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Last year I did a fair amount of consulting work for the GAIN initiative at Idaho National Lab [0]. They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reac

Last year I did a fair amount of consulting work for the GAIN initiative at Idaho National Lab [0]. They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reactors that can basically be "dropped in" decommissioned coal-burning sites because the infrastructure to tie into the electric grid already exists. It was expressed to me that selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle and uptake was very slow to nonexistent. [0] https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx

hutzlibu 4y ago
"selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle" Could you elaborate on the why? I would asume, because of risk. A solar plant, you can more or less just put anywhere, but a nuclear power plant, even a small one, needs state permission, has to meet extensive regulation, etc. It would need some convincing for me, too, that a nuclear reactor can be just a drop in replacement for coal. I would think unknown risks, hidden costs due to regulations, neverending building, etc. And are we talking about a battle tested design, or is it new technology? That sounds extra risky.
- bozhark 4y ago
  Sounds like a good time to get into the energy sector. Time for an HN Wind, water, solar, and nuclear company start-up. Who’s in?
  - _1tan 4y ago
    Here, email is avg@duck.com
  - samstave 4y ago
    There was a nuclear startup that came through YC a few years back... what happened to them?
    - pnw 4y ago
      Oklo is still around, recent news article wasn’t great though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937836
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    I have government contracting experience in construction management QAQC
  - vegetablepotpie 4y ago
    Looking at the energy landscape the most significant area for innovation is with government relations. There exist green energy companies, and their biggest barrier to growth is government policy. For example, when Green Mountain energy wanted to sell to customers in AZ in 2021, SRP, one of the states largest utilities, pushed the state to repeal the competition laws it had on the books for 24 years. HB2101 was introduced in January to do this and it was signed by governor Doug Ducey in April. This gutted the states policy to have a competitive energy market and stopped the expansion of Green Mountain into the state. You need friendly environments to operate in. Existing players like their monopolies, and they have the political connections to use the force of law to shut down your energy startup. You may have to plan to spend most of your investors money on Lobbyists and Lawyers. https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2022/02/10/arizona-utilities-team-up-legislators-block-competition/6740768001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/...
- 7952 4y ago
  Not the parent but have some experience with this on the UK. Typically energy companies will start with the technology they want to develop and then find a site that will suit it. Starting with the plot of land is the wrong way around. And existing decomissioned sites are just an asset like any other. They may be sold for a distribution centre or a data centre. And the grid connection may be used by a new power station built on a neighboring plot or to connect an offshore wind farm.
nradov 4y ago
Private industry uptake is slow because the required changes to staffing, security, and waste disposal are so expensive. Until there are higher costs for CO2 emissions, it will be cheaper for power companies to convert those facilities to natural gas, or just shut them down.
- Arrath 4y ago
  > ...waste disposal are so expensive. Until there are higher costs for CO2 emissions... Perhaps we should also examine the requirements and costs associated with storing waste from coal-fired power plants. Oft overlooked in favor of the fuel rod boogeyman. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-other-dark-side-toxic-ash https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-... If we treated such waste with the care and security it deserved, the cost equation may balance out differently.
  - krallja 4y ago
    One of the victims of coal was Pat McCrory in the 2016 NC governors race. Signing “H.B. 2,” the stupid transgender-bathroom law, is often cited as the main reason for his loss, but I believe the coal-ash spill[1] and subsequent coverup scandal were decisive in his losing support in rural areas. I certainly agree: the true costs of coal should be better believed! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_McCrory#Duke_Energy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_McCrory#Duke_Energy
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Yes. The problem with nuclear is basically twofold: first, the approval and regulatory process is deliberately cumbersome and in obvious need of reform. Treating every plant as a one-off design rather than standardizing has enormously inflated costs. And generally much higher scrutiny requirements for new designs have strangled the ability to roll out better/safer designs. It's very similar to what happens in the FAA with aircraft/engine designs, we can design much better engines/reactors than we could in 1960, but the new ones require an onerous approval process while the old ones got grandfathered approval. So we only build the old/worse ones! If you don't want any more nuclear constructed, set policy to that effect, don't use the approval process to artificially inject costs to make it unfavorable. And the disposal situation just needs to happen, period. The waste has to go somewhere, we can't just have it sitting around forever. Even if we never ran another nuclear plant ever, the existing waste still has to go somewhere, and that process was dragged to a halt for political reasons too. The Yucca Mountain repository needs to be moved forward again. Second, we need to stop letting coal externalize its costs. Tax carbon emissions heavily, require secure disposal of radioactive coal ash rather than letting it sit around in storage ponds that eventually spill and destroy miles and miles of land, etc. Unfortunately, in both cases, the fossil fuel industry has its finger on the pulse of washington and isn't going to allow a trillion-dollar industry to be torn down without a massive fight. Existing stakeholders are just too entrenched for it to ever be successful and construction costs/disposal/externalities are just the place where that iceberg breaks the surface. The "once you build the expertise, costs come down for the Nth plant" is also probably true, but there's also other things going on here with the process as a whole.
bozhark 4y ago
We could always start _new_ companies…
logifail 4y ago
> micro and modular reactors Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs? "The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on producing radioactive waste"[0] "Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants"[1] Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter"[2], and we're still waiting... [0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-next-generation-of-nuclear-reactors-will-produce-even-more-radioactive-waste/4015753.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-next-generation-of-n... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/nuclear_reactors_waste/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/nuclear_reactors_wast... [2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf
- a_shovel 4y ago
  There was a discussion about this a few days ago, and this comment thread [0] featured some criticism from experts on these claims. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424
  - logifail 4y ago
    and yet one of the comments from that thread stated: > 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
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      There are countries where no combination of renewables + storage is possible. Places with little sunlight and little wind. What do they do?
      - 4y ago
samstave 4y ago
That sounds like a brilliant idea. However, the tooling and staffing requirements of a Coal Plant arent going to suffice for a nuke. How do they propose training for existing employees of a coal plant. We think of Coal folks as "dirty stupid miners from kentucky" and we think of people that work at nuke sites as "white lab coat wearing scientists" The only dirty stupid person from Kentucky is Mitch.
- MisterTea 4y ago
  > However, the tooling and staffing requirements of a Coal Plant arent going to suffice for a nuke. I am not sure what you mean by Tooling but I am sure these retrofit reactors aren't going to be dropped off by UPS and someone on site has to figure out how to plug it in.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  I think there is a good amount of overlap. Operating the reactor is of course specialized. But once you have the steam, the rest of the power plant is conventional. Steam turbines, generators, and all the grid tie-in would be mostly the same as a coal plant.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), security costs, the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades, and finally, decommissioning costs (as reactors themselves become contaminated with in-situ activation products, i.e. radioactive cobalt/iron/carbon/nickel isotopes). It's basically a huge long-term liability that just doesn't exist with solar/wind/storage, hydropower, or geothermal.
- dqpb 4y ago
  > the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades This environmental remediation cost is generally missing in comparisons with all other energy sources.
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    And mining too
  - anamexis 4y ago
    It’s generally missing from the other energy sources as well.
    - joe_the_user 4y ago
      What remediation costs do solar or wind have?
      - Jedd 4y ago
        Wind turbine blades are next to impossible to recycle or (at the scale we're talking about) re-purpose. 'What What happens to all the old wind turbines?' (bbc.co.uk) [2020] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265321
cryptonector 4y ago
Here's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors for free to a developer of a new residential division, and indemnify them by offering to remove it after at least N years in operation and up to M years after that. I would consider living in a division that has extra low-cost electricity. It couldn't be zero cost because nuclear could only provide base load power, unless one of these micro/modular reactor types is so innovative that it can provide base and peak load power, in which case such a division could have truly zero-cost power for a bunch of years. I.e., promote the darned things, loss-lead if need be. If the manufacturer won't take such risks, then might never break through. I bet that after a few years you could get such good press out of it that other developers might sign on.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > Here's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors for free to a developer of a new residential division... One word: Epcot It's something Disney and Florida could probably agree on, would be a wholesome PR story about investing in Walt's futurism dreams, and would be easier to negotiate than with a less-planned development. And finally, what better showcase than "If it's safe enough for Disney"? Our Friend the Atom, indeed https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzl1wHc43I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzl1wHc43I
  - nhoughto 4y ago
    And also they already can, if you believe it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/disney-world-s-literal-nuclear-option-explained https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/disney-wo...
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Yeah... chose not to highlight that, as it seemed a clickbaity way of saying "Disney has historically had substantial independence in zoning" (which is a more accurate but less exciting way to phrase it).
- XorNot 4y ago

hutzlibu 4y ago

"selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle" Could you elaborate on the why? I would asume, because of risk. A solar plant, you can more or less just put anywhere, but a nuclear power plant, even a small one, needs state permission, has to meet extensive regulation, etc. It would need some convincing for me, too, that a nuclear reactor can be just a drop in replacement for coal. I would think unknown risks, hidden costs due to regulations, neverending building, etc. And are we talking about a battle tested design, or is it new technology? That sounds extra risky.

bozhark 4y ago
Sounds like a good time to get into the energy sector. Time for an HN Wind, water, solar, and nuclear company start-up. Who’s in?
- _1tan 4y ago
  Here, email is avg@duck.com
- samstave 4y ago
  There was a nuclear startup that came through YC a few years back... what happened to them?
  - pnw 4y ago
    Oklo is still around, recent news article wasn’t great though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937836
- cupofpython 4y ago
  I have government contracting experience in construction management QAQC
- vegetablepotpie 4y ago
  Looking at the energy landscape the most significant area for innovation is with government relations. There exist green energy companies, and their biggest barrier to growth is government policy. For example, when Green Mountain energy wanted to sell to customers in AZ in 2021, SRP, one of the states largest utilities, pushed the state to repeal the competition laws it had on the books for 24 years. HB2101 was introduced in January to do this and it was signed by governor Doug Ducey in April. This gutted the states policy to have a competitive energy market and stopped the expansion of Green Mountain into the state. You need friendly environments to operate in. Existing players like their monopolies, and they have the political connections to use the force of law to shut down your energy startup. You may have to plan to spend most of your investors money on Lobbyists and Lawyers. https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2022/02/10/arizona-utilities-team-up-legislators-block-competition/6740768001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/...
7952 4y ago
Not the parent but have some experience with this on the UK. Typically energy companies will start with the technology they want to develop and then find a site that will suit it. Starting with the plot of land is the wrong way around. And existing decomissioned sites are just an asset like any other. They may be sold for a distribution centre or a data centre. And the grid connection may be used by a new power station built on a neighboring plot or to connect an offshore wind farm.

nradov 4y ago

Private industry uptake is slow because the required changes to staffing, security, and waste disposal are so expensive. Until there are higher costs for CO2 emissions, it will be cheaper for power companies to convert those facilities to natural gas, or just shut them down.

Arrath 4y ago
> ...waste disposal are so expensive. Until there are higher costs for CO2 emissions... Perhaps we should also examine the requirements and costs associated with storing waste from coal-fired power plants. Oft overlooked in favor of the fuel rod boogeyman. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-other-dark-side-toxic-ash https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-... If we treated such waste with the care and security it deserved, the cost equation may balance out differently.
- krallja 4y ago
  One of the victims of coal was Pat McCrory in the 2016 NC governors race. Signing “H.B. 2,” the stupid transgender-bathroom law, is often cited as the main reason for his loss, but I believe the coal-ash spill[1] and subsequent coverup scandal were decisive in his losing support in rural areas. I certainly agree: the true costs of coal should be better believed! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_McCrory#Duke_Energy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_McCrory#Duke_Energy
- paulmd 4y ago
  Yes. The problem with nuclear is basically twofold: first, the approval and regulatory process is deliberately cumbersome and in obvious need of reform. Treating every plant as a one-off design rather than standardizing has enormously inflated costs. And generally much higher scrutiny requirements for new designs have strangled the ability to roll out better/safer designs. It's very similar to what happens in the FAA with aircraft/engine designs, we can design much better engines/reactors than we could in 1960, but the new ones require an onerous approval process while the old ones got grandfathered approval. So we only build the old/worse ones! If you don't want any more nuclear constructed, set policy to that effect, don't use the approval process to artificially inject costs to make it unfavorable. And the disposal situation just needs to happen, period. The waste has to go somewhere, we can't just have it sitting around forever. Even if we never ran another nuclear plant ever, the existing waste still has to go somewhere, and that process was dragged to a halt for political reasons too. The Yucca Mountain repository needs to be moved forward again. Second, we need to stop letting coal externalize its costs. Tax carbon emissions heavily, require secure disposal of radioactive coal ash rather than letting it sit around in storage ponds that eventually spill and destroy miles and miles of land, etc. Unfortunately, in both cases, the fossil fuel industry has its finger on the pulse of washington and isn't going to allow a trillion-dollar industry to be torn down without a massive fight. Existing stakeholders are just too entrenched for it to ever be successful and construction costs/disposal/externalities are just the place where that iceberg breaks the surface. The "once you build the expertise, costs come down for the Nth plant" is also probably true, but there's also other things going on here with the process as a whole.

bozhark 4y ago

We could always start _new_ companies…

logifail 4y ago

> micro and modular reactors Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs? "The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on producing radioactive waste"[0] "Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants"[1] Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter"[2], and we're still waiting... [0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-next-generation-of-nuclear-reactors-will-produce-even-more-radioactive-waste/4015753.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-next-generation-of-n... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/nuclear_reactors_waste/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/nuclear_reactors_wast... [2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf

a_shovel 4y ago
There was a discussion about this a few days ago, and this comment thread [0] featured some criticism from experts on these claims. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424
- logifail 4y ago
  and yet one of the comments from that thread stated: > 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
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    There are countries where no combination of renewables + storage is possible. Places with little sunlight and little wind. What do they do?
    - 4y ago

samstave 4y ago

That sounds like a brilliant idea. However, the tooling and staffing requirements of a Coal Plant arent going to suffice for a nuke. How do they propose training for existing employees of a coal plant. We think of Coal folks as "dirty stupid miners from kentucky" and we think of people that work at nuke sites as "white lab coat wearing scientists" The only dirty stupid person from Kentucky is Mitch.

MisterTea 4y ago
> However, the tooling and staffing requirements of a Coal Plant arent going to suffice for a nuke. I am not sure what you mean by Tooling but I am sure these retrofit reactors aren't going to be dropped off by UPS and someone on site has to figure out how to plug it in.
SoftTalker 4y ago
I think there is a good amount of overlap. Operating the reactor is of course specialized. But once you have the steam, the rest of the power plant is conventional. Steam turbines, generators, and all the grid tie-in would be mostly the same as a coal plant.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), security costs, the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades, and finally, decommissioning costs (as reactors themselves become contaminated with in-situ activation products, i.e. radioactive cobalt/iron/carbon/nickel isotopes). It's basically a huge long-term liability that just doesn't exist with solar/wind/storage, hydropower, or geothermal.

dqpb 4y ago
> the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades This environmental remediation cost is generally missing in comparisons with all other energy sources.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  And mining too
- anamexis 4y ago
  It’s generally missing from the other energy sources as well.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    What remediation costs do solar or wind have?
    - Jedd 4y ago
      Wind turbine blades are next to impossible to recycle or (at the scale we're talking about) re-purpose. 'What What happens to all the old wind turbines?' (bbc.co.uk) [2020] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265321

cryptonector 4y ago

Here's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors for free to a developer of a new residential division, and indemnify them by offering to remove it after at least N years in operation and up to M years after that. I would consider living in a division that has extra low-cost electricity. It couldn't be zero cost because nuclear could only provide base load power, unless one of these micro/modular reactor types is so innovative that it can provide base and peak load power, in which case such a division could have truly zero-cost power for a bunch of years. I.e., promote the darned things, loss-lead if need be. If the manufacturer won't take such risks, then might never break through. I bet that after a few years you could get such good press out of it that other developers might sign on.

ethbr0 4y ago
> Here's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors for free to a developer of a new residential division... One word: Epcot It's something Disney and Florida could probably agree on, would be a wholesome PR story about investing in Walt's futurism dreams, and would be easier to negotiate than with a less-planned development. And finally, what better showcase than "If it's safe enough for Disney"? Our Friend the Atom, indeed https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzl1wHc43I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzl1wHc43I
- nhoughto 4y ago
  And also they already can, if you believe it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/disney-world-s-literal-nuclear-option-explained https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/disney-wo...
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Yeah... chose not to highlight that, as it seemed a clickbaity way of saying "Disney has historically had substantial independence in zoning" (which is a more accurate but less exciting way to phrase it).
XorNot 4y ago