renewables is still falling very fast. If nukes ever were honestly competitive, they get less so every day. Ukrainians are as subject to irrationality as any population, and had recently been perceived as suffering a corruption problem. It is the role of economic analysis to recommend action based on facts. Drawing recommendations from what people choose without, particularly where corruption prevails, produces pathological outcomes. When Ukraine is next in a position to invest in infrastructure, we may expect a bias for lower-cost, less-central infrastructure, thus favoring renewables. Erecting solar sharing fields with crops would be a good choice. Siting ammonia synthesis adjacent, for fuel, fertilizer, storage, and sale of surplus would be another. They might be motivated to equip themselves to produce their own nuclear weapons, for quite understandable reasons.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    > Cost for nukes is not falling. This is not a law of nature. Nukes are technology. The cost of technology goes down in times as people make progress in that area. But if people stop building new stuff, they stop making progress, and they even regress. America and the West stopped building nuclear power plants 30 years ago. Except for the naval nuclear reactors. America still churns them at a steady pace. Roughly new Virginia-class submarine is being commissioned every year, and a new Gerald Ford class aircraft carrier every 4 years. Columbia class submarines will be build at a pace of about one every 4 years too, the first one is being built now. All in all, the US is manufacturing between 1 and 2 nuclear reactors per year. The costs are classified, but you can infer indirectly that they are around $2-3 BN / GW. That compares quite well with the more than $10 BN / GW for civilian reactors. It is even cheaper than the capital cost for a state of the art coal power plant. If we just increase the manufacturing of naval reactors from 1-2/year to 10-20/year, then why would we not see a decrease in cost? That's the whole idea of the Small Modular Reactors. NuScale estimates that their levelized cost of energy will be $40-65/MWh. The average price paid by the US consumers last year was about $140/ MWh. In New York State, the average price was $220/ MWh. You could say that the levelized cost of energy for solar is only $30/MWh. But that is based on the existing plants, and guess what, there are lots of plants in sunny California and few in New York State. If you want to build a new solar plant in NY State, then the levelized cost of energy will be higher. That cost cannot continue to decrease indefinitely, for the simple fact that the price of solar panels can only go to zero, but not less. After that, you're still left with the cost of land acquisition, of hooking to the network, with the maintenance, labor, etc, etc. Those costs won't significantly go down. The cost of land acquisition will actually go up, as you built on cheap land first, and then you need to move to more expensive one.
opo 4y ago
It is misleading to talk about solar when there is utility grid solar which provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar which does not. Rooftop solar was never, is not and will not ever be cheap and yet is usually highly promoted by advocates. The rooftop solar price is hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners are often paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme. China is planning on building about 228 nuclear plants to provide 250 GW of power. It looks like they are very serious about de-carbonizing their grid. They will likely develop a lot of expertise in building nuclear plants. https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-chinas-nuclear-pipeline-as-big-as-the-rest-of-the-worlds-combined https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-china...
- natmaka 4y ago
  The main source for the current China's nuclear-building plan is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors). Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.
  - opo 4y ago
    >Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), Something to remember here is that the vast majority of that 26% is hydroelectric (maybe 18% or so). Wind and solar provide only a few percent of the power that is produced. The bad news with those numbers is that they won't be able to grow hydroelectric by very much as there aren't many places they haven't built a dam already. The good news is that with such low percentages for solar and wind, there is plenty of growth available before they run into real problems with the intermittent nature of wind and solar. If China can decarbonize its grid with solar/wind and some new grid storage they develop in the future that would be amazing. If China ends up decarbonizing its grid by building hundreds of nuclear power plants along with solar/wind, that would also be amazing. I think we are in agreement that the goal is really to decarbonize the grid.

credit_guy 4y ago

The wrong answer in this case is quite shoddy indeed. Terrestrial Energy's rebuttal is scathing. For example The authors then quote a value of greater than 10^12 n/cm2-sec as the IMSR’s thermal flux reaching the vessel; they conclude this will make the used vessel very radioactive. However, they reference a university paper (REF 29), whose authors clearly state they are unfamiliar with the IMSR design and that they merely made assumptions to do their modeling. There are lots of other inaccuracies. Here's another quite grievous mistake. The whole assertion that SMR's produce "increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30" relies in the calculation for sodium-cooled reactors, where the factor was found to be 30. For all other reactors, the factor was 5 or less. Now, for sodium-cooled reactors, their claim is that the vast majority of the waste (about 75%) is the sodium itself: Ultimately, the sodium coolant generated several hundred cubic meters of low-level radioactive waste. The 30-MWth Toshiba 4S reactor might generate 115 m3/GWth-y of contaminated pyrophoric sodium coolant in need of treatment, conditioning, and disposal. They forget to mention how low level the radioactive waste is. Fortunately, wikipedia gives us the answer [1] Sodium has only one stable isotope, sodium-23. Sodium-23 is a weak neutron absorber. When it does absorb a neutron it produces sodium-24, which has a half-life of 15 hours and decays to stable isotope magnesium-24. So those 115 cubic meters of waste become completely non-radioactive after one month. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor